The Black Heart Crypt (12 page)

“Thanks, Mrs. Jennings. I like your pumpkins.” The boy gestured at the six flickering jack-o’-lanterns lined up along the porch railing.

As soon as the kids were gone and the door closed, the phone began to ring again.

“Hello?” Judy answered.

There was silence on the other end.

“Hello?”

More silence.

“George? Is that you?”

“No,” replied a weak voice. “This is … Francine.”

“Excuse me?”

“This is Zack’s aunt. Francine. I’m his mother’s sister.”

“Oh, right. Francine. Hi.”

Judy had never met the woman, but from what she had gathered from George, Francine Potter-Kressin-Venable-Greene was a very wealthy, extremely crabby, exceptionally angry middle-aged woman.

From Zack, Judy had learned that “Aunt Francine hates me even more than my mother did. She blames me for killing her sister.”

All in all, Aunt Francine didn’t come very highly recommended.

“Is there a number where I can call you back?” asked Judy. “We’re kind of busy here tonight.…”

“Are you Judy? The woman who took my …”

There was a long pause. “… my sister’s place?”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind. I’m on my way.”

“On your way where?”

“Tell Zack it’s Halloween, so I’m coming to take care of him.”

Norman Ickes’s
father had fired him.

“It was an earthquake,” Norman had tried to explain. “A kid panicked and knocked over some display racks. We had to evacuate the store.”

His father wouldn’t listen.

Now Norman and the strange girl, Jenny Ballard, were sitting in her car at the dead end of the dirt road that snaked up the back of Haddam Hill.

They parked in a moonlit patch of asphalt and stared at the eerie cemetery.

After several minutes with no sound but the creak of skeletal trees dancing with the wind and an angry cat’s moaning at the moon, Norman finally spoke: “My father probably wishes I had never been born.”

Jenny cuddled closer. “I’m very glad you were, Norman. You are the heir to an awesome line of amazing men.”

“What?”

“You, Norman, are an Ickleby!”

“I am?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s an Ickleby?”

“Your real name.”

“Ickleby Ickes?”

“No, silly. Norman Ickleby.”

“Says who?”

“The voice.”

“The voice?”

“It speaks to me. In here.” She tapped the side of her head. “It told me to find you, to bring you here. It told me to bring this!”

She held up a very sharp hunting knife.

“Did you steal that from my dad’s store?”

She nodded.

Norman sighed. “It was in a
locked
display case!”

“I unlocked it. While your father was firing you.”

“Great. You stole a very expensive hunting knife. How stupid are you? My dad’s going to know it’s missing.”

“So?”

“He’ll blame me for that, too!”

“Who cares? You were meant for greater things than hawking hardware.”

“Oh, really? Like what? Polishing Steve Snertz’s shaved head?”

Jenny pulled up on her door handle. “Come, Norman.”

“What? Where are we going?”

“To fulfill your destiny!”

The ghosts
of Barnabas Ickleby’s eleven descendants gathered around him outside the family crypt.

An oily black raven sat perched on the peak of the mausoleum’s gabled roof.

“They sent Eddie Boy into oblivion,” reported Barnabas.

The others hissed and moaned.

“Who was it?” asked Little Paulie Ickleby, the stubby ghost of a bank-robbing thug who’d died in 1959. “Who bumped off my boy?”

“The Jennings family, of course,” said Barnabas. “The boy and one of the hags who imprisoned us here.”

“You sure?”

“My spy saw it all.” Barnabas nodded toward the black bird roosting on the roof. “They saged him first. Then the woman spoke the words.”

Little Paulie twitched, cracked his knuckles, and smoothed out his jelly roll hairdo. Eddie Boy had been one
of Paulie’s two sons. The other one hadn’t taken up the family business: crime. Instead, Paulie’s second son, Herman, had become a coward—living the straight life, peddling paintbrushes, toilet seats, and duct tape in a two-bit small town.

“Send me out next,” said Paulie.

“Why?”

“I’ll kill the Jennings kid. Give ’em the ol’ eye-for-an-eye. They hustle my boy off into the great beyond, I send theirs to an early grave.”

“Perhaps we should wait until we have a body to do our bidding,” suggested Barnabas.

“No way. Tonight’s Halloween. We killed that old witch’s cat on Halloween, remember? Up in Great Barrington. Right before they shanghaied us down here to this Nowheresville.”

“True,” said Barnabas.

“Hey, we may be dead, but one night a year, we’re also deadly—just so long as our souls ain’t sealed up in that tomb no more. Come on. The clock’s ticking here. Where do I find this Jennings punk?”

The raven swooped off the roof.

Barnabas pointed toward its inky silhouette flitting across the sky.

