A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Oft in the Silly Night

I have been on the local constabulary here in our lair city — well, all right, village — quite a spell. In that time I calculate I have made twenty-two and a half arrests, all told. The half-arrest was a midget belonging to a side-show, who threw a brick through the window of Donovan s saloon, because he couldn’t get a drink inside, because the top of his head didn’t show above the bar and Donovan couldn’t tell where the order was coming from.

The point I wish to make is that each of those twenty-two and a half times the arrest was made against the person’s will, they didn’t come walking in and ask for it. Not until the day this Mortimer J. Griggs came walking in the stationhouse, Ed — that’s our constable — and I had just begun our afternoon game of checkers, Blackie the station-house cat was curled up dozing in the corner, and Buster, our one patrolman, was over at Main and Elm keeping an eye on the brand-new cement sidewalk, our city’s first, that had just been laid down. Complaints had come in that folks were gouging their initials into it. Everything was as peaceful as you could ask for, when a sort of shaking like an earthquake started in. Then a sound like artillery practice, mixed with grunting and squealing like a herd of pigs. Right after that the Griggs’ Oldsmobile chugs to a stop outside the door — brass carriage lamps shining in the sun, with Griggs himself at the wheel in his goggles and duster, and Mrs. Griggs sitting way up high on the back seat, also in goggles and duster and motoring veil. The Griggses have the only motor-buggy in town, in the whole county, matter of fact. They also have the only authentic, imported French castle, which they had taken apart, brought over stone by stone, and set up again out toward Meadowbrook. But more about that later. Griggs made his money by thinking up a toothpaste that lay down flat on the brush instead of curling up and rolling off. Mrs. Griggs used to be the Mary Thompson who worked down Pop’s Lunchroom on the Square.

Anyway, in he comes raring, bangs his fist down on Ed’s desk, and says in a voice like a man who has been goaded beyond endurance: “I want to be arrested! I want to be locked up, do you hear me?”

We just stare at him open-mouthed. “You what?” says Ed finally.

“You heard me,” he says in a voice shaking with righteous indignation. “I want to be put where I can get some peace and quiet, where I can get one good night’s sleep at least! I’m ready to crack wide open! I can’t stand another night of it, I tell you?”

Ed says judiciously, “What seems to be bothering you?”

“They are!” he flares.

“Who’s they?”

“Ghosts!” he sputters.

We just sit back and look at him. Then we look at each other. Now this is the year 1908, here in the United States of America, with Teddy Roosevelt, President, and a wonderful invention like an automobile standing right outside the door big as life, and he expects us to believe there is such a thing as ghosts.

“I don’t blame you,” he snaps, “I didn’t believe in them either. I went ahead and bought it, even after they told me on the other side it was haunted; Mary thought it’d be kinda stylish. But now I’ve seen ’em with my own eyes, drat it! Candles going up and downstairs all night long by themselves. Doors swinging open without anybody behind them. We’ve been without servants since yesterday morning. They left in a body when blood ran from all the water-faucets!”

Griggs takes a deep breath, pulls his coat together in front to show how much slack there is. “I’ve lost twenty pounds in the last three weeks, just from doing without my right amount of sleep! I work hard at my office out at the toothpaste plant all day, and when I come home and try to get a night’s rest, what do I get — spooks!” He acts about ready to break down and cry from aggravation.

Ed is beginning to act a little doubtful, I mean about there not being spooks. After all Griggs is one of our most influential citizens, and a man like him wouldn’t get so excited about nothing. He must have seen something. “You sure it ain’t somebody just trying to play a practical joke on you, trying to drive you out of the place?”

“I thought of that; that was the first thing come to me,” Griggs says. “I’m a hard-headed business man and I don’t frighten easy — only when the Market dips. Now who is there in these parts, would you say, who would have a reason to try to scare us out of the place?”

“Only people in the county, outside of yourselves, with enough money to live in a castle like that would be the Joneses. I understand they tried to buy it at the same time you did, over there in France, but you beat ’em to it.”

“Exactly! So what’d we do? We invited the Joneses to spend the weekend with us as our guests. Now if the spooks was somebody they hired to try to get rid of us, wouldn’t they lay off them themselves?”

“Didn’t they?”

He says, “Did Rutherford Jones tell you how he got that busted foot he’s been laid up in the hospital with these past two weeks? Jumping into the moat from his bedroom window to get away from them! And she’s had fainting spells ever since! They wouldn’t buy the place now if I paid ’em to take it off my hands!”

