Charnel House by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

department sends you its greetings and hopes that your plumbing is in full operational order.”
    She looked up over her big pink-tinted reading glasses and smiled. “John! I haven’t seen you in weeks!”
    She stood up, and tippy-toed carefully toward me through the piles of books. We kissed, a chaste kiss, and then she said, “You look tired. I hope you’re not sleeping with too many women.”
    I grinned. “That should be a problem? I’d rather stay tired.”
    â€œCome outside,’” she said. “We just got a new shipment of books in this morning, and we’re pretty cramped. Do you have time for coffee?”
    â€œSure. I’ve given myself the afternoon off, for good behavior.”
    We left the bookstore, and went across the street to Prokic’s Deli, where I ordered us capuccino and alfalfa sandwiches. For some reason, I had a craze for alfalfa sandwiches. Dan Machin (God preserve him) had said that I was probably metamorphosing into a horse. I was trying to graduate from manure disposal (he said) to manure production.
    Jane took a seat by the window, and we watched the rain spatter the street outside. I lit a cigarette and stirred my coffee, and all the time she watched me without saying a word, as if she knew that I had something to tell her.
    â€œYou’re looking good,” I told her. “Time passes, and you grow tastier with each hour.”
    She sipped her capuccino. “You didn’t come around to flatter me.”
    â€œNo, I didn’t. But I don’t like to miss an opportunity.”
    â€œYou look worried.”
    â€œDoes it show?”
    â€œBlatantly.”
    I sat back on my rush-seated chair, and blew out smoke. Up above Jane’s head, on the wall, was a poster demanding the legalization of pot, but judging from the underlying aroma in Prokic’s Deli, nobody was that impressed by the laws anyway. You could have gone in there for nothing more than a glass of milk and a salami sandwich, and come out high.
    â€œDid you ever in your whole life come across something so consistently weird that you didn’t know how to understand it?” I asked.
    â€œWhat do you mean, consistently weird?”
    â€œWell, sometimes weird things happen, right? You see someone in the street you thought was dead, or something like that. Just an isolated incident. But when I say consistently weird, I mean a situation that starts off weird and keeps on getting weirder.”
    She brushed back her hair with her hand. “Is that what’s bugging you?”
    â€œJane,” I said, in a husky voice, “it’s not bugging me. It’s scaring me stupid.”
    â€œDo you want to talk about it?”
    â€œIt sounds pretty ridiculous.”
    She shook her head. “Tell me, all the same. I like pretty ridiculous stories.”
    Slowly, with a lot of interruptions and explanations, I told her what had happened at Seymour Wallis’s house. The breathing, the burst of energy, the way that Dan Machin had been knocked out. Then I described the incident at the hospital, and Dan’s eerie luminous eyes. I also told her about his strange whispered words: “It’s the heart, John, it’s still beating!”
    Jane listened to all this with a serious expression. Then she laid one of her long-fingered hands over mine. “Can I ask you just one thing? You won’t be offended?”
    I could guess what she was going to say. “If you think I’m shooting a line, trying to get us involved again, you’re wrong. Everything I just told you happened, and it didn’t happen last month or last year. It happened here in San Francisco last night, and it happened here in San Francisco this morning. It’s real, Jane, I swear it.”
    She reached over and took one of my cigarettes. I held out my own and she lit it from the glowing tip. “It sounds like this, thing, this ghost or whatever it is, actually