Chris Grabenstein: The Smoky Corridor

The car blasted off.

Flew across the roadway.

Smashed into the wall.

Exploded.

Eddie’s cell phone rang. He snapped it open.

“How may I be of assistance?”

It was the boss.

“Yes. Mr. Johnson just had his accident. Terrible tragedy. Where? Very well. I am on my way.”

He snapped the clamshell shut.

Eddie now had to drive to a small town called Lily Dale, New York, where, apparently, all the citizens were spiritualists, clairvoyants, or psychics.

He was to pick up a medium named Madame Marie, whom the boss had recently hired in case Mr. Timothy Johnson failed to find what they were searching for.

Eddie grinned.

If Madame Marie could not help them, he would need to locate another stone wall for her to have an accident with.

10

Zack foundhis dad in the auditorium shaking hands and laughing with old friends.

“Where’d you run off to?” his dad asked.

“Bathroom.”

“Any trouble finding it?”

“A little.”

Zack’s dad smiled. “Don’t worry. It just takes a day or two to get used to the place.”

Then Zack’s father gave him a guided tour of the school. “This is the gym. We’ll follow this breezeway around to a bunch of interconnected classroom corridors. Right before we reach the wood shop, we’ll take the exit door on the left, and that’ll put us in the cafeteria, which is connected to the old Pettimore mansion—the main entrance hall.”

They were basically following the same route Zack had taken earlier, so they ended up visiting Ms. DuBois’s classroom, where Zack’s dad had a cupcake with sprinkles and chatted with the teacher about what sort of history the sixth grade would be studying.

Meanwhile, Zack stared up at a framed print of the Horace Pettimore oil painting he had seen hanging in the main lobby. It was displayed on the wall above the chalkboard, between prints of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

Fortunately, none of the famous men’s eyes were staring down at Zack.

Zack wandered over to join his dad and Ms. DuBois, who looked like a model from a magazine, with golden hair shimmering down to her shoulders.

“I’m a little nervous,” she said to Zack’s dad, who was finishing up his cupcake. “This is my first year at Pettimore.”

“I’m sure you’ll do just fine.”

“Thank you, Mr. Jennings. I’m certainly going to try.”

“Well, we’d better take off. My wife is coming home tonight.”

“Where has she been?”

“Over in Chatham. The Hanging Hill Playhouse just concluded their world premiere run of a musical based on her books.”

“It’s called Curiosity Cat,” added Zack. “It might be on Broadway next!”

“Really?” gushed Ms. DuBois. “How wonderful.”

“Well, it’s not official,” said Zack’s dad. “Not yet. But there has been some very serious interest in moving the show down to New York.”

He and Zack were both so proud of Judy Magruder Jennings they couldn’t help bragging about her every now and then.

• • •

They were cruising down Highway 31 on their way home.

Zack’s dad sighed. “Nice being back in the old building. You know, Grandpa Jim went to Pettimore when he was your age.”

“Uh-huh.”

“His father, too.”

“Huh.”

“Yep. There’s a lot of ghosts walking around inside those walls.”

“Ghosts?”

“You know—memories, history. Of course, when I was your age, the older kids tried to spook us, telling us stories about a crazy ghost called Scary Arie.”

“Who was he?”

Zack’s dad hesitated. “Nobody, really. Just a story somebody made up about a crossing guard who died saving a boy who almost got run over by a turnip truck. The truck killed Arie. Now he wanders around those twisty halls at night, looking for someone else to save. Then, of course, there’s the tunnel to hell.”

“The what?”

“That’s what my buddy Stuart Seiden always called it. You’ll see. In the winter, there’s this weird strip of grass where the snow always melts. It’s about six feet wide and runs from the back of the old Pettimore house all the way out to the gym.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Why doesn’t Mr. Crumpler like you?”

“The assistant principal?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t really remember.…”

“He does.”

“Oh, he does, does he?”

“Yeah. He says he’s gonna keep his eye on me. I think because of something you must’ve done.”

“You met Mr. Crumpler tonight?”

Zack nodded. “When I was looking for the bathroom.”

“He’s been assistant principal at Pettimore for close to forty years.”

“Wow. How come he never became principal?”

“I think he likes yelling at kids too much.”

“So why did he yell at you?”

Zack’s dad scrunched up his face. “It had something to do with Stinky.”

“Who?”

“That’s what we called Stuart Seiden.”

“Oh.”

“Okay. I remember: Mr. Crumpler accused Stinky of stealing milk cartons from the cafeteria. A whole crate of chocolate milk. So I told Stinky I’d defend him and dug up evidence that proved he was innocent.”

“Cool. Your first lawyer job.”

Zack’s dad chuckled. “Yeah.”

“So, Dad … do you believe in ghosts and tunnels to hell and stuff?”

Again his father hesitated. “No. Not really. They’re just, you know, stories. That’s all.”

Right. Zack would have to tell that to the Donnelly brothers the next time he bumped into them in the smoky corridor.

11

They droveup Stonebriar Road to their brand-new (and recently repaired) Victorian-style house.

Their home had been seriously damaged the past June in a horrible fire. A fire started by Zack when he’d tried to get rid of the ghost haunting a tree in the backyard.

His father had never seen that ghost and probably wouldn’t have believed in it, either.

Fortunately, his stepmother, Judy, had.

Unfortunately, Zack couldn’t take his stepmom to school with him every day to help him deal with the Donnelly brothers, not to mention Assistant Principal Crumpler and whatever bullies were hanging out in the halls of Horace P. Pettimore Middle School, just waiting for a skinny kid with glasses to show up.

Yep, starting the next day, from early in the morning till late in the afternoon, from the first week of September till the middle of June, Zack Jennings would have to take care of himself.

12

The ghostof Captain Horace P. Pettimore stood over his slumbering zombie in the cavernous dining hall Pettimore had designed and had built underneath the cemetery.

“Wake,” he whispered to his mindless slave. “Someone has breached the barrier. They’ve blasted a cannonball hole through the root cellar wall. You must stand guard. You must protect my treasure from intruders!”

The skeleton-thin zombie stirred. Opened his dull, glazed eyes.

He had been hibernating for more than two decades.

He would be hungry.

No matter. A fresh corpse had been buried in the graveyard just that morning. All the zombie needed to do was sniff it out and tear away the dirt underneath the coffin, and it would tumble down into this subterranean chamber, where the ghoulish beast could rip open the box and feast upon the rotting flesh inside.

The ghost of Horace Pettimore studied the zombie’s vacant face, vaguely remembering when the creature was a man named Cyrus McNulty, a Union army soldier who had died April 9, 1864, at the battle of Deadman’s Knob in Louisiana.

A few years before that fateful battle, during the Yankee blockade of New Orleans, Captain Pettimore had first learned of voodoo, a mystical religion brought to Haiti and the American South on slave ships from Africa.