Ed is stroking his jaw, I can see that he’s inclined to agree with Griggs now that there are ghosts, only thing he’s trying to decide is what to do about it. “Looks like you need protection,” he says slowly.

Griggs waves his arms helplessly all around. “Don’t gimme that! I thought of that too, long before I ever came in here today! I went in to New York and Hired me one of these private defectives for a bodyguard Monday last.”

“Where is he now asks Ed.

“At a sanitarium in the Poconos!” snaps Griggs. “They don’t think he’ll ever be the same again, he’s gotta have a trained nurse night and day.”

“Huh!” says Ed, with professional scorn.

“Huh nothing! He was a former Spanish-War man, that’s what he was, one of Teddy’s Rough Riders from San Juan Hill and a dead-shot. He brought two big Colts with him, didn’t go to bed at all that night, stayed up laying for them with all the lights out.”

“And did he see them?”

“Did he see them!” Griggs laughs bitterly, takes out a handkerchief and mops his face. “He emptied his gun at one at point-blank range, at point-blank range I tell you, and the bullets went right through it without hurting it! That left him pretty badly shaken, but he’s a former Rough Rider, remember, they don’t give in easy. He followed another along the hall and cornered it. It must have been hungry or something. He says it was eating cobwebs as it went along. And what happened this time was what gave him the finishing touch.”

“What happened?” Ed and I both say together, hanging on his words.

When he emptied the second gun at this one, again at point-blank range, it scooped the bullets up and swallowed them right before his eyes. And then it rubbed the place where its stomach was supposed to be, like they tasted good! The bullets, of course, were too heavy on account of being lead, and they dropped right through it in a little heap on the floor. We found him down there in the morning, the Missus and I, hiding under the table, talking away to himself just like a little kid, poor fella.” Ed blows out his breath. Then he pulls himself together, straightens up, all constabulary dignity. “Well, now, Mr. Griggs,” he says, “there’s protection, and protection. I don’t care if he was a Rough Rider, you should have come to us in the first place. We’re your fellow townsmen. We’ll give you the kind of protection this matter requires. Won’t we, Mac?” he says to me.

“You bet we will!” I say heartily, and I step over to the door to see if there is any sign of our patrolman yet.

“You’ve come to us for protection and by golly we’re going to see that you get it!” he goes on. “That’s what we’re here for!”

“That what we’re here for,” I agree stoutly, and I am just about to step out and go after Buster, the patrolman, when suddenly I hear the most awful sounds behind me that the English language ever made.

“Mac here,” I hear Ed remarking calmly, “is going back with you to that castle, and he’s going to stay there on special duty until this business has been cleared up once for all. You have absolutely nothing further to worry about. Ready, Mac?”

I am ready all right — just about ready to drop in my tracks. But Ed goes on, “He’s a good man, let me tell you,” and after he’s said that, I haven’t much choice in the matter.

I ask Griggs half-heartedly if he’s sure he wants to stay in the castle tonight, maybe if there was no one around to frighten for a couple nights they’d get discouraged, go somewhere else.

“I doubt it,” he says hopelessly. “They’ve probably been in it hundreds of years. And it’s my home. You know how it is, a man’s castle is his home. I paid good money for that place.”

“Well, they’ve met their Waterloo,” I let him know, and I notch my suspenders higher. It’s a sign I mean business whenever I do that.

“Plaindale,” beams Ed proudly, “needs more men like you. Better take a gun. There used to be one for shooting squirrels around here some—”

“After what I told you about the private detective,” mourns Griggs, “what good would a gun be?”

We can’t find one, anyway, there isn’t much call for firearms in a law-abiding community like ours, so I take a grip on Ed’s hand, and follow Griggs to the door. Then I come back and take another grip on Ed’s hand, just for luck.

“You did that before,” he lets me know suspiciously, “You ain’t feeling blue by any chance, are you?”

“I’m seein’ red. I’m in the pink of condition, and I’m going to do this job up brown,” I contradict. And I think of that old Roman guy that said he’d either come back on top of his shield or underneath it.

We go out to the Oldsmobile and Griggs apologizes because there isn’t any equipment for me to wear on the drive — like goggles and a duster and gauntlets. “We law-enforcement agents are used to roughing it,” I let him know with Sparta a endurance.

