Chris Grabenstein - The Black Heart Crypt

Judy saw Hannah and Sophie exchange worried glances.

“Well, dear,” said Ginny on the phone, “they’re actually more like portable smudge pots, if you will.”

“They stun evil spirits into submission,” said Hannah, sounding upset. “Come along, Sophie. It seems our baby sister has been up to some sort of mischief.” Hannah started trudging up the staircase to the second floor.

Sophie looked at Judy. Fear filled her eyes. “Will you be giving away all of the Butterfinger bars?”

“Sophia?” shouted Hannah from the steps.

“Coming.” Sophie followed Hannah up to the second floor.

Right after Judy slipped her a Butterfinger.

The doorbell rang as a new group of kids stormed up the front porch steps and screamed, “Trick or treat!”

Judy just hoped they weren’t little Icklebys.

“Trick ortreat!”

“Oh, my. Look at all these goblins and ghouls. Here you go, kids.” Smiling, Judy started doling out the candy bars. “Neat costume, Alistair.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Jennings. I like your pumpkins.” The boy gestured at the six flickering jack-o’-lanterns lined up along the porch railing.

As soon as the kids were gone and the door closed, the phone began to ring again.

“Hello?” Judy answered.

There was silence on the other end.

“Hello?”

More silence.

“George? Is that you?”

“No,” replied a weak voice. “This is … Francine.”

“Excuse me?”

“This is Zack’s aunt. Francine. I’m his mother’s sister.”

“Oh, right. Francine. Hi.”

Judy had never met the woman, but from what she had gathered from George, Francine Potter-Kressin-Venable-Greene was a very wealthy, extremely crabby, exceptionally angry middle-aged woman.

From Zack, Judy had learned that “Aunt Francine hates me even more than my mother did. She blames me for killing her sister.”

All in all, Aunt Francine didn’t come very highly recommended.

“Is there a number where I can call you back?” asked Judy. “We’re kind of busy here tonight.…”

“Are you Judy? The woman who took my …”

There was a long pause. “… my sister’s place?”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind. I’m on my way.”

“On your way where?”

“Tell Zack it’s Halloween, so I’m coming to take care of him.”

Norman Ickes’sfather had fired him.

“It was an earthquake,” Norman had tried to explain. “A kid panicked and knocked over some display racks. We had to evacuate the store.”

His father wouldn’t listen.

Now Norman and the strange girl, Jenny Ballard, were sitting in her car at the dead end of the dirt road that snaked up the back of Haddam Hill.

They parked in a moonlit patch of asphalt and stared at the eerie cemetery.

After several minutes with no sound but the creak of skeletal trees dancing with the wind and an angry cat’s moaning at the moon, Norman finally spoke: “My father probably wishes I had never been born.”

Jenny cuddled closer. “I’m very glad you were, Norman. You are the heir to an awesome line of amazing men.”

“What?”

“You, Norman, are an Ickleby!”

“I am?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s an Ickleby?”

“Your real name.”

“Ickleby Ickes?”

“No, silly. Norman Ickleby.”

“Says who?”

“The voice.”

“The voice?”

“It speaks to me. In here.” She tapped the side of her head. “It told me to find you, to bring you here. It told me to bring this!”

She held up a very sharp hunting knife.

“Did you steal that from my dad’s store?”

She nodded.

Norman sighed. “It was in a locked display case!”

“I unlocked it. While your father was firing you.”

“Great. You stole a very expensive hunting knife. How stupid are you? My dad’s going to know it’s missing.”

“So?”

“He’ll blame me for that, too!”

“Who cares? You were meant for greater things than hawking hardware.”

“Oh, really? Like what? Polishing Steve Snertz’s shaved head?”

Jenny pulled up on her door handle. “Come, Norman.”

“What? Where are we going?”

“To fulfill your destiny!”

The ghostsof Barnabas Ickleby’s eleven descendants gathered around him outside the family crypt.

An oily black raven sat perched on the peak of the mausoleum’s gabled roof.

“They sent Eddie Boy into oblivion,” reported Barnabas.

The others hissed and moaned.

“Who was it?” asked Little Paulie Ickleby, the stubby ghost of a bank-robbing thug who’d died in 1959. “Who bumped off my boy?”

“The Jennings family, of course,” said Barnabas. “The boy and one of the hags who imprisoned us here.”

“You sure?”

“My spy saw it all.” Barnabas nodded toward the black bird roosting on the roof. “They saged him first. Then the woman spoke the words.”

Little Paulie twitched, cracked his knuckles, and smoothed out his jelly roll hairdo. Eddie Boy had been one of Paulie’s two sons. The other one hadn’t taken up the family business: crime. Instead, Paulie’s second son, Herman, had become a coward—living the straight life, peddling paintbrushes, toilet seats, and duct tape in a two-bit small town.

“Send me out next,” said Paulie.

“Why?”

“I’ll kill the Jennings kid. Give ’em the ol’ eye-for-an-eye. They hustle my boy off into the great beyond, I send theirs to an early grave.”

“Perhaps we should wait until we have a body to do our bidding,” suggested Barnabas.

“No way. Tonight’s Halloween. We killed that old witch’s cat on Halloween, remember? Up in Great Barrington. Right before they shanghaied us down here to this Nowheresville.”

“True,” said Barnabas.

“Hey, we may be dead, but one night a year, we’re also deadly—just so long as our souls ain’t sealed up in that tomb no more. Come on. The clock’s ticking here. Where do I find this Jennings punk?”

The raven swooped off the roof.

Barnabas pointed toward its inky silhouette flitting across the sky.

“Follow our winged friend,” said Barnabas. “He shall lead you to the child.”

Zack andhis friends decided to skip the costume competition.

Their poster-board “Bs” were torn during the hardware store scuffle, and now, instead of killer bees, they looked like a squashed “D,” a “P,” and a “3.”

“We probably wouldn’t have won anyway,” said Azalea. “We’re looking slightly B-draggled.”

Zack and Malik laughed. They were riding in the backseat with Aunt Ginny. Zipper was sound asleep in Zack’s lap.

“Good thing you wore your gym clothes,” said Malik, indicating Aunt Ginny’s purple tracksuit. “So how come you know so much about ghosts and how to vanquish them?”

“Oh, I just listened to a lot of folklore as a child. Studied the powers of herbs. We had an older cousin up in Great Barrington who knew everything about … herbology.” She reached over to pat Zack on the knee. “You did good in there, champ.”