A few minutes later, they left the freeway and turned onto a wide street with large houses set back behind front lawns that looked almost as long as football fields. When his dad slowed the car and turned into a long, circular driveway of white gravel, Nick’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.
“Here we are,” Dad called out. “Home sweet home. At least for the next couple of days.”
Nick didn’t know exactly what he’d expected his aunt’s house to look like—maybe a two-story home with bricks and stucco, like where he lived. But the house they pulled up in front of was nothing like that. It was really old, and looked like it hadn’t been painted in a hundred years. And it was big, too. There were at least twenty windows on the front alone. With long strips of yellowing white paint peeling from the walls and faded green shutters, what it looked most like was a haunted house.
Mom seemed to feel the same way. She frowned at the lumpy porch that wrapped around both sides of the house and craned her neck to look up at the flat roof with what appeared to be a black metal fence around the edges. “She lived here by herself?”
“Just her as far as I know,” Dad said. “It used to be the family plantation, but she was the last one alive on her side after her dad disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Nick asked, leaning forward. This was more interesting than he expected.
“Most people think a gator got him,” Dad said, so seriously Nick thought he might actually be telling the truth.
Mom shook her head. “Maybe staying here isn’t such a great idea. This place gives me a bad feeling.”
“Are you kidding?” Dad said, parking the car in front of the porch. “This will be great. It’s got…character, and it’s free. It’ll be like staying in our own private hotel.”
A creepy hotel, Nick thought. One of those places where the owner cuts up his guests and feeds them to a pond full of piranhas.
Nick opened his door and a cloud of tiny black insects swarmed into the car’s air-conditioned interior. One of the specks darted straight into his mouth and Nick jumped outside, coughing and spitting.
“Blech,” he gagged. “What are those things?” The cloud of bugs followed him around like he was their new best friend.
“Gnats.” Dad got out of the car and stretched his arms. “They don’t bite…much.”
Nick wiped his tongue with the palm of his hand. “I think I just swallowed one.”
“An excellent source of protein,” Dad said. “Keep sucking them in like that, and we may not need to feed you the whole trip.”
Mom didn’t seem nearly as amused. She waved her hands in front of her face, trying to keep the bugs away. “Let’s get inside before they eat us alive.”
Dad bounded onto the porch, and the old wood groaned. He lifted a ratty brown rug and peered under it. “The realtor said he’d leave the key beneath the welcome mat, but I don’t see it anywhere.”
Covering her mouth with one hand, Nick’s mom grasped the shaky-looking railing. “Are you sure this is safe?”
“Of course. This place has been around for over a hundred years.”
Mom tried the first step and frowned. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
As his parents searched for the key, Nick pulled the collar of his shirt up over his mouth and nose and began walking toward the far end of the yard. Except for the bugs and the heat and the stickiness, this was actually kind of an awesome place. Trees fifty feet high grew so close to the side of the house that some of them actually brushed up against the walls and roof. Gray strands swung slowly back and forth from their limbs—a few so long they almost touched the ground. It was like being in the jungle.
This really would make a great haunted house, Nick thought. He could imagine ghosts swooping out of the big old trees and disappearing into the darkened second-floor windows. And what if there were monsters in the woods? Like two-headed snakes with bloated white skin and three eyes from living too close to a nearby power plant?
As he reached the edge of the yard, the ground under his feet began to get mushy, and black water squelched up around his sneakers. How cool would it be if Carter and Angelo were here—the three of them heading deep into the swamp in search of Li Grand Zombi? Carter would be snarfing peanut butter cups by the handful while Angelo read the latest research on—
A tremendous roar ripped through the trees, and Nick stumbled backward, his eyes wide. “What was that?”
It came again, filling the air like the growl of an angry lion that had somehow escaped the zoo.
“Get away from there!” A pair of arms grabbed Nick around the waist, and suddenly he was flying across the yard—his feet barely brushing the tops of the grass. He glanced over his shoulder to see his mother carrying him, her face as white as the gravel driveway.
He had no idea she was so strong. One minute he was standing on the grass at the edge of the woods and the next he was on the porch.
“Don’t ever do that again!” Mom said, her hands shaking.
“Do what?” Nick asked. He squirmed out of her tight grasp. “I was just looking into the trees. What was that sound, anyway?”
Dad tried to smile, but his face was nearly as pale as Mom’s. “I believe that was an alligator.”
“We are not spending a single night here,” Mom declared once they’d found the key under a potted plant and were inside the house. She looked dubiously around the room, as if she suspected there might be another alligator lurking beneath the afghan-covered sofa.
After all the excitement in the yard, Nick had been hoping the inside of the house would be just as cool as the outside. He was disappointed to discover it was pretty much like any other old person’s house: chairs that smelled like baby powder and dried flowers, thick orange-and-green carpet that seemed to have been chosen specifically for its ability to hide puke, and lots of snow globes and porcelain figures covering the shelves.
Dad ran a finger across the top of a bureau and whistled. “Some of this stuff looks like it could actually be worth something.”
Mom stepped beside him—her eyes lighting up. “That couldn’t be a real Chippendale, could it?”
