“Although our mutual friend Henry Jacobs, who owns this tower, does not know me at all, and I have never appeared to him, I have had a great liking for him, and have much appreciated his unconscious hospitality. All unbeknown I have accompanied him on many of his business trips to various places, particularly to the Island of Manhattan that I happen to know a great deal about, as will appear later, and am quite familiar with his affairs. While he is perfectly able to take care of himself, I feel that under the circumstances I have a sort of spiritual responsibility, so to speak.
“I confess that, although I am a ghost, and loneliness might naturally be considered my specialty, I am at times a little too lonely and it would be nice and sociable to have an old ghostly friend with me. We might think it best for Kinisi to go out after somebody we didn’t like sometime, and you may depend upon it, that if he starts, he will not come back alone. There will be other shades with him. He is one of the best terrifiers I ever knew. I have known him to frighten people so that they have jumped off the tops of high buildings, and he has caused many sudden exits from the material world.
LOOKING NORTH FROM THE TOWER TOP IN JACOBIA
“I have been sensible of this moral obligation and this is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk with you tonight. I am sorry that our friend Jacobs has never happened to be up here at an opportune time. I always make it a point to be somewhere up stairs in the tower during the night before Christmas. Perhaps you might mention this to him and I may have the pleasure of talking with him next year, unless for some reason I should be called away.”
“But what happened after the victory over the Turks?” I asked, seeing that my pale friend was somewhat inclined to wander in his narrative.
“Oh yes, excuse me. After our triumph over Ali Bey we had no serious trouble with the Turks for some time, but one night when I was asleep in my tower a bloody gang of these dogs came and I was hacked into pieces with a dozen scimitars. It is the custom of spirits to wear a semblance of their earthly apparel at the time of passing into the immaterial sphere—merely as a recognition of absurd human conventions—and that accounts for what appears to you to be a night cap on my head. The light, wavy lines leading away from my face suggest the gown I was wearing when my mortal remains were tossed into the depression back of my tower. All this happened on Christmas eve. It is a rule with many of the spiritual fraternity to visualize but once a year. I usually select this anniversary for such few appearances as I care to make, unless the occasion is something very special.
“I haunted Ali Bey for a long time after that little episode at the tower, and with the help of Kinisi, who subsequently joined me, we put him in the way of meeting a very unpleasant end. We scared him out of bed and into a big mosque for religious protection one night. Women were not allowed in mosques, as Mohammedan females were supposed to have no souls, but we knew that one of the members of Ali Bey’s harem was in there, who had fled in disguise the day before, and she got him with a knife that she had carried for use in case she was caught. I often talked with him after he became a shade, and eventually we became quite good friends. He wanted to go back after the girl but Kinisi and I persuaded him to let her alone.
“After we left Ali Bey I returned and haunted my tower for some years, but there was so much going on there I didn’t approve of, that I got tired of it after a while and went over into Dalmatia, and from there to the Adriatic. I established myself on board a ship that lay in the harbor and haunted the forecastle for over two years. I moved to the Captain’s cabin after that, and was on the upper deck at night much of the time. The captain was a very agreeable sort of a fellow although he was a bloody pirate, but I never liked the first mate. I chased him and four offensive members of the crew into the sea one night in a gale off the coast of Barbary. I visualized to them separately, and as they were very superstitious they went easily.
“We roved over the Mediterranean and captured considerable booty. We were making new shades constantly. After the victims were thrown overboard, or had walked the plank, they would generally ooze back in the bilge water seepage in the hold so as to enable them to haunt the crew, which they did with a vengeance. They were mostly Spaniards and as a rule I found them quite pleasant.