Charnel House Read Free Page A

black with age and weathering. It was fashioned like the head of a strange snarling creature, something between a wolf and a demon, and I didn’t find it at all encouraging. Somebody who could happily hang something like that on his front door couldn’t be altogether normal, unless he actually enjoyed having nightmares. Under the knocker there was engraved the single word: “Return.”
    While Dan was hesitating, I took hold of the knocker and banged it two or three times. The sound echoed flatly inside the house, and we waited patiently on the porch for Seymour Wallis to answer.
    â€œWhat do you think that is? That thing on the knocker?” Dan asked.
    â€œDon’t ask me. Some kind of a gargoyle, I guess.”
    â€œIt looks more like a goddamned werewolf to me.”
    I reached in my pocket for a cigarette. “You’ve been watching too many old horror pictures.”
    I was just about to bang the knocker again, when I heard footsteps shuffling toward us from inside the house. Bolts were pulled back at the top of the door, and at the bottom, and then it shuddered open an inch or two, until it was stopped by a security chain. I saw the pale face of Seymour Wallis peering around it cautiously, as if he was expecting muggers, or Mormons.
    â€œMr. Wallis?” I said. “We came to hear the breathing.”
    â€œOh, it’s you,” he said, with obvious relief. “Just hold on a moment there and I’ll open the door.”
    He slipped the chain and the door shuddered wider still. Seymour Wallis was wearing a maroon bathrobe and slippers and his thin, bare, hairy legs were showing. “I hope we haven’t caught you at a bad moment,” Dan said.
    â€œNo, no. Come in. I was only getting ready to take a bath.”
    â€œI sure like your knocker,” I said. “It’s kind of scary, though, isn’t it?”
    Seymour Wallis gave me a flicker of a smile. “I suppose so. It came with the house. I don’t know what it’s meant to be. My sister thinks it might be the devil, but I’m not so sure. And why it should say ‘Return’ I shall never know.”
    We found ourselves in a high, musty hallway, carpeted in threadbare brown, and with dozens of yellowing prints and engravings and framed letters all over the walls. Some of the frames were empty and others were cracked, but most of them contained sepia views of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak, or foxed and illegible maps, lists of statistics written in crabbed and faded handwriting.
    Beside us, the newel-post of the stairs was carved out of dark mahogany, and on top of it was a bronze bear, standing upright, with a woman’s face instead of a snout. The stairs them-selves, tall and narrow, rose toward the darkness of the second floor like an escalator into the gloomiest recesses of the night.
    â€œYou’d better come this way,” Seymour Wallis said, leading us down the hall toward a door at the end. There was a shabby stag’s head hanging over it with dusty antlers and only one eye. Dan said, “After you ,” and I wasn’t sure if he was joking about the house or not. It couldn’t have been much creepier.
    We entered a small, airless study. There were shelves all around that must have been lined with books at one time, but were now empty. The brownish-figured wallpaper behind them was marked with the shadows of where they had once been. In the corner, under a doleful painting of early San Francisco, was a stained leather-topped desk and a wooden stockbroker’s chair with two slats missing. Seymour Wallis had kept the shutters closed, and the room was suffocating and stale. It smelled of cats, lavender bags, and roach powder.
    â€œI hear the noises in here more than in any other room,” Wallis explained. “It comes at night mostly, when I’m sitting here writing letters, or finishing my accounts. At first there’s nothing, but then I start