TWO

One of the worst things you can ever discover in life is that some of us have it and some of us don’t. I guess it’s just as well, in a way. If every young boy had the talent to fly airplanes, or drive racing cars, or make love to twenty women in one night, there wouldn’t be many volunteers for clearing out backed-up sewers on Folsom. But it’s still tough when you discover that it’s you who doesn’t have it, and that instead of living a luxurious life of fun and profit in Beverly Hills, you’re going to have to take a nine-to-five job in public works, and cook on a hot plate.

I was born of reasonably well-shod parents in Westchester, New York, but when my father suffered a stroke, I left my mother with her house and her insurance money, and I headed West. I think I wanted to be a TV anchorman, or something grandiose like that, but as it turned out I was lucky to eat. I married a woman who was seven years older than me, mainly because she reminded me of my mother, and I was fortunately broke when she discovered me in bed with a waitress from the Fox commissary and sued me for divorce. My affair broke up, too, which left me high and dry and stranded, and having to look for the first time in my life at myself, at my own identity, and having to come to terms with what I could achieve and what I couldn’t.

My name’s John Hyatt, which is one of those names that people think they recall but in actuality don’t. I’m thirty-one, and quite tall, with a taste for subdued, well-cut sport coats and widish 1950s-style pants in gray. I live alone on the top floor of an apartment block on Townsend Street, with my stereo and my house plants and my collection of paperbacks with broken spines. I guess I’m happy and content in my work, but haven’t you ever gone out at night, someplace quiet maybe, and looked over the Bay at the lights twinkling all across America, and thought, well, surely there’s more to life than this?

Don’t think I’m lonesome, though. I’m not. I date girls and I have quite a few friends, and I even get invited to pool parties and barbecues. Right at the time we went up to Seymour Wallis’s house, though, I was going through a kind of a stale period, not sure what I wanted out of life or what life wanted out of me. But I guess a lot of people felt like that when President Carter was elected. At least with Nixon you knew which side you were on.

Maybe what happened to Dan Machin helped me get myself together. It was something so weird and so frightening that you couldn’t think about anything else. Even after he closed his eyes, just a few seconds after we burst into the room, and sank back against his pillow, I was still shivering with shock and fright, and I could feel a prickling sensation of fear across the palms of my hands.

The nurse said, “He … he …”

Dr. Jarvis stepped cautiously up to Dan Machin’s bed, lifted his wrist, and checked his pulse. Then he took a deep breath and raised Dan’s eyelid. I felt myself flinching away, in case the eye was still that fiery red color, but it wasn’t. It had returned to its normal pale gray, and it was plain that Dan was in another state of coma.

“Nurse, I want full diagnostic equipment brought up here right away. And page Dr. Foley.”

The nurse nodded, and left the room, obviously glad to have something distracting to do. I walked up to Dan’s bedside and looked at his pale, fevered face. He didn’t look so much like the scientific hick from Kansas anymore. The lines around his mouth were too deep, and his pallor was too white. But at least he was breathing normally.

I glanced up at Dr. Jarvis. The doctor was jotting notes down on his clipboard, his expression intense and anxious.

“Do you know what it was?” I asked quietly.

He didn’t look up, didn’t answer.

“Those red eyes,” I said. “Do you know what could possibly cause that?”

He stopped writing and stared at me.

“I want to know just what this breathing business you were involved in last night was all about. Are you absolutely sure it wasn’t drugs?”

“Look, I’d tell you if it was. It had to do with a house on Pilarcitos.”

“A house?”

“That’s right. We both work for the sanitation department, and the owner invited us to come up to his house to listen to this breathing. He said the house made a breathing noise, and he didn’t know what it was.”

Dr. Jarvis made another check of Dan’s pulse.

“Did you find out what caused it?” he asked. “The breathing?”

I shook my head. “All I know is that Dan’s been breathing just like it. It’s almost as if the breathing in the house has gone into him. As if he’s possessed.”

Dr. Jarvis set down his clipboard next to Dan Machin’s bowl of grapes.

“Are you a full-fledged member of the nuts club, or just an associate member?” he asked.

This time I didn’t take offense. “I know it’s difficult to understand,” I said. “I don’t understand it myself. But possession is just what it seems like. I heard the house breathing, and I heard Dan breathing just now, when his eyes were all red. It sounded to me like one and the same.”

Dr. Jarvis looked down at Dan and shook his head. “It’s obviously psychosomatic,” he said. “He heard this breathing noise last night, and it frightened him so much that he’s begun to identify with it and breathe in sympathy.”

“Well, maybe. But what made his eyes go like that?”

Dr. Jarvis took a deep breath. “A trick of the light,” he said evenly.

“A trick of the light? Now, wait a minute I”

Dr. Jarvis stared at me, hard. “You heard me,” he snapped. “A trick of the light.”

“I saw him myself! So did you!”

“I didn’t see anything. At least, I didn’t see anything that was medically possible. And I think we’d both better remember that before we go shooting our mouths off to anyone else.”

“But the nurse—”

Dr. Jarvis waved his hand in deprecation. “In this hospital, nurses are regarded as housemaids in fancy uniforms.”

I leaned over Dan and examined his waxy face, and the way his lips moved and whispered as he slept.

“Doctor, this guy is more than just sick,” I told him. “This guy has something really, really wrong. Now, what are we going to do about it?”

