Chris Grabenstein - The Hanging Hill

“Wait!” said Zack. “If you shoot Meghan, Moloch won’t get his live human sacrifice!”

“Give me that gun!” Grimes wrestled the revolver out of the muscleman’s hand. “The boy’s right! The ritual will only work if we exchange their lives for the lives of those down below.” He hurled the pistol into the fire pit under the grill.

The gunpowder inside the shells exploded like lethal popcorn. Zack heard five bullets ping against metal.

Good.

Meant they only had one gun now.

“Are you happy, little Miss Movie Star?” Grimes screamed. “Nobody’s going to shoot you. We’re just going to roast you alive like my father tried to roast me! Like he roasted my sister!”

A sixth bullet exploded.

That was when Zack heard metal start to screech.

Up near the top of the statue.

Near its mouth.

112

“This isn’t good,” said Judy, peering down at her stepson.

“Hold on,” said Kimble. “Steady.”

Zipper sank to his belly. Whined.

“Did that statue just move?” asked Mrs. McKenna.

Judy nodded. “This definitely isn’t good.”

113

A deafening squeal echoed off the walls. Metal twisting and turning against metal. The bull’s muzzle creaked open.

“Moloch has girls,” rumbled a voice deeper than a canyon at the bottom of the ocean.

Even Grimes seemed amazed.

The statue was talking.

“Have girls. Need boy.”

Grimes stepped forward. “You have girls?”

The bull’s head nodded once with a thunderous clatter.

“The child my grandfather sacrificed. Plus my sister?”

Another cacophony of clanking as the beast nodded again.

“So you only need the boy?”

Another earth-trembling nod. “Feed me the one called Zack. Need boy.”

With that, the bull became silent.

114

“I’m going down there!” said Mr. Kimble. He stood up, clutched the cable.

“I’m going with you,” said Meghan’s mom.

“Wait,” said Judy.

“Zack needs our help!” said Kimble.

“Well,” said Judy, as calmly as she could, “I think we might have a better shot at helping him from up here.”

With that, she handed each of them something from the wooden box.

“Wait till Zack gives us the signal!”

Zipper barked.

He wasn’t waiting. He took off running.

115

“Let Meghan go!” shouted Zack. “You don’t need her anymore.”

“No, Zack. I’m staying here with you.”

“Meghan, it isn’t safe.”

“Zack?”

“Get out of here!”

Grimes flung up his crippled arm. “You heard the boy! Go! Leave! My sister died so you might live!”

Meghan gave Zack a confused look.

He nodded toward the sliding steel doors. “My glasses have sports lenses.”

“What?”

“They’re like safety goggles. You’ll be better off behind those big steel doors. In case, you know, the sparks start flying when I hit the fire.”

Meghan nodded like she understood. She ran over to the open doors. Hid behind them.

“Where’s my grandfather?” Grimes spun around, stared at the floor. “Where’d he go?”

“He’s fading,” said Hakeem. “They are all fading. We must begin!”

Badir and Jamal stepped forward. Jamal raised his revolver. Aimed it at Zack’s head. “Say the words, boy!”

“And do not worry about climbing up,” added Badir. “We are going to throw you!”

Zack closed his eyes. Took in a deep breath. Shook out his fingers. Took in another breath.

“Mr. Jennings?” said Grimes. “Now!”

“I need to focus on the words.”

“Now!”

“Hey, Zack!” It was Derek. Behind him. Breathing heavy. “I’m back.”

It was showtime.

Zack stepped toward the statue.

“O, magnus Molochus!”

“Excellent!” said Grimes.

“Nos duo vitam nostram damus ut vos omnes qui hue arcessiti estis vivatis.”

“He memorized it so quickly! Go on, boy! Go on!”

Zack moved close enough to hear the brass statue creak and warble as its heated metal began to expand.

“Puer et puella …”

“Go on!” urged Grimes.

“Puri et fideles …”

“Pure and true, yes, yes!”

“Morimur …”

“You die!”

“Ut vos resuscitet.”

“That they may be resurrected! He said it. He said it all!”

The fire and Grimes roared and cackled.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Zack finally heard the sound he’d been hoping to hear: an annoying mosquito with a microphone. The nasal whine of Derek Stone’s tweaked-out monster truck flying across the floor.

Thwack!

That was the second sound Zack had hoped to hear: the remote-controlled truck slamming into Badir’s ankles like it had slammed into his!

Clunk!

Sound three. Badir dropping his gun.

Now Zack reached into his pockets and grabbed two fistfuls of fireworks.

He tossed them into the fire pit.

The Fourth of July started shooting out the bull’s nostrils and up through its chimney horns.

“I’ve got the gun!” screamed Derek.

“Heave it in the fire!”

Derek tossed the weapon into the blaze just as another sky rocket blasted off. This one streaked straight up, whistled into the exhaust hood, and screeched through the ductwork like a mortar shell until, Zack was certain, it exploded into a shower of cascading sparks right over the roof of the Hanging Hill Playhouse.

“I’m going upstairs to rescue my mom!” Derek shouted.

“Hurry!” said Zack.

As Derek ran out the doors, Grimes lurched toward Zack.

“You insolent child!” he howled.

Then Zack heard an even louder howl. A cat?

Now a bark! Zipper.

Grimes dropped to his knees, held open his arms. “Jinx?”

A hell cat the size of a beaver came charging out of the shadows with Zipper in hot pursuit. The giant cat looked ready to claw somebody’s eyes out.

It yowled, then leapt up at Grimes. Clung on to his head. The madman looked like he was wearing a fur face mask.

“Fire away!” Zack screamed to Judy. “Fire!”

Judy was a pretty good shot with the bottle rockets.

Mrs. McKenna, too.

But it was a good thing Meghan was hiding behind the blast doors. Some of the moms’ misguided missiles spiraled around the room like out-of-control comets.

Mr. Kimble? He had juggled knives when he was a kid.

He still had the stuff.

He nailed the screaming, cat-wrestling Grimes in the butt with a lumbo whistling starburst rocket. So on top of the wild caterwauling, Zack now heard tuxedo pants sizzling.

Next Kimble tagged Hakeem with a plastic-tipped missile in the side of his felt hat. Flaming embers spewed up and made it look like the poor guy was taking a sparkle shower underneath a rainbow-colored Niagara Falls.

Badir and Jamal ran out the doors.

Judy and Mrs. McKenna tossed down more rockets, the kinds that made starbursts and lots of siss-boom-bang noises up in the sky. Zack hurled them all into Moloch’s fire so his hollowed-out horns would keep shooting off distress signals like the big finale in a fireworks show.

Hey, if you couldn’t call the cops, sometimes it was a smart idea to send up a flare.

116

The crazed cat had vanished but Mr. Grimes’s face was a scratched and bloody mess. Zack guessed the full moon meant ghost claws were real for the night, too.

“Let me assist you, Exalted One.” Hakeem—his hat fried, his hair scorched—limped over to where Grimes teetered to his feet. “Do not despair. We shall try again, next August…”

Now Zack heard the whoosh he had heard last night in the elevator.