Chris Grabenstein - The Black Heart Crypt

Fortunately, the guy wasn’t a ghost. Zack could tell. Ever since he’d moved to Connecticut from New York City with his dad and stepmom, he’d learned a whole bunch of junk about the spirit world—what ghosts can do and what they can’t. He probably knew more than any eleven-year-old should legally be allowed to.

For instance, he knew that a ghost could take over the body of its blood relative, but unless it did that, it couldn’t do much besides wail and moan and try to scare you into hurting yourself.

A ghost couldn’t hold a shovel, and in Zack’s experience, digging a hole in the ground by lantern light wasn’t exactly something an evil spirit took over a relative’s body to do. He felt pretty confident that the dude digging the hole wasn’t a ghost or a possessed person.

The man started singing as he dug, a tune Zack recognized from recess on the playground:

“Don’t ever laugh when a hearse goes by ,

For you may be the next to die.”

Zack looked at Zipper and put a finger to his lips. They would try to tiptoe out of the graveyard without being seen or heard.

“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out ,

The worms play pinochle on your snout.”

Zack and Zipper crept closer to the gate. The man kept digging, kept up his steady stomp-slice-shook-flump, stomp-slice-shook-flump .

“There’s one little worm that’s very shy ,

Crawls in your stomach and out your eye.”

Zack and Zipper made it to the graveyard gate.

The digging stopped.

“Isn’t that right, boy?”

Okay. Zack didn’t remember those lyrics. He pushed open the squeaky gate.

“Freeze!” the gravedigger shouted.

Zack froze.

And this time, Zipper obeyed, too!

Somewhere inthe distance, Zack heard a stray cat meowing at the moon.

Then he heard boots clomping up behind him.

“I heard you callin’ to your dog, boy,” said the man, who kept coming closer. “Zipper. What kind of name is that for a dog?”

Slowly, Zack turned around.

The man was standing six feet behind him, holding his clay-draggled shovel like a knight’s lance with one hand, the flickering lantern with the other.

“Well,” said Zack, wishing his throat weren’t so dry, “Zipper is very fast and …”

“Dogs ought to be named Fido, Duke, Sparky. What you two doin’ here, anyway? Cemetery’s closed.”

“Um,” said Zack, “Zipper chased a cat up the hill from the highway.”

“A cat?” The creepy gravedigger raised the lantern up beside his craggy face. “You sure it weren’t a dog? A big black dog?”

Zack gulped. “Pardon?”

The gravedigger bugged out his eyes. “A big black dog with fiery-red eyeballs. What some folks call a Black Shuck, a ghostly black beast what guards graveyards from foul spirits.” The man grinned menacingly. “Wonder why he let you two in.”

“It was just a cat,” said Zack.

The stray cat yowled again. With its strangled cry, it sounded like a baby screaming for its bottle.

“Well, we better get going.”

“Yep. You should. Ain’t very wise to be in a boneyard this close to Halloween unless, of course, you’ve got some serious business to attend to, such as digging a new grave.”

Zack was scared but also confused, so he said, “Huh?”

The gravedigger nodded toward the hole he’d been scooping out. “Mr. Henry H. Heckman has arrived just in time for Halloween, when he’ll crawl up out of the ground to go take care of whatever business he left undone when he died.”

“Heckman?”

“That’s what I said, boy. Putting him in the family plot. There’s all sorts of Heckmans buried up here on Haddam Hill.”

Yeah , Zack wanted to say. He had met one of them back in June: a dead bus driver named Bud Heckman.

“Yep,” the gravedigger went on, “Heckmans have lived and died in these parts since before the Revolutionary War.”

“Just like the Icklebys, huh?”

The gravedigger lost his sly smile. “Icklebys ain’t from around here, boy.”

“Really? I saw their name on that big tomb over there, so I figured …”

“Icklebys don’t belong here and neither do you two! Git!”

Zipper snarled.

The gravedigger raised his shovel. “Git!”

“We’re ‘gitting,’ ” said Zack.

“Good! And don’t never come back here no more!”

“Don’t worry,” said Zack. “We won’t.”

Because a graveyard was the last place Zack Jennings wanted to be this close to Halloween.

Too many worm-eaten ghosts with pinochle cards up their snouts.

Thirteen demonsstared at the gravedigger through the cold stone walls of the Ickleby crypt.

“Let us out!” screamed the youngest soul trapped inside. “Let us out, you grody gravedigger, or I’ll ice you, man!”

His elders shook their heads. They knew that all the gravedigger would hear of the young man’s rant was the howl of a distant wind.

“Quiet, boy,” rasped Barnabas, the family patriarch and the oldest Ickleby entombed on Haddam Hill. “The gravedigger cannot hear you.”

“I don’t care, man. Someday, I’m gonna bust down these walls and break outta here!”

“Ah, you’re all wet, ya sap,” said the ghost of Crazy Izzy Ickleby, a gangster who had made his fortune running rum with Al Capone during Prohibition. “Besides, it ain’t the stones locking us in.”

“It is the spell,” said Barnabas. “The cursed spell!”

Barnabas, who had died in 1749 and, even as a ghost, still wore his bandit mask and tricornered hat, kept an eye on their unexpected visitor, the young boy in the glasses, as he disappeared down the hill with his dog.

“That child.” His voice was the husky croak of a strangled crow.

“What about him?” snapped the tough-talking gangster.

“When he leaned up against the wall, I felt a most peculiar chill. He is a Jennings.”

The twelve other demons hissed when he said the name.

The Icklebys hated the Jenningses.

They had hated them ever since the day thirty years ago when certain members of the Jennings clan had confined these thirteen Ickleby souls to this cramped crypt.

“We shall have our revenge on that boy,” said Barnabas. “And soon. Very soon.”

“They’re notout there, George,” said Judy.

“You’re sure?”

Zack’s dad and stepmother were standing in the kitchen, looking out through the big bay window into the backyard.

“Come on,” said George. “Zack and Zip might be in trouble.”

“Or they might just be in the front yard,” said Judy.

“Halloween’s coming.”

“So?”

“The veil grows thin!”

Judy shook her head to clear out her ears. “What?”

“Halloween. The veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is thinnest on October thirty-first!”

Oh, boy , thought Judy.

Ever since George had learned that Zack could see ghosts (the same way George had been able to when he was a boy), he had been spending a little too much time on his daily commute to and from New York City reading books about the spirit world.