The Smoky Corridor

by Chris Grabenstein

  Zack leaned over Zip. Listened hard. All he heard was some distant grumbling, like a caged lion eager to escape from the zoo.

  “I think we’re safe for now,” said Zack. “We just need to find a way out of here.”

  “Well, we can’t go out the way we came in.”

  Zack shone his flashlight around. “Let’s keep moving forward. And, Malik?”

  “Yes, Zack?”

  “Thanks for figuring out the code.”

  “Well, I had a little time to kill.…”

  Now they both heard the zombie growling angrily behind them.

  But just as the pocket watches said, he didn’t come down the left-hand tunnel after them.

  97

  Kurt Snertz ran out of the janitor’s closet.

  “You there!”

  It was the new janitor, dressed like a golfer, and the blond history teacher, the one who was always busting Kurt’s chops.

  “Have you seen Zack Jennings?” the janitor asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Where is he?” asked the teacher.

  “Why?”

  “We have reason to believe,” said the janitor, “that Mr. Jennings brought his dog to school today.”

  “Yeah. He did. Is he in trouble?”

  “Big trouble,” said the teacher. “Detention hall for life!”

  “Awesome. He went in there.” Kurt pointed toward the door he’d just come through. “There’s like this other room connected to the first room and then there’s this hole in the wall that leads to a—”

  The teacher and the janitor didn’t wait to hear the rest.

  They shoved open the closet door and, from the sound of it, knocked over a bunch of boxes and plastic jugs as they made their way to the room with the dirt floor.

  Man, they must want to punish Jennings bad!

  98

  Captain Pettimore finally piloted his new body to the boiler room and the smokestack chamber, his final defense against any intruders.

  Now he saw an unknown man stoking the firebox.

  “Who in blazes are you?” he had Azalea say for him.

  The man turned around and Captain Pettimore could tell: He wasn’t a man anymore. He had the unstaring, unseeing, unfocused eyes of a soulless zombie.

  “Who turned you, boy? Who is your bokor? Your voodoo sorcerer?”

  “He’s ours, little girl!” two voices answered.

  It was the Donnelly brothers. The blustering bully, Joseph, and Seth, the puny little clairvoyant whom the ghost of John Lee Cooper had once used to communicate with his kin, that foolish math teacher Patrick J. Cooper, one of the many Coopers to come north over the years to try to claim the captain’s gold as their own.

  In short, the Donnelly boys had aided and abetted his sworn enemies! He had Azalea sneer at them. “I am Horace P. Pettimore! How’d you two worthless souls master the voodoo to raise a zombie from the dead?”

  “We didn’t have to!” said the one called Joseph. “Yours bit the poor feller. Ain’t that so, zombie?”

  The zombie stood there drooling.

  “Answer my brother,” said the small one, Seth.

  “Yes, master.”

  “Well done, Seth,” Pettimore jeered through Azalea’s lips. “You taught your zombie to speak. Bravo. You should know, then, that his fate is forever linked to the fate of the slave I call McNulty.”

  “Huh?” said the brutish boy, Joseph.

  “If anything were to happen to my zombie, why, yours would simply become a man again, because you did not trap his soul in a jar, did you?”

  “We didn’t need to!”

  That made Pettimore grin. “Perhaps. But I always found it wise to keep one’s possessions tightly sealed and hidden away. Now, if you will excuse me …”

  “Talking’s not the only thing our zombie knows how to do, pal!” boasted Joseph. “Now that your spirit is walking around inside the body of a little girl, my brother can have his zombie rip you to shreds and eat out your brain.”

  “That’s right,” said Seth. “I can!”

  Pettimore made the girl’s lips curl even higher. “I’d like to see you try.”

  Seth hesitated. He clearly lacked the bloodlust to be a ruthless slave driver.

  His brother, however, did not.

  “Sic him, Seth! Do it now!”

  “But she’s a girl.…”

  Pettimore laughed.

