The Fabulous Zed Watson!

by Basil Sylvester

“More sky.”

  Sam finally ordered us to quit, but we did get an ice cream pit stop out of it.

  Cherry sprinkle bomb with a side order of “Would you like that in a waffle cone, little boy?”

  Then it was back in the car with nothing to do but feel impatient.

  So I decided to pass the time by edumacating Gabe about good music.

  “I made a playlist,” I said.

  Gabe groaned. “You already made me listen to your playlist when we started out, remember?”

  “(A) You didn’t listen. (B) That was standard stuff. I made a secret playlist for when we started actually finding the clues. Ready?”

  “No.” Gabe reached into his backpack for his own headphones.

  “Sorry, Gabe. I grabbed them while you were brushing your teeth this morning.”

  He slumped back in his seat. “Please no more Beyoncé.”

  “Ha! Only a couple of her tunes. But I did some research, and we start off with something I’m sure you’ll love.”

  I clicked Play.

  The unmistakable sound of a heavy-metal guitar riff blasted from the speakers. It was soon joined by some driving drums and then a primal scream.

  Not my cup of tea, but some palatable Metallica. I could live with it as long as it was followed by some of my fave bangers.

  I smiled at Gabe, who looked like a bird had just pooped on his head.

  “What?” I said. “It’s Metallica! Every metalhead loves Metallica!”

  “Who the heck is Metallica?”

  Sam started laughing in the front seat.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Hand Gabe his player and the aux cord,” she said.

  I reached into my backpack and grabbed Gabe’s stuff.

  He plugged in his player.

  The loud shrieking I’d heard in snippets came through the speakers, but instead of driving guitars, the singer was backed up by violins, trumpets and cellos.

  She stopped shrieking, then began singing something in . . . Italian, maybe?

  “Wait,” I said. “You. Like. OPERA?”

  “No. I love opera. Haven’t you noticed my shirts?”

  I looked at the one he was wearing. “It says you like butterflies.”

  “That’s Madama Butterfly. It’s an opera by Puccini.”

  “And yesterday you had on a shirt with a barber pole. I figured you liked haircuts.”

  “It’s from The Barber of Seville!”

  I blinked.

  “By Rossini!”

  I blinked again.

  “Wagner? The Ring cycle shirt I wore on Monday?”

  “I thought that was for The Lord of the Rings.”

  Gabe shook his head sadly. Sam just started laughing again.

  “Gabe, you never cease to amaze me,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “So what opera is this?”

  “Aida.”

  “Eye-eater? Still sounds like a heavy metal band to me.”

  “Aida. A-i-d-a. It’s Verdi’s masterpiece. Although the libretto was written by Ghislanzoni. My fave.”

  A light bulb went off. “Flora and Aida.”

  “FlorAida.” He nodded. “My username on the site.”

  The music swelled. Sam joined Gabe in some high-pitched singing.

  “This music is horrible,” I said.

  Gabe handed me his headphones.

  About seventeen million hours later, the opera finally ended and I was able to take off the headphones.

  “Are we done torturing cats?” I said.

  Gabe sighed. “Culture is lost on some people.”

  “What a very Zeddish thing to say,” I said.

  “So what the heck is a huzzah?” Sam asked as we headed across the Missouri state line.

  “It’s a word that British soldiers used to cry to get pumped up for battle.”

  “HUZZAH!” Gabe yelled.

  “Geez!” Sam swerved slightly, then straightened out the car. “Do. Not. Do. That. Again.” She took a deep breath. “More explanation, please, Zed.”

  When someone asks Zed Watson for an explanation, I oblige.

  “Marion Arbuthnot is the name of Taylor’s revenant monster—or zombie, as they’re more generally called. He says ‘Huzzah’ in a chapter called ‘The Revenant’s Chest.’”

  “Okay. Following so far.”

  Gabe, lover of words, jumped in. “The title is actually a double pun because Arbuthnot has a chest where he hides his letters from Cassandra. But he also got shot in the chest.”

