Table Of ContentALFIE'S GUARANTEE
If you don't shudder with every twist and sudden thrust of these 16 terror tales...
if you are able to turn off your bedside lamp after closing this volume and drift
off to a deep, dreamless sleep...
if you can drink your morning coffee without thinking there just might be a
peculiarly bitter taste to it, or turn your back on your spouse or best friend
without feeling a funny itching between your shoulder blades...
then that lovable old master of menace, Alfred Hitchcock, apologizes and
personally guarantees you your full payment in horror. All you have to do is
meet him in the cemetery under the next murderer's moon....
ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS:
16 SKELETONS FROM MY CLOSET
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION by Alfred Hitchcock
GHOST STORY by Henry Kane
WHERE IS THY STING? by James Holding
THE BUTLER WHO DIDN'T DO IT by Craig Rice
CHRISTMAS GIFT by Robert Turner
THE MAN AT THE TABLE by C. B. Gilford
DEATH OF ANOTHER SALESMAN by Donald Honig
MAN WITH A HOBBY by Robert Bloch
...SAID JACK THE RIPPER by Robert Arthur
A GUN WITH A HEART by William Logan
ASSASSINATION by Dion Henderson
A LITTLE SORORICIDE by Richard Deming
THE MAN WHO GOT AWAY WITH IT by Lawrence Treat
SECRET RECIPE by Charles Mergendahl
DADDY-O by David Alexander
THE CRIME MACHINE by Jack Ritchie
HOMICIDE AND GENTLEMEN by Fletcher Flora
INTRODUCTION
Shortly after the completion of shooting on my most recent motion picture, I
remember reading about a murder which had occurred the day previous in the
city of Chicago. Now, I can hardly think of a better place for the scene of a
murder. Chicago has always seemed a perfect locale for such a crime: the cold
wind coming in off Lake Michigan, long black cars speeding along major
thoroughfares, the sudden, deadly sound of machine-gun fire. The perfect locale
indeed.
However, the murder of which I speak was horribly disappointing. A matron of
middle years, supposedly happily married for quite some time, went shopping in
the afternoon and purchased a hat. The price for this headpiece was $39.98 "on
sale." A fine buy, obviously. She brought it home proudly, and showed it to her
spouse, just returned from a most difficult and trying day at the office. He,
unfortunately, did not like the hat. Very calmly, then, the woman went to a desk
drawer in the living-room, took from it a loaded thirty-eight caliber pistol, and
shot her husband dead.
How dull. One shot and poof. How much better if she had emptied the pistol into
the man in hysterical rage - but no, a single shot.
***
It seems to me that when our century was newer the crime would not have
happened in so pedestrian a manner. I very much doubt a pistol would have been
used, since a pistol is decidedly not a woman's weapon, as so many mystery
writers have been quick to point out for so many satisfying years. Perhaps a
rolling-pin, a jungle knife brought back from the Amazon country years ago by
the original owner who had traveled with Theodore Roosevelt, a dose of poison
in the soup, a thin but strong cord across the top of the staircase...
Such was the grandeur of yesteryear, when murder was done with flair and
imagination.
Of course, we all recall the story of Miss Lizzie Borden, who took an ax and
gave her parents forty whacks.
And then there was the gentleman on December 31, 1913, who stabbed his wife
to death, dissected her body, and sent the pieces to friends and relatives with best
wishes for a most enjoyable New Year.
The press would be much enlivened by a good garroting or a woman tied and
left on a railroad track (of course, one would have to be sure the trains are still
running).
I cannot promise such excitement in the future, but I can promise you a
shudderingly good time in the pages to come.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
Detectives should not be required to apprehend ghosts. It simply takes too much
time. Moreover, though clothes may make the man, there's far more to a ghost
than his bed sheet.
GHOST STORY
BY HENRY KANE
I do not believe in ghosts. Perhaps I do not believe in ghosts because I refuse to
believe in ghosts and my mind rejects the possibility and seeks other
explanation. In the Troy affair such explanation, for me, involved death-wish,
hallucination, guilt complex, retribution, self-punishment and dual personality,
but there again I am out of my ken: I am not a psychiatrist, I am a private
detective. There are those who disagree with my conclusions, and you may be
one of those. So be it, then. All I can do is render the events just as they
occurred, beginning with that bright-white afternoon in January when my
secretary ushered Miss Sylvia Troy into my office.
"Miss Sylvia Troy," said my secretary and departed.
"I'm Peter Chambers," I said. "Won't you sit down?"
She was small, quite good-looking, very feminine, about thirty. Close-cut wavy
russet-red hair was capped about a smooth round face in which enormous dark-
brown eyes would have been beautiful except for a flaw in expression almost
impossible to put into words. There is only one word - haunted! - and that word,
of course, is susceptible to so many different interpretations. Her eyes were far
away, gone, out of her, not part of her, remote and lost. She remained standing
while I, still seated behind my desk, squirmed uneasily.
"Please sit down," I said in as cordial a tone as I could muster within the
embarrassment of trying to avoid those peculiarly-luminous, strangely-isolated,
frightened eyes.
"Thank you very much," she said and sat in the chair at the side of my desk. She
had a soft lovely voice, almost a trained voice as a professional singer's voice
may be termed trained: it was round-voweled, resonant, beautifully-pitched, very
feminine, melodious. She was wearing a red wool coat with a little black fur
collar and she was carrying a black patent-leather handbag. She opened the
handbag, extracted three hundred dollars, snapped shut the bag, and placed the
money on my desk. I looked at it, but did not touch it.
"Not enough?" she said.
"I beg your pardon?" I said.
"The way you're looking at it."
"Looking at what?" I said.
"The money. Your fee. I'm sorry, but I can't afford any more."
"I'm not looking at it in any special way, Miss Troy. I'm just looking at it. Three
hundred dollars may be enough or not enough - depending upon what you want
of me."
"I want you to lay a ghost."
"What?"
"Please, sir, Mr. Chambers," she said, "I'm deadly serious."
"A ghost -"
"A ghost who has already killed one person and threatens to kill two others."
I directed my squirming to seeking in my pockets and finding a cigarette. I lit it
and I said, "Miss Troy, the laying of ghosts is not quite my department. If this so-
called ghost of yours has killed anyone, then you've come to the wrong place.
There are constituted authorities, the police -"
"I cannot go to the police."
"Why not?"
"Because if I tell my story to the police I would be incriminating myself and my
two brothers in..." She stopped.
"In what?"
"Murder."
There was a pause. She sat, limply; and I smoked, nervously.
Then I said, "Do you intend to tell me this story?"
"I do."
"Won't that be just as incriminating -"
"No, no, not at all," she said. "I must tell you because something must be done,
because somebody - you, I hope - must help. But if you repeat what I tell you to
the police, I will simply deny it. Since there is no proof, and since I would deny
what you might repeat, nobody would be incriminated."
It was coming around to my department. People in trouble are my department.
Had there been no mention of a ghost, it would have been completely and
familiarly in my department. But it was sufficiently in my department for me to
tap out my cigarette in an ashtray, pull the money over to my side of the desk,
and say, "All right, Miss Troy, let's have it."
"It begins about a year ago. November, a year ago."
"Yes," I said.
"There are - or were - four of us in the family."
"Four in the family," I said.
"Three brothers and myself. Adam was the oldest. Adam Troy was fifty when he
died."
"And the others?"
