GHOST at large in Montclair, New Jersey? As soon a matinée of the Folies Bergères in Old Trinity! I never would have believed it for an instant if it hadn't been for Lew Macey.
It did not require a clairvoyant to see that Macey believed it, though. Ordinarily he is a prematurely settled sort of chap, bald at thirty, wearing thick double lenses, getting his lightest recreation out of reading The New Republic, and all that. Just the type of build you'd expect to find in an anchor man in the city bowling league, but refined by education and thought instead of coarsened by beer and exercise.
I liked Macey but usually avoided him, because when I came down to the Century Club I was in search of diversion, not arguments, and my opinions always clashed head-on with his. To see him sitting alone and drinking, though! It was enough to arrest my attention, for to my positive knowledge Lew always had been a quiet but stanch advocate of prohibition.
“Brooding over the Russian collapse?” I questioned, stopping beside his table. It would not have surprised me greatly if he had answered in the affirmative, so seriously does he take all affairs of government and world-import, but he shook his head, motioning with a shaky forefinger at the chair opposite.
“Sit down!” he croaked hoarsely, and astounded at what I perceived from a closer inspection of his face, I obeyed. The calm, heavy expression of judicial gravity had vanished as completely from his face as if it had never been his. Instead, pallor of skin and a widened, strained expression of the blue eyes akin to chronic terror had replaced it.
“I have had to come to it lately, Hoffman,” he muttered, indicating the decanter of Scotch at his elbow. “Nerve gone. Can't stand it!”
“Why on earth, man?” I exclaimed. “Are you taking the war—”
“The war?” he interrupted vaguely. “No, not that. Wife's down at Asheville now with Lenore, my daughter. Complete nervous breakdown, both of them. I stayed. Now it's got me!”
“What?” I did not smile, though I had a premonition of something far less terrible than Macey considered it.
“Say, Hoffman!” Macey gained better command of
himself for an instant. “Want to buy my place in Montclair? You know it—same estate I had when you were out a year ago Thanksgiving. Cost over a hundred thousand. I'll sell it to you just as it stands now, furnished and all, for fifty thousand!”
XCEPT for his strange proposition, Macey seemed a trifle saner, and I stared at him. The place would bring much more than fifty thousand even under the hammer, and I knew it. He was gazing at me steadily now, and I thought a glint of hope had crept into his eyes, shielded as they were behind the lenses.
“What is the proposition, Lew?” I asked, trying not to seem in the least excited. “Why don't you want it?”
“Ghosts!” he retorted tersely, clenching one of his heavy fists. “Too many tenants now!”
Macey was sincere in his offer and belief, and I knew it; yet I laughed heartily. It seemed too absurd that the calm, heavy scholar, used to analyzing national symptoms as a physician diagnoses illness from seemingly unrelated signs, should bow to superstition.
“Oh, nonsense, old man!” I concluded. “You've been reading too much.”
“Think I'm crazy?”
“No, of course not. Your nerves have become ragged, likely.”
“Then how about the rest of us?” Macey leaned forward on the table, grasping his short glass. “Grant that I have imagined all that I have heard. My wife and daughter have been scared out of their wits! They are down recuperating now, as I told you.”
I smiled tolerantly. “You probably did the scaring yourself,” I suggested, thinking that such might well be the case, as Macey certainly looked the part of temporary insanity.
He shook his head. “No sir, Hoffman. You have no conception of what it means to be converted to a belief in spirits. You know I did not use to take any stock in such things? Yes! Now I do. I cannot reconstruct my scheme of things to jibe with it, either! It is terrible—no, horrible is the word!”
“Have you actually seen any of the—er—tenants?”
“No.” Macey seemed reluctant to make the admission. “Ethel has, though. And my dog Pete!”
“You say your dog has seen ghosts?” I asked incredulously.
Macey bowed somberly. “Pete is as crazy as the rest of us. When the noises start, he runs up and down the house with his hair standing up in a ruff around his neck and along the ridge of his back. Now and then he stops and howls at something in the empty room from which the noise is coming! If it were a person, he would bark. No, he howls like a wolf!”