The Ghost of a Model T and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

Packer promised him. “I shall hit them easy.”
    He went up the lift with the bar. The sight of Lang’s discomfiture made him feel a little better and he managed to whistle a snatch of tune as he went down the hall.
    As he fumbled with the key, he heard the sound of rustling coming from beyond the door and he felt a chill go through him, for the rustlings were of a furtive sort and they sounded ominous.
    Good Lord, he thought, there can’t be that many mice in there!
    He grasped the bar more firmly and unlocked the door and pushed it open.
    The inside of the place was a storm of paper.
    He stepped in quickly and slammed the door behind him to keep the blowing paper from swooping out into the hall.
    Must have left a window open, he thought. But he knew he had not, and even if he had, it was quiet outside. There was not a breath of breeze.
    And what was happening inside the apartment was more than just a breeze.
    He stood with his back against the door and watched what was going on and shifted his grip on the bar so that it made a better club.
    The apartment was filled with a sleet of flying paper and a barrage of packets and a snowstorm of dancing stamps. There were open boxes standing on the floor and the paper and the stamps and packets were drifting down and chunking into these, and along the wall were other boxes, very neatly piled—and that was entirely wrong, for there had been nothing neat about the place when he had left it less than two hours before.
    But even as he watched, the activity slacked off. There was less stuff flying through the air and some of the boxes were closed by unseen hands and then flew off, all by themselves, to stack themselves with the other boxes.
    Poltergeists! he thought in terror, his mind scrambling back frantically over all that he had ever thought or read or heard to grasp some explanation.
    Then it was done and over.
    There was nothing flying through the air. All the boxes had been stacked. Everything was still.
    Packer stepped out into the room and stared in slack-jawed amazement.
    The desk and the tables shone. The drapes hung straight and clean. The carpeting looked as if it might be new. Chairs and small tables and lamps and other things, long forgotten, buried all these years beneath the accumulation of his collection, stood revealed and shining—dusted, cleaned and polished.
    And in the middle of all this righteous order stood the wastebasket, bubbling happily.
    Packer dropped the bar and headed for the desk.
    In front of him a window flapped open and he heard a swish and the bar went past him, flying for the window. It went out the window and slashed through the foliage of a tree, then the window closed and he lost sight of it.
    Packer took off his hat and tossed it on the desk.
    Immediately his hat lifted from the desk and sailed for a closet door. The closet door swung open and the hat ducked in. The door closed gently on it.
    Packer whuffled through his whiskers, He got out his handkerchief and mopped a glistening brow.
    â€œFunny goings-on,” he said to himself.
    Slowly, cautiously, he checked the place. All the boxes were stacked along one wall, three deep and piled from floor to ceiling. Three filing cabinets stood along another wall and he rubbed his eyes at that, for he had forgotten that there were three of them—for years he’d thought that he had only two. And all the rest of the place was neat and clean and it fairly gleamed.
    He walked from room to room and everywhere it was the same.
    In the kitchen the pots and pans were all in place and the dishes stacked primly in the cupboard. The stove and refrigerator had been wiped clean and there were no dirty dishes and that was a bit surprising, for he was sure there had been. Mrs. Foshay’s kettle, with the broth emptied out of it and scrubbed until it shone, stood on the kitchen table.
    He went back to the desk and the top of it was clear except for several items laid out, as if