  Perhaps that was a mistake.

  Anger flared in the younger ghost’s eyes. “Kill her!”

  “Yes, master.”

  The zombie lurched forward.

  Pettimore had Azalea calmly show the zombie the amulet dangling off her necklace:

  It was the same symbol he used to corral his own zombie, to keep McNulty from straying where he did not want the beast to go.

  “What is that chicken-scratching?” asked Joseph.

  Pettimore had Azalea chuckle. “You two fresh fish have much to learn if you ever hope to become true voodoo masters. This is the veve of Baron Samedi, a loa of Haitian voodoo!”

  “A what?”

  “He is one of the mystères, the invisibles, the saints of the voodoo religion! Baron Samedi is the loa of the dead! It is he who ferries souls to the underworld. No zombie dare anger him or attack a human under Samedi’s protection!”

  The zombie backed away.

  “Now, boys, if you will excuse me.…”

  Captain Pettimore had the girl walk over to the boiler and open the fourth firebox door on the furnace below, the door with flames painted on its glass window because it wasn’t really a firebox at all. Pettimore had Azalea lift the latch and crawl inside. This part of the furnace was cold, an insulated cubbyhole with a bank safe for its floor, making it a trapdoor—if you knew the combination to the lock.

  Captain Pettimore, of course, did. In fact, he was the one who, more than a century ago, had etched it into the steel walls.

  CE-18, P-12, W-18

  A simple back-and-forth numbers-letters code that translated to 35-R, 16-L, 23-R.

  He opened the door in the floor and made Azalea climb down the ladder riveted to the wall.

  “I’ll be downstairs, lads. Collecting my treasure!”

  99

  Judy and George pulled into the driveway at the front of the school.

  They had already driven around the cemetery loop road and hadn’t seen Zack, the teacher, or anybody.

  “Maybe they went back to a classroom,” said George as they climbed out of the car with their pizza boxes.

  “Would they let Zipper go into the school?”

  “Maybe.…” Then George stuck a thumb and forefinger into his mouth and let out a piercing whistle, the kind that could stop taxicabs in Times Square.

  Judy almost dropped her pizza.

  “He usually comes when I whistle like that,” George explained.

  Judy’s ears were ringing.

  She’d be surprised if the whistle didn’t wake the dead people back in the cemetery!

  100

  Zack, Zipper, and Malik were sitting in a small room, staring at the wild inscription on the wall:

  “Any idea what it is?” Zack asked.

  “Some kind of voodoo symbol,” said Malik. “Probably painted with chicken blood.”

  “Gross. We need to find where Pettimore stored his soul jars.”

  “You mean there’s another root cellar?”

  “Sort of. See, when the bokor steals a dead person’s soul, he captures the ti bonanj, the part of our spirit that holds whatever it is that makes you and me unique and different from everybody else.…”

  “Did you look this up on Google?”

  “Last night. A friend gave me a heads-up on what we might be facing.”

  “Who? Benny?”

  “That’s not important. What’s important is—”

  Suddenly, Zipper’s ears perked up.

  “He hears something!” said Malik. “The zombie?”

  “No. His tail’s waggi
ng. He’s not afraid. He’s happy.”

  Zipper looked up at Zack and gave him a series of short barks.

  “What’s he trying to say?” asked Malik.

  “I don’t know. It’s not one of his standard barks.”

  And then Zipper took off!

  “Where’s he going?” asked Malik.

  “Back the way we came …”

  “What about the zombie?”

  “I don’t think they like dog brains. Just humans’.”

  Malik sighed. “I sort of wish I were a dog.”

  “Come on. Let’s go see what’s up ahead.”

  101

  “This is it,” said Daphne DuBois, staring at the scorched hole in the wall. “The entrance to the treasure tunnel.”

  “There’s a stone on the ground,” said Eddie. “See it? What do all those strange carvings mean?”

