Charnel House Read Online Free PDF

going on there. I’m taking Bryan Corder from the engineering department, too. I had a talk with him this morning, and he guessed it might be some kind of katabatic draft.”
    Dan, when I turned around again, didn’t appear to have heard. He was sitting up in bed, staring absentmindedly across the room, and his lower jaw had dropped open slack.
    â€œDan?” I said. “Did you hear that?”
    He blinked at me.
    â€œDan?”
    I walked quickly across to the bed and took his arm.
    â€œDan, are you okay? You look real ill.”
    He licked his lips as if they were very dry. “Sure,” he said uncertainly. “I’m okay. I guess I need some rest, that’s all. Once I came out of the concussion, I didn’t sleep too good. I kept having dreams.”
    â€œWell, why don’t you ask the nurse for a sleeping pill?”
    â€œI don’t know. I just kept having these dreams, that was all.”
    I sat down again, and looked at him intently.
    â€œWhat kind of dreams? Nightmares?”
    Dan took off his eyeglasses and rubbed his eyes. “No, no, they weren’t nightmares. I guess they were kind of scarey, but they didn’t seem to frighten me. I dreamed about that doorknocker, you know, that one at old man Wallis’s house. But it wasn’t a doorknocker at all. I dreamed it was hanging on the door, but it was talking to me. Instead of metal, it was made of real hair and real flesh, and it was talking to me, trying to explain something to me, in this kind of quiet, whispery voice.”
    â€œWhat was it saying? Don’t light fires in the forest?”
    Dan didn’t seem to see the joke. He shook his head seriously. “It was trying to tell me to go somewhere, to find something, but I couldn’t make out what it was. It kept explaining and explaining, and I could never understand. It was something to do with that bear on Mr. Wallis’s stairs, you know, that little statue of the bear with a face like a woman. But I couldn’t get the connection at all.”
    I frowned at Dan’s white, grave face for a while, but then I grinned and gripped his wrist in a friendly squeeze.
    â€œYou know what you’re suffering from, Dan old buddy? Post-ghost delusion. It’s an occult type of post-natal depression. Have a few days’ rest and you won’t even remember what you were worried about.”
    Dan grimaced. He didn’t seem to believe me at all.
    â€œListen,” I told him, “we’re going to go over that house tonight with a fine-tooth comb, and whatever it was that laid you out, we’ll find it. We won’t only find it, we’ll bring it back alive, and you can keep it in a jar in your laboratory.”
    Dan attempted a smile, but it wasn’t much of one. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Do what you like.”
    I sat there for a few more minutes, but Dan didn’t seem to be in a conversational mood. So I gave him one more friendly squeeze of the hand. “I’ll drop in tomorrow. ’Round about the same time.”
    Dan nodded, without looking up.
    I left him, and went out into the hospital corridor. A doctor was on his way to Dan’s room, and he brushed past me as I came out. As he opened the door, I said, “Doctor?”
    The doctor looked at me impatiently. He was a short, sandy-haired man with a pointed nose and purple bags under his eyes like the drapes of an old-fashioned theater curtain. A badge on his lapel said Doctor James T. Jarvis .
    I nodded toward Dan’s room. “I don’t like to intrude. I’m only a friend of Mr. Machin’s, not a relative or anything. But I just wanted to know if he was okay. I mean, he seemed pretty strange today.”
    â€œWhat do you mean by strange?”
    â€œWell, you know. Not quite himself.”
    Doctor Jarvis shook his head. “That’s not unusual after severe concussion. Give him a few days to get over