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Sanctuary 337
I changed the subject when the coffee came. I couldn’t risk insulting my host.
And a curious phrase of the colonel’s had recurred to my mind. “Your friend wished
us happiness in this ‘haunted villa.’ What did he mean by that? Surely this is too
modern a place to have its ancestral specters?”
Outside the large windows of the living room we should have seen the terrace
and the sea, but the blackout curtains shut us into our narrow personal cell.
From outside a steady drumming noise beat into this cell, the percussive rhythm
of machinery from the nearby Barras plant, origin of France’s cheapest pleasure car
in peace times and now given over to even de Champsfleuris knew not what. Dr.
Palgrave hesitated before replying, and the steady thumps of manufactured death
were loud in the room.
“Yes,” he said at last. “This place is, by reliable reports, haunted. Or once was.
One sole manifestation, which is, I gather from physical students, most unusual.”
“Give,” I said. “Or does your scientific mind reject it?”
“So many scientific minds have rejected what I have accomplished that I keep
my own mind open, or try to. But this is a curious incident. It was before my tenancy,
when the villa belonged to its original owner, the British novelist Uptonleigh.
One day in 1937, I believe, in the midst of a house party, there suddenly appeared
a ghost. A black-faced ghost, like a relic from one of the minstrel shows of my boyhood,
clad in dirty dungarees and tattered tennis shoes. He spoke with an American
accent and announced that he had just been treacherously murdered and had never
expected heaven to be like this. The guests were sufficiently merry when he arrived,
as was usually the case with Uptonleigh’s guests, to enter into the spirit with the
spirit, so to speak; if it chose to believe that heaven was one long party, they would
give it one long party. The party lasted, I believe, for six weeks, almost equaling the
record set by the wake which Uptonleigh held when his best novel was filmed. In
that time the ghost assumed civilized attire, washed its face and grew a beard. The
party might have gone on to a new record if the ghost had not vanished as abruptly
as it appeared. It has never been seen since.
Dr. Palgrave related this preposterous narrative as calmly as he had told of his
time machine, as calmly as he had accepted Colonel von Schwarzenau’s manifestos
of the New Order. I smiled politely. “Some drunken American who decided to crash
a good party,” I suggested.
Dr. Palgrave shook his head. “You do not understand. The ghost appeared suddenly
from nowhere in the midst of them. One moment there was empty space, the
next this black-faced intruder. All accounts allow of no rational explanation.”
The Barras works thumped. I stared at the thin-bearded scientist. Did nothing interest
him, nothing perturb him but his ventures into the past with senile guinea pigs
and rusting iron? “It would be fun,” I said, “to see your ghost meet your colonel.”
Dr. Palgrave half smiled. “But we talk of these trivial matters when I have so
much to show you, Holding. I want so very much to interest you in my experiments.
I even dare hope that if I can convince you—”
There was an honest-to-God gleam in his eye. “Hold on,” I said hurriedly. “You
aren’t aiming to graduate from guinea pigs to me, are you?”
“I should not have put it quite that way, but my thought was something of that
nature.”