Doc Savage - The Giggling Ghosts Part 1

THE GIGGLING GHOSTS.

A Doc Savage Adventure.

by Kenneth Robeson.

Chapter I. GIGGLING GIRL.

THE dictionary says: GIGGLE: To laugh with short catches of the breath and voice; to laugh in an affected or a silly manner or with an attempt at repression.

That is the definition of a giggle as given in the dictionary.

There is nothing extraordinary about giggling. Most persons giggle a little at one time or another. The psychologists claim that it is a form of laughter, and therefore good for you.

But when ghosts giggle, it is different.

The giggling these ghosts did was not good for anybody, it developed.

Like many unpleasant and momentous events, the existence of the giggling ghosts began as rumors. There was nothing very definite. Just stories.A small boy came tearing home one night and told his mother he'd heard a ghost giggling in a brush patch. Now most ghosts are seen by small boys, and so the story was pleasantly smiled upon. No one thought anything about it. Naturally it didn't get in the newspapers.

A New Jersey politician-the giggling ghosts seemed to haunt only New Jersey-was the next man to see a ghost. His const.i.tuents had long ago stopped believing anything the politician said about lowering taxes, so they treated his story dubiously.

He'd been taking an evening walk in a Jersey City park, and he'd heard a giggling ghost, and caught a glimpse of it. This little item got in the newspapers, and quite a number of people humorously remarked that more politicians should be haunted.

Two or three other giggling ghost stories got around, and at this point a bad mistake was made: Too many people thought the stories were being imagined. This was the Twentieth Century, the age of realism in thought and action. There were no such thing as ghosts.

Particularly, there could be no such thing as giggling ghosts.

A girl was the first one to make the awful discovery that the ghosts' giggling was catching.

"MIAMI" DAVIS was the girl's name. She had been standing with her head shoved through a hole where a pane had been broken out of a window of an old storehouse just across the Hudson River from New York City.

She had heard a giggling ghost. She was trying to see it.

She had been trying to see the ghost for about three minutes when she caught the giggling.

The giggling of girls is usually pleasant enough to listen to. Girls will giggle if you tickle their necks, and when you tell them nice little lies.

The giggling of Miami Davis was not pleasant to listen to. Not in the least. It was terrible.

Her sounds were made with short catches of the breath; there was certainly an attempt at repression; she did not want to make the noises. She was giggling, according to the literal word of the dictionary definition.

The girl grabbed her mouth with her right hand, her nose with her left, and tried to stop the sounds coming out. She had no luck. Then she tried to gag herself with a mouthful of her own coat collar. That failed.

She ended up by fleeing wildly from the storehouse.

The storehouse was made of brick, had a tin roof. It looked as if the Bureau of Public Safety should have ordered it torn down about ten years ago. The storehouse was full of steam shovels, dump trucks, excavators and other construction equipment.

At one end of the storehouse was the Hudson River. Past the other end ran a typical water-front street: rutted, dirty, haunted by smells.

The sky was a dome of gloom in the late dusk, crowded with clouds, promising rain. It had showered about an hour ago, just enough so that the marks were visible where rain drops had splattered the duston the pavement.

The girl got in the middle of the street and ran. Ran as if something were after her. She covered about a block and reached a car-a small convertible coupe, new and neat-and pitched into it.

The girl was frightened. She jabbed at the rear-view mirror, knocking it around until she could see herself in it. She saw a pert, dynamic small girl with an unusual quant.i.ty of copper-colored hair, large blue eyes, inviting lips, and a face that was distinctly fascinating in a bright way.

Suddenly she giggled. Convulsively. She couldn't help it. And complete terror came on her own face.

She started the car motor and drove away speedily.

FIFTEEN minutes later, some policemen listened to the girl-and smiled. She was an easy girl to smile at. Also, her story was ridiculous, and that encouraged them to smile.

"How did you happen to be looking into a storehouse for a giggling ghost?" a cop asked skeptically.

Miami Davis giggled hysterically.

"I followed the ghost there," she said.

"Oh, you followed it. Well, well!"

"I was working late," the girt said. "When I left the office-it's in a factory not far from this storehouse-I saw a shadowy figure. It was a ghostly figure." She looked at them, giggled, then screamed wildly, "A ghost figure, you hear? I followed it. It giggled! That's why I followed it. I had been hearing those stories about giggling ghosts."

"Was it a male or a female ghost?" a cop inquired.

The girl giggled angrily.

"You don't believe me!" she said, between giggles.

"There have been some yarns about giggling ghosts floating around," one policeman admitted.

The captain of police came in, then, and heard the story. He did not believe it. Not a word of it.

"Go home; go to bed and call a doctor," he ordered.

The girl stamped an irate foot, giggled wrathfully at him, and flounced out.

