A dozen twists and turns later, Malik had taken the black stone heart completely apart and freed the tiny coal-black heart trapped at its core.
“Well done, puzzle geek,” said Azalea playfully.
“Why, thank you,” said Malik. “Hey, Zack, do you think your aunt Ginny would mind if I shared this with a friend, a fellow puzzle aficionado?”
“You mean a fellow geek,” said Azalea.
Zack shrugged. “Sure. Why not? I mean, she has so much junk in this trunk, I don’t think she’ll miss one puzzle.”
The three friends continued laughing and digging through Aunt Ginny’s treasure chest.
Which was why none of them heard the low rumble of thunder from somewhere not too far up the road.
The dog that men called the Black Shuck had been sent to guard the Haddam Hill Cemetery, to protect the goodly souls buried there from the graveyard’s foulest residents.
It perked up its ears, not liking what it heard.
The click of a lock being opened.
A spell being broken.
The dog scurried around to the front of the Ickleby crypt.
The black heart lock was still there, clamped tight through the hasp on the door.
But the dog smelled something foul.
The pent-up evil of thirteen villainous souls seeping out through the crypt’s mildewed stone walls.
The seal had been shattered.
The souls of the Icklebys had, somehow, been set free.
Zack was having another very bad dream.
He figured it was because he was sleeping in the basement on a flimsy foldout sofa bed with a metal bar digging into his spine.
Or maybe because of the ice cream sundaes he and Aunt Ginny had whipped up in the kitchen after Malik and Azalea had gone home: Moose Tracks and peppermint ice cream topped with fudge sauce, raw cookie dough (squeezed straight from the tube), a gob of peanut butter, whipped cream, and maraschino cherries. Plus sprinkles.
Yeah. That’d give a guy nightmares.
In the dream, things kept turning into other things. First Zack and Zipper were floating downstream in a big and bouncy bra boat. They each had their own foamy bucket seat lined with frilly lace. But then the bra boat became a double-barrel slingshot, which Zack’s pal Davy, who popped in to say, “Howdy, pardner,” used to make trick shots behind his back, one of which took out a window on Main Street, which was when Grandpa Jim, in his sheriff’s uniform, showed up.
“Zack?” said Grandpa Jim. “Are you awake, champ?”
Zack pried open an eye.
Grandpa Jim was sitting in the battered recliner where Azalea had sat earlier, a chair Zack’s dad had inherited when Grandpa Jim passed away.
“Don’t worry, champ. I’ll be keeping an eye on things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Anything. Everything.”
“What exactly are you talking about, Grandpa?”
“Can’t say.”
“Because of the rules?” Grandpa Jim nodded.
From the other ghosts he’d met, Zack had learned that there were very strict rules governing what ghosts could do or say to help people on the other side of the dirt, and since Grandpa Jim had been the top cop in North Chester when he was alive, he was all about playing by the rules.
“Are you here to protect me from evil spirits?”
Grandpa Jim gave Zack a worried smile that told Zack that, yep, that was exactly why he had popped in so close to Halloween.
“That’s why your sisters are here, too,” said Zack. “All of them. Ginny, Sophie, and Hannah.”
“I know.”
“They’re upstairs if you want to say hello.”
“Already did.”
“Are you here to protect them, too?”
“Those three don’t need me, Zack. Go back to sleep, champ. There’s nothing for you to do. Not tonight, anyway.”
“Tomorrow’s Halloween. Is that when the trouble starts?”
“Can’t say.”
“Because they won’t let you?”
“Because I don’t know what tomorrow might bring. Nobody does.”
“Okay. So what am I supposed to do?”
“Same thing I told you to do that time I took you fishing up at Coulter’s Pond.”
Coulter’s Pond was a lake where everybody said Battling Bob, this bigmouthed bass the size of a whale, lurked just below the surface, waiting to yank unsuspecting fishermen out of their boats.
“Um, you told me to sit down because I was rocking the boat?”
“And after that?”
“You said I should hold on to my fishing rod real tight, just in case Battling Bob was itching for a fight.”
“That’s right, Zack. Be ready and hang on tight.”
And with that, Grandpa Jim Jennings disappeared into the cushions of his favorite chair.
A half mile up the road, thirteen devilish souls swarmed together outside the buttressed stone walls of the Ickleby family crypt, savoring their newfound freedom.
“The foul curse is finally broken!” proclaimed Barnabas.
“Hang on, Pops,” said Eddie Boy Ickleby, the murdering thief who had died in 1979. His shaggy hair was cut into a mullet—short in the front and on the sides, long in the back. “The black heart lock is still clamped tight to the door, man.”
“It was never the lock that held us prisoner,” said Barnabas. “It was something much stronger.” His mask—a jack-o’-lantern pattern cut into a coarse burlap sack—was cinched around his neck with a frayed rope as thick as any hangman’s noose.
“What’re you bumping your gums about?” demanded the 1930s gangster ghost, Crazy Izzy Ickleby.
“The sinister spell of the three detestable Jennings sisters,” said Barnabas. “They were the ones who sealed our souls inside this wretched tomb with their cursed incantations.”
The spirits now circled around Barnabas were his direct descendants: Silas Ickleby, in his powdered wig; Webley Ickleby, the most notorious mass murderer of the 1820s; Pie-Eyes Ickleby, who had rushed to California in 1849, not to mine for gold but to steal it from those who did; Little Paulie Ickleby, who, with Mad Dog Murphy, had robbed banks during the 1950s.
“Do you suppose those three sisters might lock us up once again?” This came from Hornus Ickleby, a scallywag who, like so many of these thirteen Icklebys, had met his death at the noosed end of a rope.
“Rest easy, gentlemen,” hissed Barnabas. “We simply need to seize the black heart stone before the Jennings sisters reassemble it and repeat their abominable spell!”
“Seize it?” snarled Cornelius Ickleby, an embezzler who, in the late 1800s, had devised clever Wall Street swindles. He was crouched near a fallen branch. “Look here—I cannot even seize this twig lying before me on the ground. My hands pass clean through it.”
“You idle-headed, inky-fingered clerk,” sneered Barnabas. “As ghosts, we can do little. To thrive, we must find a living, breathing body!”
“Say what, Old Scratch?” said Bad Bart Ickleby, a riverboat gambler who had died with five aces up his sleeve.
“He’s right, man,” said Eddie Boy. “We gotta find us a new body.”
“How we gonna do that, huh, huh?” demanded Crazy Izzy.
Barnabas smirked beneath his mask. “Do not worry, children. A fresh body will come to us when the veil between our world and theirs is at its thinnest.”
“And when exactly is that?”
“Today!” croaked Barnabas. “Halloween.”
Halloween fell on a Monday, so at two-thirty in the afternoon, Zack was still at school.
“The same middle school where his father used to chat with the dead crossing guard,” said Ginny. “The same school where Zack recently ran into the ghost of Horace P. Pettimore.”