Charnel House (9 page)

Above everything, though, I had the strongest feeling that whatever was going on wasn't erratic or accidental. It was like the opening of a chess game, when the moves appear casual and unrelated, but are all part of a a deliberate stratagem. The question was
whose
stratagem? And why?

How Bryan Corder's terrible accident and Dan Machin's eerie concussion could possibly be connected, though, I couldn't understand. I didn't want to think about it too deeply, either, because I kept getting ghastly mental pictures of Bryan's fleshless head, and the thought that he might still be alive made the creeps twenty times creepier. I didn't have a strong stomach at the best of times. I was always the squeamish person who couldn't eat the squid in the seafood platter and ordered his eggs well-boiled.

The telephone rang and gave me a chill prickly feeling up the back of my scalp. I picked it up and said, “John Hyatt here. Who is this?”

“John? It's Jane.”

I took a mouthful of coffee. “You're up early,” I remarked. “Couldn't you sleep?”

“Could you?”

“Well, not exactly. I kept thinking about Bryan. I called the hospital a little while ago, but they don't have any news yet. I almost hope he's dead.”

“I know what you mean.”

I carried the telephone over to the sofa and stretched out. Right now I was beginning to feel tired. Maybe it was just the relief of having someone friendly to talk to. I finished my coffee and accidentally took a mouthful of grounds, and I spent the rest of the conversation trying to pick them off my tongue.

“The reason I called you was something I found out,” Jane said.

“Something to do with Bryan?”

“Not exactly. But something to do with Seymour Wallis's house. You know all those pictures of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak?”

“Sure. I was wondering about those.”

“Well, I went and looked them up in some of my books back at the store. Mount Taylor's in the San Mateo Mountains, elevation eleven thousand, three hundred eighty-nine feet, and Cabezon Peak is way off to the northeast in San Doval County, elevation eight thousand three hundred feet.”

I spat grounds. “That's in New Mexico, right?”

“That's right. Real Indian country. And there are dozens of legends connected with those two mountains, mostly Navaho stories about Big Monster.”

“Big Monster? Who the hell is Big Monster?”

“Big Monster was a giant who was supposed to terrorize the southwest centuries and centuries ago. He made his home on Mount Taylor. He had a blue- and black-striped face, and a suit of armor made out of flints, woven together with the intestines of all the people and animals he'd slaughtered.”

“He doesn't sound like the John Weitz of the ancient world.”

“He wasn't,” said. Jane. “He was one of the fiercest giants in any legend in any culture. I have an eighteenth-century book right here that says he was in charge of all man-destroying demons, and that no mortal could destroy him. He was slain, though, by a pair of brave gods called the Twins, who deflected his arrows with a rainbow, and then knocked off his head with a bolt of lightning. They threw his head off to the northeast, and it became Cabezon Peak.”

I coughed. “That's a very pretty story. But what does it have to do with Seymour Wallis's house? Apart from all the etchings of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak, of course.”

“Well, I'm not sure, exactly,” said Jane. “But there's a reference here to the First One to Use Words for Force, which I don't really understand. Whatever or whoever the First One to Use Words for Force was, it was apparently powerful enough to have cut off Big Monster's golden hair, and make a mockery out of him, and there's something else, too. The First One to Use Words for Force was eternal and immortal, and his motto to all the gods and humans who tried to dispose of him was a Navaho word which I can't pronounce but which means ‘to come back by the path of many pieces.'”

“Jane, honey, you're not making much sense.”

“John, darling, there's another word for ‘come back,' in case you've forgotten. ‘
Return
.'”

I swung my legs off the sofa and set up straight. “Jane,” I said, “you're clutching at totally improbable straws. Now, I don't know why Seymour Wallis has all of those pictures of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak in his house. I guess they were there when he moved in. But you could take any mountain in the whole of the southwest and find some kind of Indian legend connected with it. It's no big deal, really. I mean, maybe we're dealing with some kind of supernatural power. Some latent force that has suddenly been released as a kinetic force. But we're not dealing with Navaho monsters. I mean, there's no way.”