He goes up ahead, cranks, and races the engine to the front seat. On the seventh try he beats it to the wheel before it dies. A couple of little boys help us start off with a push from behind, and we’re on our way. As though there can be ghosts in an age of such scientific marvels!

We can’t talk much on account of the vibration, which makes it dangerous to use your tongue. It gets dark about halfway to the castle and Griggs switches on the brass headlamps, but they only make the trees and bushes look more scary than ever. A jackrabbit hops across the road in front of us and Griggs squeezes the rubber bulb attached to the horn when I am not expecting it. It goes “Oink-Goou!” and I nearly jump out of my skin. “Don’t do that again unless it’s absolutely necessary,” I suggest when I have gotten my wind back. Which was some time later.

In about half-an-hour more the castle shows up, very eerie against the night sky. It isn’t exactly a homey-looking place, and to make it worse a big cartwheel moan has come up directly behind it and splashes it full of shadows. It has four towers, one on each corner, and a wide ditch all around it, and for a doorstep they have a drawbridge.

Mrs. Griggs leans over from the back seat and touches him on the shoulder, and we nearly go off the road, with the jump he gives. “Did — did you leave a light burning in the northeast tower, Mort?” she chatters, pointing. There’s a tiny pin-head gleam twinkling through one of the slits that they called windows in the old days, and used to shoot arrows through.

“Of course not,” he shivers, “the sun was still up when we started out, and you know I never go up into them things anyway, on account of all the cobwebs and bats and things.”

“Then it’s them,” she whispers. “They’re starting in early tonight...”

Right while we’re staring fearfully up at it, whiff the light goes out. The chugging of the engine must have carried up there on the still air.

He and Mrs. Griggs are both looking at me sort of expectantly. “If you could get up there quick,” he hints, “maybe you could sort of catch them red-handed.”

I can’t think of any excuse for backing out, much as I would like to, so we trot across the drawbridge on foot and lie unlocks a little door down ill the left-hand corner of a great big one the size of a barn, which they used to walk their horses through when they came back from war.

“Take those stairs over there,” he says. “Have you got one of these newfangled pocket batteries? I never got around to wiring the towers of the castle for electricity.” Which is a fine time to be told that! All I have with me is a pocketful of big sulphur-matches, which I helped myself to from the general store last time I was in. I can’t turn around and come down again, because Mrs. Griggs has tiptoed in after us and is watching me, half-scared and half-admiring. So I go jogging up, sort of surprised at my own feet for playing a dirty trick like this on me.

“Go with him, Mort,” she urges, “two heads are better than one. Sometimes,” she adds dubiously.

“Right away,” he agrees, going in the other direction, “just as soon as I get the car put away in the barn out of the dew.”

Above the second floor, where the turret part begins, the lights quit and the stairs begin spiraling around worse than a corkscrew. I start lighting matches one by one to see my way. Between standing still and thinking about what is up ahead, and going up and finding out, I am just as scared one way as the other, so I may as well go on up. Every time I stop, anyway, there is a big wavering shadow of myself up ahead, and another one down below, so I keep going in self-defense.

The top of the stairs opens into a little round room, with slits all around it letting the moon in, and spiderwebs in the corners, and a mouse making a run for its hole. It was here that we saw the light coming from, but there’s no sign now that anyone was ever in here, and I certainly didn’t pass anyone on the stairs coming up, not even a ghost or a draft of air. There’s an ancient iron ladder flat against the wall, leading up to a trap opening onto the tower roof, and I go up that to investigate. I dislodge the trap with one shoulder after a little trouble and stick my head through, and hold up my hand with a match in it. There’s nothing up there, just a flat roof with a slotted circular parapet running around it, that they shot their crossbows through. A long row of things that look like black socks dangling around on the inside of it start coming to life and squeaking — bats! — so I back down in a hurry and close the trap after me.

As I pull my head down I have a disturbing optical illusion that a whole zig-zag row of the big stones in the wall, in the room below, are just slipping back into pace, and I nearly let go and fall off the ladder backwards for a minute, but I buck up by telling myself it was probably just the wavering light of the match that made me imagine it.

I go over and start tapping the different slabs of stone with my knuckles, to see if any of them sound hollow. I am down to my last match by now, and Griggs is certainly taking his time about putting his car away and coming up to join me. Then suddenly I see something that I could have sworn wasn’t there when I came up just now. A big hefty chunk of candle leaning out from an old sconce stuck in the wall. I examine it closely, but I can tell this wasn’t what made the light we saw down below, because the wick hasn’t been used and there is no sign of drippings down the sides. It is so old it has turned color, is a dark brown instead of white, but at least it’s a light. I just have time to touch my last match to the wick, before it goes out.

