Doc Savage - The Giggling Ghosts Part 8

When he got home, he sat down on his front porch and t.i.ttered. He snickered until he had to hold his sides, but strangely enough, there was no joy on his face. Rather, there was growing terror.The grocer's wife came out on the porch. His wife was a large woman with affirmative ways, and after she had asked him several times what he thought was so funny, and her husband only snickered at her, she lost her temper and gave him a kick in the ribs.

Her husband toppled over and continued to shake with his giggles.

"Gug-gug-get a doctor!" he giggled.

His wife did not believe in doctors. She hauled him in the house, and tried doctoring him herself with good old-fas.h.i.+oned remedies such as castor oil, ice packs, smelling salts, and a hot foot bath. But by midnight the grocer was so much worse that his wife grew really scared, and called an ambulance.

The ambulance attendants looked puzzled as they carried the grocer, quaking and giggling, out to the white vehicle. The ambulance moaned through the streets to the hospital.

In the hospital, all the doctors looked puzzled.

The giggling merchant went into the diagnosis room, where he was X-rayed, had his reflexes tested, his metabolism measured. Most doctors joined the conference.

Then all the doctors stood around and shook their heads. The giggling merchant had them stumped.

When five other giggling people landed in the hospital the following day, it was a much bigger mystery.

The newspapers got hold of it. The giggling ghosts became an incredible story.

IT had been a quiet day for the newspapers; the international situation was calm, the stock market was stationary, and there had been no interesting murders. True, there had been a mysterious bridge explosion on a remote New Jersey road two nights before.

Residents of the thinly populated district had heard this detonation, but no one had been found who had witnessed it. This mystery of a destroyed bridge was played up in the early newspaper editions, but lost prominence after an anonymous note reached the sheriff of the New Jersey county, a note stating that some unruly boys had been experimenting with a home-made bomb.

This note caused the authorities to start looking for unruly boys; it kept them from dragging the deep water under and around the bridge, something they had been considering doing; so the note succeeded-Batavia had sent it-in its purpose: a ruse to keep Doc Savage's submerged car from being found.

There also appeared in the newspapers a small item to the effect that William Harper "Johnny" Littlejohn, the eminent archaeologist and geologist, had stated that Doc Savage had disappeared.

Johnny Littlejohn was another one of Doc Savage's five a.s.sistants.

The fact that Doc Savage had disappeared would have received a burst of newspaper publicity, except that William Harper Littlejohn declared there was no justification for any belief that the bronze man might have met with foul play. Johnny made this tempering statement because he knew of Doc Savage's dislike for publicity.

The bridge explosion, the missing Doc Savage, were wiped off all the front pages by the giggling people.

By six o'clock five gigglers had turned up in hospitals, in addition to the merchant.Some of these insisted they must have caught the giggles from the giggling ghost, or ghosts.

Automobiles loaded with doctors kept rus.h.i.+ng from one hospital to another, trying to diagnose the epidemic. As might be expected, there was disagreement among the specialists, some contending one thing, and some another.

Gradually, however, they all agreed that the giggling was caused by spasms of the respiratory muscular system, undoubtedly was the result of something drastically wrong with the respiratory nervous centers.

By ten o'clock that night, over twenty gigglers were in Jersey hospitals. The gigglers were all in Jersey: there were none in Manhattan, the Bronx, or Staten Island.

Each victim of the giggling malady became steadily worse.

The police investigated, of course. The police at once noticed that all gigglers were being found in Jersey-in a certain area of Jersey, to be exact. The sector was confined to a district on the river front, near the mouth of a vehicular tunnel which had been recently constructed under the Hudson River.

It was a region of low-priced homes, not a particularly fas.h.i.+onable neighborhood. By dawn the following morning, it was absolutely certain that every giggling victim had come from this sector. So had the stories of the giggling ghosts.

Also by morning, it had been ascertained that each of the gigglers had one thing in common: they each had taken a walk that day, or that evening. In every case, the victim had walked through the streets in the river-front district.

At nine o'clock the next morning, A. King Christophe put in an appearance.

A. KING CHRISTOPHE was a very fat man, with round eyes, not much of a nose, a puffy face and very black hair. When A. King Christophe blew out his cheeks and glared, which he had the habit of doing on the slightest provocation, he looked very fierce. He was a geologist. Newspaper investigators later in the day learned that A. King Christophe was a rather well-known geologist.

Geologist A. King Christophe got a load of newspaper publicity that day, for it was he who came forth with a discovery of the source of the giggling malady.

A. King Christophe arrived in a taxicab. When he alighted from the cab, he carried a suitcase, large and much worn. He immediately had a quarrel with the taxi driver over the fare, and blew out his cheeks and looked so fierce that he bluffed the driver.

When A. King Christophe's worn suitcase was opened, it proved to contain litmus papers and other scientific aids for a.n.a.lyzing the composition of earth and air. For two hours he prowled over the region, using the devices. Then he went to the police.

"See!" he said. "I have idea."

"Go away," the cops said. "Everybody seems to have ideas around here to-day. Ghosts with the contagious giggles! All kinds of ideas!"

