Charnel House by Graham Masterton

decided to take the day off work.”
    â€œWon’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?”
    â€œBirds? What birds? I’ve been shut up with Corder all night.”
    â€œI’m surprised nobody mentioned it. Your whole damned hospital looks like a bird sanctuary.”
    Dr. Jarvis raised an eyebrow. “What kind of birds?”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œAre there many?”
    â€œThousands. 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.
    â€œAnything wrong?” I asked him.
    â€œIt’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.”
    â€œ 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.”
    â€œThen 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.”
    â€œFor 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