The Mystery of the Green Ghost Read online

  THE MYSTERY

  OF

  THE GREEN GHOST

  Robert Arthur

  Introduction

  Are you ready to confront a ghost? Well, ready or not, you’re about to meet one. You’ll also come up against some strange pearls and a little dog who plays no part in the story because he does absolutely nothing. Or does he? Sometime doing nothing is as important as doing something. Chew on that for a while.

  In the meantime I could tell you about a lot of other strange episodes in the story you’re about to begin…but I’m sure you’d rather read about them yourself. So instead I’ll do what I promised – I’ll introduce you to The Three Investigators.

  Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews make up this junior detective firm.

  They use their spare time to solve any mysteries that come their way, and I mean any. No puzzle is too bizarre or obscure for them. The boys live in Rocky Beach, California, a town on the Pacific Coast a few miles from. Hollywood. Pete and Bob live with their parents, and Jupiter lives with his aunt and uncle, Titus and Mathilda Jones, who own and operate the Jones Salvage Yard. In that rather extraordinary junkyard you can find almost anything.

  One thing you can’t find in this junkyard is the Headquarters of The Three Investigators. It’s a thirty-foot mobile home that Titus Jones was never able to sell. So Jupiter and his pals use it as their office and have it hidden from sight under a great mound of junk. The adults have forgotten about the trailer. Only The Three Investigators know it’s there, and they keep it a mystery by using secret passageways to enter and exit.

  The entrance they use most is called Tunnel Two. It’s a piece of corrugated pipe that runs from their outdoor work shop, partly underground, beneath some junk, and under Headquarters. After crawling through the pipe, they enter Headquarters through a trap door.

  And the inside of Headquarters is a lot more than a bare room. The boys have rigged up a small laboratory, a darkroom, and an office with a desk, typewriter, telephone, tape recorder, and a lot of reference books. All the equipment was rebuilt by The Three Investigators from junk that came into the salvage yard.

  But my three young friends don’t spend all their time in this secret trailer. Sometimes they need to travel long distances on a case. When that happens they can use a gold-plated Rolls-Royce – complete with chauffeur – which Jupiter won the use of in a contest. The boys have this privilege for thirty days. For local travel, they ride their bikes or sometimes get Hans and Konrad, the big Bavarian yard helpers, to give them a lift in one of the salvage yard trucks.

  Now that you’ve heard the background info, let me introduce the boys. Jupiter is stocky

  – in fact, some people might even call him fat. He has a round face which can look stupid.

  But this is misleading, because Jupiter has an excellent mind, as he’d probably tell you himself. He has many good qualities, but modesty isn’t one of them.

  Pete is tall and very athletic. He’s Jupiter’s right-hand man at trailing suspects and carrying out other dangerous exploits.

  Bob has a smaller build than the two. He has a lot of courage and he’s in charge of gathering background data for the cases the boys handle. He has a part-time job in the local library, which makes a vast array of reference books available to him.

  That’s enough introducing. Hold on to your chairs. The green ghost is about to scream!

  ALFRED HITCHCOCK

  Chapter 1

  The Green Ghost Screams

  The scream took Bob Andrews and Pete Crenshaw by surprise.

  Standing in a driveway overgrown with weeds, they were studying an old, empty house as big as a hotel. One end was torn down where the wreckers had begun on it. Moonlight made everything misty and unreal.

  Bob was talking into a portable tape recorder, slung around his neck, describing the scene. He interrupted himself to turn to Pete and say:

  “A lot of people think that house is haunted, Pete. It’s too bad we didn’t think of it when Reginald Clarke was looking for a haunted house for one of his pictures.” Mr.

  Crenshaw was a special-effects expert in Hollywood. Bob was referring to the time they had tried to find a genuine haunted house for a director friend of his.

  “I bet Mr. Clarke would have liked this place all right,” Pete agreed. “But I don’t. In fact, every minute I’m getting more nervous. What do you say we get away from here?”

  That was when the scream came from the house.

  “EEEeeeee- aahhhhhh! ” It was a high-pitched sound, almost more animal than human.

  The hair stood up on both boys’ necks.

  “Did of hear that?” Pete gulped. “Now we are getting out of here!”

  “Wait!” Bob said, standing his ground despite an impulse to run. As Pete hesitated Bob said, “I’ll turn up the tape recorder in case we hear anything else. That’s what Jupiter would do.”

  He was referring to Jupiter Jones, their partner in the firm of The Three Investigators, who was not with them.

  Pete began. But Bob had already turned up the volume control and pointed the microphone at the empty, moldering old house among the trees.

  “Aaaaaaahhhhh—ahheeeee— eeeeee! ” The scream came again and died out slowly, in a most unsettling manner.

  “Now let’s go!” Pete said. “We’ve heard enough!” Bob was in full agreement. They spun around and started to run down the old driveway to where their bikes were parked.

  Pete was fleet as a deer, and Bob ran faster than he had run for many years. After a fall down a rocky slope, he had broken his leg in several places and for a long time he had had to wear a brace. However, the leg had healed well, and after a long period of exercises, Bob was told, just the previous week, that he could discard the brace.

