"065 (B056) - The Giggling Ghosts (1938-07) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

"He's no mug. He's my brother." The seismograph expert scowled.
Batavia subsided. The hour dragged past, and still there was no call from Washington. Suddenly thunder gave a great whopping gobble outside, and it began to rain again. Finally the telephone rang; it was Washington.
The man who knew all about seismographs talked to his brother in Washington and laughed several times. He came out of the booth chuckling.
"Perfect!" he said.
"He have any trouble getting to the Washington seismograph?" Batavia demanded.
"Nope. He had keys to the place." The expert chuckled again. "He made the Washington instrument show a quake at the same place and time that we faked one on the two machines here. You know, I'm beginnin' to enjoy this gag."
"You're sure," Batavia asked, "that these seismographs are the only ones in this part of the United States?"
"The only ones in operation," the expert said.
"Then we got us an earthquake all fixed up," Batavia declared.
Chapter IX. THE GIGGLING PEOPLE
THE next instance of a giggling ghost came to the public notice about nine o'clock the next night. The newspapers did not print the story of this giggling ghost that night; that came later.
No giggling ghost actually appeared this time.
A man just caught the giggles.
He was not a very happy man, which made his giggling all the more startling; startling at first, that was, before it began to be realized that being happy or sad had very little to do with the giggling.
This first victim was a grocer; he ran a store, which he kept open evenings. The store was close enough to his residence that he could go home for dinner, and he habitually took a short-cut across a vacant lot which was thickly overgrown with weeds.
On this night he took his usual short-cut. He was rather a bug on health, and he always walked with his chest out and head back, taking deep breaths.
He did not see a ghost.
He began to giggle shortly after he had crossed the weed-grown lot. He started with small snickers. When he got home, he sat down on his front porch and tittered. 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-fashioned 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 assistants.
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 rushing 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 fashionable 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 analyzing 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!"