The wick is so dry with age that it just sputters and sparks, doesn’t even give as much light as the match did, but it is all I have. I leave it there and go back to the business of wall rapping.

At the third rap I get something. In fact I get more than I bargained for. There’s a hiss, like I’ve stirred up a dozen copperheads, and the whole tower-room turns a ghostly green around me, like a photographer’s studio. I’ve fiddled around until I’ve finally raised them, and by the way my shadow falls on the wall in front of me, there must be an awfully bright one standing right behind me.

I’m more dead than alive, but I manage to do my collapsing in a circle instead of straight up and down, and face around the other way. Instead of a long, lanky, wispy thing like I expected it to be, it has taken the form of a round ball of green fire, and is floating slow and dreamy up to the ceiling, right above where the candle in the wall is.

There’s another viperish hiss, a “Whoosh!”, and its mate has joined it, in the shape of a red ball of fire. This one must be the male, it is more active. It hits the roof, bounces down to the floor, spreads out into a long snaky shape, and comes wriggling at me across the floor.

Flesh and blood can stand no more, at least not without a little elbow room. I give a sort of disembodied howl, jump over it toward the door, touch about every tenth step on the stairs and skin my elbows going down. Behind me the hissing keeps up as more and more of them show up and one or two even chase me part of the way down. Then they sort of spit disgustedly after me and give up.

I make the landing where the electricity begins in something under thirty seconds flat, which no old-timer ever did, especially in those iron pants they used to wear. Then I slow up and think things over, as it would be bad for the Griggs’ morale to see me coming down in such a hurry, they might think I was frightened or something. A swig of very high grade liquor standing there in a decanter helps my reasoning powers along too, and when I have quit — er — vibrating with rage so much, I go the rest of the way down with a very knowing look on my face. They can’t put anything over on T.J. MacComber — well, not for long, anyway.

Griggs is just coming in from putting his car away, which is what you call convenient timing. He and his wife cannot help but admire my perfect self-control. “What happened? Did — did you see them?” they ask.

“They knew better than to let me see them,” I growl. “Tried to frighten me by setting off a roman candle. I just stepped aside and waited till it got through going off. I only came down because I ran out of matches.”

She quickly grabs me by the sleeve, although I have not budged in the slightest. “You are not going up there again,” she says firmly, “until you have a bite of supper first. The laws of hospitality come first in my house — er — chat-oo.”

I am too well-brought-up to contradict a lady, so we sit down at the table, which is in the ma n banquet hall of the chat-oo. I take long deep breath, which I hope they will understand is one of regret because I am being kept from my duty. Griggs remarks that in the old days they used to eat in here on rushes.

“What was their hurry?” I ask.

He then goes on to tell me the history of the chat-oo, which I have not asked for and would be a lot happier without knowing. It seems it was built by some old baron, who had spent most of his life robbing folks and had collected quite a bit of treasure. He hid the treasure somewhere in the walls, and then went and had all the tongues cut off the laborers who had worked on the place, so they wouldn’t be able to tell anyone. Ever since that time the castle was supposed to be haunted.

“Well it sure is haunted,” I admit, “but that story about the treasure must be a fake, because you had it taken apart stone by stone when you brought it over and you didn’t find anything, did you?”

“Not a red cent,” Griggs admits.

At this point all the lights go out all over the castle at one time. “Hello,” he says in the dark.

“This is no time to exchange greetings,” his wife answers, “do something about it. Get candles.”

Before I let him light them I take a nick in each one, because the supper table is no place for fireworks, but this time they are pure tallow, the real article.

We take one apiece and go downstairs to the power-house to see if we can find out what is wrong. The chat-oo generates its own current, on account of being quite a spell out of town, and Griggs has converted what used to be the torture chamber into a power-plant. Besides all the coils and dynamos and things he has installed, there are cozy little pieces of bric-a-brac like thumbscrews and a rack left over, so it is no place in which to digest a meal properly.

“Fuse musta blown out,” he says, poking around. Then he turns around and asks, “What was that funny choked sound you just made?”

I have been incautious enough to open up an iron lady that used to hug people to death, and there is a skeleton still inside which has sort of leaned out and bowed to me. I am now sitting down backward on the floor. “A crumb got caught in my throat,” I explain, “that is probably what you heard.”