  Now, without it, he felt so light he could almost fly. But fast as they ran, neither lie nor Pete got very far.

  Strong arms suddenly and unexpectedly stopped them.

  “Ah-ulp!” Pete grunted in surprise as he ran headlong into someone behind him. Bob, too, was brought up short by plunging into a man who grabbed him and held him.

  They had run full tilt into a group of men who had come up the driveway behind them as they stood listening to the eerie screams.

  “Whoa, boy!” the man who had grabbed Pete exclaimed good-naturedly. “You nearly knocked me down!”

  “What was that sound?” asked the man who had caught Bob from falling as the boy ran blindly into him. “We saw you boys standing and listening.”

  “We don’t know what it was,” Pete spoke up. “But it sounded like the ghost to us!”

  “Ghost, nonsense! … It could be someone in trouble! … Maybe it was just a tramp. …”

  The five or six men in the group into which the boys had plunged all began to speak at once, ignoring Pete and Bob now. The two boys could not see their faces clearly. But they all seemed well-dressed and spoke like typical dwellers in the pleasant neighborhood that surrounded the overgrown grounds and the empty house, known as the Green estate.

  “I think we should go inside!” One man with an unusually deep voice spoke loudly. Bob couldn’t make out his features, except to see that he had a moustache. “We came over here to look at the old building before it got torn down. We heard somebody scream. Somebody may be inside, hurt.”

  “I say we should call the police,” said a man in a checked sports jacket, a little nervously. “It’s their duty to investigate such things.”

  “Someone may be hurt,” the deep-voiced man said. “Let’s see if we can help. If we wait for the police he might die.”

  “I agree,” spoke up a man wearing thick glasses. “I think we should go inside, and look around.”

  “You can go inside, I’ll go get the police,” said the man in the checked coat. He had turned away when a man who led a small dog on a leash spoke up.

  “It may be just an owl or a cat that’s gotten inside,” he said. “If you call the police for that, you’ll look pretty foolish.”

  The man in the checked coat hesitated.

  “Well –” he began. At that point a large man, the biggest in the group, took the lead.

  “Come on,” he said. “There’s half a dozen of us and we have several flashlights. I say we look inside first, and then call the police if it’s necessary. You two boys – you can go on home, you’re not needed here.”

  He strode up the flagstone path that led toward the house, and after a moment’s hesitation, the others followed him. The man who was leading the small dog picked it up and carried it, and the man in the checked coat, somewhat reluctantly, brought up the rear of the group.

  “Come on,” Pete said to Bob. “Like he said, they don’t need us. Let’s go home.”

  “And not find out what made that noise?” Bob asked.

  “Think what Jupe would say. We’d never hear the end of it. We’re supposed to be investigators. Anyway, there’s nothing to be scared about now, there’re so many of us.”

  He hurried up the path after the men, and Pete followed him. Outside the big front door, the men were milling around uncertainly. Then the big man in the lead tried the door. It opened, showing a black cavern of hall way inside.

  “Use your flashlights,” he said. “I want to find out what it was we heard.”

  With his own flashlight on, he led the way inside.

  The others crowded close at his heels, and three more flashlights cut bright paths into the darkness. As the men entered, Pete an
d Bob quietly slipped inside behind them.

  They found themselves in a big reception hall. The men who had flashlights shone the beams around, and they could all see that the walls were covered with what had once been cream-colored silk tapestries, with Oriental scenes on them.

  An impressive flight of stairs curved down into the hall. One of the men shone his light on it.

  “That must be where old Mathias Green fell down and broke his neck fifty years ago,”

  he said. “Smell the air! This place has been shut up for the whole fifty years.”

  “The house is supposed to be haunted,” someone else said. “And I’m willing to believe it. I only hope we don’t see the ghost.”

  “We’re not getting very far with our search,” said the big man. “Let’s start by searching the ground floor.”

  Staying in a group, the men began to go through the big rooms on the ground floor.

  The rooms were empty of furniture. Dust lay everywhere. One wing of the building had no back wall. That was where the wreckers had started to tear the building down just that day.

  The group found nothing but echoing, empty rooms through which they walked hesitantly, talking in hushed whispers. They tried the other wing of the mansion. Finally they came into what must once have been a big parlor. There was an impressive fireplace at one end and tall windows at the other. The men gathered in front of the fireplace, uneasily.

  “We’re not doing any good,” one man said in a low voice. “We should call the police –”

  “Sssh!” another voice cut him off. Everyone froze into silence. “I thought I heard something,” the second man said in a low whisper. “It may be just an animal. Let’s turn off all the lights and see if anything moves.”

  All the lights winked out. Darkness engulfed the room, except for some very faint moonlight coming through the dirty windows.

  Then someone said in a gasping tone, “Look! Over by the door!”

  They all turned. And they all saw it.

  A greenish figure was standing by the door through which they had entered. It seemed to glow slightly, as if with an inner light, and to waver a bit as though it were insubstantial mist. But as Bob stared at it, unconsciously holding his breath, it seemed to him to be the figure of a man in long, flowing green robes.

  “The ghost!” a rather weak voice gulped. “Old Mathias Green!”