  “That’s the Masons’ code,” said Daphne, pulling out her spiral notebook, the one filled with all sorts of information related to the treasure quest. She found the page dealing with the code and quickly translated the stone’s message.

  “It mentions a zombie,” she said.

  Eddie laughed. “The old carpetbagger is bluffing! Colonel Cooper told Zack Jennings in no uncertain terms, ‘There are no more booby traps in the tunnels, no more guards.’”

  “Yes. The boy would never have been brave enough to crawl into that hole if he thought there might be a zombie at the other end waiting for him!”

  “I’ll go in first,” said Eddie. “Grab a couple of those candles off the shelf.”

  She did. Eddie lit them.

  Daphne smiled. “Now let’s go get our gold!”

  102

  Daphne watched Eddie slide down the chute.

  When he hit the ground with a soft thump, Daphne crawled into the hole. She was all set to slide down to join her brother when she heard him scream.

  “Leave me be!”

  Next Daphne heard an angry roar and thrashing and Eddie shrieking.

  “No! Stop!”

  More howls and bellowing. The shredding of cloth. Snarls and rips and the crunching of bone and sloppy wet feeding sounds.

  She blew out her candle.

  Bracing her hands against the ceiling, her feet against the floor, she crept down the sharply inclined tube. She moved very slowly, very cautiously, the whole time serenaded by the sounds of someone greedily stuffing his face with food.

  “Mmmm … good … brains …”

  She reached the bottom. Crawled feetfirst into some kind of darkened cave.

  Eddie’s black wax candle lay on the floor, still sputtering, still casting a faint glow—enough light for Daphne to see the most horrific thing she had ever seen in her life.

  A lanky beast in a frayed Yankee soldier uniform scooping curdled gray matter out of her brother’s cracked-open skull and slurping it into his mouth.

  103

  Zack and Malik kept moving forward.

  The tunnels were chilly, dark, and quiet. The narrow passageways turned back on themselves at abrupt angles. Whenever the path split, they headed left—just like the pocket watches had told them to.

  “Thanks again, Zack,” Malik whispered.

  “For what?”

  “Being my friend. Coming down to find me.”

  “No problem.”

  “You think that thing killed Kurt Snertz?”

  “I hope not.”

  They walked some more.

  “If we actually find the gold,” said Malik, “I’ll split it with you!”

  “That’s okay. You keep it. I just want to go home and play with Zip in the backyard!”

  They kept walking.

  Downhill.

  Working their way deeper into the labyrinth.

  The zombie’s lair.

  104

  The beast was licking his spindly fingers.

  It pained Daphne DuBois to see her brother this way. Torn asunder. His pants and legs lying in a heap to the left. His jacket and torso to the right.

  His head hollowed out like a Halloween pumpkin.

  But she had to press on.

  For Edward Cooper DuBois.

  For Patrick J. Cooper and John Lee Cooper! For every son of the Confederacy humiliated by the Union aggressors when the noble cause ran out of money because the scoundrel Horace P. Pettimore ran off with the shipment of English gold!

  She saw Eddie’s revolver lying on the ground near the gnawed remains of his right arm.

  The beast seemed momentarily satiated. Gorging on her brother’s meaty brain appeared to have made him drowsy.

  She saw the creature’s bulging eyes disappear beneath their reptilian lids.

  Very quietly, she reached down and took the pistol.

  Then, turning away from the beast, she started trotting quietly down a long, straight tunnel. After about fifty feet, she lit her own candle. Held it out in front of her.

  Ahead she saw a wall full of pocket watches.

  The straightaway ended. She had a choice. A staircase twenty feet to her right. A staircase twenty feet to her left.

  She could not decide which way to go.

  She needed help. A spirit guide!

  “Colonel Cooper?” she whispered. “Can you hear me?”

  There came no ghostly reply. Frustrated, she stomped her feet. “Grandfather!” she whined. “Tell me which way I should go!”

  One hundred yards behind her, she heard the beastly thing bay. Heard him rumble like a dragon.