A cop followed her, and stopped her when she reached her coupe.

"Look," the cop said, "why not go to Doc Savage?"

This apparently failed to mean much to the girl.

"Doc-who?" she asked.

"Doc Savage."

The girl frowned, trying to remember, then said, "There was a story in the newspapers a while backabout a man named Doc Savage who had discovered something new about atoms or molecules or some such thing. But why should-or do you mean he treats-crazy people? Well, I'm not crazy!"

The cop waited until she stopped giggling.

"You've got me wrong," the officer said. "This guy's a scientist, but that ain't his main racket. He puts in most of his time going around helping people out of trouble. And the more unusual the trouble they're in, the better he likes it."

"I don't understand," the girl said.

"It's his hobby, or something. Helping people. I know it sounds crazy, but this Doc Savage is a good man to see about this giggling ghost business."

The girl giggled while she thought that over.

"It won't be much trouble," the girl said, "to see this Doc Savage."

"No," the cop said, "it won't be much trouble."

They were both wrong.

THE girl drove across the George Washington Bridge into New York City, guided her car to the uptown business district, and parked her car near a very tall building.

The elevator starter in the big building said, "So you want to see Doc Savage?"

The girl nodded, and she was ushered to an express elevator.

A man hurried and got in the elevator with her.

The man was tall, thick-bodied, and wore an expensive gray hat with a snap brim, fuzzy gray sports oxfords, and gray gloves of high quality. He also wore a yellow slicker.

Miami Davis-she was not giggling as much now-noticed what the man wore. She did not see the man's face, because he kept it averted.

The elevator climbed up its shaft.

Suddenly the man in the slicker yelled, "Operator! The girl is gonna hit you-"

Then the man himself hit the operator. He knocked the fellow senseless with a blow from behind, a skull blow with a blackjack which he had whipped from a pocket. The operator could not have seen who had hit him.

Because of what the man had yelled, the operator would think that the girl had struck him.

The man who had slugged the operator showed cigarette-stained teeth in a vicious grin.

"He'll think you slugged 'im," he told the girl. "That won't do you any good."

He bent over, lifted one of his trousers legs, and removed a double barreled derringer from a clip holster fastened, garterlike, below his knee. He pointed the derringer at the girl."This wouldn't do you any good, either!" he said.

Chapter II. CHANGED MINDS.

THE GIRL stared at the derringer.

The gun was not much longer than the middle finger of the man who held it, and the barrels were one above the other so that looking into their maws was like looking at a fat black colon. She could have inserted her little fingers in either barrel without much difficulty. She could see the bullets, like lead-colored bald heads.

"This thing"-the man moved the derringer-"will do as much damage as any other gun."

The girl moved, pressed herself into a corner of the elevator, and went through swallowing motions several times.

The man said, "When we get back to the lobby, we say the elevator operator fainted, see? Then you walk out with me." He gestured again with the gun. "Make any cracks, sis, and they'll be your epitaph!"

The girl tried to swallow again.

The man folded his newspaper carefully and tucked it in a pocket so it wouldn't be left lying around for fingerprints. He stepped to the elevator controls. When the operator had dropped after being slugged, he had instinctively shifted the control lever to the center, so that the cage had come to a stop.

The man set the control at, "Down." He seemed confident. He leaned against the side of the cage, c.o.c.king an eye on the girl, whistling idly as he waited. Abruptly his confidence got a puncture.

"What the devil?" he gulped.

The elevator was not going down. It was going up. Up! The man doubled over, stared at the controls.

The handle was on "Down." But the cage was going up.

The man yanked at the handle, thinking control markings might be reversed-but the cage kept going up.

The controls now seemed to have absolutely no effect on the elevator.

The man's mind leaped instantly to the conclusion that he was in a fantastic trap. He made snarling noises, even fired his derringer at the elevator controls, but accomplished nothing except to deafen himself and the girl.

His eyes, searching for escape, found the safety escape hatch in the top of the cage. He jumped at that until he got it open. With a great deal of grunting, kicking and snarling, he managed to pull himself through the hatch at the top of the slowly rising cage.

The girl let him go.

The man crouched on top of the cage; there was no stable footing. He clutched at a cable to steady himself, but the cable was moving, and he cursed.

The elevator was rising very slowly, although it was an express lift, and expresses in this building normally traveled at high speed. Obviously there was some kind of emergency mechanism in operation.

The skysc.r.a.per was served by a battery of elevators, all operating side by side. There was no divis...o...b..tween the shafts-only the vertical steel tracks on which the cages operated.

The man peered upward, saw another cage descending in the adjacent shaft. He made a lightning decision to take a long chance; he jumped for the top of the other cage as it pa.s.sed. And he made it!