  “He was killed by his own troops after he ‘betrayed’ them at the Battle of Bunker Hill. It wasn’t really a betrayal, though, because they were horrible people. He says at one point, ‘Is a cause for war just if the warriors are unjust?’”

  “Legit Q,” said Sam.

  “That was another controversial part of the book. In the chapter we have, Taylor portrayed the colonial soldiers as cruel and bloodthirsty. Marion was more of a pacifist.”

  “Then—bang!—they shot him,” Gabe said.

  I sighed. “But as you know, Cassandra saved him. Sort of. Now each one can only leave letters for the other to read. I’ll give you a sample of one of them.”

  I gave a quick cough and recited the relevant part of the chapter from memory:

  Oh, Cassandra!

  I despair that we shall never talk face to face again. I wander the world by day, hunted and hunting.

  My only solace is the words you write to me at night and leave for me to find when I wake.

  I know these delicate papers will fade and decay as I await some miracle that unites us again. But the words will never leave my mind or heart.

  I utter a feeble “Huzzah” for a dream that someday we may again be allowed to meet.

  Yours forever,

  M.

  I wiped a tear from my eye. “And we won’t know if they ever meet again until we find the rest of the book.”

  Sam did not seem moved. “So the dead dude says this word, and that’s got us stopping in some dusty heck-hole looking for what exactly?”

  Gabe perked up. “Well, thanks to you, now we know we’re looking for coordinates, so it has to be a number. Maybe a street address like the church?”

  Sam snorted. “So are we hoping to find a Zombie Avenue in Huzzah?”

  We didn’t say anything.

  She shot us a look in the rear-view mirror. “How much of this journey is just you two making stuff up?”

  “We’re two for two so far,” I said, “making stuff up.”

  “And after Huzzah?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  “We’re looking for a bridge?” Sam asked.

  “It was a metaphor,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Gabe agreed. “And maybe there is a Zombie Avenue in Huzzah.”

  “Well, you can look it up on my phone. We have to stop for gas.” She pulled off the road.

  “Sam, I don’t feel you have quite entered into the spirit of this journey,” I said.

  She pointed at the clock radio on the dashboard. “Ticktock. May I remind you that this is my journey? And I agreed to these side trips as long as they weren’t too far off the highway.”

  “And so far, we’re right on time,” Gabe pointed out.

  Sam snorted. “With only two near-death experiences, inside a tornado and a bell. I can’t wait to see what disasters lie ahead with you two.”

  “The likeliest disaster I can see is that the A/C breaks down again,” I said.

  Sam turned off the ignition. “I’ve got to get this stuff to my dorm room and get ready for classes in four days. If we find this weird little kiddie comic book of yours before that, cool. If not, you help me unload and get on a plane back home—without the book.”

  Even though she had said this in a calm voice, it was one of the scariest things I’d heard from her on the entire trip.

  Chapter 18

  Wish You Were Here

  Turned ou
t there was an ice cream stand inside the gas station.

  I’d predicted the old dude would call me a boy.

  Gabe had said girl.

  One full tank of gas and a pink twinkle swirl cone and chocolate dip later, we were back inside Rusty Raccoon.

  But I was bummed. First off, the old dude in the gas station had handed me the cone with a smile and an “Enjoy it, little girl.” Which meant the ice cream was on me.

  Gabe brought me up to date on the running score.

  “Boy 5, girl 5!”

  “Anyone use ‘they’? Or even ‘kid’?” I asked miserably.

  He pretended to check the list. “Um, no. Well, unless you count Darlene. But she knew ahead of time.”

  “Hmph. Predictable.”

  The second thing that had me bummed was that a quick check on Sam’s phone had turned up no zombie-themed or even zombie- or monster-adjacent places in Huzzah.

  And Sam had ordered us back in the car before I’d had time to check on the fan site.

  We drove into town, if you can call it that.