“There’s only one thing we can do. Diagnose his problem and give him recognized medical treatment. We don’t undertake exorcisms here, I’m afraid. In any event, I don’t believe this is any worse than an advanced case of hypersuggestibility. Your friend here went up to the house, and became hysterical when he thought he heard breathing. It was probably his own.”

“But I heard it, too,” I argued.

“Maybe you did,” said Dr. Jarvis offhandedly.

“Doctor,” I said, angry. But Dr. Jarvis turned on me before I could tell him how I felt.

“Before you start censuring me for lack of imagination, just remember that I work here,” he snapped. “Everything I do has to be justified to the hospital board, and if I start raving about demonic possession and eyes that glow red in the dark, I’ll suddenly find that my promotion has been shelved for a while and that I only get half the facilities and finance I need.”

He came around the bed and faced me directly. In a low, urgent voice, he said, “I saw Mr. Machin’s eyes go red, and so did you. But if we want to do anything about it, anything effective, we’d better keep it quiet. Do you understand?”

I looked at him curiously. “Are you trying to tell me that you believe he’s really possessed?”

“I’m not trying to tell you anything. I don’t believe in demons and I don’t believe in possession. But I do believe that there’s something wrong here that we need to work out for ourselves, without the knowledge of the hospital.”

At that moment, Dan stirred and groaned. I felt the hair on the back of my neck prickle upright in alarm, but when he spoke, he was obviously back to some kind of normal.

“John …” he murmured. “John …”

I leaned over him. His eyes were only open in slits, and his lips were cracked.

“I’m here, Dan. What’s wrong? How do you feel?”

“John …” he whispered. “Don’t let me go …”

I glanced across at Dr. Jarvis. “It’s okay, Dan. Nobody’s going to let you go.”

Dan weakly raised one of his hands. “Don’t let me go, John. It’s the heart, John. Don’t let me go.”

Dr. Jarvis came close. “Your heart? Is your heart feeling bad? Do you have any constriction? Any pain?”

Dan shook his head, just a fraction of an inch each way. “It’s the heart,” he said, in a voice almost too faint to hear. “It beats and it beats and it beats. It’s still beating. It’s the heart, John, it’s still beating! Still beating!”

“Dan,” I whispered urgently. “Dan, you mustn’t work yourself up like this! Dan, for Christ’s sake!”

But Dr. Jarvis held me back. Dan was already settling back on to his pillow, and his eyes were closing. His breathing became slow and regular again, slow and painful and heavy, and even though it still reminded me of the breathing we’d heard at Seymour Wallis’s house, he seemed at last to be catching some rest. I stood up straight, and I felt shaken and tired.

“He should be okay now. At least for an hour or two,” Dr. Jarvis said quietly. “These attacks seem to come at regular ninety-minute intervals.”

“Can you think of any reason for that?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “There could be any number of reasons. But ninety minutes is the time cycle of REM sleep, the kind of sleep in which people have their most vivid dreams.”

I looked down at Dan’s drawn and haggard face. “He mentioned dreams to me earlier on,” I said. “He had dreams about doorknockers coming to life, and statues moving. That kind of thing. It was all to do with that house we visited last night.”

“Are you going back there? To the house?” Dr. Jarvis asked.

“I was planning a trip up there this evening. One of my engineering people thinks that what we heard could have been an unusual kind of downdraft. Why?”

Dr. Jarvis kept his eyes fixed on Dan. “I’d like to come with you, that’s why. There’s something happening here that I don’t understand, and I want to understand it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “All of a sudden you’re not so sure of yourself?”

He grunted. “Okay. I deserved that. But I’d still like to tag along.”

I took one last look at Dan, young and pale as a corpse on his hospital bed, and I said, very softly, “All right. It’s fifteen-fifty-one Pilarcitos. Nine o’clock sharp.”

Dr. Jarvis took out a ballpen and made a note of the address. Then, before I left, he said: “Listen, I’m sorry about the way I spoke to you earlier on. You have to realize that we get a whole lot of friends and relatives who watch too much ‘General Hospital’ and think they know it all. I mean, I guess we’re kind of defensive.”

I paused, and then nodded. “Okay. I got you. See you at nine.”

That afternoon, a gray and gloomy line of ragged clouds blew in from the ocean and threatened rain. I sat at my desk fidgeting and doodling until half after two, then I took my golf umbrella and went for a walk. My immediate superior, retired Naval Lieutenant Douglas P. Sharp, would probably choose this very afternoon for a snap inspection, but right now I couldn’t have cared less. I was too edgy, too nervous, and too concerned about what was happening to Dan. As I crossed Bryant Street, a few spots of rain the size of dimes speckled the sidewalk, and there was a tense, magnetic feeling in the air.

I guess I knew where I was headed all the time. I turned into Brannan Street, and there it was, The Head Bookstore, a tiny purple-painted shop lit from within by a couple of bare bulbs, and crammed with second-hand paperbacks, Whole Earth Catalogs, posters, and junk. I stepped in and jangled the bell, and the bearded young guy behind the counter looked up and said, “Hi. Looking for anything special?”

“Jane Torresino?”

“Oh, sure. She’s out back, unpacking some Castaneda.”

I shuffled past the shelves of Marx, Seale, and Indian incense, and ducked my head through the small door that led to the stockroom. Sure enough, Jane was there, squatting on the floor and arranging Yaqui wisdom into neat stacks.

