Charnel House by Graham Masterton Page A

and thoughtful that I couldn’t help asking, “What’s wrong? You look like you lost a dollar and found a nickel.”
    â€œIt’s the breathing,” he said. “It’s gone .”
    â€œGone? How do you know?”
    â€œI don’t know. Not exactly. Not for sure. But I didn’t hear it all last night, and I haven’t heard it at all today. Apart from that, well, I sense it’s gone.”
    I sat on the edge of his desk and sipped my Scotch. The whisky was nine years old, and it tasted mature and mellow, but it didn’t mix too well with half-digested alfalfa sandwich, and I began to think that I ought to have had something solid to eat before I went out ghost hunting. I burped quietly into my fist while Wallis fidgeted and twitched and looked even more unhappy.
    â€œYou think that the breathing might have somehow transferred itself out of the house and into Dan?” I asked him.
    He didn’t look up, but he shrugged, and twitched some more. “It’s the kind of thing that enters your mind, isn’t it? I mean, if ghosts are really capable of haunting a place , why shouldn’t they haunt a person ? Who’s to say what they can do and what they can’t do? I don’t know, Mr. Hyatt. The whole damned thing’s a mystery to me, and I’m tired of it.”
    For a while, we sat in silence. Seymour Wallis’s study was as close and airless as ever, and I almost felt as if we were sitting in some small dingy cavern at the bottom of a mine, buried under countless tons of rock. The house on Pilarcitos gave you that kind of a sensation, as if it was bearing down on you with the weary weight of a hundred years of suffering and patience. It wasn’t a feeling I particularly cared for. In fact, it made me feel depressed and edgy.
    â€œYou said something about the park,” I reminded him. “When you first came to see me, you mentioned the park. I didn’t know what you meant.”
    â€œThe park? Did I?”
    â€œWell, it sounded like it.”
    â€œI expect I did. Ever since I worked on that damned park I’ve had one lousy piece of luck after another.”
    â€œThat was the park at Fremont? Where you found the bear-lady?”
    He nodded. “It should have been the easiest piece of cantilever bridging ever. It was only a pedestrian walkover, nothing fancy. I must have built twenty or thirty of them for various city facilities all the way down the coast. But this one was a real bitch. The foundations collapsed six or seven times. Three wetbacks got themselves seriously hurt. One was blinded. And nobody could ever agree on how to site the bridge or handle it. The arguments I had with city hall were insane. It took four months to put up a bridge that should have been up in four days, and of course it didn’t do my reputation any good. I can tell you something, Mr. Hyatt, ever since Fremont I’ve felt dogged.”
    I lifted my whisky glass and circled it around to take in the study and the house. “And this,” I said, “all this breathing and everything, you thought it could have been part of your bad luck?”
    He sighed. “I don’t know. It was just a thought. Sometimes I wonder if I’m going crazy.”
    Just then, the doorknocker banged twice. “I’ll answer it,” I said, and I went out into the shadowy hallway to open the front door. As I pulled back the bolts and the chains, I couldn’t help glancing over at the bear-lady on the banister. In the dark, she seemed larger than she had with the light on, and shaggier, as if the shadows that clung around her had grown into hair. And all around me, on every wall, were these dim and uninspiring views of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak, engravings and etchings and aquatints, but all apparently executed in the dullest weather. All I knew about either mountain was that they were in sunny New Mexico, which made it strange that every one