  There was only Main Street. About twenty old wooden buildings leaned at odd angles. Some had their windows boarded up. A number of front doors were gone, making the buildings look like they were twisted faces with missing front teeth.

  Everything seemed covered in a layer of reddish dust.

  “Looks like a perfect home for a zombie,” Gabe said. “Or a ghost.”

  I was starting to love him.

  Sam let out a loud whistle. “Looks more like one of those ghost towns you see in old Westerns.”

  She parked the car in front of a low brick building. It seemed to be the only one with glass left in the windows. Even those were covered in iron bars.

  We got out.

  A faded sign over the door read United States Post Office.

  “Who gets mail here?” Sam said. “Tumbleweeds?”

  “I bet the post office would know if there was ever a Zombie Street,” Gabe said.

  “Or maybe somebody named Marion Arbuthnot?”

  “I don’t think anybody’s been named that for two hundred years,” Sam said. “At least not by choice.”

  A warm breeze ruffled my hair.

  Actual tumbleweeds rolled down the street.

  “This is hopeless,” Sam said.

  I thought about the post office again. “Marion’s always getting letters from Cassandra. Maybe this is where we need to look?”

  “Is it open?” Gabe asked.

  The windows were covered with so much dust it was impossible to tell if there were lights on inside.

  “Only one way to find out,” Sam said. “Actually, you two find out. I’m going to walk around and see if the ghosts offer anything for lunch.”

  She did not seem optimistic about this as she turned and walked down the street. The middle of the street, actually, because there were no other cars anywhere in sight.

  “I hope we meet again, dear witch!” I called in my best Marion Arbuthnot voice.

  She waved her hand over her shoulder and kept walking.

  I turned back around.

  Where was Gabe?

  “Gabe!” I called. “Have you been kidnapped by a ghost? You have all the luck.”

  “He went into the post office, doofus,” Sam called.

  “Oh.” I pushed the rusted metal door, and it creaked open. How had I missed that awesome sound?

  The air inside was actually cooler. It smelled like flowers, and the walls were lined with dozens of wooden mail slots. Almost all of them were empty, but they were also polished and dusted. They gleamed in the soft light of the post office lamps.

  The inside was as clean as a whistle, as my mom likes to say. She’d never said that about my room, of course, but I’d heard her mention it about other places in our house.

  Gabe was standing in front of a long wooden counter.

  He was already having an animated conversation with a guy who looked as old as the town. He wore a name tag that said “Jerry.”

  “. . . first post office in Missouri!” Jerry was saying. “We’ve been in operation since the town was founded in the 1800s.”

  “And still going since the town ended, by the looks of it,” I said. I waited for a laugh.

  Jerry frowned at me. “City slicker, huh?”

  “Sorry. It just seems like the town has—”

  “Yes, yes. Fallen on hard times. A lot of small towns have these days.” He gave a deep sigh. “But you should have seen us back in the day.”

  “The 1820s?” I joked.

  This time he gave me a grin. “No. Back when I was a little younger, this was even a bit of a hangout for all sorts of interesting people. Good times.” He stopped talking and just kind of stared out the window for a minute.

  “I think he’s having a Zed moment,” I whispered to Gabe.

  “What do you mean by interesting?” Gabe asked.

  Jerry shook his head like he was waking up from a dream. “Yeah. Musicians. Writers. Painters. Creative types. There was a kind of annual meet-up every Fourth of July. It was a real humdinger.”

  He looked like he was about to start staring out the window again, so I quickly jumped in. “You’ve lived here a long time, then?”

  “All my life.”

  Perfect.

  “Any chance there’s a street or maybe a building with the word ‘zombie’ in the name?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “No Zombie Street?”

  “Nope.”

  “Zombie Zone?”

  “Nope.”

  “Revenant Lane? Dead Guy Gulch? Poltergeist Boulevard? Ghost Cul-de-Sac?”

  “Nope, nope, nope and nope.”