She didn’t look up at first, and I leaned against the doorway and watched her. She was one of those girls who managed to look pretty and bright, no matter how scruffy she dressed. Today she was wearing tight white jeans and a blue T-shirt with a smiling Cheshire cat printed on it. She was skinny, with very long mid-blonde hair that was crimped into those long crinkly waves that always remind me of Botticelli, and she had a sharp, well-boned face and eyes like saucers.

I had first met her at a party out at Daly City to welcome the Second Coming of Christ, as predicted by an eighteenth-century philosopher. The principal guest of honor, not altogether surprisingly, didn’t show. Either the predicted date was wrong, or Christ didn’t choose to come again in Daly City. I wouldn’t have blamed Him. But whatever went wrong with the Second Coming, a lot went right between me and Jane. We met, talked, drank too much Tohay, and went back to my apartment for lovemaking. I remember sitting up in bed afterward, drinking the intensely black coffee she had made me, and feeling pleased with what life had dropped so bountifully in my lap.

However, it didn’t work out that way. That night, Second Coming night, was the first and only time. After that, Jane insisted we were just good friends, and even though we went out for meals together, and took in movies together, the lovelight that shone over the spaghetti bolognaise was mine alone, and eventually I accepted our friendship for what it was, and switched the love-light off.

What had developed, though, was an easy-going relationship that was intimate but never demanding. Sometimes we saw each other three times in one week. Other times, we didn’t touch bases for months. Today, when I dropped by with my golf umbrella and my anxieties about Dan Machin, it was the first visit for six or seven weeks.

“The sanitation department sends you its greetings and hopes that your plumbing is in full operational order.”

She looked up over her big pink-tinted reading glasses and smiled. “John! I haven’t seen you in weeks!”

She stood up, and tippy-toed carefully toward me through the piles of books. We kissed, a chaste kiss, and then she said, “You look tired. I hope you’re not sleeping with too many women.”

I grinned. “That should be a problem? I’d rather stay tired.”

“Come outside,’” she said. “We just got a new shipment of books in this morning, and we’re pretty cramped. Do you have time for coffee?”

“Sure. I’ve given myself the afternoon off, for good behavior.”

We left the bookstore, and went across the street to Prokic’s Deli, where I ordered us capuccino and alfalfa sandwiches. For some reason, I had a craze for alfalfa sandwiches. Dan Machin (God preserve him) had said that I was probably metamorphosing into a horse. I was trying to graduate from manure disposal (he said) to manure production.

Jane took a seat by the window, and we watched the rain spatter the street outside. I lit a cigarette and stirred my coffee, and all the time she watched me without saying a word, as if she knew that I had something to tell her.

“You’re looking good,” I told her. “Time passes, and you grow tastier with each hour.”

She sipped her capuccino. “You didn’t come around to flatter me.”

“No, I didn’t. But I don’t like to miss an opportunity.”

“You look worried.”

“Does it show?”

“Blatantly.”

I sat back on my rush-seated chair, and blew out smoke. Up above Jane’s head, on the wall, was a poster demanding the legalization of pot, but judging from the underlying aroma in Prokic’s Deli, nobody was that impressed by the laws anyway. You could have gone in there for nothing more than a glass of milk and a salami sandwich, and come out high.

“Did you ever in your whole life come across something so consistently weird that you didn’t know how to understand it?” I asked.

“What do you mean, consistently weird?”

“Well, sometimes weird things happen, right? You see someone in the street you thought was dead, or something like that. Just an isolated incident. But when I say consistently weird, I mean a situation that starts off weird and keeps on getting weirder.”

She brushed back her hair with her hand. “Is that what’s bugging you?”

“Jane,” I said, in a husky voice, “it’s not bugging me. It’s scaring me stupid.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“It sounds pretty ridiculous.”

She shook her head. “Tell me, all the same. I like pretty ridiculous stories.”

Slowly, with a lot of interruptions and explanations, I told her what had happened at Seymour Wallis’s house. The breathing, the burst of energy, the way that Dan Machin had been knocked out. Then I described the incident at the hospital, and Dan’s eerie luminous eyes. I also told her about his strange whispered words: “It’s the heart, John, it’s still beating!”

Jane listened to all this with a serious expression. Then she laid one of her long-fingered hands over mine. “Can I ask you just one thing? You won’t be offended?”

I could guess what she was going to say. “If you think I’m shooting a line, trying to get us involved again, you’re wrong. Everything I just told you happened, and it didn’t happen last month or last year. It happened here in San Francisco last night, and it happened here in San Francisco this morning. It’s real, Jane, I swear it.”

She reached over and took one of my cigarettes. I held out my own and she lit it from the glowing tip. “It sounds like this, thing, this ghost or whatever it is, actually possessed him. It’s like The Exorcist or something.”

“That’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.”

“Maybe 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.”

“What 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?”

“I 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.”

“Why me?” she asked calmly. “Surely there are better occult experts than me. I only sell books about it.”

“You read them as well as sell them, don’t you?”

“Sure, 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 second, one irrational lurching instant, it seemed as if I had touched bristles instead of bronze. But I held it again, and I knew that I was imagining things. The doorknocker was grotesque, its face was wild and malevolent, but it was nothing but cast metal, and when I banged on the door, it made a loud, heavy knock that echoed flatly inside the house.

