Charnel House Read Free Page B

straining my ears and I’m sure I can hear it. Soft breathing, just as if somebody’s walked into the room, and is standing a little ways away watching me. I try, well, I’ve tried , not to turn around. But I’m afraid that I always do. And of course there’s nobody there.”
    Dan walked across the worn-out rug. The floorboards creaked under his feet. He picked up an astral calendar from Seymour Wallis’s desk, and examined it for a moment or two. “Do you believe in the supernatural, Mr. Wallis?”
    â€œIt depends what you mean by the supernatural.”
    â€œWell, ghosts.”
    Wallis glanced at me and then back to Dan. I think he was afraid that we were putting him on. In his maroon bathrobe, he looked like one of those elderly men who insist on taking a dip in the ocean on Christmas Day.
    â€œI was telling my colleague here that some houses act as receivers for sounds and conversations from the past. If anything particularly stressful has happened inside them, they kind of store up the sound in the texture of their walls, and play it back like a tape recorder, over and over again. There was a case in Massachusetts, only last year, where a young couple claimed to have heard a man and a woman arguing in their living room at night, but whenever they went downstairs there was nobody there. They heard actual names being shouted, though, and when they went to their local church register and looked them up, they found that the people they could hear had lived in their house in 1860.”
    Seymour Wallis rubbed his bristly chin. “You’re trying to say that when I hear breathing, it’s a ghost?”
    â€œNot exactly a ghost,” said Dan. “It’s just an echo from the past. It might be frightening, but it’s no more dangerous than the sound you can hear from your television. It’s just sound , that’s all.”
    Wallis sat slowly down on the old stockbroker’s chair and looked at us gravely. “Can I get it to leave me alone?” he asked. “I mean, can you exorcise it?”
    â€œI don’t think so,” said Dan. “Not without knocking the house down. What you’re hearing is within the fabric of the house itself.”
    I coughed and said politely, “I’m afraid there’s a city ordinance against knocking down these old houses for meretricious reasons. Sub-section eight.”
    Seymour Wallis looked very tired. “You know something,” he said, “I’ve wanted one of these houses for years. I used to walk by here and admire their age and their character and their style. At last I’ve managed to get one. It means a great deal to me, this house. It represents everything I’ve done in my life to maintain the old true standards against the easy, false, beguiling modern world. Look at this place. There isn’t a foot of Formica, an ounce of plastic, or a scrap of fiberglass. Those moldings around the ceiling are real plaster, and these floorboards came from an old sailing ship. Look how wide they are. Now look at those doors. They’re solid and they hang true. The hinges are brass.”
    He raised his head, and when he spoke there was a great deal of emotion in his voice.
    â€œThis house is mine,” he said. “And if there’s a ghost in it, or a noise in it, I want it out. I’m the master of this place, and, by God, I’ll fight any supernatural oddity for the right to say that.”
    â€œI don’t like to sound as if I don’t believe you,” I said, “because I’m sure you heard what you say you did. But don’t you think you’ve been over-working? Maybe you’re just tired.”
    Seymour Wallis nodded. “I’m tired, all right. But I’m not so tired that I won’t fight to keep what’s mine.”
    Dan looked around the room. “Maybe you could come to some arrangement with this breathing. You know, strike some