The Black Heart Crypt

by Chris Grabenstein

  “Maybe. A little. Kind of.”

  “I’m just trying to make sure Zack is safe. Halloween isn’t easy for a guy who sees ghosts, trust me.”

  “Look, I’m sure if Zack sees anything paranormal, he’ll tell us.”

  “I hope so. Maybe he should wear a disguise so the wandering spirits don’t wreak revenge on him.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know. They’re dead. They’re not thinking straight.”

  Judy heard leaves crunching.

  “What’s that?” George swung his flashlight toward the forest.

  And practically blinded his son.

  “Hey, Dad. Hey, Mom.” Zack had to shield his eyes with his forearm. Zipper stood at his side, merrily wagging his tail.

  “Are you two okay?” his father asked.

  “Yeah. Zipper went chasing after a devil dog.”

  “A what?” said Judy.

  “A big black dog with glowing red eyeballs. He chased it all the way up to the Haddam Hill Cemetery.”

  “Ah,” said his father. “A Black Shuck! They guard graveyards. I read about those.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” asked Judy.

  “Yeah. The dog-beast vanished.”

  His father nodded knowingly. “They’ll do that.”

  “But,” said Zack, “we might want to keep an eye out for Henry H. Heckman.”

  “The baker on Main Street?” said George, who had grown up in North Chester and knew everybody in town.

  “Yeah. He just died. The gravedigger figures he’ll be up and walking around on Monday night, seeing how it’s Halloween and all.” Zack yawned. “I’m pooped. Think I’ll head up to bed.”

  “You still want to go pumpkin picking tomorrow?” his father asked, his brow wrinkled with concern.

  “Yeah. And Malik and Azalea are really looking forward to it, too.”

  “Great,” said Judy, smiling warmly. “Good night, hon. Don’t forget to brush your teeth.”

  “I won’t. Come on, Zip.”

  The two of them headed into the house.

  “Okay,” said George, “that does it. We’re going to need reinforcements. I’m texting Aunt Ginny.”

  Judy, who had only married George five months earlier, was still a little foggy about his family. “Which one is she?”

  “Virginia. The youngest of my father’s three sisters. She helped me when I was Zack’s age and could see ghosts.”

  “Really? How?”

  “She made them go away.”

  Near midnight, a young woman, maybe twenty-four, scaled the cemetery fence and approached the Ickleby crypt.

  “Hey,” said the youngest soul trapped inside, the one the others called Eddie Boy, the Ickleby who had been gunned down by the Massachusetts State Police during a convenience store robbery gone bad in 1979. “Who’s this chick? She is loo-king goooood!”

  The girl had ringlets of wild blond hair curlicuing out from under the peak of her hooded cape. Her cloak was made of black velvet and lined with deep-purple silk. A pentagram pendant, a five-pointed sterling silver star, dangled on a chain around her neck.

  “She,” said Barnabas, his voice a sinister squawk, “is one who can be of much use to us. Her name …”

  He strained to suck thoughts from the young woman’s mind. Having been a ghost for over 260 years, Barnabas Ickleby had honed telepathic powers few other spirits possessed.

  “… is Jenny Ballard, and, children, it seems she fancies herself a witch. She longs to fill her mind with evil thoughts. Miss Ballard should prove quite receptive to all my subconscious suggestions!”

  The other twelve souls sniggered at the remark.

  “I shall infest her mind with wickedness!” Barnabas gloated. “And then—I shall send her forth to seek out our new earthen vessel!”

  Fast asleep in his bedroom, Zack sure hoped he was dreaming.

  If not, all sorts of dead people were dropping by to wish him a happy Halloween.

  First to arrive was Rodman Willoughby, the dead chauffeur for the Spratlings, the family that used to be the richest one in all of North Chester because they owned the famous Spratling Clockworks Factory.

  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 Zac
k 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.

  Georgie even had a son of his own, a boy named Zachary, whom the aunts had not spent much time with, because his mother, a rather dour woman named Susan, had made it frightfully clear that her husband’s aged aunts were not welcome in the young family’s swanky New York City apartment.

  The three sisters had, however, returned to New York after Susan’s untimely death and, more happily, eighteen months later, for George’s second wedding, when he married the lovely and talented Judy Magruder.

  Ginny pulled a sleek cell phone out of her purse, swiped her fingers a
cross its glass face, turning it on, and set it down on the table.

  A faint smile creased Hannah’s sour lips. “So, tell us, Virginia: How is Georgie?”

  “How’s Zack?” asked Sophie, her eyes sparkling like sugared plums. “And Judy? I liked Judy.”

  “They’re all fine,” said Ginny.

  Suddenly, her cell phone started vibrating.

  “Oh, my!” gasped Sophie, fanning her hands, making her upper arms jiggle. “It’s alive!”

  “No, Sophie,” said Ginny. “That simply means I have received a new text message.”

  She glanced at the screen.

  “Oh, dear. I should have turned my phone on earlier! We must fly home to North Chester. Immediately. Georgie needs us!”

  “Fly home, Virginia?” said Hannah. “Whatever is the problem?”

  “It’s Zachary,” said Ginny, quickly looking around to make certain no one was eavesdropping. “Georgie’s son has—the gift.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Hannah.

  “Oh me, oh my,” added Sophie, nervously nibbling the sprinkled edge of her second Pop-Tart.

  Ginny was about to give them more details when the boorish nephew returned with a sloppy bowl of mush, which he slammed down so hard in front of his wheelchair-bound uncle, chunky gray clumps leapt up and splattered his bathrobe.

  “Hah! Look at you, sitting in your high chair, food all over your face. No wonder you need diapers! You’re a big baby!”

  Ginny had seen enough.

  She placed her banana peel on the table and plucked the plastic straw out of her water glass.

  “Sisters?” she said, angrily arching an eyebrow.

  “We three agree,” said Hannah and Sophie.

  Ginny held up the straw as if it were a conductor’s baton she meant to fling at the oafish young man.

  But she didn’t.

  Because at that very instant, the baboon seemed to slip on something very slick, very wet.

  Why, it was almost as if he had stepped on a banana peel.

  He lost his footing and, arms whirling, fell into the swimming pool.

  Ginny smiled.

  So did her two sisters.