I waited, listening to the soft rustle of the rain, and the swish of passing cars on Mission Street. Thunder grumbled again, and there was more lightning, closer this time. Inside the house, I heard a door open and shut, and footsteps coming up to the door.

The bolts and the chains rattled, and Seymour Wallis looked around the gap. “It’s you,” he said. “You’re early.”

“I wanted to talk before the others arrived. Can I come in?”

“Very well,” he said, and opened the solid, groaning door. I stepped into the musty hall. It was just as ancient and suffocating as it had felt yesterday, and even though their frames had been cracked and broken by last night’s burst of power, the doleful pictures of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak still hung on the dingy wallpaper.

I went across to the strange figure of the bear that stood on the newel-post of the banister. I hadn’t looked at it particularly closely last night, but now I could see that the woman’s face on it was quite beautiful, serene and composed, with her eyes closed. I said, “This is a real odd piece of sculpture.”

Wallis was busy bolting the door. He looked older and stiffer tonight, in a loose, gray cardigan with unraveled sleeves, and baggy gray pants. He smelled of whisky.

He watched me run my hand down the bear’s bronze back.

“I found it,” he said. “That was years ago, when I was working over at Fremont. We were building a traffic bridge for the park, and we dug it up. I’ve had it with me ever since. It didn’t come with the house.”

“Dan Machin had a dream about it this morning,” I told him.

“Really? I can’t think of any special reason why he should. It’s just an old piece of sculpture. I don’t even know how old. What would you think? A hundred, two hundred years?”

I peered closely at the bear-lady’s passive face. I don’t know why, but the whole idea of a bear with a woman’s face made me feel uneasy and creepy. I guess it was just the whole atmosphere of Wallis’s house. But who had sculpted such an odd figure? Did it mean anything? Was it symbolic? The only certainty was that it hadn’t been modeled on life. At least, I damned well hoped not.

I shook my head. “I’m not an expert. All I know is sanitation.”

“Is your friend coming? The engineer?” asked Wallis, leading me through to his study.

“He said so. And there’s a doctor, too, if you don’t mind, and a friend of mine who runs an occult bookstore on Brannan.”

“A doctor?”

“Yes, the one who’s treating Dan. We had a bit of an incident there today.”

Wallis went across to his desk and unsteadily poured two large glasses of Scotch, “Incident?” he asked, with his back turned.

“It’s hard to describe. But I get the feeling that whatever we heard in here last night has really got Dan upset. He’s even been breathing in a similar kind of way. The doctor thought he had asthma at first.”

Wallis turned around, a glass of amber Scotch in each hand, and his face in the green-shaded light of his desklamp was strained and almost ghastly. “Do you mean to tell me that your friend has been breathing the same way as my breathing here?”

He was so intense that I almost felt embarrassed. “Well, that’s right. Dr. Jarvis thought it might be psychosomatic. You know, self-induced. It sometimes happens after a heavy concussion.”

Seymour Wallis gave me my whisky and then sat down. He looked so troubled and thoughtful that I couldn’t help asking, “What’s wrong? You look like you lost a dollar and found a nickel.”

“It’s the breathing,” he said. “It’s gone.”

“Gone? How do you know?”

“I 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.

“You 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.

“You 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.”

“The park? Did I?”

“Well, it sounded like it.”

“I expect I did. Ever since I worked on that damned park I’ve had one lousy piece of luck after another.”

“That 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 of these dozens of views should have been drawn on overcast days.

The doorknocker banged again. “All right! All right!” I snapped, “I can hear you!”

I pulled the door open, and there was Dr. Jarvis, standing on the porch with Jane. It was still raining and thundering out, but after being shut up in Seymour Wallis’s study, the night air was cool and refreshing. Across the street, I could see Bryan Corder, his head bent against the sloping rain, his shoulders hunched as he walked quickly toward us.

“You two seem to have met,” I said to Jane and Dr. Jarvis as I ushered them inside.

“It was just one of those chance encounters across a gloomy porch,” said Jane.

Bryan came running up the steps, shaking rain from his hair like a wet dog. He was a solid, bluff man of almost forty, with a broad, dependable face that always reminded me of a worldly Pat Boone, if such a thing could exist. He gripped my arm. “Hi, John. Almost couldn’t make it. How’s things?”

“Spooky,” I said, and meant it. And before I closed the front door, I couldn’t stop myself from taking a quick look at the doorknocker, just to see if it was still bronze, still inanimate, and still as fiercely ugly as ever.

I led everyone to Seymour Wallis’s study, and introduced them. Wallis was polite but distracted, as if we were nothing more unusual than realtors who had come to value his property. He shook hands and offered whisky, and pulled up chairs, but then he sat back at his desk and stared at the threadbare carpet and said almost nothing.

Dr. Jarvis looked less medical in a navy blue sportcoat and slacks. He was sharp, short, and gingery, and I was beginning to like him. He took a swallow of whisky, coughed, and then said, “Your friend hasn’t made much improvement I’m afraid. He hasn’t had any more of those attacks, but he still has respiration problems, and we can’t wake him out of his coma. We’re running some EKGs and EEGs later tonight to see if there’s any sign of brain damage.”

“Brain damage? But all he did was fall off a chair.”

“I’ve known people to die from falling off chairs.”

“Do you still think it’s concussion?” Jane said. “What about his eyes?”

Dr. Jarvis turned in his seat. “If I thought it was concussion and nothing else, I wouldn’t be here. But it seems like there’s something else involved, and right now I don’t have a dog’s idea what.”