Nick watched his parents oohing and aahing over furniture and lamps that he wouldn’t have given a second glance at a garage sale. “Don’t mind me,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I’m just going to find somewhere I can sit and think about how much fun Angelo and Carter are probably having right now without me.” When they didn’t respond, he added, “I’ll try not to get eaten by a hungry reptile or bitten by an extremely venomous snake.”
Neither of them appeared to be listening to a word he said, so he turned and wandered away, hoping the rest of the house would be a little more interesting.
It wasn’t.
Each room he stuck his head into looked the same. Musty-smelling carpet on the floors, walls covered with framed black-and-white photographs of people he didn’t know, and lots more old furniture for his parents to get excited about.
What were Angelo and Carter doing right now? Probably trying on their costumes and making plans for how to collect the most candy while avoiding Frankenstein. He walked into the kitchen, scuffing his feet across the lumpy kitchen linoleum and feeling worse than ever. The yellow refrigerator buzzed like it was full of angry hornets. He considered checking to see what was inside, but decided going through a dead woman’s food was weird. Besides, he was too depressed to eat anything.
He dropped into a kitchen chair and stared at a pair of salt and pepper shakers shaped like angels with guitars. They were set on either side of a black, life-size cat statue. When his dad said Aunt Lenore was peculiar, he’d imagined something out of a horror movie. Now he wondered if Dad had just meant she had really bad taste. Who would fill her house with vomit-colored carpet and put her salt and pepper in rock-and-roll angels?
He let out a deep sigh, and the cat statue turned to look at him.
“Geez!” he yelped, scooting his chair backward so fast it nearly tipped over.
The statue blinked its green eyes.
Slowly, Nick’s racing heart returned to its normal rhythm. It wasn’t a statue at all. It was a real cat. He wondered if his parents knew Aunt Lenore had a pet.
“Hey there, little guy. Or are you a girl?” Nick reached out to pet it. Before he could get close enough, the black cat leaped silently to the floor and started toward the other end of the room.
“Here kitty, kitty,” he called. He wondered whether anyone had fed it since his aunt died. “Do you want some milk?”
The cat looked back at him, and he could almost swear it smiled before disappearing through a doorway at the other end of the kitchen. Nick hurried after it, and found himself in a narrow, dimly lit hallway. The cat was at the other end. As soon as it saw Nick, it reached up to scratch its claws against a white door.
“Do you want to go out?” Nick opened the door, but instead of leading outside, it opened on an even narrower set of stairs that led down to some kind of basement. Across the floor at the top of the stairs lay an old broom. The cat started toward the broom, stopped, and hissed. Its tail rose straight up and the hairs all stood on end.
Nick picked up the broom, wondering what had freaked out the cat so much. As soon as he did, the cat darted down the stairs. This was really weird. But at least it beat sitting around watching his parents look at furniture. Still holding the broom, he followed the cat down the rickety staircase. When he reached the bottom, he couldn’t see the cat anywhere. In fact, he couldn’t see much of anything at all.
From the dim light shining through the open door at the top of the stairs, it looked like he was in a small room. There might have been a row of shelves on the other side, but he couldn’t tell for sure. The air had a strange smell to it, sort of a mix between a science experiment gone wrong and his mother’s spice cabinet. This was probably some kind of pantry, where his aunt had kept her canned food.
“Where did you go?” he called, searching for the cat in the darkness. He reached toward the wall, trying to turn on a light. But instead of finding a switch, his fingers brushed against what felt like dozens of bottles. He took one from the shelf and tried to see what it was. It felt too small to be canned fruit or vegetables. His fingers went almost all the way around it.
He squinted at the jar but couldn’t see what was inside. Jelly, maybe? The thought made his stomach rumble. Holding the bottle close to his face, he sniffed the lid. It smelled of metal, dust, and something kind of rotten. If it was jelly, it had definitely gone bad.
At the end of the shelves—right beside the stair rail—he bumped into a thin metal chain. He tugged on the chain, and a single lightbulb illuminated the room. Nick could now see its walls were lined with shelf after shelf of colored bottles, clay pots, and boxes of all sizes. All of them had neat black handwriting on the front, but they didn’t look like anything his mom kept in their pantry at home.
What is this place? he wondered.
Realizing he was still gripping the tiny bottle under his nose, he held it out to look at it. Inside the glass was a yellowish liquid. His first thought was that he was holding a bottle of pee. But unless his great-aunt was a lot weirder than his parents had let on, he couldn’t imagine her storing urine in her basement.
He turned the bottle around to look at the label on the other side. In the small, neat handwriting in which he might have expected his aunt to write “string beans” or “raspberry preserves” were the words:
Black Mamba Venom
50 mg
Lethal dose approximately .30 mg
Time to death 30–60 minutes
Nick’s eyes went from the words to the yellow liquid inside. The bottle his aunt was storing in her basement—the bottle he’d held almost right against his lips—contained one of the most lethal snake poisons in the world.
Shaking so badly he nearly dropped the bottle, Nick stuck it back on the shelf and wiped his hands on the front of his jeans. Was it really venom? Who kept snake poison in a jar? Maybe it was just a joke—a way to scare people who came snooping around. For all he knew, it was really just pickle juice inside the bottle.
