Julie looked up moistly from her handkerchief. "But I _haven't_ decided," she wailed. "That's just it; I can't seem to decide anything. Marc has never done anything like this before. All of a sudden he just blew up the basement and started acting strange. I just can't get over the feeling that maybe it's partly my fault somehow...." "Ridiculous!" Jewel snorted. "Of course!" May chimed. "Oh, I don't know," Julie said hopelessly. "I just have a feeling that Marc isn't to blame, that something strange is happening to him, and he can't help himself. Maybe he needs me very badly right now." "What's happened to him isn't so strange," Jewel pronounced. "It's just that lousy male chemistry at work. The devils all get that way sooner or later. Men are just a bunch of brutes, all of them. If there's anything mysterious about all this it's only how you manage to feel so damned charitable about it." Albeit unwittingly on this occasion, Jewel, in all her history of premeditated lies, had never spoken a greater untruth. There was something far more mysterious going on than just Julie's feeling of charity. It wanted only a trip to the basement to be discovered. The thing that was taking place in the subterranean regions of the house was stranger than either truth or fiction and twice as paralyzing. * * * * * The fact of the matter was that George had finally arrived on earth. Starting logically at the beginning, with the first principle of haunting as set down in the Guide, George had descended to the place of his earthly part's untimely demise. Here, according to the rules, there were certain procedures of investigation to be followed; but George was far too excited with his sudden condition of release to be bothered with those. Like a giddy school girl with her first party dress, he could hardly wait to try on his ectoplasm. Even in this, however, there were difficulties involved. Unfortunately, as George saw it, the process of ectoplasmic materialization depended largely upon the concentration of the entity involved; first he had to thoroughly picture in his mind the earthly form that he was to assume, and then, from that mental image, shape his earthly manifestation. The trouble was that George's powers of concentration had never been anything to brag about. George's observance of the human form had always been extremely sketchy at best. Faced with the problem of shaping such a form for himself, he was somewhat at a loss. Pressing his memory to the limit he could only recall that there were such things as arms, legs, head and torsos, but the exact number and arrangement of these appointments completely escaped him. Try as he would to think, nothing very clear came to mind. Finally, in desperation, he decided just to give it the old trial-and-error and make it up as he went along. He might have done better to find himself an anatomy chart.