“Was this the room where it happened? The breathing and everything?” Bryan asked.

“Sure.”

Bryan stood up and walked around the perimeter of the study, touching the walls here and there, and peering into the fireplace. Every now and then he tapped the plaster with his knuckles to feel how solid it was. After a while he stood in the center of the room, and he looked puzzled.

“The door was closed?” he asked me.

“Door and windows.”

He shook his head slowly. “That’s real strange.”

“What’s strange?”

“Well, normally, when you get any kind of pressure build-up because of drafts or air currents, the fireplace is free and the chimney is unblocked. But you can put your hand here in the fireplace and feel for yourself. There’s no downdraft here. The chimney is all blocked up.”

I went across and knelt on the faded Indian carpet in front of the fire. It was one of those narrow Victorian study fires, with a decorated steel hood and a fireclay grate. I craned my head around and stared up into the cold, soot-scented darkness. Bryan was right, there was no draft, no breath of wind. Usually, when you look up a chimney stack, you can hear the sounds of the night echoing down the shaft, but this chimney was silent.

“Mr. Wallis,” said Bryan, “do you know for certain that this chimney is blocked? Did someone have it bricked up?”

Wallis was watching us with a frown on his face. “That chimney isn’t blocked. I had a fire in there just a few days ago. I was burning some old papers I wanted to get rid of.”

Bryan took another look up the chimney. “Well, Mr. Wallis, even if it wasn’t blocked then, it’s sure blocked now. It’s possible that the blockage may have had something to do with the noises you heard. Do you mind if I take a look upstairs?”

“Be my guest,” said Wallis. “I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind. I’ve had enough of this for one day.”

The four of us trooped out into the hallway and switched on the dim light that illuminated the stairs. It was dim because of its olive-and-yellow glass shade, which was thick with dust and spiderwebs. Everything in the house seemed to be musty and faded and covered with dust, but then I suppose that’s what Wallis called character. I was beginning to feel like a dedicated supporter of Formica and plastic and tacky modern building.

As Bryan mounted the first stair, Jane suddenly noticed the bronze statuette of the bear-lady.

“That’s unusual,” she said. “Did it come with the house?”

“No. Seymour Wallis dug it up in Fremont someplace when he was working on a bridge. He builds bridges, or at least he used to.”

Jane touched the serene face of the statuette as if she expected it to open its eyes at any moment.

“It reminds me of something,” she said softly. “It gives me the strangest feeling. It’s almost like I’ve seen it before, but I couldn’t have.”

She paused for a second or two, her hand touching the statuette’s head, and then she looked up. “I can’t remember. Perhaps I’ll think of it later. Shall we get on?”

With Bryan leading the way, we trod as quietly as we could up the old, squeaking staircase. There were two flights of about ten stairs each, and then we found ourselves on a long landing, illuminated by another dingy glass shade, and carpeted in dusty red. It didn’t look as if the house had been decorated for twenty or thirty years, and all around was that pervasive silence and that moldering smell of damp.

“The study chimney must come up through this room,” said Bryan, and led us across to a bedroom door that was set at an angle on the opposite side of the landing. He turned the brass handle and opened it up.

The bedroom was small and cold. It had a window that overlooked the yard, where dark wet trees rose and fell in the wind and the rain. There was pale blue wallpaper on the walls, stained brown with damp, and the only furniture was a cheap varnished wardrobe and a shabby iron bed. The floor was covered with old-fashioned linoleum that must have been green many years ago.

Bryan went across to the fireplace, which was similar to the fireplace in Seymour Wallis’s study, except that someone had painted it cream. He knelt down beside it, and listened, and the rest of us stood there and watched him.

“What can you hear?” I asked him. “Is it still blocked?”

“I think so,” he said, straining his eyes to see up into the darkness. “I just need to see round the ledge and I might be able to …”

He shifted himself nearer and cautiously poked his head up under the hood of the fire.

Dr. Jarvis laughed, but it was a nervous kind of a laugh. “Can you see anything?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” Bryan answered in a muffled voice. “There’s a different kind of resonance here. Some sort of thudding noise. I’m not sure if it’s echoing down the chimney or if it’s vibrating through the whole house.”

“We can’t hear anything out here,” I told him.

“Hang on,” he said, and shifted himself so that his whole head disappeared up the chimney.

“I hope you don’t mind washing your hair before you come back to civilization,” said Jane.

“Oh, I’ve done worse than this,” said Bryan. “Sewers are worse than chimneys any day of the week.”

“Can you hear anything now?” I asked him, kneeling down on the floor next to the fireplace.

“Ssshh!” ordered Bryan. “There’s some kind of noise building up now. The same kind of thudding.”

“I still don’t hear it,” I told him.

“It’s quite clear inside here. There it goes. Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud. It’s almost like a heart beating. Thud-thud-thud—why don’t you time it? Do you have a second hand on your watch?”

“I’ll time it,” put in Dr. Jarvis. “If it’s a pulse, then it’s my line of country.”

“Okay,” said Bryan, with a cough. “I’m starting now.”

He kept his head right up inside the hood of the chimney, and groped his hand around until he could touch Dr. Jarvis’s knee. Then as whatever he could hear began to thud in his ears, he beat out the time, and Dr. Jarvis checked it on his watch.

“It’s not a pulse,” commented Dr. Jarvis, after a couple of minutes. “Not a human pulse, anyway.”

