The Black Heart Crypt (3 page)

Seeing Mr. Willoughby sitting on the edge of the bed in his black suit and driver’s cap wasn’t too big of a shock because Zack had already seen Mr. Willoughby’s ghost at school, a couple of days after the old guy had died.

“On Halloween,” Mr. Willoughby whispered mysteriously, “I must hurry home to take care of the Cadillac. It needs its oil changed.”

That was why Zack figured this had to be a dream. In his experience, dead people never had to whisper, because
nobody could hear them except the people they wanted to hear them, anyway. Whispering was a total waste of time for ghosts.

Before Zack could say, “Thanks for popping by,” Mr. Willoughby turned into Davy Wilcox—a ten-year-old farm boy in denim overalls with a slingshot sticking out of his back pocket. Weird junk like old men turning into ten-year-old boys happened only in dreams. Or movies.

“Howdy, pardner,” said dream Davy.

Zack tried to say, “Hey,” back, but since he was asleep, he couldn’t make his mouth move.

“Best be prepared come Halloween,” said Davy. “Whole mess of ghosts will come a’swarmin’ up out of the ground. It’s the dadgum spooks’ and spirits’ big night out on the town.”

Davy disappeared and became the ghost of Kathleen Williams, a dead nightclub singer and star of Broadway musicals back in the 1950s. Dressed in a black-and-orange sequined gown, she sat with her legs crossed on the edge of the bed and held a microphone in her hand. The black widow spider ring on her finger looked like it was alive!

“Hiya, Zack!” She turned to an unseen accompanist: “Hit it, Joe!”

Now Zack heard heavy pipe organ music as Kathleen Williams started belting out a little-known verse from “The Hearse Song”:

“Your stomach turns a slimy green

And pus pours out like whipping cream
.

You spread it on a slice of bread

And that’s what you eat when you are dead.”

Zack was about to laugh at the gross lyrics, but in a flash, his dream became a nightmare.

Kathleen Williams
turned into Susan Potter Jennings.

Zack’s dead mother.

The way she’d looked right before she died. Shrunken and shriveled. Tufts of hair sprouting out on top of her vein-riddled head. A surgeon’s scar rippling down her throat until it disappeared beneath the collar of her hospital gown, the gown she had died in after wasting away to little more than ninety pounds, her whole body wracked by the poisonous drugs meant to kill her cancer.

You did this to me
, Zack remembered his mother wheezing at him as she was dying.
You ruined my life
.

In his head, Zack now knew that what his mother had said wasn’t true. But sometimes, when it was dark and he was alone, Zack wondered if he had somehow magically killed Susan Potter Jennings so he could get a do-over, a happy new life with a mom who actually loved him. His stepmother. Judy Magruder Jennings.

Now Zack could hear wet mucus rumbling around
inside his dead mother’s leathery lungs. Her eyes went wide, frantically searching the room.

“Zachary?”

She moaned from the foot of the bed.

“Zachary?”

She stretched out her skeletal arms as if to hug him, something Zack couldn’t remember her ever doing while she was alive.

“Where are you?”

Zack tried to shut his eyes even tighter, but he couldn’t make the ghostly apparition disappear, because his dead mother wasn’t there as a ghost—she was trapped inside a dream.

“Zachary!”

Uh-oh
.

Zack’s dead mother only called him Zachary when she was totally mad at him—like when he embarrassed her in front of her rich girlfriends or made up a stupid story or played with his action figures, which she called his dollies.

Okay, she had pretty much called Zack Zachary every minute of every day for the first nine years of his life.

But this “Zachary” sounded, well, different. Not angry but scared. Terrified.

Even though Zack could see her, could feel the weight of her emaciated body on his bed,
she
couldn’t see
him
. She kept clawing at the air with hands as gnarled as eagle talons.

“I will come,” she said, her voice weak and thin. “I will come for you, Zachary!”

No thanks
, Zack wanted to say.
Stay in hell or purgatory or limbo or wherever they’ve got your soul locked up these days
.

But he couldn’t say anything.

It was still a dream. The worst dream he’d ever had in his whole life.

“Wake up, Zack,” said a new voice. A man’s. His tone firm and gentle. “Wake up, champ.”

Zack pried open an eye.

The only creature on the edge of his bed was Zipper, who was snoring and kicking his hind legs probably because his dreams involved chasing squirrels.

Zack sat up. Felt his dog’s very real, very warm fur. Okay. Zack was definitely awake.

“We’ll get through this thing,” said the unseen man. “We’ll do it together.”

Zack looked toward his homework desk and saw an athletic man with a shock of white hair. The man was wearing a familiar sheriff’s uniform.

“You better go back to sleep, champ. Trust me—you’ll need your strength when my sisters show up.”

“Grandpa Jim?”

The old man winked.

Then he disappeared.

Zack’s grandpa Jim had died three years earlier, just before Zack’s real mother passed away.

Grandpa Jim wasn’t part of the dream.

Grandpa Jim was a ghost.

