THREE

I tossed and turned on my sweaty, wrinkled bed for a couple of hours, and then at five in the morning I got up and made myself a mug of strong black coffee and topped it up with Calvados. It’s what the old men of Normandy drink to brace themselves on cold December days. I stood by the window looking down over the wan early morning street, and I felt as if the whole course of my life had subtly and strangely changed, like taking a wrong turn in a city you think you know, and finding yourself in an unfamiliar neighborhood where the buildings are dark and tatty, and the people unfriendly and unsociable.

By six I couldn’t restrain my curiosity any longer, and I called Elmwood Foundation Hospital to see if Dr. Jarvis was there. A bland receptionist told me that Dr. Jarvis was taking no calls, but she made a note of my number and promised to have him call me back.

I sat back on my floral sofa and sipped more coffee. I’d been thinking all night about everything that had happened at 1551 Pilarcitos, and yet I still couldn’t understand what was going on. One thing was certain, though. Whatever force or influence was haunting that house, it wasn’t anything friendly. I really hesitated to use the word “ghost” even when I was thinking about it in the privacy of my own apartment, but what the hell else could it be?

There were so many odd sides to this situation, and none of them seemed to have anything to do with anything else. I had the feeling that Seymour Wallis himself was more important than he knew. After all, it was his house, and he’d been the first to hear all that breathing, and he’d said himself that bad luck had been dogging him around ever since he worked at that park on Fremont. He still had that odd souvenir of Fremont, too, the bear-lady on the banister.

Above everything, though, I had the strongest feeling that whatever was going on wasn’t erratic or accidental. It was like the opening of a chess game, when the moves appear casual and unrelated, but are all part of a a deliberate stratagem. The question was whose stratagem? And why?

How Bryan Corder’s terrible accident and Dan Machin’s eerie concussion could possibly be connected, though, I couldn’t understand. I didn’t want to think about it too deeply, either, because I kept getting ghastly mental pictures of Bryan’s fleshless head, and the thought that he might still be alive made the creeps twenty times creepier. I didn’t have a strong stomach at the best of times. I was always the squeamish person who couldn’t eat the squid in the seafood platter and ordered his eggs well-boiled.

The telephone rang and gave me a chill prickly feeling up the back of my scalp. I picked it up and said, “John Hyatt here. Who is this?”

“John? It’s Jane.”

I took a mouthful of coffee. “You’re up early,” I remarked. “Couldn’t you sleep?”

“Could you?”

“Well, not exactly. I kept thinking about Bryan. I called the hospital a little while ago, but they don’t have any news yet. I almost hope he’s dead.”

“I know what you mean.”

I carried the telephone over to the sofa and stretched out. Right now I was beginning to feel tired. Maybe it was just the relief of having someone friendly to talk to. I finished my coffee and accidentally took a mouthful of grounds, and I spent the rest of the conversation trying to pick them off my tongue.

“The reason I called you was something I found out,” Jane said.

“Something to do with Bryan?”

“Not exactly. But something to do with Seymour Wallis’s house. You know all those pictures of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak?”

“Sure. I was wondering about those.”

“Well, I went and looked them up in some of my books back at the store. Mount Taylor’s in the San Mateo Mountains, elevation eleven thousand, three hundred eighty-nine feet, and Cabezon Peak is way off to the northeast in San Doval County, elevation eight thousand three hundred feet.”

I spat grounds. “That’s in New Mexico, right?”

“That’s right. Real Indian country. And there are dozens of legends connected with those two mountains, mostly Navaho stories about Big Monster.”

“Big Monster? Who the hell is Big Monster?”

“Big Monster was a giant who was supposed to terrorize the southwest centuries and centuries ago. He made his home on Mount Taylor. He had a blue- and black-striped face, and a suit of armor made out of flints, woven together with the intestines of all the people and animals he’d slaughtered.”

“He doesn’t sound like the John Weitz of the ancient world.”

“He wasn’t,” said. Jane. “He was one of the fiercest giants in any legend in any culture. I have an eighteenth-century book right here that says he was in charge of all man-destroying demons, and that no mortal could destroy him. He was slain, though, by a pair of brave gods called the Twins, who deflected his arrows with a rainbow, and then knocked off his head with a bolt of lightning. They threw his head off to the northeast, and it became Cabezon Peak.”

I coughed. “That’s a very pretty story. But what does it have to do with Seymour Wallis’s house? Apart from all the etchings of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak, of course.”

“Well, I’m not sure, exactly,” said Jane. “But there’s a reference here to the First One to Use Words for Force, which I don’t really understand. Whatever or whoever the First One to Use Words for Force was, it was apparently powerful enough to have cut off Big Monster’s golden hair, and make a mockery out of him, and there’s something else, too. The First One to Use Words for Force was eternal and immortal, and his motto to all the gods and humans who tried to dispose of him was a Navaho word which I can’t pronounce but which means ‘to come back by the path of many pieces.’”

“Jane, honey, you’re not making much sense.”

“John, darling, there’s another word for ‘come back,’ in case you’ve forgotten. ‘Return.’”

I swung my legs off the sofa and set up straight. “Jane,” I said, “you’re clutching at totally improbable straws. Now, I don’t know why Seymour Wallis has all of those pictures of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak in his house. I guess they were there when he moved in. But you could take any mountain in the whole of the southwest and find some kind of Indian legend connected with it. It’s no big deal, really. I mean, maybe we’re dealing with some kind of supernatural power. Some latent force that has suddenly been released as a kinetic force. But we’re not dealing with Navaho monsters. I mean, there’s no way.”

