Page:Weird Tales Volume 2 Number 2 (1923-09).djvu/67

66 "Great Scott!" I exclaimed. "If I can go a million miles an hour, I will soon have been everywhere and back again."

"I said there's a limit of a million miles an hour, not that you could make a million miles an hour," explained Ben, "You'll need to grow a few days before you can make half that."

"Will I be traveling a half million miles an hour in a few days?" I demanded,

"Perhaps," nodded Ben. "If some ghost sting-ray doesn't meet you and lay her eggs in your neck to hatch out."

I laughed. "That must be a ghost-boil! But I'd believe more of that if I knew less of you."

It angered Ben to be called a prevaricator to his face. "Have it your own fool way," he said, "You'll be lucky if the sting-ray doesn't bore a hole in your identity and lay her eggs there. Only I'd be sorry for the little sting-rays that had to be hatched in your identity."

"What's the most fun a blue ghost can have for nothing?" I asked, for I had just that much in my pocket, but no pocket as yet.

"Roll on the grass and get the ghost hives," replied Ben.

"What are the ghost hives good for?"

"To scratch."

"Is it a pleasure to scratch the ghost hives?"

"The only fun a blue ghost can have is to scratch his hives," replied Ben. "Now, aren't you sorry you died?"

"I couldn't help it," I said. "I was shot."

"But you shouldn't have taken that cow," said Ben.

"Hello! what have we here?" I cried. In another moment I started to run, and not ask any more questions, for I had recognized the thing before me as just a big ghostly human hand, seven feet high, and it was reaching for me. If it should close on my poor ghost it would squeeze the very identity out of it.

"Help!" I cried, for the big hand had got me and was squeezing my outline into the shape of a disappointed cruller. But it seemed that nothing could squeeze my identity into any other shape that it was, for it was too rigid.

After the hand had squeezed my outline from all ghostly semblance to a man, it threw me aside and moved on, walking on its fingers, toward the cemetery. I watched it till it was hidden by the tombstones, then I arose on one end of my damaged outline and soon had worked myself back into my former shape, and felt no worse for my amazing experience. My identity seemed even more rigid than ever.

"Was that the ghost of a glad hand?" I asked.

"No, that was the ghost of a milkman," replied Ben, "He milked twenty cows before breakfast for seventeen years, and died suddenly one morning from water on the brain, and now he goes about milking every blue ghost he comes across, and we blame blue ghosts have to stand for it, for blue ghosts have to stand for everything."

"Where was the rest of him?" I asked.

"There isn't any rest of him. He is all hand. Ghostland is full of ghosts that now are all what they were most of while alive as men and women. There are ghosts that are all ears, or nose, or necktie, or haircut. You want to look out for the ghost that's all gall. If he ever spreads himself over you, even your identity will be slightly fussed."

Just then a pair of large, bare, very clean, very pink feet hurried by, each about a yard high, and I watched them until they had hurried over the hill, than I sat down and whistled,

"Great Scott!" I laughed. "That must have been the ghost of H. Hurry Scott. He always was in a hurry about something."

"That's Scott's ghost," nodded Ben. "He died in a hurricane."

"I must be half an hour old," I considered. "I guess my crust should be hard enough by now for me to roll onward. Believe me, Ben, I had some crust before I became a ghost."

"I'll go along with you a little ways," Ben offered, pushing his bike along beside me. "There's a ghost dog down the road that always rushes out and bites me in my outline, and he may want a change of outline."

"If he comes after me, I'll change his outline," I laughed. "Say, Ben, do you know of any rich young ghost girl—I mean wealthy, for all girls are rich—who might be willing to marry a handsome blue ghost an hour old?"

"There's a wealthy ghost girl down the road a ways, but she's not very young," replied Ben.

"How old is she—a month?"

"She became a ghost girl the year that Helen was carried off to Troy by Paris. But you'd never guess her age from her looks."

"Now for her looks," I said, holding my ghostly breath.

"She's a triangle, with one blind eye in the center of the triangle."

I waved the temptation to sudden riches aside, "I'd rather work and change jobs so often that it wouldn't seem like real work. But I say, Ben, what makes your bike rattle so?"

"That's the dead Chinaman's tooth, that punctured the tire and got inside. If there was only one dead Chinaman in all the world, and he had only one tooth, that tooth would have worked up out of his coffin and punctured my tire. That's just my blame blue luck."

"But I say, Ben, I thought ghostland was a dim, haunted place, inhabited with ghastly specters and grisly shapes, and your hair stood on end without any vaseline, and a clammy sweat froze your B. V. D's, to your funked back bone, and your middle name was fear! Then Horror blew out the last candle and you were alone with—"

"With what?" asked Ben.

I sunk my ghostly voice to a ghostly whisper. "The seven dead Chinamen whose throats you had cut to rob them."

"How much did you get?"

"Only a pint of little black collar buttons and a lady's back comb with thirteen paste shiners in it," I replied.

"Well, that's something," said Ben, "I wouldn't have got that much."

"Then a faint, phosphorous light came from somewhere in the darkness," I continued. "And I saw a little tree coming up from the ground with something swinging to it, and one of the dead Chinamen arose and watered the tree with blood from his throat that I had cut, and the tree grew higher and higher till it was a large oak, and swinging to it, hanged by the neck until dead, was—"

"What?" asked Ben,

"A human figure—a man with a black hood over his face—and something compelled me, step by step, to approach the tree and remove the hood from over the face of the dead and hanged man, and it was—"

"Yourself," yawned Ben.

"Sure," I nodded. "That's what hurt! There I was, cutting myself down, hanged dead, and only got out of the job a pint of little black collar buttons and a lady's back comb with thirteen paste shiners in it. It was very disappointing."

"Ghostland isn't what it used to be," Ben sighed, "We ghosts used to pull off some pretty shaky stunts, When I was alive as a man and in the yam and bicycle business in Florida, the ghost of a big murdered buck negro used always to follow me into my bedroom at nights and lock the door behind me, and throw