A. King Christophe blew out his cheeks, glared and intimidated the officer into listening.

"She are gas that make all this giggle!" Christophe declared. "She are gas, and she come from ground!""What kind of gas?" the cop wanted to know.

"Give me time, give me time!" said A. King Christophe indignantly.

The policeman called other policemen, and they called chemical experts; and A. King Christophe demonstrated to the satisfaction of everyone that the earth in certain parts of the Jersey gas area was undoubtedly saturated with a mysterious vapor.

The newspapers broke out their biggest type.

MYSTERIOUS EARTH GAS,.

NOT GHOSTS,.

CAUSING GIGGLE DEATHS!.

Two giggling victims had died by now. The poor grocery merchant went first, and the other victim was a truck driver.

A. King Christophe was hailed as a hero; he had accomplished nothing, but he was hailed anyway. He had learned there was gas.

But what kind of gas was it? That was the question.

"Have chemists make a.n.a.lysis," suggested A. King Christophe. "They might learn."

Why did the gas happen to be coming from the ground? That was another question. A. King Christophe pondered that.

"I have theory." Christophe blew his cheeks out. "Suppose this gas are deep in earth for long time.

Suppose she not get out because of strata of rock over it, like a lid. Suppose earthquake crack the stone lid."

"Earthquake?"

"I say it may be."

It appeared, however, that no one had felt any earthquakes around New Jersey recently. The giggling ghost story seemed as sensible.

"Many earthquakes no one are notice!" A. King Christophe said angrily. "To find earthquake, look at instrument made to record them-instrument called seismograph!"

They consulted the seismographs at the university, the museum in Was.h.i.+ngton; so they found evidence of a subterranean earthquake in the vicinity of Jersey.

A score of people then popped up to declare they had felt the earthquake at the precise time the seismograph records said it had occurred. These people even described how pictures danced on the walls and gla.s.ses had jumped off tables; such is human nature.

Now it was generally concluded that a mystery gas had been imprisoned under the earth's crust for centuries, that an earthquake had cracked the crust, and that the gas was coming out and making people giggle themselves to death.

Ghosts-nothing!Then William Harper Littlejohn put in an appearance, and the affair began to get complicated.

AS a geologist William Harper "Johnny" Littlejohn had a reputation considerably exceeding that of A.

King Christophe. Johnny was just about tops in the geology business.

Johnny Littlejohn was also probably the longest and the thinnest man who had ever been in that part of Jersey; newspapermen liked to label Johnny as being two men tall and half a man thick, and he came near being that. Johnny's clothing never fitted him, for no tailor could quite manage to cope with such a broomstick physique.

Johnny appeared in the gas disaster district to conduct an investigation of his own. Johnny's scientific instruments were more complicated than those used by A. King Christophe. Because Johnny had a geological reputation, a number of newspapermen followed him around, awaiting his conclusions.

When Johnny voiced his findings the first time, n.o.body understood him.

"I'll be superamalgamated!" Johnny exclaimed.

He had a habit of never using a small word when he could think of a big one.

"An ultraconsummate mumpsimus!" he added.

The reporters copied Johnny's big words down; the tongue-knotters always made good color in a news story.

"Now, just what do you mean?" the reporters asked. "Ghosts?"

Reluctantly, Johnny fell back on little words.

"There is gas," he said. "There is no doubt that the gas is causing the giggling, because it seems to be some nature of pulmonic-"

"Whoa!" a reporter interrupted. "Little words-if you don't mind."

"A pulmonic," Johnny explained, "is an agent affecting the lungs. In this case, it is causing spasmodic behavior, and eventual disintegration of the affected nervous area."

"So that's what you said," a reporter grunted. "That's what you meant by ultra-ultracon-"

"No, it isn't," Johnny corrected.

"Huh?"

"What I said," Johnny explained, "is that there has been a tremendous mistake."

"Mistake about what? You don't mean there is a ghost?"

"The earthquake."

"Meaning?"

"There wasn't any earthquake," Johnny said.

WORD of this remarkable statement reached A. King Christophe who, after sneering several times, blew out his cheeks.

"Who is this William Harper Littlejohn?" he jeered.

"He's got a bigger reputation than you have," he was told, but more impolitely.

"Poof!"

A. King Christophe let the air out of his cheeks. "He has reputation as Doc Savage hanger-on! I not consider him authority."

The reporters, on the lookout for the dramatic, made an inquiry. "Would you like to tell Johnny Littlejohn that to his face?" they asked.

"Yes," said A. King Christophe.

The two geologists met and surveyed each other like two strange roosters. Physically, they both came rather close to being freaks, and the news cameramen got busy taking pictures.

"I'll be superamalgamated!" Johnny said grimly.

A. King Christophe looked startled.

"Which?"

William Harper Littlejohn said, "In Doc Savage's headquarters there is a seismograph."

"But-"

"And this seismograph of Doc's did not register an earthquake," Johnny said.

"But three other seismographs did register one!" A. King Christophe shouted.

"I don't care what registered which!" Johnny yelled. "There wasn't any earthquake! I stake my opinion on Doc's machine!"

A. King Christophe stamped away making remarks about long, lean walking dictionaries.

Chapter X. FAKE QUAKE.