  My shoulders sagged. Were we wrong about Huzzah?

  Gabe tried a different tack.

  “How about Arbuthnot?”

  Jerry grinned. “Now that’s interesting.”

  “It is?” I asked. “How?”

  Jerry winked at me. “Sometimes you have to ask the right questions to find the answers you’re looking for.”

  He ducked down behind the counter and popped back up again holding a metal box. He flipped open the lid and began pulling out postcards.

  “This is the strangest thing. No one by the name of Marion Arbuthnot has ever lived here.”

  “We never said his first name,” I said.

  “I know!” Jerry was really grooving now. “But someone has been sending postcards to a Marion Arbuthnot every year for the past forty years.”

  “Forty years!”

  “Yup. Started up and never stopped.”

  He laid the postcards on the counter. They covered the entire area. They all had pictures of odd places: Salem, Massachusetts; Loch Ness in Scotland; Edgar Allan Poe’s grave in Baltimore; the Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta.

  “This person has good taste,” I said.

  Jerry smiled and turned one over.

  “Every year, a postcard from someone named General Wolf has arrived here in Huzzah. It’s always prepaid, so there’s no return address or postmark. And here’s an even stranger thing.”

  “What?” Gabe and I asked together.

  “No one called Arbuthnot has ever lived here—or even, as far as I can tell, visited here.”

  Gabe and I leaned over the cards. Each one had the exact same line handwritten on the back:

  When you are ready, come dine with me.

  Signed,

  General Wolf

  And they all had the same address:

  Marion Arbuthnot

  PO Box 107

  Huzzah, MO

  “Who owns box 107?” I asked. Could Taylor secretly be living here in Huzzah? Were we that close?

  Jerry laughed. “No one does. It doesn’t exist.”

  “What?” Gabe and I said.

  “There are barely a hundred people who remember this town exists, let alone live here now.” He pointed at the wall behind him. It was full of shiny gray metal boxes with locks and numbers on
tiny brass plates.

  “The numbers end at 74,” Gabe said.

  “Yup.”

  “So why keep the postcards?” I asked.

  “Because it’s one of the most interesting things that has ever happened in this job. It’s a mystery!”

  “You got that right,” I said.

  “Can we have one?” Gabe asked. “To help us solve this mystery?”

  “I don’t see the harm in that after all these years. Which one do you want?”

  Gabe pointed at one with a Venus flytrap at the exact same moment I pointed at one with a haunted Transylvanian castle.

  “Why not one each?” Jerry said with a huge grin.

  We beamed.

  “Jerry, thank you so much.”

  “It was a pleasure serving two such amiable young kids.”

  I turned to Gabe. “So 107 is the clue! Let’s grab Sam’s phone so we can figure out the coordinates.” We started to give each other a high five.

  But then Jerry spoke again. “Darnedest thing is that for forty years these postcards go unclaimed, and now you’re the second folks to come here asking about them in two days.”

  Gabe and I froze. I turned.

  “Someone else asked about them?”

  “Yup. Big feller. I remember his feet in particular.”

  “Did you give him a postcard?” Gabe asked.

  “Nope. He didn’t seem as interested in them as you. Just wanted the address.”

  Gabe and I ran out the door yelling for Sam.

  There was no mistaking it—the historian was on the same quest we were.

  And he was ahead of us.

  The race was on.

  Chapter 19

  We

  Sam was nowhere to be found.

  After a minute, we stopped calling for her and leaned against the car to wait. I could feel the heat of the metal through my sweater.

  The sun was blazing in the cloudless sky.

  “I’m starting to sweat,” I said. “Where’s your stupid sister?”

  “Hey!” Gabe said. “That’s not nice.”

  “Whatever. We’ve got to get moving.”

  “Maybe you could take off your sweater?”

  “I’d rather die.” I wiped beads of sweat off my forehead.

  Gabe started to walk toward the post office. “Maybe we should go back inside?” he suggested. “It’s cooler.”