Jane wasn’t abashed. “I still think we ought to look into it further,” she said. “The trouble with you is, you’re too rational.”

“Rational? I work for the sanitation department and you think I’m rational?”

“Yes, I do. John Hyatt, the national rational. You’re so rational they even named a hotel chain after you.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Listen, will you do me a favor? Will you call the office for me. Speak to Douglas P. Sharp and tell him I’m sick. I want to get around to Elmwood Hospital this morning and see Dr. Jarvis.”

“Shall I meet you for lunch?”

“Why not? I’ll come by the bookstore and pick you up.”

“Will you call me when you find out how Bryan is? I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure.”

I laid down the phone. I thought about what Jane had said for a while and then I shook my head and smiled. She liked ghosts and magic and monsters. She had once dragged me off to see all the old original horror pictures, like Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, and Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein. Somehow, the idea that Jane believed in ghouls and monsters ’round at 1551 Pilarcitos was reassuring. It brought out the hearty patronizing male chauvinist in me. Perhaps that’s why I’d asked her along there in the first place. If Jane believed it, then it couldn’t be true.

The telephone rang again just as I was shaving. With my chin liberally lathered with hot mint foam, I picked it up like Father Christmas taking an order for next winter’s toys.

“John? This is James Jarvis. You left me a message to call.”

“Oh, hi. I was just wondering how Bryan Corder was.”

There was a pause. “His heart’s still beating.”

“You don’t think he’s going to live?”

“It’s hard to say. I wouldn’t like him to. In any case, he could never go out into the world again. He’d have to spend the rest of his life in a sanitized oxygen tent. The whole brain is exposed, and any infection would kill him straight away.”

I wiped foam away from my mouth with the back of my hand. “Couldn’t you pull the plug out and let him die anyway? I think I know Bryan well enough to say that he wouldn’t want to go on living like that.”

“Well,” said Dr. Jarvis, “we have.”

“You have what?”

“We’ve taken him off life-support systems. He’s getting no plasma, no blood, no intravenous nutrition or sedation, no adrenalin, no electronic heart pacing, no nothing. Medically, he should have died hours ago.”

He paused again, and I heard someone come into his office and say something indistinct. Then Dr. Jarvis said, “The trouble is, John, his heart’s still beating and it won’t stop. However serious his injuries, I can’t certify that he’s dead until it does.”

“What about euthanasia?”

“It’s illegal, that’s what. And no matter how bad Bryan’s injuries are, I can’t do it. I’m taking enough of a risk as it is, depriving him of life-support systems. I could lose my license.”

“Has his wife, Moira, seen him?”

“She knows he’s had an accident, but that’s all. We’re obviously doing everything we can to keep her away.”

“How about Dan Machin? Any improvement?”

“He’s still comatose. But why don’t you come up to the hospital and see for yourself? I could do with some moral support. I haven’t been able to talk about last night with anyone here. They’re all so goddamned sane, they’ll think I belong to a coven or something.”

“Okay. Give me a half hour.”

I shaved, dressed in my off-white denim suit and a red shirt, and splashed myself with Brut. It’s surprising what a change of clothes can do for your morale. Then I made my bed, rinsed up my coffee cup, blew a kiss to the picture of Dolly Parton that hung in my bijou hallway, and went downstairs to the street.

It was one of those bright mornings that make you screw your eyes up. The blue skies and the torn white clouds did a lot to reassure me that life was still capable of being ordinary, and that last night’s accident could have been an isolated and unpleasant freak of nature. I walked down to the corner and hailed a taxi. I used to own a car, but keeping the payments up on a sanitation officer’s salary was like trying to clear up a blocked-up sewer with a toothbrush. The repossessors had arrived one foggy morning, and driven away my metallic blue Monte Carlo into the swirling pea-souper. It was only after they’d gone that I realized I’d left my Evel Knievel sun-glasses in the glove box.

As we drove up Fulton Street toward the hospital, which was one of those multi-leveled teak-and-concrete structures overlooking the ocean, the taxi driver said, “Look at them damn birds. You ever see anything like that before?”

I glanced up from my Examiner. I’d been trying to find any mention of Bryan Corder’s accident. We were turning between neatly clipped hedges into the hospital’s wide forecourt now, and to my fascination and disquiet, the building’s rooftops were thick with gray birds. It wasn’t just a flock that had decided to settle. There were thousands of them, all along the skyline of the main building, and sitting on every outbuilding and clinic and garage.

“Now that’s what I call weird,” said the taxi driver, circling the cab around the forecourt and pulling up by the main door. “Weird with a capital ‘wuh.’”

I climbed out of the car and stood there for a moment or two, looking along the fluttering ranks of gray. I didn’t know what species of bird they were. They were big birds, like pigeons, but they were gray as a thundery sky, gray as the sea on a restless day. What’s worse, they were silent. They didn’t chirrup or sing. They sat on the hospital roof, their dark feathers ruffled in the warm Pacific breeze, patient and quiet as birds on a granite gravestone.

“You see that Hitchcock movie?” asked the taxi driver. “The one where the birds go crazy?”

I coughed. “I don’t need reminding of that, thanks.”

“Well, maybe this is it,” said the taxi driver. “Maybe this is where the birds take over. Mind you, I’d like to see a bird trying to drive this hack. The fan belt slipped off twice this morning. I’d like to see a bird put a fan belt back on.”

