Chris Grabenstein - The Smoky Corridor

“Orphans?” said Azalea.

“Oh, yes. The Donnellys had no family. No father, no mother. They came here from a place called Saint Cecelia’s House for Wayward Children over in Brixton. In fact, according to young Seth’s diary, he considered their math teacher, Mr. Cooper, to be as close a thing to family as he and Joe had ever had.”

“So how’d they die? Was it gruesome?”

Man. Azalea sure had a one-track mind.

“Well, Azalea,” said Ms. DuBois, “the teacher and the two boys were trapped in that narrow, smoke-filled corridor with no exit. In mere minutes, they succumbed to what we would now call carbon monoxide poisoning. Mr. Cooper’s body was found slumped in front of that doorway, the key to this classroom in his hand. All three were dead long before the fire turned that cramped corridor into a broiling hot oven that cremated their bodies. The rest, as they say, is history.”

“That Mr. Cooper was a very brave man!” said a guy in the middle of the classroom.

“That he was. Which is why I am proud to say he is a distant relative of mine.”

“What? Really? Wow!” The whole classroom bubbled over with excitement.

“That’s awesome, Ms. DuBois,” said Malik.

“Yes. It is. I am quite proud of my great-great-great-great-uncle Patrick J. Cooper.”

She pointed toward a framed portrait sitting on her desk—a sepia-tone print of a man with a high forehead, beady eyes, and a bushy goatee. He looked kind of angry and, in Zack’s humble opinion, not extremely heroic.

“I am even prouder to be teaching here in the same classroom where he once taught. Now then, who here besides Azalea, whose father is bravely serving overseas, has a hero hiding in the branches of their family tree?”

Most of the kids shrugged. They had no idea.

Zack figured his grandpa Jim, who had been the sheriff in North Chester years earlier, was probably pretty heroic. But he didn’t want to show off.

“Well,” said Ms. DuBois, “I have a feeling some of you, perhaps all of you, have incredible ancestors. That is why, this month, you will each construct your very own family trees.”

“Cool. Awesome.”

All of a sudden, every kid in the class loved history.

“All right, everybody, let’s open our textbooks to chapter one.…”

Zack flipped his book open.

But he didn’t read what was written on the page.

He had that feeling again.

Somebody was watching him.

He slowly raised his eyes.

That picture of Horace P. Pettimore hanging over the blackboard?

It was staring at him.

It was also smiling.

28

The ghostof Horace Pettimore oozed into yet another copy of his portrait and studied the children seated at their desks.

He had examined many faces this way at the start of each new school year.

He had done so for more than one hundred years.

Searching for the One. The child irresistibly lured there by his magic voodoo spell.

“This year. This year he will come.”

He needed to find a child who was flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. A relative, no matter how distant. It was why he had buried, in the front yard of his mansion, an urn filled with powders, herbs, feathers, and an incantation written in his own blood on parchment—a spell guaranteed to one day attract a family member to this place.

For Horace Pettimore needed to find a descendant in order to rise from the dead.

Yes, it could be done!

He could live forever!

He had known that orchestrating his own resurrection was possible ever since the nine-year-old girl had come to him in 1866, a year after the Civil War had ended, when he’d still lived in New Orleans. He, a Yankee carpetbagger, had just ascended to the position of supreme voodoo king after the unexpected death of Queen LaSheena.

Well, unexpected by everyone but him.

Pettimore had been plotting how to kill the old witch for months.

Anyway, that morning, he had been in the captain’s quarters of his paddle wheel steamer.

The little girl gently rapped her knuckles on his door.

He immediately recognized the child as Queen LaSheena’s granddaughter, the young girl he had seen playing in the back room of Queenie’s voodoo shrine in the French Quarter. The girl had caramel-colored skin. Her hair was piled up high under a bright yellow head scarf, the same style her grandmother had always worn.

She had a small doll clutched in her hand.

A cloth doll dyed a deep navy blue, the color of the Union army’s uniforms in the Civil War.

“Good day, Captain Pettimore,” the young girl said with a sly smile. “What a pleasure it is to see you again.”

Then she proceeded to tell him things only Queen LaSheena would know.

“You may think you have taken over my throne, King Pettimore,” the little girl went on, “but you are sadly mistaken. For you will never have a child or a grandchild or even a niece or nephew to carry your soul forward into future generations. I have made certain of that!”

She showed him her doll.

There were pins stuck into it.

It was a voodoo doll. The little girl with the soul of Queen LaSheena dug one needle deeper into the doll’s leg and the captain could’ve sworn he’d just been wounded by a musket ball.

“I know, for you have told me that you have no brother or sister. No cousins, aunts, or uncles.” She jabbed a new needle into the doll. “You will see no children of your own.” She held up the doll so he could see a likeness of his own face stitched into its head. “When you die, as all men must, your soul will find no blood of your blood nor flesh of your flesh, no earthen vessel to carry it forward. I have won. Joc-a-mo-fee-no-ah-nah-nay , Captain Pettimore. Enjoy your reign as the voodoo king of New Orleans. It shall be brief.”

She twisted the needle in the doll’s leg.

Now he could still remember the searing pain in his thigh.

But Queen LaSheena wasn’t half as smart and cunning as she so arrogantly imagined.

Unbeknownst to her, there was one member of the Pettimore family he had never spoken of and, therefore, Queen LaSheena could not hex.

A beloved sister who had so disgraced the family that she’d fled Boston and disappeared. Pettimore had learned of her whereabouts, quite accidentally, from a soldier he’d met in an army hospital outside Vicksburg.

“Captain,” the dying man had cried out faintly from his filthy cot, “will you kindly do me the service of informing my wife that I met an honorable end in service to my country?”

In truth, Pettimore couldn’t have cared less about comforting the dying soldier’s widow. He had only come to the hospital to steal antiseptics, to make certain none of his zombies infected him with diseases their corpses had carried up from the grave. But the sickly soldier, weak though he was, forced a weathered photograph with curled edges into his hand.

It was Pettimore’s long-lost sister!

In the tintype, Mary was wearing a bell-skirted bridal gown and a white laurel wreath in her black hair.

“She lives with our daughter,” said the dying man, mustering up just enough strength to speak, the death rattle already sounding in his chest. “In a small mill town. North Chester. Connecticut.”

The soldier, of course, died.

It was fate that had decreed he should reveal what he knew about Pettimore’s only family, moments before wheezing out his final breath.

So after the meeting with Queen LaSheena’s granddaughter, Captain Horace P. Pettimore packed up all his belongings, his gold, and his army of zombie slaves and moved back north.

He did not find his sister or his niece.

Or any trace of them.

But he heard rumors of Mary Jane Hopkins, for that was her new name.