His eyes scanned across a few of the nearby labels. Bat’s head root. Campeche wax. White lodestone. Peace water. Coffin nails.
Coffin nails?
All at once he realized what he was looking at, and his mouth went dry. This was no joke. And that wasn’t pickle juice in the jar. The containers on his aunt’s shelves held the kinds of ingredients described in Angelo’s book. This wasn’t Aunt Lenore’s pantry. It was her voodoo supplies!
“She is a voodoo queen,” Nick whispered to himself. Did his parents suspect? Is that why they’d never let him meet Aunt Lenore?
Looking around the room at the powders and potions in jars, boxes, and pots of all sizes and shapes, a part of him wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. Once his parents realized what Lenore really was, they might not even stay for the funeral. He might be able to get home in time to go trick-or-treating with Carter and Angelo. But another part of him knew he’d never get a chance to explore something like this again.
In one corner of the room was a wooden desk with a roll top cover. On each of its four corners there were carved owl heads that looked so real he could almost feel them watching him. Sliding the cover open, he found a neatly stacked pile of really old-looking books.
Several of them were in a language he didn’t understand. But one was called Drawing and Capturing Spirits. Sliding into the chair in front of the desk, he opened the book and began leafing through the pages.
Some of the chapters were really creepy, like the one titled “Le Cochon Gris, The Gray Pig: Consuming Human Flesh.” Could Aunt Lenore be a cannibal? Now he definitely didn’t want to go poking around in her refrigerator. A few parts were actually kind of funny, including a skeleton named Samedi that the book claimed had an insatiable sweet tooth. He was about to read a chapter called “The Feast of the Yams” when something scraped across the basement floor. Nick jumped from his chair with a yelp, dropping the book onto the desk. Sure that some tarantula or snake had escaped from its box, he backed toward the stairs. It took him a minute to notice the black shape staring at him from inside the fireplace. In his excitement over all his other discoveries, he’d completely forgotten about the cat he had followed down here in the first place.
“Hey little guy,” he said. Peeking out from behind a big, black hanging pot, the cat blinked its green eyes and scraped its claws along the fireplace floor, making the sound that had scared Nick.
As he reached out to pet the cat, Nick noticed it was sitting on a black lump in the fireplace. At first he thought it might be a piece of wood or coal, but as he bent down to get a better look, he realized it was actually a book of some kind. Someone had burned it so badly that the thick leather cover was curled and completely charred. When he reached for it, the cat hissed and its black fur spiked like something in a cartoon.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked, pushing the cat aside and grabbing the book before the cat could do more than give an annoyed mew.
When he picked up the book, the front cover slid completely off and several of the pages crumbled to ash. Why would Aunt Lenore burn a book? She seemed to have taken such good care of everything else in the room. Any why leave the charred remains in the fireplace? The rest of the room was so organized and neat, he couldn’t imagine her leaving this mess here…unless she had burned it shortly before she died?
Kneeling on the cold basement floor, he brushed away the ashes to see if any of the book was still readable. The pages at the front and back were either totally destroyed or else so blackened he couldn’t make out anything at all. But about halfway through, he found several pages that were still partially legible.
…curse appears to have failed. We tried to kill him but he was too strong for us.
Cold fear played up Nick’s spine like icy fingers racing along a line of piano keys. It was hard to tell with all the smudging and smoke
damage, but the words looked like the same handwriting he’d seen on his aunt’s bottles and boxes. “Tried to kill him,” he murmured. It sounded like his aunt had cursed some guy in an attempt to kill him. The next readable line was a few inches lower on the page.
The bokor’s power is great. I can feel him trying to get back at us from beyond the grave. E has given in. The loss of…
The next few words were too burned to make out, and then
…too powerful. I have hidden the treasure where she can never get to it. The key is beyond her reach.
A treasure? What kind of treasure? Nick glanced around the room, looking for a chest or a secret door. But the only thing he saw was the cat’s green eyes glaring at him.
The next two pages were completely unreadable. But the page after that looked almost untouched.
…such a shame about the girl. If only we had known what she was up to. But there is nothing to be done now. I can feel the King calling me at night, beckoning me. His power is so great, his undead army so strong. If I give in, he will—
“Nicholas Charles Braithwaite!”
Nick jumped up and spun around, sure his dead aunt had come back to kill him.
What he saw was nearly as terrifying. His mother was standing at the bottom of the stairs, her face white and her eyes huge and round. She looked slowly around the room, her lips pulling down into a tight pink line as her eyes took in the voodoo ingredients on the shelves. Her gaze stopped on the bottle of snake venom. “Out. Now.”
“Don’t you realize what this means?” Nick said. “Aunt Lenore is—”
“You heard your mother.” Nick’s father crossed the room and took Nick’s shoulder.
“But, Dad,” Nick said, trying to pull away as his father dragged him across the room. “You have to see what I found. Look at this…”
Nick started to show his father Aunt Lenore’s journal, if that’s what it was, before realizing he had somehow crushed it in his hands when his mother shouted at him—the pages he’d been reading were nothing but black smears of ash.
Case File 13 Page 3