Chris Grabenstein - The Smoky Corridor

“What’d you find this time? An antique cheeseburger?”

Zipper whimpered and kept scratching at the ground.

“What is it, boy?” Zack asked.

And then he and Malik saw what Zipper had just uncovered.

47

“Well,” saidZack, “the middle part is obviously a warning, like a No Trespassing sign. But the rest? Maybe they’re Egyptian hieroglyphics or something.”

“No,” gasped Malik. “It’s code!”

They studied what someone had carved into the stone:

“It appears to be a diagrammatic cipher,” said Malik.

“Huh?”

“It substitutes symbols for letters instead of letters for letters as you might find on a decoder ring.”

“What’s it say?”

“Not certain. But I believe the coder is using what is called the pigpen cipher, a substitution code often used by the Masons. Each clustering of letters indicates a new word.…”

“How much time do we have until the bell rings?”

Malik checked his watch. “Not much. Perhaps I should take a rubbing of the inscription. That way, we can finish cracking the code at a more convenient time.”

“Yeah,” said Zack.

“We need a sheet of paper and a crayon of some kind.”

Zack scanned the room with his flashlight. On the wall he saw some rock concert posters and another one of those prints of Horace Pettimore. They might work. Then, on a rack, he saw a stack of brown paper grocery sacks. “There’s your paper!”

“Excellent!” Malik grabbed a bag and tore out a flat panel.

Zack turned his flashlight left. Saw more jars of pickled preserves. A pile of moldy potatoes. A stack of candles, some white, some black.

“Hey, how about a black candle for your crayon?”

“Perfect! I should be able to pick up the impressions using the same technique one would employ to do a gravestone rubbing.”

“Do you need the light?”

“No.”

Malik started rubbing. Zack moved his flashlight beam up to the jagged hole in the wall just past the spot where they’d found the secret message. The fieldstones circling the three-foot-wide opening were scorched black. Zipper sniffed the edges.

“Careful, boy,” said Zack. He didn’t want Zipper falling through the hole. There was some kind of chute, like an enclosed playground slide, on the other side. Maybe that was what the warning was all about: descending into whatever hell was down there in the darkness.

He couldn’t risk it. Zack scooped his dog off the ground. Cradled him in his arms.

“Finished!” said Malik.

“Great. How much time till the bell?”

Malik rolled up his paper and checked his watch. “Two minutes.”

“Okay, Zipper, under my shirt. We need to smuggle you out of the building.”

The boys made their way through the swiveling shelves to the janitor’s closet—shoving the shelf unit back into place.

And then, at the sound of the bell, they ran out the door faster than either one of them had ever run before.

48

Horace Pettimorehad not been this joyful in ages.

Not since the steamy Louisiana night when he’d stolen sixty-six dead men’s souls and sealed them up inside glass jars.

He had just slipped into the portrait hanging on the wall of the old root cellar, where he observed the new boy, the one with a long family history in this corner of Connecticut, as the boy discovered the secret marker.

It had to be a sign. An omen.

Zack had to be the one .

The one he had been seeking for more than a century. The one he had lured there with the buried voodoo charm.

The time was drawing nigh. Soon he would slip his soul into the boy’s body and use it to retrieve his treasure.

Of course the scrawny child would lose his soul in the exchange, exactly twenty-four hours after Pettimore’s soul shoved it out of the boy’s body.

But that did not matter.

Because Captain Horace P. Pettimore would live again!

49

“Hi, Mom!You remember Ms. DuBois?”

“Sure.”

Zack didn’t have time for much more than a quick pass off of Zipper through an open car window.

“I am so sorry about this,” Judy said to Ms. DuBois.

“I’m sure Zipper just missed Zack,” said Ms. DuBois. “No harm, no foul, as they say.”

“From now on, he doesn’t go outside without bodyguards.”

“Well, we best hurry back inside,” said Ms. DuBois. “If we’re not in the cafeteria for our lunch period, Mr. Crumpler might become suspicious.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Zack said.

Judy blew him a quick kiss. Zipper had his paws pressed against the edge of the window, a huge smile on his snout.

“You’re riding shotgun, pal.” Judy picked Zip up and placed him on the passenger seat. “In fact, you might want to lie low until we clear the school zone.”

Zipper seemed to understand. He hopped down to the floorboard, where he hunkered on the rubber mat, head tucked between paws in sneak-attack mode.

“See you after school, Zack!” Judy said as she pulled away.

“See you, Mom!”

“Love you!”

“Love you, too!”

The second bell rang.

“Come on, Zack,” said Ms. DuBois. “Back inside. So, where did you boys hide?”

Zack was just about to tell Ms. DuBois about the swiveling supply shelf in the janitor’s closet and the root cellar and the cool carved stone when he saw Mr. Willoughby walk through a door. Not a doorway, a door.

He was shaking his head and mouthing a single word over and over: “No!”

“Um, here and there. No place special.”

“Well,” said Ms. DuBois, “it worked!”

Yeah.

But apparently, Zack couldn’t tell any grown-ups about the root cellar, either!

50

Zack’s terribleday got even worse after school officially ended.

His final class was technology education with another really cool teacher, named Mr. Bill Green, who told them that starting the next day, they’d each be designing, engineering, and constructing a ping-pong catapult to do a trajectory-analysis project.

“That should be fun!” said Malik as he and Zack headed up the crowded corridor toward their lockers. Everywhere Zack looked, he (and no one else) saw guardian ghosts. Some were escorting their relatives up and down the hall. Others were hanging out inside open lockers. One was trying to get a drink from a water fountain but her palm kept passing through the on button.

Two, who looked like a mismatched set—one a lady in a bright green dress, the other a man in a funny bowler hat, both with bullet holes in the center of their heads—stood behind the newest janitor, who was working a push broom down the hall. The newly arrived ghosts were holding their noses and shouting stuff like “Stay away from this one!” and “He’s nothing but trouble!” to anyone who’d listen.

Zack, of course, was the only one who could listen, and frankly, he had enough to worry about without adding a new janitor to the mix, thank you very much.

The couple followed the janitor, blowing unheard raspberries at him as he swept the corridor clean.

Zack and Malik were headed the other way.

They pulled open a door and there was Azalea Torres, working her locker open on the wall outside Ms. DuBois’s classroom.

“Hey, you guys! I just had this awesome idea. It’s October already. Halloween’s coming. We should go on a cemetery crawl!”

“What’s that?” asked Zack.

“Well, you go to a graveyard and take rubbings off the headstones. Some of the inscriptions are wicked funny, like ‘Here lies the body of Jonathan Blake, Stepped on the gas instead of the brake.’”