Dead Men Scare Me Stupid by John Swartzwelder

phenomena of all kinds were
occurring everywhere - weird manifestations that made my ghosts seem corny by
comparison.
    “Like what?”
    He thought for a
moment. “Well, last week the whole city was briefly under miles of ocean.”
    “I must have been
in the can when that happened.”
    “And then the
city was hit by a bunch of comets. And there was a World War there for a
minute. And the spitball was legalized briefly, so we could all throw spitballs
again without fear of being suspended. And there was that big Titanic race in
the harbor – a race that the experts had said could never happen. And…”
    “Gee, I sure must
go to the can a lot.” A thought occurred to me. “Hey, maybe the government is
doing all this. Did you ever think of that?”
    He sneered at
this idea. “Governments don’t do anything. That’s just something people say
when they don’t know what’s going on and want to sound like they do.”
    “Well, yeah,” I
admitted, “I do say that when I don’t know what’s going on, but in this case…”
    “Get out of
here.”
    I said I wasn’t
leaving until I got some kind of clue, something to go on. This is where being
big and slow to be satisfied comes in handy. After a moment’s vain struggle to
release himself from my dull, uncomprehending grip, he said I might try The
Very Haunted House. I asked what that might be.
    “We haven’t had
time to look into it,” he said, “but we’ve been getting a lot of reports from a
neighborhood a few blocks south of here. Apparently some house is so full of
ghosts they’re spilling out into the street. The neighbors have been
complaining about it.”
    I thanked him,
and left. Finally I had a lead!
    When I got to the
neighborhood he had told me about, I wished I’d remembered to get the exact
address. All the houses on both sides of the street looked pretty rundown. They
all looked like they could be haunted. I was trying to figure out which one to
try first, when I saw a ghost suddenly appear three feet above the street, fall
to the ground, sit up, looking confused, then run off.
    I followed him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    I followed the
ghost to an old apparently abandoned Victorian home, and watched as he walked
up to the door, knocked, listened for a moment, then dissolved through the door
into the house.
    I went up the
steps and knocked on the door. I heard a faint eerie “come in”, but nobody came
to open the door. I tried the knob. The door was locked. I tried shouldering my
way in, but only succeeded in hurting my shoulder.
    I knocked again,
but all I got for my efforts were a couple of more “come ins”, a “wipe your
feet”, and another sore shoulder.
    I tried to waft
through the door like I had seen the ghost do. You never know. But all I got
out of that experiment was a chipped tooth.
    I took a walk
around the house to see if I could find an open window. At first I couldn’t
find one, but after awhile, when I was sure no one was looking, I found one. I
climbed through.
    There didn’t seem
to be anyone in the place. It was, to all appearances, just an old empty house.
The furniture was covered with layers of dust. The mirrors were streaked with
grime. Rocking chairs were rocking by themselves. The fireplace was going on
and off. Just an old empty house.
    Then I heard a
noise. A strange wailing sound. It didn’t sound human. Then I heard footsteps
on the stair. They didn’t sound human either. But when I looked at the
staircase (not human), there was nobody there! Then the wailing sound came
again. It sounded like it was coming from one of the closets, so I opened the
door. There were thousands of ghosts in there. They tumbled out and began
swarming all around me, shrieking and wailing, and laughing unearthly laughs.
    Normally I would
have been scared shitless, because, like I said before, dead things that don’t
act dead scare me. But I’d seen so much of this kind of thing lately, it just
didn’t make much of an impression on me