“Follow our winged friend,” said Barnabas. “He shall lead you to the child.”

Zack and
his friends decided to skip the costume competition.

Their poster-board “Bs” were torn during the hardware store scuffle, and now, instead of killer bees, they looked like a squashed “D,” a “P,” and a “3.”

“We probably wouldn’t have won anyway,” said Azalea. “We’re looking slightly B-draggled.”

Zack and Malik laughed. They were riding in the backseat with Aunt Ginny. Zipper was sound asleep in Zack’s lap.

“Good thing you wore your gym clothes,” said Malik, indicating Aunt Ginny’s purple tracksuit. “So how come you know so much about ghosts and how to vanquish them?”

“Oh, I just listened to a lot of folklore as a child. Studied the powers of herbs. We had an older cousin up in Great Barrington who knew everything about … herbology.” She reached over to pat Zack on the knee. “You did good in there, champ.”

“Thanks.”

“Azalea and I might have been seriously injured,” said Malik, “if Zack hadn’t pushed us out of the way like that.”

Zack shrugged. “I could see what the guy was doing; you two couldn’t.”

“Indeed,” said Malik. “You have an extremely rare and useful talent, Zack.”

“I guess.”

Azalea turned around to ask Aunt Ginny a question. “So how come this ghost could actually do junk like knock over shelves full of paint cans? Zack told us ghosts can’t do stuff like that.”

“Zack is correct,” said Aunt Ginny. “Ghosts are disembodied spirits, so on most days, they cannot do much in our realm. Tonight, however, is Halloween.”

“Ooh,” said Malik eagerly, “do they get special superpowers every October thirty-first?”

“Something like that,” said Aunt Ginny. “On Halloween, the border between this world and the next is so thin, spirits can more easily reach through the veil that separates the living from the dead.”

“They can reach out and touch someone,” said Azalea. “Whack ’em, too.”

“Well, it’s eight o’clock,” said Zack’s dad. “They only have four more hours to reach out and wreak havoc.”

“Actually,” said Aunt Ginny, “they have until sunup tomorrow.”

“The sun rises at 7:22 a.m. tomorrow,” said Azalea.

“It was on the front page of the newspaper this morning.”

“Great,” said Zack. “They’ve got eleven and a half hours to knock junk over.”

“Or try to knock people off,” added Azalea.

The van
was headed west on State Route 13.

Fortunately, Zack knew they would exit before reaching the Haddam Hill Cemetery. He did not want to see who else had risen to pull a Halloween all-nighter in the boneyard.

He turned to Aunt Ginny.

“Last Friday,” he whispered, “I hid behind the Ickleby crypt up in the graveyard.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. You think maybe they’re mad at me for doing that? Is that why Eddie Boy came after me tonight?”

“Doubtful, dear.”

They passed the tall wrought-iron gates at the entrance to Spratling Manor, a deserted stone castle built in 1882. No one had lived on the mansion grounds since Gerda Spratling and the last resident, Mr. Rodman Willoughby, her longtime chauffeur, passed away.

And there he was. Standing in front of the vine-shrouded
gates. A ghost in a black suit and driver’s cap. He waved cheerily at Zack as the van passed by. Zack gave him a tentative finger wave back.

“You know, Zack,” Aunt Ginny whispered, “there is a way to be rid of your gift, if that’s what you want.”

“Really?” Zack whispered back.

Azalea had cranked up the radio when it started playing the theme from the movie
Ghostbusters
—enough disco noise for Zack and Aunt Ginny to chat without anyone hearing what they were chatting about.

Now Zack saw Davy Wilcox walking along the edge of the road with a fishing pole slung over his shoulder.

“Howdy, pardner!” Davy shouted with a wave.

Only Zack and Aunt Ginny heard him.

“Friend of yours?” asked Ginny.

“Yeah,” said Zack, feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. “That’s Davy. I met him last summer. In the crossroads.”

“Well, all you have to do, if you never want to see him or an Ickleby again, is drink a special drink.”

“You mean like a magical herb potion?”

“Actually, it’s more like a chocolate milk shake.”

“Like my dad drank?”

Aunt Ginny nodded.

“And then the ghosts would all go away?”

“Well, they’d still be there. You just wouldn’t be able to see them.”

Zack turned back to the window and thought about what Aunt Ginny was proposing.

Ever since he had first started seeing ghosts (and not just imagining that the ghost of his dead mother was lurking in the shadows to make him pay for making her life so miserable), Zack had wished his special talent came with a gift receipt so he could take it back and exchange it for something better, like Azalea’s photographic memory.

But tonight his ghost-seeing ability had helped him save Malik and Azalea from getting creamed under a heap of falling hardware or tumbling paint cans. It helped him rescue Zipper.