I paid the driver and walked through the automatic doors into the cool precincts of the hospital. It was all very tasteful in there. Italian tiles on the floor, paintings by David Hockney, palm trees, and soft music. You didn’t come to Elmwood Foundation Hospital unless your medical insurance was well paid up.

The receptionist was a buxom girl in a tight white dress who must have tipped the balance for many a touch-and-go coronary patient. She had bouffant black hair, in which her nurse’s cap nestled like a neatly laid egg, and enough teeth for herself and three others like her. Not that there could have been three others like her, or even one.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Karen.”

“Hi, Karen, I’m John. What are you doing tonight?”

She smiled. “This is Wednesday. My hair wash night.”

I looked up at her beehive. “You mean you wash that thing? I thought you just had it revarnished.”

She went huffy after that, and prodded a button to page Dr. Jarvis. “Some of us still believe in the old values,” she said tartly.

“You mean like stiletto heels and cars with fins?”

“What’s wrong with stiletto heels and cars with fins?”

“Don’t ask me, ask Claes Oldenburg.”

The receptionist blinked sooty eyelashes. “Claes Oldenburg? Is he an intern?”

Dr. Jarvis mercifully appeared from the elevator, and came across with his hand out.

“John! Am I glad to see you!”

I nodded meaningfully toward the brunette receptionist. “The feeling could be mutual,” I told him. “I think your front-desk lady keeps her brains in her bottom drawer.”

Dr. Jarvis ushered me over to the elevator, and we rose up to the fifth floor. Gentle muzak played “Moon River” which (unless you had any taste in music) was supposed to be soothing.

We emerged in a shiny corridor that was lit by dim fluorescent tubes and hung with mediocre lithographs of Mill Valley and Sausalito. Dr. Jarvis led the way down to a pair of wide mahogany doors and pushed them open. I followed obediently and found myself in an observation room, with one glass wall that looked into the murky, blue-lit depths of an intensive-care unit. Dr. Jarvis said, “Go ahead,” and I walked across the tiled floor and peered through the glass.

The sight of Bryan in that livid blue room, lying on a bed with his naked skull resting on a pillow, and his full fleshed body in a green medical gown was eerie and frightening. Even though I’d seen him before, and actually had the shock of trying to drag him out of the chimney, this grinning skeletal vision was almost too much for me. But what was worse was the electrical screen monitor beside his bed, which showed his heartbeats coming slow but regular, tiny traveling blips of light that meant: I am still alive.

“I don’t believe it,” I whispered. “I can see it with my own eyes, but I just don’t believe it.”

Dr. Jarvis came up and stood next to me. He was very white, and there were mauve smudges of tiredness under his eyes. “Nor do I. But there it is. His heartbeat is very slow, but it’s regular and strong. If we killed him now, there would be no doubt at all that we would technically be committing a homicide.”

A young intern standing next to us said, “He can’t hold out very much longer, sir. He’s real sick.”

Dr. Jarvis shrugged. “He’s not just sick, Perring. He’s dead. Or at least he should be.”

I stared at Bryan’s white and glistening head for four or five minutes. The vacant eye sockets looked like dark mocking eyes, and the jaws were bared in a bony grin. Beside me, Dr. Jarvis, said nothing, but I could see his hands out of the corner of my eye, twisting a ballpen around and around his fingers in nervous tension.

And in the depths of that blue-lit room, the heartbeat went on and on, the blips coursing ceaselessly across the screen, keeping Bryan Corder alive in a hideous aquamarine hell that he could never see nor understand.

“I have some kind of a theory. Do you want to hear it?” Dr. Jarvis said hoarsely.

I was glad to turn away from that glass inspection panel, and keep my eyes and my mind off that living skull. “Sure. Go ahead. Jane’s got herself some theories, too, although I have to tell you that they’re pretty wild.”

“I don’t suppose mine are any less wild than hers.”

I took his arm. “Is there any way of getting a drink around here? I could sure use one.”

“I have an icebox in my office.”

We left the observation room thankfully, and walked along the corridor to Dr. Jarvis’s office. It was pretty cramped, with just space enough for a desk and a tiny icebox and a narrow settee, and the view was only impressive if you liked staring at the backs of buildings. Apart from a cheap desk-lamp and a stack of medical journals, and a photograph of Dr. Jarvis standing on a rustic bridge with a freckly young girl—“my daughter by my ex-wife, God bless her”—the room was undecorated and bare.

“I call this the broom closet,” explained Dr. Jarvis, with a wry grin. “The best offices are all along the west wall, overlooking the ocean, but you have to work here for at least a century before you get one.”

He took a bottle of gin from his desk drawer and produced tonic and ice from his diminutive fridge. He mixed us a couple of g-and-t’s, and then sat back and propped his feet on his desk. One of his shoes was worn through to the cardboard lining.

“Jane thinks that what’s happening at Wallis’s house is something to do with Red Indian legends,” I said. “Apparently Mount Taylor used to be the home of some giant dude called Big Monster, and Cabezon Peak is his head. He had it knocked off by lightning.”

Dr. Jarvis lit a cigarette and passed me one. I didn’t smoke very much these days, but right then I felt like smoking the whole pack. There was a pool of nausea someplace down in my stomach, and every time I thought of Bryan Corder’s sightless eyes, it stirred itself around and around.