We neither of us have any great knack for electricity, so we have to give up. “I’ll phone in for an electrical repairman,” he says, “it’s a job for an expert.”

Mrs. Griggs overhears this where she is waiting for us and says, “The phone’s been cut too, I just tried it.”

“I’ll have to drive in myself, then,” he says, “Mac can stay here with you till I get back.” He puts on his hat and he opens the little door inside the big one. He sticks out his leg, then just pulls it back in time and hangs onto the side of the door. “Who hauled the drawbridge up?” he asks in a scared voice. “I left it down when I came in.”

“Some ghosts, that can do a thing like that!” I remark grimly.

He starts cranking the handle just inside the door that lowers it. He cranks till he gets red in the face, and nothing happens, the thing sticks up flat against the chat-oo wall. “Must be jammed,” he says, and keeps on cranking till he just flops against the wall. Then I try my hand at it, until my arm nearly comes off. It doesn’t, but the crank handle itself finally does. Also a great big loose chain tumbles down from above and goes into the moat with a splash, just missing my head by inches.

“Well,” says Griggs, kind of pale, “looks like we stay here — for tonight anyway. I can’t swim — can you? — and that thing out there is too wide to jump across.”

“Maybe you can find a plank wide enough to stretch across,” his wife says.

At that, we both say the same thing at the same time: “Nothing doing, we’d find it had been sawed through when we got halfway over!” And he closes the door again and bolts it.

“Oh I wish we hadn’t come back here tonight!” Mrs. Griggs whimpers. “I don’t like this at all, being cut off in this horrible place. I wish I’d never asked you to buy it, Mort.”

“I kinda do too,” he admits.

For that matter, so do I.

They decide to go up to their room and lock themselves in until morning. “Of course, you’ll probably want to stay up and lay for them,” he tells me. Which doesn’t leave me a very wide choice of answers.

“Bet your bottom dollar!” I gulp, with a look over my shoulder, to see if just the three of us are present.

“Have you any plan of campaign?” Mrs. Griggs asks me nervously.

I just nod wisely. As a matter of fact I do have one; it is to make myself as inconspicuous as possible — even at the risk of being overlooked by them — and live and let live.

Griggs shakes hands with me at the foot of the stairs, as if he never expected to see me alive again. “Well, good luck and here’s hoping. If you need any help, don’t hesitate to call me.” Then he adds, “But I’m a very heavy sleeper, you might have to keep calling and calling.” Something tells me I may as well not bother, I can count him out right here and now — at least until the morning sun comes up.

They lock themselves in upstairs, shove heavy pieces of furniture up against their door, and that is the end of the Griggses for the night. Which leaves me holding the fort single-handed. There is practically no one I would not change places with just then, but I don’t notice any offers, so it looks like I am elected.

The first thing I decide to do is make sure I am not caught without plenty of light, like I was up in that tower. Mrs. Griggs has shown me where their supply of candles kept, so I go down there to bring up as many as I can carry. It is in a little room halfway down to the dungeons, which they now call the storeroom but which used to be the place where the gaol keeper slept, according to what Griggs has told me — although I was surprised to hear they played football in those days, and indoors at that.

Just as I am reaching out for an armful of candles to take upstairs with me, I hear faint slithering footsteps going by somewhere close to me.

Like someone walking in carpet-slippers. I rush out to the stairs I just came down myself, and the lighted candle I hold up is shaking like a lightning-bug, but the stairs are empty, there isn’t a sign of anything on them, up or down. And the muffled footsteps sound fainter out here. They sound as though they are earning from the other direction, through the wall of the storeroom. I go back and put my ear up close to it, and I can hear them plainer for a minute. Then they stop, as though they got to wherever they were going, and there’s a smothered clink, as though somebody dropped something. I can’t figure how anyone can walk around inside solid stone walls, even ghosts, unless there is a secret passage or something back there that even the Griggses don’t know about. But I am not in very good shape for figuring out anything much just then; it is raining all down my face, and my knee-joints keep wanting to get together in a huddle, and the soles of my feet are craving to carry me at high speed up the stairs away from here.

Meanwhile something else has started in, where the footsteps left off. A blurred kind of rapping against stonework, with something hard like a chisel or mallet. I can hear it coming faintly through the wall. Bop-bop-bop, like that. And then a sort of whispering sound, like one ghost saying to another, “How’s it coming, Whitey?”

