Chris Grabenstein - The Black Heart Crypt

Grandpa Jim! Sitting in the passenger seat.

“Shhh,” he said. “Don’t let on you can see and hear me. Ginny and Judy can’t, because I don’t want them to.”

Zack budged his eyebrows up half a millimeter to ask Grandpa Jim what he was doing there.

“You’ve got to find that black heart stone, champ. You need to finish what Ginny started. Listen to what your mother told you.”

Zack still had no idea what Grandpa Jim was talking about.

“Remember everything she said. Everything! ”

“Zack?” It was Judy.

“Yeah?”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. I’m just worried about Aunt Ginny.”

“She’s very lucky,” said the paramedic. “The bullet went clean through her shoulder.”

Zack looked back to the front seat to check out Grandpa Jim’s reaction to the good news.

Only he was gone.

Leaving Zack to wonder: What had his mother said that could help him find the stone?

Azalea Torreswas on the school bus, cramming for a science test.

That meant opening the textbook for the first time, checking out the chapter.

“Got it,” she muttered to herself. Yes, a photographic memory was a girl’s best friend. Right now, she knew more about solar and geothermal energy than even Malik Sherman!

The bus made its standard fart noises, swung out its squeaky red stop sign, and came to a halt at the corner where Malik boarded.

Only he wasn’t at the bus stop.

Three kids climbed aboard, but no Malik.

Maybe the big meeting of the Pettimore Trust down in New York City hadn’t gone so well.

Losing his big reward, which was supposed to cover all his mom’s medical bills, would be a total bummer. If that was what had happened, Azalea might need to go home sick today, too.

She’d ask Zack if he’d heard anything.

His stop was only two away.

Right after Haddam Hill and the totally creepy but totally cool cemetery.

Zack, Judy, Aunt Hannah, and Aunt Sophie sat in the emergency room waiting area.

It was nearly eight a.m.

A television suspended on a bracket was blaring the local news but nobody was paying much attention to it.

Judy was on her cell phone, talking with Zack’s dad. He would be on the next train home to North Chester.

“Come straight to the hospital,” Judy suggested. “Aunt Ginny will be here a while.… We will.… Love you, too.”

Judy closed her cell and glanced up at the TV.

“What’s that?”

She and Zack got up and walked closer to the monitor.

“That’s Ickes and Son,” said Zack. “The hardware store on Main Street.”

The TV showed a short man, his face sad and gray, standing next to a big guy with a shaved head and a tiny chin beard. The big guy was chewing gum, grinning, and waving at the camera.

“That’s Norman’s father,” said Zack. “And a Snertz who works at the hardware store.”

As if to prove Zack correct, titles appeared on the bottom of the screen: Herman Ickes, father. Stephen Snertz, coworker.

The camera zoomed out and a reporter lady jabbed a microphone under Mr. Ickes’s nose.

“This is terrible,” he said. “I don’t know what could have gotten into my son.”

“The real question,” said Zack, “is who got into his son.”

“Didn’t you recently fire your son?” asked the reporter. “Yes.”

“Didn’t you have his name painted over on your sign?”

Stephen Snertz grabbed for the microphone. “It wasn’t his name. It was the ‘and Son.’ Basically, Herman here was telling the world he no longer had a son, isn’t that right, Herm?”

Mr. Ickes didn’t answer. He dropped his head in shame.

So the reporter concentrated on Snertz.

“You worked with Norman. Do you think his father’s recent actions are what sent the younger Mr. Ickes over the edge?”

“Definitely. Of course, Norman was always nuttier than squirrel poop.”

“So you’re not surprised at this turn of events?”

“Nah. Except the horse. Who knew the nerd could ride?”

The reporter turned to face the camera, which zoomed out even further, taking in the hardware store and the other shops lining Main Street.

“There you have it, Chip,” said the reporter. “A father’s public humiliation of his only son sends him spiraling into a violent rampage that has terrorized a picture-perfect small town in this bucolic corner of Connecticut.”

While she talked, the camera panned right and took in more storefronts, the village green and town hall, the town clock tower … The clock tower!

With its hands rusted in place.

Where the time was always frozen at 9:52.

That was what his mother had told him right before she disappeared.

Nine-fifty-two!

She had broken the rules and told him exactly where he had to go.

“The town clock!” Zack said to Judy.

“What?”

“That’s where they hid the black heart stone!”

Azalea wasseated in her usual spot near the rear of the bus, so she saw him first.

A guy dressed all in black and wearing one of those hats they wear in Colonial Williamsburg came charging down the cemetery hill on a horse.

“Um, Ms. Tiedeman?” she called up to the bus driver.

The guy on the horse was gaining on them. Azalea could see he was wearing a mask that made his head look like a burlap pumpkin, complete with the triangle eyes and nose and the sawtooth jack-o’-lantern grin.

“Ms. Tiedeman?” She shouted it this time.

The bus driver looked up at her rearview mirror.

“What’s the problem back there, Azalea?”

The horse rider raced past Azalea’s window. He was moving faster than the bus. She heard him scream, “Onward, Satan! Fly, Satan, fly!”

Great . Pumpkin Head’s horse was named Satan.

“I think this guy wants us to pull over.”

The bus driver leaned forward to check her side-view mirror.

“Stand and deliver!” the horse rider shouted as he drew parallel to the driver’s window.

“What?” said Ms. Tiedeman.

“Stand and deliver, I say!”

“Yeah? Well, I say, ‘Shut up and go away!’ ”

“Pull over to the side of the road, wench!”

“Sorry, pal. I have a schedule to keep.”

Azalea felt the rumbling bus accelerate.

“Everybody buckled up?” the bus driver shouted at the panoramic mirror, in which she could see all the kids. “Grab hold of a seat back and brace yourself!”

Then she pressed the pedal to the metal.

But the black stallion, with bubbly foam streaming out around its mouth bit, pumped it up a notch, too. The colonial jockey reached down into a saddlebag and pulled out a flaming lantern, which he hurled about twenty yards up the road.

It hit the asphalt and erupted into a gassy fireball.

“Hang on, kids!” Ms. Tiedeman pulled her steering wheel hard to the right and then immediately back to the left, sending the school bus careening through a cloud of smoke, but clear of the blaze.

Azalea turned around and saw that the bandit on horseback was behind the bus now, having just blown through the smoke cloud where the lantern grenade had exploded.