  “All lights on!” the big man said sharply. “Shine them that way!”

  But before the lights went on, the greenish misty figure seemed to glide along the wall and dart out through the open door. It vanished as three flashlights beamed light toward it.

  “I wish I was someplace else,” Pete whispered

  into Bob’s ear. “Beginning about an hour ago.”

  “It may have been a flash from an auto

  headlight,” a man said firmly. “Just coming in a window. Come on, let’s have a look in the hall.”

  They all trooped noisily out into the hall and

  flashed their lights around again. There was

  nothing to be seen. Then someone suggested that they turn the lights out once more. They waited in silence and darkness again; the small dog one man carried in his arms whimpered slightly.

  This time Pete spotted the figure. The others

  were looking around them, but he happened to

  glance up the stairs and there, on the landing, was the greenish figure.

  “There it is!” he shouted. “On the stairs.”

  They all turned. They all saw the figure move

  from the landing and glide up toward the second floor.

  “Come on!” shouted the big man. “It’s

  someone pulling a gag on us. Follow him and

  catch him!”

  He led the way pell-mell up the stairs. But

  when they got to the second floor, they found nothing.

  “I have an idea.” It was Bob who spoke. He was asking himself what Jupiter Jones would have done if he had been there, and he thought he knew.

  “If anybody came upstairs ahead of us,” he said, as the men turned to him and someone shone a light on his face so that he had to squint, “they’d leave tracks on the dusty floor. If they left tracks, we can follow them.”

  “The boy’s right,” the man with the dog exclaimed. “You fellows, shine your lights here on the floor of the hall, where none of us has walked yet.”

  Three flashlights glowed on the floor. There was dust, all right, plenty of it, but nothing had disturbed it.

  “Nobody’s been up here!” The speaker sounded baffled. “So what did we see go up these stairs?”

  Nobody answered that, although everyone knew what everyone else was thinking.

  “Let’s turn out the lights and see if we see it again,” a voice suggested.

  “Let’s get out of here,” someone else said, but there was a chorus of agreement with the first speaker. After all, there were eight or nine of them – counting Pete and Bob – and nobody wanted to admit to being scared.

  In the darkness at the head of the stairs, they waited.

  Pete and Bob were staring down the hall when someone whispered sharply.

  “To the left!” he said. “Halfway down the hall.”

  They spun around. A green glow, so faint it could hardly be seen, stood beside a doorway. The figure grew clearer. Definitely now it was a human-shaped figure in green flowing robes like a Mandarin’s.

  “Let’s not scare it,” somebody said in a low voice. “See what it does.”

  They all waited silently.

  The ghostly figure began to move. It glided down the hall close to the wall, to the very end. Then it turned the corner, or seemed to, and vanished.

  “Follow it, slowly this time,” someone murmured. “It’s not trying to get away.”

  Bob spoke up again. “See if there are any footprints now, before we go down the hall,”

  he suggested.

  Two flashlights winked on and played up and down the hallway.

  “No footprints!” The deep-voiced speaker sounded a bit hollow. “Not a trace of a print in the dust. Whatever it is, it’s floating on air.”

  “We’ve come this far, we have to go on,” someone else said firmly. “I’ll lead the way.”

  The speaker, the big man, strode out boldly down the hall. The others followed. They came to a cross corridor, where the green figure had turned, and stopped. Someone shone a light down the other hallway. Two open doors showed in its beam. Beyond the doors the hallway ended in a blank wall.

  They shut off the lights and waited. In a moment the green, ghostly figure glided out of one of the open doors, down the hall, hugging the wall, and stopped at the blank wall where the hall ended. Then, very slowly, it faded out.

  As if, Bob said later, it had oozed right through the wall.

  And there were no footprints in the dust!

  Nor, when the police came later after the men had called them, could Chief Reynolds or any of his men find a thing. There was no trace of a human being in the house, no one hurt, no animal. Nothing.

  Being a policeman, Chief Reynolds did not like to believe that eight reliable witnesses had seen a ghost, or heard a ghost scream. But he had no choice.

  Because later that night a watchman reported that he had seen a greenish, ghostly figure lurking near the rear entrance of a big warehouse. It had faded away when he approached.

  Still later, a woman phoned to the police in a panic, saying a moaning noise had awakened her and she had seen a greenish figure standing out on her patio. It had vanished when she turned the light on. Two truckers at an all-night restaurant said they saw a ghostly figure beside their truck.

  But finally, Chief Reynolds had a call from two radio patrol car officers who said they had seen a figure in Rocky Beach’s Green Hills Cemetery. Reynolds hurried down there and stepped inside the big iron gate of the cemetery. Standing against a tall white monument was a green, ghostly figure that, as he approached it, sank into the ground and was gone.

  The Chief flashed his light on the monument.

  It was the monument to the unfortunate Mathias Green, who had fallen down his stairs and broken his neck fifty years before in the great, old mansion.

  Chapter 2

  Summons for Bob and Pete

  “AAAhhhhhhh— eeeeeeee! ” The ghostly scream sounded again. But this time it did not bother Bob and Pete. It was coming from the tape recorder.