“Well, I don’t know about legends,” said Dr. Jarvis, “but there seems to be some kind of connection between what happened to Machin and what happened to Corder. When you think about it, both of them were investigating some kind of noise at 1551 Pilarcitos, and both of them came away from that investigation acually producing the sound that they’d heard. Machin is breathing like the breathing he heard in Seymour Wallis’s study, and Corder’s heart is beating just like the beat he heard up Wallis’s chimney.”

I sipped my gin-and-tonic. “So what’s the theory?”

Dr. Jarvis pulled a face. “That’s it. That’s the whole theory. The theory is that whatever influence or power is dominating that house, it’s kind of smuggling itself out of there in bits and pieces.”

“Oh, sure,” I said laconically. “What do we get next? Legs and arms? Noses and ears?”

But right at the very moment I was saying those words with my lips, my mind was saying something else. Reminding me of what Jane had said on the telephone only an hour or two ago. A Navaho word which I can’t pronounce which means ‘to come back by the path of many pieces.’

And on the doorknocker, it said: “Return.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Dr. Jarvis. “You look sick.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I am. But something that Jane said about her Indian legend kind of ties up with something that you said. There was a demon or something that was capable of besting this Big Monster, even though Big Monster was almost indestructible by humans and demons and almost everyone else. This demon was called the First One to Use Words for Force, something like that.”

Dr. Jarvis finished his gin-and-tonic and poured himself another. “I don’t see the connection,” he said.

“The connection is that this demon’s motto was some Indian word that means ‘coming back by the path of many pieces.’”

Dr. Jarvis frowned. “So?”

“So everything! So what you said was that whatever power was possessing Wallis’s house, it’s smuggling itself out of there in bits and pieces! First it’s breathing and now its heartbeat.”

Dr. Jarvis looked at me long and level, and didn’t even lift his drink from the table. I said, almost embarrassed, “It’s a thought, anyway. It just seemed like too much of a coincidence.”

“What you’re trying to suggest is that these noises in Wallis’s house are something to do with a demon who’s gradually taking people over? Bit by bit?”

“Isn’t that what you’re suggesting?”

Dr. Jarvis sighed, and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t exactly know what I’m suggesting. Maybe we ought to call at the house again, and ask Mr. Wallis if the heartbeat’s vanished, too.”

“I’m game if you are. I haven’t heard from him all day.”

“He left a message that he telephoned here,” said Dr. Jarvis. “He was probably asking about Corder.”

Dr. Jarvis found the message on the pad and punched out Wallis’s number. It rang and rang and rang. In the end he put the receiver back and said, “No reply. Guess he did the wise thing and went out.”

I finished my drink. “Would you stay there? I wouldn’t. But I’ll call around there later this afternoon. I decided to take the day off work.”

“Won’t San Francisco miss its most talented sanitation officer?”

I crushed out my cigarette. “I was thinking of a change anyway. Maybe I’ll go into medicine. It seems like an idle kind of a life.”

He laughed.

I drank some more. “Did you see the birds?”

“Birds? What birds? I’ve been shut up with Corder all night.”

“I’m surprised nobody mentioned it. Your whole damned hospital looks like a bird sanctuary.”

Dr. Jarvis raised an eyebrow. “What kind of birds?”

“I don’t know. I’m not Audubon the Second. They’re big, and kind of gray. You should go out and take a look. They’re pretty sinister. If I didn’t have better taste, I’d say they were buzzards, waiting for Elmwood’s rich and unfortunate patients to pass away.”

“Are there many?”

“Thousands. Count ’em.”

Just then Dr. Jarvis’s telephone bleeped. He picked it up and said, “Jarvis.”

He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay. I’m right there,” and clapped the phone down.

“Anything wrong?” I asked him.

“It’s Corder. I don’t know how the hell he’s been doing it, but Dr. Crane says he’s been trying to sit up.”

“Sit up? You have to be kidding! The guy’s almost a corpse!”

We left our drinks and went quickly back down the corridor to the observation room. Dr. Crane was there, along with the bearded pathologist Dr. Nightingale, and a nicely proportioned black lady who was introduced to me as Dr. Weston, a specialist in brain damage. Nicely proportioned though she was, she spoke and behaved like a specialist in brain damage, and so I left well enough alone. One day, she’d find herself a good-looking neurologist and settle down.

It was what was happening behind the window, in the blue depths of the intensive-care unit that really stunned me. I had the same desperate breathless sensation you get when you step into a swimming pool that’s ten degrees too cold.

Bryan Corder had turned his head away from us, and all we could see was the back of his skull and the exposed muscles at the back of his neck, red and stringy and laced with veins. He was moving, though, actually moving. His arm kept reaching out, as if it was trying to grasp something or push something away, and his legs stirred under the covers.

Dr. Jarvis said, “My God, can’t we stop him?”

Dr. Crane, a bespectacled specialist with a head that seemed to be two sizes too large for his body, said, “We’ve already tried sedation. It doesn’t appear to have any effect.”

“Then we’ll have to strap him down. We can’t have him moving around. It’s bizarre!”

Dr. Weston, the black lady, interrupted him. “It may be bizarre, Dr. Jarvis, but it’s quite unprecedented. Maybe we should just let him do what he wants. He’s not going to survive, anyway.”

“For Christ’s sake!” snapped Dr. Jarvis. “The whole thing’s inhuman!”

Just how inhuman it really was, none of us really understood, not until Bryan suddenly lifted himself on one elbow, and slowly swung himself out of his bed.

Dr. Jarvis took one look at that stocky figure in its green robes, with its ghastly skull perched on its shoulders, standing alone and unaided in a light as blue as lightning, as blue as death, and he shouted to his intern, “Get him back on that bed! Come on, help me!”