Jane wasn't abashed. “I still think we ought to look into it further,” she said. “The trouble with you is, you're too rational.”

“Rational? I work for the sanitation department and you think I'm rational?”

“Yes, I do. John Hyatt, the national rational. You're so rational they even named a hotel chain after you.”

I couldn't help laughing. “Listen, will you do me a favor? Will you call the office for me. Speak to Douglas P. Sharp and tell him I'm sick. I want to get around to Elmwood Hospital this morning and see Dr. Jarvis.”

“Shall I meet you for lunch?”

“Why not? I'll come by the bookstore and pick you up.”

“Will you call me when you find out how Bryan is? I'd appreciate it.”

“Sure.”

I laid down the phone. I thought about what Jane had said for a while and then I shook my head and smiled. She liked ghosts and magic and monsters. She had once dragged me off to see all the old original horror pictures, like Bela Lugosi's
Dracula
, and Boris Karloff's
Frankenstein
. Somehow, the idea that Jane believed in ghouls and monsters 'round at 1551 Pilarcitos was reassuring. It brought out the hearty patronizing male chauvinist in me. Perhaps that's why I'd asked her along there in the first place. If Jane believed it, then it
couldn't
be true.

The telephone rang again just as I was shaving. With my chin liberally lathered with hot mint foam, I picked it up like Father Christmas taking an order for next winter's toys.

“John? This is James Jarvis. You left me a message to call.”

“Oh, hi. I was just wondering how Bryan Corder was.”

There was a pause. “His heart's still beating.”

“You don't think he's going to live?”

“It's hard to say. I wouldn't like him to. In any case, he could never go out into the world again. He'd have to spend the rest of his life in a sanitized oxygen tent. The whole brain is exposed, and any infection would kill him straight away.”

I wiped foam away from my mouth with the back of my hand. “Couldn't you pull the plug out and let him die anyway? I think I know Bryan well enough to say that he wouldn't want to go on living like
that.”

“Well,” said Dr. Jarvis, “we have.”

“You have what?”

“We've taken him off life-support systems. He's getting no plasma, no blood, no intravenous nutrition or sedation, no adrenalin, no electronic heart pacing, no nothing. Medically, he should have died hours ago.”

He paused again, and I heard someone come into his office and say something indistinct. Then Dr. Jarvis said, “The trouble is, John, his heart's still beating and it won't stop. However serious his injuries, I can't certify that he's dead until it does.”

“What about euthanasia?”

“It's illegal, that's what. And no matter how bad Bryan's injuries are, I can't do it. I'm taking enough of a risk as it is, depriving him of life-support systems. I could lose my license.”

“Has his wife, Moira, seen him?”

“She knows he's had an accident, but that's all. We're obviously doing everything we can to keep her away.”

“How about Dan Machin? Any improvement?”

“He's still comatose. But why don't you come up to the hospital and see for yourself? I could do with some moral support. I haven't been able to talk about last night with anyone here. They're all so goddamned sane, they'll think I belong to a coven or something.”

“Okay. Give me a half hour.”

I shaved, dressed in my off-white denim suit and a red shirt, and splashed myself with Brut. It's surprising what a change of clothes can do for your morale. Then I made my bed, rinsed up my coffee cup, blew a kiss to the picture of Dolly Parton that hung in my bijou hallway, and went downstairs to the street.

It was one of those bright mornings that make you screw your eyes up. The blue skies and the torn white clouds did a lot to reassure me that life was still capable of being ordinary, and that last night's accident could have been an isolated and unpleasant freak of nature. I walked down to the corner and hailed a taxi. I used to own a car, but keeping the payments up on a sanitation officer's salary was like trying to clear up a blocked-up sewer with a toothbrush. The repossessors had arrived one foggy morning, and driven away my metallic blue Monte Carlo into the swirling pea-souper. It was only after they'd gone that I realized I'd left my Evel Knievel sun-glasses in the glove box.

As we drove up Fulton Street toward the hospital, which was one of those multi-leveled teak-and-concrete structures overlooking the ocean, the taxi driver said, “Look at them damn birds. You ever see anything like that before?”