“Do you have enough?” coughed Bryan. “I’m getting kind of claustrophobic up here.”

“More like Santa Claustrophobic,” joked Jane. “Will you bring a sack of toys out with you?”

“Ah, nuts,” said Bryan, and started to shift himself out.

Abruptly, horribly, he screamed. I’d never heard a man scream like that before, and for a second I couldn’t think what it was. But then he shouted, “Get me out! Get me out! For God’s sake, get me out!” and I knew something terrible was happening, and it was happening to him.

Dr. Jarvis seized one of Bryan’s legs, and yelled, “Pull! Pull him out of there!”

Freezing with fear, I grabbed hold of the other leg, and together we tried to tug him out. But even though it was only his head that was up inside the chimney, he seemed to be stuck fast, and he was shrieking and crying and his whole body was jerking in agonized spasms.

“Get me out! Get me out! Oh, God, oh God, get me out!”

Dr. Jarvis let go of Bryan’s leg and tried to see what was happening up inside the chimney hood. But Bryan was nailing around and shrieking so much that it was impossible to understand what was going on. Dr. Jarvis snapped, “Bryan! Bryan, listen! Don’t panic! Keep still or you’ll hurt yourself!”

He turned to me. “He must have gotten his head caught somehow. For Christ’s sake, try to hold him still.”

We both got a grip on the fireplace hood and tried to wrench it away from the tiles, but it was cemented by years of dust and rust and there was no getting it loose. Bryan was still screaming, but then suddenly he stopped, and his body slumped in the fireplace.

“Oh God,” said Dr. Jarvis. “Look.”

From under the fireplace hood, soaking Bryan’s collar and tie, came a slow stain of bright red blood. Jane, standing right behind us, retched. There was far too much blood for a minor cut or a graze. It dripped down Bryan’s shirt and over our hands, and then it began to creep along the cracks in between the tiles on the fireplace floor.

“Carefully now,” instructed Dr. Jarvis. “Pull him down carefully.”

Little by little, we shifted Bryan’s body downward. It seemed as if his head was still firmly caught at first, but then there was a sickening give of flesh, and he came completely out of the chimney, collapsing in the grate.

I stared at his head in rising horror. I could hardly bear to look but then I couldn’t look away, either. His whole head had been stripped of flesh, and all that was left was his bare skull, with only a few raw shreds of meat and a few sparse tufts of hair remaining. Even his eyes had gone from their sockets, leaving nothing but glutinous bone.

Jane, her voice trembling with nausea, said, “Oh, John. Oh, my God, what’s happened?”

Dr. Jarvis carefully laid Bryan’s body down. The skull made a sickening bonelike sound on the tiles. Dr. Jarvis’s face was as white and shocked as mine must have been.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he whispered. “Never.”

I looked up toward the dark maw of the old Victorian fireplace. “What I want to know is what did it. For Christ’s sake, Doctor, what’s up there?”

Dr. Jarvis shook his head mutely. Neither of us was prepared to take a look. Whatever it was that had ripped the flesh off Bryan’s head, whether it was a freak accident or some kind of malevolent animal, neither of us wanted to face it.

“Jane,” Dr. Jarvis said, taking a card out of his breast pocket, “this is the number of the Elmwood Foundation Hospital where I work. Call Dr. Speedwell and tell him what’s happened. Tell him I’m here. And ask him to get an ambulance around here as fast as he can.”

“What about the police?” I said. “We can’t just—”

Dr. Jarvis glanced cautiously across at the fireplace. “I don’t know. Do you think they’ll believe us?”

“For Christ’s sake, if there’s anything up that chimney that rips people apart, I’m not going to go up there and look for myself. And neither are you.”

Dr. Jarvis nodded. “Okay,” he said to Jane. “Dial the police as well.”

Jane was just about to leave the room when there was a soft knock at the door. Seymour Wallis’s voice said, “Are you all right in there? I thought I heard shouting.”

I went across to the door and opened it. Wallis stood there pale and anxious, and he must have seen from the look on my face that something had gone wrong.

“There’s been an accident,” I told him. “It’s probably better if you don’t come in.”

“Is someone hurt?” he asked, trying to look around my shoulder.

“Yes. Bryan is badly injured. But please, I suggest you don’t look. Its pretty awful.”

Wallis pushed me aside. “It’s my house, Mr. Hyatt. I want to know what goes on here.”

Well, I guess he was right. But when he walked into the bedroom and saw Bryan’s body lying there, its skull grinning up at the ceiling, he froze, and he could neither speak nor move.

Dr. Jarvis looked up. “Get that ambulance,” he told Jane tersely. “The sooner we find out what happened here the better.”

Wallis sat down heavily on the narrow bed, his hands in his lap, and stared at Bryan in unabating horror.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Wallis,” said Dr. Jarvis. “He thought he heard some kind of noise in the chimney, and he poked his head up there to see what it was.”

Wallis opened his mouth, said nothing, then closed it again.

“We had the feeling that something or someone attacked him,” I explained. “When his head was up there and we were trying to tug him out, it was just like someone equally powerful was pulling him back.”

Almost furtively, Wallis turned his eyes toward the dark and empty fireplace. “I don’t understand,” he said hoarsely. “What are you trying to say?”