The intern stayed where he was, white and terrified, but Dr. Jarvis pushed open the door between the observation room and the intensive-care unit, and I went in behind him.

There was a strange, cold smell in there. It was like a mixture between ethyl alcohol and something sweet. Bryan Corder—what was left of Bryan, stood only four or five feet away from us, silent and impassive, his skull fixed in the empty, revenous look of death.

“John,” said Dr. Jarvis quietly.

“Yes?”

“I want you to take his left arm and lead him back to the couch. Force him to walk backward, so that when he reaches the couch, we can push against him and he’ll have to sit back. Then all we have to do is swing his legs across, and we’ll have him lying flat again. See those straps under the couch? As soon as we get him down, we buckle him up. You got me?”

“Right.”

“You frightened?”

“You bet your ass.”

Dr. Jarvis licked his lips in nervous anticipation. “Okay, John, let’s do it.”

Bryan’s heartbeat, monitored in steady blips through the wires that still trailed from his chest, was still at a slow twenty-four beats to the minute. But right then, my own heartbeat felt even slower. My mouth was dry with fear, and my legs were the bent wobbly legs of someone who wades into clear water.

Dr. Jarvis and I both inched closer, our hands raised, our eyes fixed on Bryan’s skull. For some reason I felt that Bryan could still see, even though his eye-sockets were empty. He took a shuffling step toward us, and the raw muscle that held his jaw in place started to twitch.

“My God,” whispered Dr. Jarvis, “he’s trying to say something!”

For a moment I thought that I probably wasn’t going to have the nerve to grab hold of Bryan’s arm and force him back on the bed. Supposing he fought back? Supposing I had to touch that naked, living skull? But then Dr. Jarvis snapped, “Now!” and I went forward awkward and clumsy, with my courage as weak as a girl’s. I think I even shrieked out loud. I’m not ashamed of it. At least I tried.

Bryan collapsed in our arms. Instead of forcing him back, we had to drag him, and we heaved him up on to the couch like a sack of meal. Dr. Jarvis held the back of his skull to prevent any injury, and we laid him carefully down with his arms by his sides and strapped him tight with restraining bands. Then we stood and looked at each other across his supine body, and all we could do was smirk with suppressed fear.

Dr. Jarvis checked Bryan’s heartbeat and vital signs, and they were still the same. Twenty-four beats a minute and continuing strong. Respiration slow but steady. I took a deep breath and wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. I was sweating and shaking, and I could hardly speak.

Dr. Jarvis said, “This beats everything. This guy is supposed to be dead. Every rule in the book says he’s dead. But here he is living and breathing and even walking about.”

At that moment Dr. Weston came in. She looked down at Bryan Corder and said, “Maybe it’s a miracle.”

“Well, maybe it is,” said Dr. Jarvis. “But maybe it’s a damned evil piece of black magic, too.”

“Black magic, Dr. Jarvis?” said Dr. Weston. “I didn’t think you white folks believed in that.”

“I don’t know what to believe,” he muttered. “This whole thing is totally insane.”

“Insane or not, I have my tests to run,” she said. “Thank you for restraining him so well. And thank you, too, Mr. Hyatt.”

I coughed. “I won’t say it’s been a pleasure.”

We left Dr. Weston and her interns to run through their brain-damage tests on Bryan Corder’s exposed skull, and we went out into the corridor. Dr. Jarvis stood for a long time by the window, staring out across the hospital parking lot. Then he reached into the pocket of his white medical coat and took out a pack of cigarettes.

I stood a little ways away, watching him and keeping quiet. I guessed he wanted to be alone right then. He was suddenly faced with something that turned his most basic ideas about medicine upside down, and he was trying to rationalize a bizarre horror that, so far, could only be explained by superstition.

He lit his cigarette. “You were right about the birds.”

“They’re still up there?”

“Thousands of them, all along the roof.”

I stepped up to the window and looked out. They were there, all right, ragged and fluttering in the Pacific wind.

“They’re like some kind of goddamned omen,” he said. “What’s the matter with them? They don’t even sing.”

“They look like they’re waiting for something,” I said. “I just hope that it’s nothing more portentous than a packet of birdseed.”

“Let’s go take a look at Machin. I could use some light relief,” Dr. Jarvis suggested.

“You call what happened to Dan light relief?”

He took a last drag at his cigarette and nipped it out between his finger and thumb. “After what happened just now, a funeral would be light relief.”

We walked along the corridor until we came to Dan’s room. Dr. Jarvis looked through the small circular window in the door, and then opened it.

Dan was still in a coma. There was a nurse by his bedside, and his pulse and respiration and blood pressure were being closely observed. Dr. Jarvis went across and examined him, lifting his eyelids to see if there was any response. Dan’s face was white and spectral, and he was still breathing in that same deep, dreamless rhythm that had characterized the breathing in Seymour Wallis’s house.

As Dr. Jarvis was checking Dan’s body temperature, I said, “Supposing—”

“Supposing what?” he said, preoccupied.

I came closer to Dan’s bedside. The young boy from Middle America was so still and pallid he might have been dead, except for his hollow, regular breathing.

“Supposing Bryan was trying to get here, to see Dan.”

Dr. Jarvis looked around. “Why should he want to do that?”

