“You will never, never, never get away,” whispered a mad old cassette player in a cracked voice. “No, never! You will stay here like all the rest of us and rust and crack and turn to dust. And never get away.”
“We will, though,” said the toaster. “Just you wait and see.”
But how? That was the problem the toaster had to solve without further delay.
Now the surest way to solve any problem is to think about it, and that’s just what the toaster did. It thought with the kind of total, all-out effort you have to give to get a bolt off that’s rusted onto a screw. At first the bolt won’t budge, not the least bit, and the wrench may slip loose, and you begin to doubt that any amount of trying is going to accomplish your purpose. But you keep at it, and use a dab of solvent if there’s any on hand, and eventually it starts to give. You’re not even sure but you think so. And then, what do you know, it’s off! You’ve done it! That’s the way the toaster thought, and at last, because he thought so hard, he thought of a way they could escape from the pirate and rescue the radio at the same time.
“Now here’s my plan,” said the toaster to the other appliances, which had gathered round him in the darkest corner of the dump. “We’ll frighten him, and that will make him run away, and when he’s gone we’ll go into his shack—”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that,” said the blanket with a shiver of dread.
“We’ll go into his shack,” the toaster insisted calmly, “and get the radio and put it inside the baby buggy and get in ourselves, all except the Hoover, of course, which will high-tail it out of this place just as fast as it can.”
“But won’t the gate be locked?” the lamp wanted to know. “It is now.”
“No, because the pirate will have to unlock it to get out himself, and he’ll be too frightened to remember to lock it behind him.”
“It’s a very good plan,” said the Hoover, “but what I don’t understand is—how are we going to frighten him?”
“Well, what are people afraid of the most?”
“Getting run over by a steam roller?” the Hoover guessed.
“No. Scarier than that.”
“Moths?” suggested the blanket.
“No.”
“The dark,” declared the lamp with conviction.
“That’s close,” said the toaster. “They’re afraid of ghosts.”
“What are ghosts?” demanded the Hoover.
“Ghosts are people who are dead, only they’re also sort of alive.”
“Don’t be silly,” said the lamp. “Either they are dead or they aren’t.”
“Yes,” the blanket agreed. “It’s as simple as ON and OFF. If you’re ON, you can’t be OFF, and vice versa.”
“I know that, and you know that, but people don’t seem to. People say they know that ghosts don’t exist but they’re afraid of them anyhow.”
“No one can be afraid of something that doesn’t exist,” the Hoover huffed.
“Don’t ask me how they do it,” said the toaster. “It’s what they call a paradox. The point is this—people are afraid of ghosts. And so we’re going to pretend to be one.”
“How?” asked the Hoover skeptically.
“Let me show you. Stoop down. Lower. Wrap your cord around my cord. Now—lift me up…”
After an hour’s practice of pretending to be a ghost, they decided they were ready. Carefully, so that the other appliances wouldn’t fall off, the old Hoover trundled toward the window of the shack. The toaster, where it was balanced atop the handle of the vacuum, was just able to see inside. There on a table between a stack of unwashed dishes and the pirate’s ring of keys was the poor captive radio, and there, in dirty striped pajamas, getting ready to go to bed, was the pirate.
“Ready?” the toaster whispered.
The blanket, which was draped over the vacuum in a roughly ghostlike shape with a kind of hood at the top through which the toaster was able to peer out, adjusted its folds one last time. “Ready,” the blanket replied.
“Ready?” the toaster asked again.
For just a moment the lamp, where it was hidden halfway down the handle of the Hoover, turned itself on and then, quickly off. The bulb it had taken from the socket in the ceiling of the pickup truck had only half the wattage it was used to, and so its beam of light was noticeably dimmer—just enough to make the blanket give off the faintest yellowish glow.
“Then let’s start haunting,” said the toaster.
That was the signal the Hoover had been waiting for.
“Whoo!” groaned the Hoover in its deepest, most quivery voice. “Whoo!”
The pirate looked up with alarm. “Who’s there?” he demanded.
“Whoo—oo!” the Hoover continued.
“Whoever you are, you’d better go away.”
“Whoo—oo—oo!”
Cautiously the pirate approached the window from which the groaning seemed to issue.
Upon receiving a secret electric signal from the toaster, the vacuum crept quietly alongside the shack to where they would be out of sight from the window.
“Whoo…” breathed the Hoover in the barest of whispers. “Whoo… Whoo—oo…”
“Who’s out there?” the pirate demanded, pressing his nose against the pane of glass and peering into the outer darkness. “You’d better answer me. Do you hear?”
In answer the Hoover made a strangling, gurgling, gaspy sound that sounded frightening even if you knew it was only the Hoover doing it. By now the pirate, who didn’t have any idea what this mysterious groaning might be, had got into a considerable state of nerves. When you live all alone in the City Dump you don’t expect to hear strange noises just outside your window in the middle of the night. And if you were also a bit superstitious, as pirates tend to be…
“All right then—if you won’t say who you are, I’m going to come out there and find out!” He lingered yet a while before the window, but at last, when no reply was forthcoming, the pirate pulled on his pants and then got into his boots. “I’m warning you!” he called out, though not in a tone that could be called threatening.
Still there was no reply. The pirate took up his key ring from where it lay on the table beside the radio. He went to the door.
He opened it.
“Now!” said the toaster, signaling secretly to the blanket along its electric cord.
“I can’t,” said the blanket, all atremble. “I’m too afraid.”
“You must!”
“I mustn’t: it’s against the rules.”
“We discussed all that before, and you promised. Now hurry—before he gets here!”
With a shudder of trepidation the blanket did as it was bidden. There was a rent in its side where it had been pierced by a branch on the night it was blown up into the tree. The lamp was hiding just behind this rent. As the pirate appeared around the corner of the shack, the blanket twitched the torn fabric aside.
The pirate stopped short in his tracks when he saw the shrouded figure before him.
“Whoo—oo!” groaned the Hoover one last time.
At this cue the lamp turned itself on. Its beam slanted up through the hole in the blanket right into the pirate’s face.
When the lamp lit up, the pirate stared at the figure before him with the utmost horror. What he saw that was so frightening was the same thing the daisy had seen, the same thing Harold and Marjorie had seen, as well—he saw his own features reflected in the toaster’s mottled chrome. And as he had been a very wicked person from his earliest youth, his face had taken on that special kind of ugliness that only very evil people’s faces acquire. Seeing such a face grimacing at him from this strange hooded figure, what was the pirate to suppose but that he had come upon the most dangerous kind of ghost, the kind that understands exactly who we are and knows all the wrong things we’ve done and intends to punish us for them. From such ghosts even grown-up pirates will flee in terror. Which is exactly what the pirate did.