  She probably shouldn’t have raised her voice like that.

  A loud roar shook the rafters.

  Daphne DuBois ran as fast as she could down the staircase on the left.

  105

  Judy saw Zipper tear out the front door of the school.

  “George! It’s Zip!”

  “Hey, boy.” George knelt down.

  The dog practically trampolined off the asphalt and into his arms.

  And then he wouldn’t stop barking.

  “Where’s Zack?” George asked.

  Zipper barked more loudly.

  “Is he in trouble?” asked Judy.

  He gave a bark that sounded an awful lot like “Yes!” Followed by a series that sounded like “Hurry! Follow me!”

  “Take us to him, Zip!”

  Zipper flew back into the school.

  Judy and George flew after him.

  106

  A slow-moving car pulled into the driveway at the front of the school.

  A young African American girl—about eight years old with caramel-colored skin, her hair piled up under a bright yellow head scarf, her cheeks freckled with dots of black paint—stepped out. She was carrying a small burlap sack.

  “Wait for me here, Auntie,” she said. “I shan’t be long.”

  The little girl marched toward the school, quietly singing a snatch of her favorite song.

  My grandma see your grandpa sitting by the fire

  My grandpa say to your grandma, gonna fix your chicken wire.

  Talkin’ ’bout, hey now, hey now. Iko, iko on day.

  A sly smile slid across her lips.

  “Joc-a-mo-fee-no-ah-nah-nay,” she mumbled. “Joc-a-mo-fee-nah-nay.”

  It was a ritual chant used in New Orleans by marchers in Mardi Gras parades, a chant so old the words were no longer clear, but loosely translated, “Jockomo feena nay” meant, “Don’t mess with us.”

  This little girl from New Orleans was nobody to mess with.

  107

  The ghost of Horace Pettimore stared through Azalea Torres’s eyes at the mountain of shimmering gold bars stacked floor to ceiling in his hidden vault.

  He propelled the girl’s body closer to the pile. Each bar weighed 12.4 kilograms. About 27 pounds. There were hundreds of them.

  He had the girl grab a bar, hoist it off the pile, and load it into her backpack.

  “Ummpfff …”

  It strained her weak arms.

  She would never be able to carry th
is treasure lode up to the surface and exchange it for money.

  “McNulty!” he had her shout. “McNulty! Come here! I need you! I need you now!”

  108

  Daphne DuBois was catching her breath in a small chamber with a strange drawing on the wall when she heard something even stranger: Azalea Torres shouting for somebody named McNulty.

  “Come here! I need you! I need you now!”

  Then she heard what sounded like horse hooves thundering down the corridor at the top of the stairs.

  The zombie.

  But he didn’t come down the left side! He must have gone right!

  The slobbering beast who had devoured her brother was no longer pursuing her.

  She forged on.

  “I do this for all the Coopers who came this way before me,” she vowed under her breath.

  And Eddie. Her little brother.

  He would not die in vain!

  109

  McNulty scampered down the steep staircase.

  When he reached his killing pit, he took the tunnel to his left.

  Followed it to where it would enter the steamship boiler room.

  But the master was not in that room.

  He was down below.

  In the gold vault.

  McNulty was too tall to fit inside the furnace cubbyhole and take the ladder down to the treasure chamber. He would need to find a different way to reach his master.

  He followed the tunnel into the darkness.

  His nostrils flared as he attempted to pick up the master’s scent.

  It was no good. He kept running. Deeper. Downhill. Dark.

  “McNulty!”

  His master’s voice!

  Behind an earthen wall.

  It did not matter.

  McNulty was strong. He ripped through the dirt and the rock and the mortar. The wall crumbled. Now he was in a tiny sealed room. Many glass jars lined the shelves.

  “McNulty!”

  The master was close. The other side of another wall. McNulty needed to break through. The next wall was thick. A vault wall. Cinder blocks. Bricks.