“Well, each of them has one of the sounds that used to haunt Seymour Wallis’s house. Maybe the two of them have enough in common that they want to get together. All that Indian stuff that Jane was talking about, you know, returning by the path of many pieces, well maybe that means some kind of reincarnation by numbers.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It’s pretty simple. If this power or influence or whatever it is that’s haunting Seymour Wallis’s house was all kind of split up, you know, breathing in one place and heartbeat in another, then maybe it might try to get itself back together again.”

“John, you’re raving.”

“You’ve seen Bryan walking around with no skin on his skull and you tell me I’m raving?”

Dr. Jarvis made a note of Dan’s temperature on his chart and then stood up straight. “There’s no point in trying to find farfetched answers,” he said. “Whatever’s going on, there has to be a simple explanation.”

“Like what? One man goes crazy and another man loses the skin off his head, and we have to look for a simple explanation? James, there’s something planned and deliberate going on here. Somebody wants all this to happen. It’s as if it’s all been worked out.”

“There’s no evidence in favor of that,” he said, “and I’d rather you called me Jim.”

I sighed. “All right, if you want to take it the slow, logical, medical way, I don’t suppose I blame you. But right now I feel like talking to Jane and Seymour Wallis. Jane has a theory that’s worth listening to, and I’ll bet you two Baby Ruths to six bottles of Chivas Regal that Seymour Wallis knows more than he’s told us.”

“I don’t drink Chivas Regal.”

“Well, that’s okay. I don’t eat Baby Ruths.”

I took a taxi down to The Head Bookstore just after noon. As I was driving away from the hospital, I couldn’t help looking back at the birds on the roof. From a distance they looked like a gray and scaly encrustation, as if the building itself was suffering from some unhealthy skin condition. I asked the taxi driver if he knew what species of bird they were, but he didn’t even know what “species” meant.

Surprisingly, Jane wasn’t there when I called at the purple-painted shop on Brannan. Her young, bearded assistant said, “I don’t know, man. She just upped and went out, round about a half hour ago. She didn’t even say ciaio”

“You don’t know where she went? I was supposed to meet her for lunch.”

“She didn’t say a word, man. But she went that way.” He pointed toward The Embarcadero.

I went out into the street. Slices of sunlight were falling across the sidewalk, and I was jostled and bumped by the lunchtime crowds. I looked around, but I couldn’t see Jane anywhere. Even if I walked along to The Embarcadero, I’d probably miss her. I went back into the bookstore and told the boy to have Jane call me at home, and then I hailed another taxi and asked the driver to take me to Pilarcitos Street.

I was annoyed, but I was also worried. The way things had been going these past couple of days, with Dan Machin and Bryan Corder both in the hospital, I didn’t like to lose touch with any body. In the back of my mind I still had this un-settling notion that whatever was happening was part of some preconceived scheme, as if Dan had been meant to go to 1551 Pilarcitos, and as if Bryan had been deliberately maneuvered into going there, too. And don’t think I didn’t wonder if something equally horrific was going to happen to me.

The taxi stopped on Pilarcitos, and I paid the driver. The house looked shabby in the sunlight, and as gray as the birds on the hospital roof. I swung the wrought-iron gate open and went up the steps. The doorknocker grinned at me wolfishly, but today, in the clear light of noon, it didn’t play any tricks on me. It was heavy cast bronze and that was all.

I knocked three times, loudly. Then I waited on the porch, whistling “Moon River.” I hated that damn tune, and now it was stuck on my mind.

I knocked again, but there was still no answer. Maybe Seymour Wallis had taken himself off for a walk. I waited for another few moments, gave one final bang on the knocker, then turned around to go home.

But just as I went back down the steps, I heard a creaking sound. I looked around and the front door had opened a little way. My last knock must have pushed it ajar. It obviously wasn’t locked, or even closed on the catch.

Now considering how many bolts and chains and safety locks Wallis had installed on that door, it seemed pretty much out of character for him to leave it completely unlocked. I stood by the gate staring at the door wondering what’s wrong? For some reason I couldn’t even begin to describe, I felt chilled and frightened. Worst of all, I knew that I couldn’t leave the door open like that and just walk away. I was going to have to go into the house, that ancient house of breathing and heartbeats, and see what was up.

Slowly, I remounted the front steps. I stood by the half-open door for almost a minute, trying to distinguish shapes and shadows in the few inches of darkness that I could see. The doorknocker was now looking away from me, up the street, but its smile was as smug and vicious as ever.

I looked at the doorknocker and said, “Okay, smartass. What particular nasty traps have you set up this time?”

The doorknocker grinned and said nothing. I hadn’t really expected it to, and I think I would have jumped out of my skin if it had, but it was one of those creepy situations where you just like to make sure that if the spooks are spooks, and not just doorknockers or shadows or hatstands, then they don’t get the idea that they’re fooling you.

I reached out like a man reaching across a bottomless pit, and pushed the door open a ways. It groaned a little more and shuddered. Inside, the hallway was swirling in dust and darkness, and that musty closed-up smell was still as strong as ever.

Swallowing hard, I stepped inside. I called, “Mr. Wallis? Seymour Wallis?”

There was no reply. Once I entered the hallway, all the sounds from the street outside were muffled and suppressed, and I stood there and heard nothing but my own taut breathing.

“Mr. Wallis?” I called again.

I walked across to the foot of the stairs. The bear-lady, eyes closed, still reared on the banister post. I squinted up into the stale darkness of the second floor, but I couldn’t make anything out at all. To tell you the God’s honest truth, I didn’t feel particularly inclined to go up there. I decided to take a quick look in Seymour Wallis’s study, and if he wasn’t at home, to get the hell out of there.