I decide I have hung around down here long enough. There’s such a thing as looking for trouble. If I would stay up above where I belong, in the main banquet-hall, I probably wouldn’t be able to hear all these footfalls and tappings. And I always say, what you don’t know, won’t hurt you. So I grab blindly for an armful of candles and get ready to leave with more haste than dignity.

But in my hurry I reach for the wrong bin or something, and what I get is fly-paper. A sheet of it sticks to my cuff and I have a heck of a time prying it off. I look and there is a whole drawerful of the stuff. What they need it for I don’t know, unless that moat outside breeds flies and gnats in the summertime, or maybe some ambitious drummer once caught Mrs. Griggs off guard and beat down her sales resistance to practically zero. Why, there is enough of it laid away to paper the side of a—

And with that, I get the idea of a lifetime, practically an inspiration, you might say. I know this one must be good, too, because I don’t get them very often, so I better use it while I have it, no telling when I’ll get another. What it amounts to is simply this: flypaper is good for catching light-weight winged things like flies and mosquitoes. Well, what is more light-weight than a ghost? If fly-paper will catch mosquitoes and flies, why don’t it catch ghosts too? All I have to do is spread it around in the right place, and they will probably float right onto it and get stuck. They certainly have feet, as those slithering footsteps I just heard prove.

I get so excited that I even forget to be scared of the tapping any more. I grab up the whole stack, bin and all, and cart it up above to the banquet-hall. Then I go back and bring up plenty of candles. The rapping, meanwhile, is keeping up for dear life, faster and faster, like they were getting excited about something too. It is down below there where the dungeons are, you can’t hear it up above.

The more I think over my inspiration, the more it appeals to me. In fact it seems to be the only possible way. A gun is no good, that private detective proved that; and a lasso wouldn’t work, because they can probably make themselves very skinny and slip right through the knot, and anyway I can’t throw one. And even if they got sense enough to steer clear of fly-paper, which I doubt, because it is a modern invention after their time, at least I can spread it around in a sort of deadline, make them stay away.

It is a cinch they can’t be in two places at once, ghosts or no ghosts, and as long as they seem to be busy down below in the dungeons right now, the safest place to begin seems to be the other extreme of the chat-oo, that tower where we saw the light when we came home.

So I take a good stiff hitch in my suspenders to get up my courage, and up I go. There are no lights anywhere in the chat-oo now, so it is no worse up here than down below, and this is the one place I am sure they are not at, at the moment, so in fact it is a whole lot better. I park lighted candles all around me on the floor so I can see what I am doing, and then I go down again and bring up a jug of maple syrup for paste, and a paint brush to apply it with, because of course the paper has to go stick right side up if it’s going to work at all.

Just as I am ready to start in. on my hands and knees, I feel a slight coolness, you might say a draft, on the back of my neck. Now it isn’t coming from the trap-door in the ceiling, because that is closed, and it isn’t coming from those slits in the wall, because they are way over my head when I am crouched down like this.

I don’t turn my head and look behind me, because you never can tell what you might see in a place like this, and I don’t want any surprises. I just sort of stiffen a little, and slowly swing my arm around behind me and feel around vaguely in the air. If it runs into anything cool or clammy standing there, I would rather just leave without looking.

I swing my arm like a dog wagging its tail, and there is nothing there but air, so I turn my head, and all I see is the stones of the wall. But the draft keeps up, I can feel it on my face now — especially as my face is quite wet with perspiration from — er — annoyance. Well, I never heard of a draft coming through solid stone before, and I wet my thumb and stick it out against the wall, and, sure enough, a regular breeze is coming through from somewhere. I play the candlelight up and down it, and then I see that certain of the stones have no mortar between them, just a solid black line.

I remember what I thought I saw coming down the ladder that time, a whole zig-zag row of stone blocks slipping back ii to place. So I run down to the second floor, remove a great big flat-headed lance from a suit of armor they have standing there, bring it up and start prying along that black line where the draft is coming from. Before I know it. out swings a whole zigzag row of the wall stones in one piece, hinged together. Only they’re not real stone at all, just wood carved and colored to loot dike stones. And the opening is just wide enough to pass a person through sideways.

On the other side there are stairs going down into the blackness, and way below some place I can hear that tapping still going on. Well, it takes a lot of courage and a lot of time, and a lot of swallows out of that decanter I have brought up from below, but finally I am edging down those stairs with a candle held in front of me.

