Charnel House by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page B

possessed him. It’s like The Exorcist or something.”
    â€œThat’s what I thought. But I felt so dumb trying to suggest it. I mean, for Christ’s sake, these things just don’t happen.”
    â€œMaybe they do. Just because they never happened to anyone we know, that doesn’t mean they don’t happen.”
    I crushed out my cigarette and sighed. “I saw it with my own eyes, and I still don’t believe it. He was sitting up there in bed, and I tell you, Jane, his eyes were alight . He’s just an ordinary young guy who works for the city and still wears crew cuts, and he looked like a devil.”
    â€œWhat can I do?” Jane asked.
    I looked out of the deli window at the shoppers sheltering from the rain. The sky was a curious gun-metal green, and the clouds were moving fast across the rooftops of Brannan Street. Early that morning, before I went to see Dan, I had telephoned Seymour Wallis to make an appointment to view the house again, and he had asked me that very same question. “What can I do? For land’s sakes, tell me, what can I do?”
    â€œI don’t really know,” I told Jane. “But maybe you could come along tonight when we look over the house. You know something about the occult, don’t you? Spirits and ghosts and all that kind of thing? I’d like you to take a look at old man Wallis’s front doorknocker, and some of the stuff inside. Maybe there’s some kind of clue there. I don’t know.”
    â€œWhy me?” she asked calmly. “Surely there are better occult experts than me. I only sell books about it.”
    â€œYou read them as well as sell them, don’t you?”
    â€œSure, but—”
    I held her hand. “Please, Jane, just do me a favor and come along. It’s nine o’clock tonight, on Pilarcitos Street. I don’t know why, I need you along, but I feel that I do. I really feel it. Will you come?”
    Jane touched her face with her fingertips as if gently reassuring herself that she existed, and that she was still twenty-six years old, and that she hadn’t changed into anyone else overnight. “All right, John, if you really want me to. As long as it’s not a line.”
    I shook my head. “Can you imagine a couple called John and Jane? It would never work out.”
    She smiled. “Just be thankful your name isn’t Doe.”
    I went around a little early to Pilarcitos Street that night. Because of the overcast weather, it had grown dark much sooner than usual, and the heavy-browed house was clotted with shadows and draped with rain. As I stood in the street outside, I heard its gutters gurgling with water, and I could see the scaly shine of its wet roof. In this kind of weather, in this kind of gloom, number 1551 seemed to draw in on itself, brooding and uncomfortable in the rainswept city.
    I had called briefly at the hospital again, but the nurse had told me that Dan was still sleeping, and that there was no change. Dr. Jarvis had been away on a break, so I hadn’t been able to discuss Dan’s progress with him any further. Still, with any luck, he would turn up tonight, and see what had happened for himself.
    Across the Bay, lightning walked on awkward stilts, and I could hear the faraway mumbling of thunder. The way the wind was blowing, the storm would move across the city in a half hour, and pass right overhead.
    I opened the gate and climbed the steps to the front door. In the dense shadows, I could just make out the shape of the doorknocker, with its grinning wolfish face. Maybe I was just nervous, and thinking too much about Dan Machin’s dream, but that doorknocker almost seemed to open its eyes and watch me as I came nearer. I was half expecting it to start talking and whispering, the way Dan had imagined it.
    Reluctantly, I put my hand out to touch the knocker and bang on the door. The moment I grasped it I recoiled, because for one split