As quietly as I could, I tippy-toed along the worn-out carpet of the corridor to the door under the stag’s head. The study was closed, but the key was in the lock. I turned it slowly, and I heard the lock mechanism click in that impenetrable silence, disturbing that breathless air that seemed to have hung around the house for all the years that it had stood here.

I put my hand on the brass doorknob, and turned it. The study door opened. It was gloomy in there, and the drapes were still drawn, so I reached around the lintel to find the lightswitch. My fingers groped along the damp wallpaper, and I clicked the switch down, but nothing happened. The bulb must have burned out.

Nervously, I pushed the door wider and stepped inside. I took a quick, almost panicky look behind the door to make sure nothing and nobody was hiding there, and I had a half second of shock when. I saw Seymour Wallis’s bathrobe hanging there. Then I strained my eyes, and stared across at the dark shape of Seymour Wallis’s desk and chair.

For a while, I couldn’t see if there was anything there or not. But then my eyes grew gradually accustomed to the darkness, and something began to take shape. “Oh, Christ.” The words came out like strangled puppies.

Some enormous inflated man was sitting in Seymour Wallis’s chair. His head was blackened and puffy, and his arms and legs were swollen twice their normal size. His face was so congested that his eyes were tiny slits, and his fingers came out of the sleeves of his shirt like fat purple slugs.

I could never have recognized him except by the clothes. It was Seymour Wallis. A distended, swelled-up, grotesque caricature of Seymour Wallis.

I could hardly get the words out. “Mr. W-Wallis?”

The creature didn’t stir.

“Mr. Wallis, are you alive?”

The telephone was on his desk. I had to call Dr. Jarvis right away, and maybe Lieutenant Stroud, too, but that meant reaching across this inflated body. I circled the study cautiously, peering more and more closely at him, trying to make up my mind if he was dead. I guessed he must be. He wasn’t moving, and he looked as if every vein and artery in his whole body had hemorrhaged.

“Mr. Wallis?”

I stepped up real close, and bent my knees a little so that I could look right into his purplish, blown-up face. He didn’t seem to be breathing. I swallowed again, in an effort to get my heart back down in my chest where it belonged, and then I slowly and nervously leaned forward to pick up the telephone.

I dialed Elmwood Foundation Hospital. The phone seemed to ring for centuries before I heard the receptionist’s voice say, “Elmwood. Can I help you?”

“Can you get Dr. Jarvis for me?” I whispered. “It’s an emergency.”

“Will you speak up, please? I can’t hear you.”

“Dr. Jarvis!” I said hoarsely. “Tell him it’s urgent!”

“Just a moment, please.”

The receptionist put me on hold, and I had to listen to some schmaltzy music while she paged Dr. Jarvis. I kept glancing anxiously down at Seymour Wallis’s bloated face, and I was hoping and praying that he wasn’t going to jump up suddenly and catch me.

The music stopped, and the receptionist said, “I’m afraid Dr. Jarvis is out at lunch right now, and we don’t know where he is. Would you like to speak to another doctor?”

“No thank you. I’ll come right up there.”

“In that case please use the south entrance. We’re having the city sanitation people around to clear away some birds.”

“The birds are still there?”

“You bet. The whole place is covered.”

I set down the telephone and backed respectfully away from Seymour Wallis. I was only two or three paces toward the door, though, when his revolving chair suddenly twisted around, and his huge body dropped sideways on to the carpet, face first, and lay there prone. The shock was so great that I stood paralyzed, unable to run, unable to think. But then I realized he was either dead or helpless, and I went over and knelt down beside him.

“Mr. Wallis?” I said, although I have to admit that I didn’t hold out any hopes of an answer.

He stayed where he was, swollen up like a man who has floated around in the sea for weeks.

I stood up again. On his desk was a cheap shorthand notebook, in which he had obviously been writing. I picked it up, and flicked back some of the pages. It was written in a heavy, rounded hand, like the hand of a dogged, backward child. It looked as if Seymour Wallis had been struggling to complete his notes before the swelling made it impossible for him to write any further.

I angled the notebook sideways so that the dusty light from outside strained across the pages. The notebook read: “I know now that all those disastrous events at Fremont were merely the catalyst for some far more terrible occurrence. What we discovered was not the thing itself, but the one talisman that could stir the thing into life. Perhaps there was always a predestined date for its return. Perhaps all these ill-starred happenings have been coincidental. But I realize one thing for sure. From the day I discovered the talisman at Fremont, I had no choice but to buy the house at 1551. The ancient influences were far too strong for someone as weak and as unaware of their domineering power as me to resist.”

That was how it ended. I couldn’t figure it out at all. Maybe Seymour Wallis thought that his bad luck on the Fremont job had caught up with him at last, and judging by his condition, I couldn’t say that I blamed him. But right then, the first thing I wanted to do was get out of that house and contact Dr. Jarvis. I definitely had the feeling that 1551 was harboring some hostile, brooding malice, and if three people had already suffered so hideously while trying to discover what that malice was, I was pretty sure that I could easily be the fourth.

I went out through the hallway, casting a quick backward glance up the stairs just in case something horrible was standing up there, then I dodged past the doorknocker and out on to the porch. As I turned to close the door, though, I saw something that made me feel more unsettled and frightened then almost anything that had happened before.

The banister post was missing its statuette. The bear-lady had gone.