They open out into a little room, that is in very untidy condition. There are chop bones and crusts of bread lying scattered around on the floor, and a pair of cots that haven’t been made up, and unionsuits of black underwear and unionsuits of white underwear, and empty cans of red paint, and a lot of other things that I can’t explain what ghosts would want with. Beyond this little room there are more stairs going still further down, and the tapping and whispering is very clear up here, it must be just at the bottom.

Well, I have found out about all I need to know, and it is surprising how self-confident I have become. But then whoever heard of meat-eating ghosts, or ghosts that wear woolen unionsuits to keep from catching cold? I get busy then and there, and in about half an hour I have that whole inner flight of stairs from the little room on up to the tower papered with fly-paper, stuck on with maple syrup; not only the steps but the sides of the stair walls too. I keep working my way backward, so as not to cut myself off, and when I am through there isn’t enough fly-paper left over for a gnat to sit down on. Then I carefully close the secret door again, and I go down the outer stairs.

Now all that remains to be figured out is how to drive them up those stairs in a hurry, without stopping to look where they are going. Nearly everyone is afraid of ghosts, I say to myself, but what the heck are ghosts afraid of? Then I snap my fingers and T have it. Why, other ghosts, of course!

I go down to the power-house torture-chamber and take out that skeleton that is inside the iron lady I told you about. It is not a real one of course, Griggs has explained to me. There was a real one in it when they bought the chat-oo, but the government over there wouldn’t let it be taken out of the country, so in order to keep everything just the way it was, Griggs had an imitation one made.

The next thing to do is try to locate about where the ghosts are, from this side. The tapping and the whispering guides me some, but what chiefly helps is that in one of the dungeons I notice wisps of dust coming out between the stones, so they must be hacking away right on the either side of that wall. I bring down my skeleton and I wait for them to break through.

But they don’t seem to keep at any one block of stone very long. The puffs of dust keep coming out here, and there, and all over the place. Which is no way to excavate. I say to myself, they’ll never get anywhere doing that. Then suddenly something crunches, or caves in, on their side that doesn’t sound like stone at all, it sounds like rotten wood or plaster or something. This seems to get them all stirred up; they start jabbering away a mile a minute, I never heard such garrulous ghosts. I also hear a lot of clinking sounds, like they were playing poker with iron washers for chips. Then before I know what has happened, chinks of light start showing through from their side. I have left it dark on mine, of course. One of the big blocks in the wall, which are about four by eight, starts sliding in under the rest, which means they are pulling it out from where they are. It moves very easily, though, with a splintering sound, so I guess that is the fake one that caved in just now. I hear iron clinkers falling all over the floor on their side and rolling around, and foreign words.

I wait just long enough to get a squint through, when the block has dropped out of the way and left a big oblong window, and in the lantern light on the other side I can make out a pair of fluttery figures jumping up and down. They are the Chat-oo Griggs ghosts all right, because they are in long white things like sheets, with pillowcases for hoods and round holes where their eyes are. They look a lot like Klansmen. One is tall and skinny, the other short and fat.

I take my bony lady-friend by the back of the neck and shove her skull through. By moving the wires from in back I can make her lower jaw work up and down, like them guys with puppets. Then I stick one bony arm through, holding it at the elbow-joint, and stroke the short fat one playfully down the back with it. I pull that falsetto voice that always sends the fellows around the cracker barrel into stitches, and squeak: “Hello, boys! Anyone got a chaw of terbacky?”

They both give a sort of lift off the floor at the same time, as if they were going to fly right up through the ceiling, but instead they come right down again where they were before, with a couple of pretty heavy clumps for ghosts to make. Bop-bop-bop! like that. Then they tear loose with a couple of the most ear-splitting screeches you ever heard in your life. A noon factory-whistle is silent by comparison. They both get in each other’s way trying to get over to the stairs on their side at one time. The tall skinny one makes it first, but the other one isn’t far behind. Whisht! and they are gone, elbowing each other aside all the way up.

All the way up you can hear scuffling and squeaks of “Le baron! Le baron!”

They might stop to get their breaths back, and get over being frightened, in that little room midway up, with the cots and all the garbage, so just to keep up the good work, I climb through, haul the skeleton with me, and start up after them. The skeleton’s celluloid feet trail along the stone steps with a sort of rattling sound, and I guess they don’t stop to take any naps on their little, cots, because the next thing I hear is a sort of slapping, ripping sound, and they don’t seem to be making much headway any more. So when I come to their little nest, I put the skeleton down, and pick up a fairly heavy brass candlestick instead and hold it upside-down, and go up the rest of the way, with a lighted candle in my other hand.