I glanced up from my
Examiner
. I'd been trying to find any mention of Bryan Corder's accident. We were turning between neatly clipped hedges into the hospital's wide forecourt now, and to my fascination and disquiet, the building's rooftops were thick with gray birds. It wasn't just a flock that had decided to settle. There were thousands of them, all along the skyline of the main building, and sitting on every outbuilding and clinic and garage.

“Now that's what
I
call weird,” said the taxi driver, circling the cab around the forecourt and pulling up by the main door. “Weird with a capital ‘wuh.'”

I climbed out of the car and stood there for a moment or two, looking along the fluttering ranks of gray. I didn't know what species of bird they were. They were big birds, like pigeons, but they were gray as a thundery sky, gray as the sea on a restless day. What's worse, they were silent. They didn't chirrup or sing. They sat on the hospital roof, their dark feathers ruffled in the warm Pacific breeze, patient and quiet as birds on a granite gravestone.

“You see that Hitchcock movie?” asked the taxi driver. “The one where the birds go crazy?”

I coughed. “I don't need reminding of
that
, thanks.”

“Well, maybe this is it,” said the taxi driver. “Maybe this is where the birds take over. Mind you, I'd like to see a bird trying to drive this hack. The fan belt slipped off twice this morning. I'd like to see a bird put a fan belt back on.”

I paid the driver and walked through the automatic doors into the cool precincts of the hospital. It was all very tasteful in there. Italian tiles on the floor, paintings by David Hockney, palm trees, and soft music. You didn't come to Elmwood Foundation Hospital unless your medical insurance was well paid up.

The receptionist was a buxom girl in a tight white dress who must have tipped the balance for many a touch-and-go coronary patient. She had bouffant black hair, in which her nurse's cap nestled like a neatly laid egg, and enough teeth for herself and three others like her. Not that there could have been three others like her, or even one.

“Hi,” she said. “I'm Karen.”

“Hi, Karen, I'm John. What are you doing tonight?”

She smiled. “This is Wednesday. My hair wash night.”

I looked up at her beehive. “You mean you wash that thing? I thought you just had it revarnished.”

She went huffy after that, and prodded a button to page Dr. Jarvis. “Some of us still believe in the old values,” she said tartly.

“You mean like stiletto heels and cars with fins?”

“What's wrong with stiletto heels and cars with fins?”

“Don't ask me, ask Claes Oldenburg.”

The receptionist blinked sooty eyelashes. “Claes Oldenburg? Is he an intern?”

Dr. Jarvis mercifully appeared from the elevator, and came across with his hand out.

“John! Am I glad to see you!”

I nodded meaningfully toward the brunette receptionist. “The feeling could be mutual,” I told him. “I think your front-desk lady keeps her brains in her bottom drawer.”

Dr. Jarvis ushered me over to the elevator, and we rose up to the fifth floor. Gentle muzak played “Moon River” which (unless you had any taste in music) was supposed to be soothing.

We emerged in a shiny corridor that was lit by dim fluorescent tubes and hung with mediocre lithographs of Mill Valley and Sausalito. Dr. Jarvis led the way down to a pair of wide mahogany doors and pushed them open. I followed obediently and found myself in an observation room, with one glass wall that looked into the murky, blue-lit depths of an intensive-care unit. Dr. Jarvis said, “Go ahead,” and I walked across the tiled floor and peered through the glass.

The sight of Bryan in that livid blue room, lying on a bed with his naked skull resting on a pillow, and his full fleshed body in a green medical gown was eerie and frightening. Even though I'd seen him before, and actually had the shock of trying to drag him out of the chimney, this grinning skeletal vision was almost too much for me. But what was worse was the electrical screen monitor beside his bed, which showed his heartbeats coming slow but regular, tiny traveling blips of light that meant:
I am still alive
.

“I don't believe it,” I whispered. “I can see it with my own eyes, but I just don't believe it.”

Dr. Jarvis came up and stood next to me. He was very white, and there were mauve smudges of tiredness under his eyes. “Nor do I. But there it is. His heartbeat is very slow, but it's regular and strong. If we killed him now, there would be no doubt at all that we would technically be committing a homicide.”