Dr. Jarvis stood up. There was nothing more he could do for Bryan now, except try to discover what had killed him. He said seriously, “Either he got his head caught in some kind of freak accident, Mr. Wallis, or else there’s a creature up there, or a man, who tore the flesh off Bryan Corder’s head in some sort of psychopathic attack.”

“Up the chimney? Up the chimney of my house?”

“I’m afraid it looks that way.”

“But this is insane! What the hell lives up a chimney, and tears people apart like that?”

Dr. Jarvis glanced down at Bryan’s body, then back at Seymour Wallis. “That, Mr. Wallis, is exactly what we have to find out.”

Wallis thought about this for a while, then he rubbed his face in his hands. “It makes no sense, any of this. First breathing and now this. You realize I’ll have to sell this place.”

“You shouldn’t lose your money,” I said, trying to be helpful. “These old mansions are pretty much top-of-the-market these days.”

He shook his head tiredly. “It’s not the money I’m worried about. I just want someplace to live where things like this don’t happen. I want some peace, for Christ’s sake. That poor man.”

“Well, as long as the ghost doesn’t follow you, I guess that moving away might turn out to be the best solution,” I told him.

Wallis stared at me in shock and annoyance. “It’s up the damned chimney!” he snapped. “It just killed your colleague, and you’re trying to talk about it like it isn’t even important. It’s up there, and it’s hiding, and who are you to say that it won’t come out at night and strangle me when I’m lying in bed?”

“Mr. Wallis,” I said, “I’m not Rod Serling.”

“I suppose you called the police,” retorted Mr. Wallis, without even looking at me.

Dr. Jarvis nodded. “They should be here soon.”

At that moment, Jane came back upstairs and said, “Two or three minutes. They had a car in the neighborhood. I called the hospital, too, and they’re sending an ambulance right down.”

“Thanks, Jane,” I told her.

“I have a gun, you know,” Wallis said. “It’s only my old wartime Colt. We could fire it up the chimney, and then whatever it was wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Dr. Jarvis came over. “Do you mind if I borrow a pillow slip?” he asked. “I just want something to cover Mr. Corder’s head.”

“Sure. Take it off that pillow right there. It’s a pretty gruesome sight. Can you think what the hell did it? Is there any kind of bird that does that? Maybe some kind of raven got trapped down the chimney, or maybe a chimpanzee.”

“A chimpanzee?” I queried.

Dr. Jarvis said, “It’s not so farfetched. There’s an Edgar. Allen Poe story about an ape who murders a girl and stuffs her up the chimney.”

“Sure, but whatever did this is real fierce. It looks more like a cat or a rat to me. Maybe it’s starved from being trapped up the chimney stack so long.”

Wallis got up off the bed. “I’m getting my gun,” he said. “If that thing comes out, I’m not standing here unprotected.”

Outside in the street, a siren wailed. Jane squeezed my arm. “They’re here. Thank God for that.”

There was a heavy knocking at the front door, and Wallis went down to answer it. We heard feet clattering up the stairs and two cops in rain-speckled shirts and caps came into the small bedroom. They knelt down by the body of Bryan without looking at any of the rest of us, as if Bryan was their habitually drunken brother they were coming to take home.

“What’s this pillow slip over his head?” asked one of the cops, a gum-chewing Italian with a drooping moustache. He didn’t make any attempt to touch the pillow slip or move the body. Like most West Coast cops, he had a sense of suspicion that was highly attuned, and one of the first rules he’d ever had to learn was don’t touch anything until you know what it is.

I said, “We were surveying the house. There were some noises here that Mr. Wallis found a nuisance. My name’s John Hyatt and I work for the sanitation department. This is Jane Torresino and this is Dr. Jarvis from Elmwood.”

The cop glanced over at his buddy, a young Irishman with pale gray eyes and a freckly face that was almost more freckle than face. “How come the sanitation department is working so late?”

“Well,” I said, “this came outside the usual type of sanitary investigation. This is what you might call personal.”

“How about you, Doctor?”

Dr. Jarvis gave a brief, twitchy smile. “It’s the same for me. I’m moonlighting, I guess.”

“So what happened?”

I coughed, and explained. “This gentlemen, Bryan Corder, he’s an engineer from the same department as me. He’s a specialist in house structure, and he usually works on slum clearance, that kind of thing. We brought him along because he knows about odd noises, and drafts, and everything to do with dry rot.”

The policeman continued to stare at me placidly, but still made no move to lift the pillow slip from Bryan’s head.

“He thought he heard a thudding noise in the chimney,” I said, almost whispering. “He put his head up there to hear it better, and well, that’s the result. Something seemed to attack him. We didn’t see what.”

The cop looked at his buddy, shrugged, and lifted off the pillow slip.

A white-and-gold Cadillac ambulance whooped away through the easing rain, bearing Bryan Corder’s body off to the Elmwood Foundation Hospital. I stood on the front step of 1551 and watched it go. Beside me, the police lieutenant who had arrived to deal with the case lit up a cigarette. He was a tall, laconic man with a wet hat and a hawkish nose, and a manner of questioning that was courteous and quiet. He had introduced himself as Lieutenant Stroud and produced his badge like a conjurer producing a paper flower out of thin air.

“Well,” he said gently, blowing out smoke. “This hasn’t been your evening, Mr. Hyatt.”

I coughed. “You can say that again.”

Lieutenant Stroud smoked for a while. “Did you know Mr. Corder well?”