When I come to where the fly-paper ought to begin, there isn’t any. It has been swept clean off the steps and stair walls, just leaving sticky syrup smears. But farther on, near the tower, I come upon plenty of it, in fact all there is. It has peeled off the walls and steps in one long chain, and rolled itself all up together in two big mounds, and both are heaving and fluttering and flapping weakly.

So I just hole, the candle up, gauge about where the heads are under all that goo, and give each one a good substantial knock with the brass candlestick — not too hard, but just hard enough — and all motion stops for the time being. Then I open the secret door in the tower, cup my hands, and holler down: “Oh. Mr. Griggs!”

He is, as he warned me, a very heavy sleeper — or else maybe my voice don’t give him much confidence, in the middle of the night like that. Anyway, by the time he does come out, the birds have been singing for an hour in the trees outside and the sun is up. He comes down the stairs in his bathrobe and asks, “Did you call me?”

“Yeah,” I yawn, “about one or two this morning.”

“Tsk, tsk,” he says, “don’t time fly, though!” Then he asks, “Who’s this gentleman sitting next to you on the bottom of the stairs in towels?”

“This is no gentleman,” I correct, “this is one of your ghosts. And I am having a very hard time understanding him. This elementary French reader that was all I could find in your library, has nothing but people losing their aunts’ cousin’s umbrellas in it. He is in Turkish towels because he is very raw and tender all over.”

Mrs. Griggs bends down close and takes a good look at him. “Why, I have seen him before!” she exclaims. “He was the original caretaker when the chat-oo was still over in France!”

“Yes,” I say, “I found that out, but not without a lot of lost-umbrella trouble. And you will find his wife, who was the other ghost, upstairs soaking fly-paper off in a hot bath. You might go up and give her a hand, as it is a very arduous proceeding.”

“Then it was really them two live people did all that?” Griggs asks. “But what about them self-opening doors and floating candles and all that?”

“I’ve got it all written down here. They simply tied black thread to the doorknobs, stood back out of sight, and swung them slowly open. Then jerked and snapped the thread off short when you came out to look, about the floating candles: they just dressed up in black unionsuits and pulled stockings over their heads, and carried them up and down stairs; you couldn’t see them themselves in the dark. About that poor Rough Rider that shot at them: they took good care to empty his two guns and put blanks in when he wasn’t looking, don’t worry. And about the faucets running blood, they just emptied some cans of red paint into the water-tank, that was all.”

“But why’d they want to go to all that trouble for? Why’d they want to scare us out of here?” he says.

“Oh, I nearly forgot!” I say, snapping my fingers. “You’ll find a heap of moldy green washers, and tarnished bracelets and rings and things, lying down there just on the other side of the second dungeon from the right; they came on: of one of the fake stones in the wall that was all hollow inside; a chest, really, covered with moss and plaster. That was what they was after, and why they went through all this ghost rigmarole, so they could do their prospecting undisturbed. They finally located it just last night, as I caught up with ’em.”

“But how’d they get in?” he wails. “I had it all taken apart, and every stone numbered and brought over!”

“The place was chockfull of secret stairs and passageways, and your construction-engineers carried out your orders to the letter. They put ’em all back in again on this side. Trouble is, I guess you didn’t bother going over the blueprints very closely, or you would have known about them. These two followed you over here, when you interrupted their treasure hunting by buying the place and taking it apart around them. They sneaked behind your back as soon as it was up again and went back to work. Probably not caretakers at all, but a pair of high-class crooks posing as caretakers. They musta had great confidence that the treasure was still inside one of the building-blocks intact. Well, they were right.”

He says, “Mac my boy,” putting his hand on my shoulder, “part of it is going to you. If it wasn’t for you, they woulda gotten away with it right under my nose, right in my own chat-oo.”

“Heck,” I said modestly, scuffing my heel, “if you feel that way about it, guess there’s nothing I can do but take it. ’Bout a third’ll be enough.”

Later, driving me back to town in the Oldsmobile to turn my two prisoners over to Ed, he says to me kind of sheepish: “I knew all along those weren’t real ghosts, but — but I wanted an expert’s opinion about it.”

“Shucks,” I answer, “I knew it too! Y’don’t suppose they had me fooled, do you?”

Then each one of us says to himself, “Wonder if he believes me, the big whopping liar?”