The young
woman in the hooded cape stood transfixed, staring up at the name engraved above the entrance to the crypt.

ICKLEBY

Jenny Ballard was hanging out in yet another graveyard at midnight because she had decided she was tired of being a waitress at the Bob’s Big Boy out near the interstate.

She wanted to become a witch.

And not the airy-fairy, goody-goody kind that floated around in bubbles. She wanted to be a bad witch, the old-fashioned wicked kind from fairy tales. She wanted to cast evil spells on all the popular girls who had made fun of her when she wore her retainer to middle school. She wanted to turn all the bad tippers at Bob’s Big Boy into toads.

She fluffed out her corkscrewy hair and moved one step closer to the massive mausoleum.

She felt a deep chill. Goose pimples popped up on the soft undersides of her pale arms.

“Jenny!”

There was no one else in the graveyard, yet she clearly heard a man with a scratchy voice whispering her name.

“Jenny!”

Her breathing came faster.

“He is one of us,”
the ominous voice continued.
“Bring him here on Halloween. Reap your reward!”

Jenny had no idea who or what the voice was talking about or why she was hearing it.

“Bring him unto us, Jenny, on All Hallows’ Eve.”

Okay. The invisible dude with the monster-movie voice had to be some kind of ancient, disembodied soul. Who else would call Halloween by its old-school name: All Hallows’ Eve?

“I will bring him,” Jenny mumbled.

She decided to ask for more information.

“Who is it that thou seek?”

But the bird voice was gone.

In its place, all she heard was the thick fluttering of wings.

She looked up. An inky black raven sat perched atop the head of an angel statue at the peak of the tomb’s steeply slanted roof. The bird glared down at Jenny with glowing black eyes.

“Haw!” it croaked.

Jenny bent into a slight bow. “Yes. Of course.”

The bird was right. It was time for her leave.

Time for her to go find the man the evil voice in her head said it needed so desperately.

Virginia “Ginny”
Jennings and her two sisters, Hannah and Sophie, were eating breakfast poolside at their condo complex in Boca Raton, Florida.

Ginny had brought along Pyewacket, her white-and-gray cat, who sat purring contentedly in her lap.

Breakfast for Ginny was a banana and an English muffin. Her sister Hannah was mixing fiber powder in a glass of prune juice, while Sophie had a gooey cheese Danish, a package of little powdered doughnuts, and a foil-wrapped pair of Pop-Tarts.

It was early morning, but the sun, blindingly bright and glimmering off the pool, had already baked the southern tip of Florida to a muggy eighty-six degrees, which was why Ginny always wore flowery Hawaiian muumuus—loose-fitting dresses with ample armpit room for breezy ventilation.

Hannah, on the other hand, wore prim blouses (with the collar buttoned) under cardigan sweaters, while Sophie, who was rather plump, came down to the pool each
morning decked out in polka dots, which made her look like a bouquet of balloons.

A young man shoved a wheelchair up to the table next to the sisters’.

“Wait here while I get your food, Uncle Gus,” he said to the shrunken man sitting in it, who was wearing a flimsy flannel bathrobe.

“Eh?” The old man brought a trembling hand up to his hairy ear.

“I SAID WAIT HERE!” Then he added under his breath, “You deaf old fart.”

Ginny gasped.

The horrible nephew whirled around to face her.

“Mind your business, you old hag.”

He stomped away.

Pyewacket the cat hissed at his back—three times.

“Sisters,” said Ginny, “I believe the brinded cat hath hissed thrice.”

“Virginia?” said Hannah, quite sternly. “We are retired. How many times must I remind you?”

“But …”

“Re-tired. To this, we three did agree, did we not?”

“Oh, yes,” said Sophie, a blizzard of white powdered doughnut sugar showering down on her ample bosom. “We did. I remember. We agreed.”

Ginny sighed.

“Of course, Hannah,” she said. “You are correct. We are retired.”

* * *

Birds chirped. Uncle Gus wheezed in the wheelchair. Hannah snapped open her very organized plastic pillbox and prepared to pop her daily regimen of anti-everything medication. Sophie nibbled a chocolate-frosted Pop-Tart. Ginny peeled open her banana and sipped ice water through a straw.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” said Ginny. “You’ll never guess who I exchanged text messages with last week.”

“Text messages?” said Hannah. “What on earth are those?”

“Why, I suppose you could say they are postcards you can read on your telephone.”

“How?” inquired Hannah, tossing her head back to swallow her pills the way a pelican swallows a fish.

“You read the message on the screen.”

“I don’t really like telephones,” said Sophie with a quivering giggle. “They’re a bit like children, aren’t they? Always making noise, always insisting that you answer them
immediately
.”

The comment saddened Ginny. She and her sisters had never married, never had children. All three were what were once called spinsters.

That was why all three had always doted on their only nephew, Georgie, the son of their brother, James. Of course, Georgie was all grown up now, a very important lawyer in New York City, living in North Chester, Connecticut, the Jennings family’s ancestral home.