“We worked in the same department. I went ’round to his place for supper one night. Moira’s a real hand at pecan cookies.”

“Pecan cookies, huh? Yes, they’re a weakness of mine. I expect Mrs. Corder will take this very hard.”

“I’m sure she will. She’s a nice woman.”

An upstairs window rattled open, and one of the policemen leaned his head out. “Lieutenant?”

Stroud stepped back a pace, looked upward. “What is it, officer? Have you found anything?”

“We’ve had half of that goddamned chimney out, sir, and there’s no sign of nothing. Just dried blood.”

“No signs of rats or birds? No secret pas sages?”

“Not a thing, sir. Do you want us to keep on searching?”

“Just for a while, officer.”

The window rattled shut, and Lieutenant Stroud turned back to the street. The clouds had all passed overhead now, and stars were beginning to sparkle in the clear night sky. Down on Mission, the traffic booped and beeped, and out of an upper window across the street came the sounds of the Hallelujah Chorus.

“You a religious man, Mr. Hyatt?” asked Lieutenant Stroud.

“On and off,” I said cautiously. “More off than on. I think I’m more superstitious than religious.”

“Then what you said about breathing and heartbeats in the house … you really believe it?”

I looked at him carefully across the porch. His eyes were glistening and perceptive. I shook my head, “Uh-huh.”

“What I have to consider is a number of alternatives,” Lieutenant Stroud said. “Either Mr. Corder died in a particularly bizarre and unlikely accident; or else he was attacked by an animal or bird that was trapped in the chimney; or else he was attacked by an unknown man or woman who somehow hid him or herself in the chimney; or else he was attacked and killed by you and your friends.”

I stared down at the wet sidewalk and nodded. “I realize that.”

“Of course, there is the possibility that some supernatural event occurred somehow connected with your occult investigations here.”

I glanced up. “You consider that as a possibility?”

Lieutenant Stroud smiled. “Just because I’m a detective, that doesn’t mean I’m totally impervious to what goes on in this world. And out of this world, too. One of my hobbies is science fiction.”

I didn’t know what to say for a while. Maybe this tall, polite man was trying to win my confidence, trying to inveigle me into saying that Dr. Jarvis and Jane and I had sacrificed Bryan at some illicit black magic ceremony. His face, though, gave nothing away. It was intelligent but impassive. He was the first cultured-sounding policeman I’d ever met, and I wasn’t sure I liked the experience.

I turned back to the door and indicated the wolfish doorknocker with a nod of my head.

“What do you make of that?” I asked him.

He raised an eyebrow. “I noticed it when I first came in. It does look a little sinister, doesn’t it?”

“My friend thought it looked like a werewolf.”

Lieutenant Stroud stepped back. “Well, I wouldn’t know about that, Mr. Hyatt. I might like science fiction, but I’m not an expert on vampires and demons and all that kind of thing. And in any case, my superiors prefer flesh-and-blood killers they can lock in cages. I always look for the natural answer before I think of the supernatural one.”

“Well, you’re a policeman.”

The front door opened and Dr. Jarvis stepped tout. He was pale and he looked as if he’d spent the evening giving blood. “John, can I just have a private word with you?”

Lieutenant Stroud nodded his assent. “Dr. Jarvis led me into the hallway, and next to the statue of the bear-lady he turned around and faced me with an expression that was even more shocked and grave than before.

I said, “What’s wrong? You look awful.”

He took out his handkerchief and patted the sweat from his forehead. “I couldn’t tell the lieutenant about this. He’s going to find out sooner or later in any case. But I’d rather he heard it from someone else, someone who’s actually there.”

Just then, Jane came down the stairs. She said, “They’ve almost demolished the whole bedroom and they haven’t found anything. John, can we leave now? I’d give my gold lamé tights for a gin-and-orange juice.”

“Jane,” Dr. Jarvis said, “you might as well hear this, too. You were there when it happened. At least you’ll believe it.”

Jane asked, frowning, “What is it? Is anything wrong?”

I took the opportunity of putting my arm around her, and giving her a protective, masculine squeeze. It’s strange how a man’s sexual instincts go on working, even in moments of crisis and horror. But my ardor wasn’t exactly firing on all eight. And when Dr. Jarvis told us his news, my hand dropped to my side and I stood there, frightened and wooden and coldly convinced that what was happening in Seymour Wallis’s house was growing darker and more powerful and more malevolent with every hour that passed.

“I had a call from Elmwood. They took your friend Bryan Corder straight into the morgue, and began a postmortem.”

“Did they find out how he died?” asked Jane.

Dr. Jarvis swallowed uncomfortably. “They didn’t find out because they couldn’t. In spite of what happened to his head, he’s still clinically alive.”

My mouth fell open like an idiot. “Still alive? He can’t be!”

“I’m afraid that he is. At least, the surgeons believe he is. You see, his heart’s still beating. They listened to his chest, and it’s beating loud and clear at twenty-four beats to the minute.”

“Twenty-four?” asked Jane. “That’s not—”

“Not human,” put in Dr. Jarvis. “Not human at all. But the fact remains that his heart’s beating and while it’s beating they’re going to try to keep it beating.”

It was right then that I was sure I heard someone or something whispering. It may have been one of the policemen upstairs. It may have been an automobile’s tires on the wet street. But when I turned around instinctively to see who it was, I realized I was standing nearer to that damned hideous doorknocker than anything else, that doorknocker that said: “Return.”