"Say!" enthused Todd. "Now, there's a great idea, Sparks! I think I'll work on that!"
I looked at him and groaned.
"You invent an anti-gravitational shield? What are you going to use for brains? Buttons? I've never known but one man in my life with the genius to pull that miracle—and he's dead. Lanse Biggs. I hope that wherever he is he can't hear you. He'll be rolling over in his grave so fast they'll call him 'Revolving Biggs.' Either that, or he'll come back and haunt you for daring to—"
And then it happened. Todd, who had been listening to me petulantly, suddenly stiffened. His jaw dropped ... his eyes popped out like marbles on stalks ... and his hair climbed two full, quivering inches off his scalp.
"S-s-sparks!" he wailed. "D-d-don't say that! Behind you!"
Then he keeled over in a dead faint. I turned. My heart took a running leap for my lips, and I think I screamed. Because I was staring at a thin, wavering nebulosity—a form gray and ghastly—a transparent simulacrum of—
Lancelot Biggs!
What happened next, I wouldn't rightly know. All I know is that for the first time I realized how a deep-rooted tree must feel when a pup comes sniffing at it with malice in his eyes. My brain said, "Get going, babies! Double-quick!" But my pedal extremities were as nerveless as a batch of yesterday's dough.
But there was nothing wrong with my senses. On the contrary: they were as sharp as a creditor's letter. And for the first time in my life I realized that the old stories you hear about ghosts are on the up-and-up. For this shimmering wraith of Biggs carried along with it all the visual, audible and olfactory accoutrements with which the ghosts of lore are usually endowed.