Outside the hospital, the vermin crew from the sanitation department were trying to scare the gray birds off with blank gunshots. I recognized one of them, Innocenti, and I went across to ask him how they were getting on.

Innocenti jerked a disgusted thumb at the serried ranks of silent birds still perched on the rooftops, undisturbed by the crackling racket of gunfire.

“I never seen birds like ’em. They just sits there. You shout and they sits. You yell and they sits. We sent Henriques up on the roof with a clapper, and what do they do, sits. Maybe they’re hard of hearing. Maybe they don’t give a damn. They sits, and they don’t even shits.”

“Have you found out what they are?” I asked him.

Innocenti shrugged. “Pigeons, ravens, ducks, who knows from birds? I ain’t no ornithologist.”

“Maybe they have some special characteristic.”

“Sure. They’re so fuckin’ bone idle they won’t even fly away.”

“No, but maybe they’re a special type of bird.”

Innocenti was unimpressed. “Listen, Mr. Hyatt, they could be fuckin’ ostriches for all I care. All I know is that I have to get ’em off the roof, and until I get ’em off the roof, I have to stay here and miss my dinner. Do you know what’s for dinner?”

I gave him a friendly wave of my hand and walked across to the hospital entrance.

“Osso bucco!” he yelled after me. “That’s what’s for dinner!”

I went into the hospital and walked straight across the Italian-tile foyer to the elevators. The elegant stainless-steel clock on the wall said seven o’clock. It was four hours now since I’d telephoned Dr. Jarvis from the booth on the corner of Mission and Pilarcitos. Four hours since the ambulance crew had arrived to collect Seymour Wallis’s distended body under a green blanket that any casual bystander could have seen was bulging grossly, bulging far too much for a natural corpse. Four hours since Dr. Jarvis and Dr. Crane had been carrying out a detailed post mortem.

I took the elevator to the fifth floor, and walked along the corridor to James Jarvis’s office. I let myself in, and raided his desk for his gin bottle and his icebox for his tonic. Then I sat back and took a stiff, refreshing drink, and by Saint Anthony and Saint Theresa, I needed it.

I’d been trying all afternoon to locate Jane. I’d called every mutual friend and acquaintance I could think of, until I’d finally run out of dimes and energy. I’d revivified myself on a McDonald’s cheeseburger and a cup of black coffee, and then made my way up to Elmwood. I felt helpless, lost, frustrated, and frightened.

I was just pouring my second gin-and-tonic when Dr. Jarvis came in, and flung his coat across his chair.

“Hi,” he said, a little tersely.

I lifted my glass. “I made myself at home. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Why should I? Fix me one while you’re at it,” he asked.

I clunked ice into another glass. “Did you finish Wallis’s postmortem?” I asked.

He sat down heavily, and rubbed his face with his hand. “Oh, sure, we finished the postmortem.”

“And?”

He looked up through his fingers, his eyes were red with fatigue and concentration. “You really want to know? You really want to get involved in this thing? You don’t have to, you know. You’re only a sanitation officer.”

“Well, maybe I am, but I’m involved already. Come on, Jim, Dan Machin and Bryan Corder were friends of mine. And now Seymour Wallis. I feel responsible.”

Dr. Jarvis reached in his pocket for his cigarettes. He lit one unsteadily, and then tossed the pack across to me. I left it lying there. Before I sat back and relaxed, I wanted to know what was going on.

He sighed, and looked up at the ceiling, as if there was a kind of teleprompt up there that might give him a clue what to say. “We tried every possibility. I mean, everything. But that bodily distension was caused by one factor, and one factor only, and no matter what we hypothesized, we always came back to the same conclusion.”

I sipped gin. I didn’t interrupt. He was going to tell me, no matter what.

“I guess the cause of death will officially go down as blood disorder. That’s a kind of a white lie, but it’s also completely true. Seymour Wallis was suffering from a severe blood disorder. His blood wasn’t lacking in red corpuscles, and it didn’t show any signs of disease or anemia. But the simple fact was that he had too much of it.”

“Too much of it?”

He nodded. “The normal human being has nine pints of blood circulating through his body. We emptied the blood from Seymour Wallis’s body and measured it. His arteries and veins and capillaries were swollen because he had twenty-two pints of blood in him.”

I could hardly believe it. “Twenty-two pints?”

Dr. Jarvis blew out smoke. “I know it sounds crazy, but that’s the way it is. Believe me, if I thought I could sweep this whole business under the rug, I’d empty that extra blood down the sink.”

He sat there for a while, staring at his untidy desk. I guessed that with all the weird ramifications of Seymour Wallis and his malevolent house, that he hadn’t had much time for his paperwork.

“Have the police been around?” I asked.

“They’ve been informed.”

“And what did they say?”

“They’re waiting for the postmortem. The trouble is, I don’t know what to tell them.”

I finished my drink. “Why not? Just tell them he died of natural causes.”

Dr. Jarvis grunted sardonically. “Natural causes? With nearly three gallons of blood in him? And, anyway, it’s worse than that.”

“Worse?”

He didn’t look my way, but I could tell how confused and anxious he was. “We analyzed the blood, of course, and put it through the centrifuge. Dr. Crane is one of the finest pathologists in the business. At least, he gets paid as if he is. He says that without a shadow of a doubt, the blood that we found inside Seymour Wallis was not human.”

There was a pause. Dr. Jarvis lit another cigarette from the butt of the first.

“There isn’t any question that all twenty-two pints were the blood of some species of dog. Whatever happened to Seymour Wallis, the blood that he died with wasn’t his own.”