Suddenly, Doll Face ducked down and stepped over a low cinder block wall, through a very narrow opening that led into some sort of dank crawl space.
The air here was damp, thick with the scent of mildew. The floor was dirt, maybe mud. Zack, who wasn’t all that tall, had to walk hunched over to avoid scraping his head against the rough beams in the ceiling.
Doll Face leaned forward and floated.
“Are we still under the theater?” Zack asked. “I think I hear the river. Do you smell it?”
No answer.
Maybe ghosts couldn’t smell.
Zack had a funny feeling he had been led down here for a reason, and maybe not a particularly nice one. Maybe this ghost was the demon sent to slay the demon slayer.
“You know what? I think it’s time I headed back upstairs. My mom’s probably wondering where I am.”
Once more, Doll Face froze.
This time, however, she slowly raised her right arm and pointed at something on the ground directly in front of her.
Zack moved forward. The ghost’s stiff finger seemed to glow and illuminated a shadowy rectangle near her feet.
A steamer trunk.
An old-fashioned footlocker about four feet long with riveted ribbons along all its edges. Two hinged hasps flanked a lock that was already flipped up and open.
Aha! Doll Face had switched teams and was now working with Bartholomew Buckingham, whose spies had reported seeing two burly hooligans hiding a theatrical trunk.
Zack read what was stenciled in faded paint above the lock clasp: Professor Nicholas Nicodemus.
Suddenly, the crawl space went dark.
Doll Face had disappeared, taking her glowing light with her.
68
“Hello? Hello?”
Yep. Doll Face was definitely gone. Zack was alone. In the dark.
Never his favorite place to be.
It was where he saw her sometimes.
His dead mother.
She was gone and buried, but in the dark, when he was alone with nothing but his feelings of guilt, scary memories, and wild imagination, Zack sometimes heard her.
“You’re the reason I had to die! I had to get away from you!”
“It’s not true!” Zack yelled. His voice echoed off the low ceiling. “I. Did. Not. Kill. You!”
Finally. He had said it out loud. Okay, he had said it out loud in the dark in a crawl space but he had said it.
He did not kill his mother.
She caught cancer because she smoked too many cigarettes. She smoked too many cigarettes because she was miserable and sad, not because Zack was horrible and bad. She made her own choice. Zack did not make her make it.
Stumbling in the dark, Zack felt up and down the sides of the trunk until he found one of its leather handles and gave it a yank.
This was what Buckingham had wanted him to find.
Somehow, it would help him save Meghan, Derek, and Judy. That was what he was going to do. He wasn’t going to sit in the dark being afraid.
“So quit bugging me, okay?” he yelled at the blackness, hoping his real mother would get the message: He was absolutely, totally, and completely finished feeling guilty about doing something he hadn’t even done.
69
Zack dragged the steamer trunk out of the crawl space.
He bumped into a few support posts, tripped over a crusty pile of rubble, and fell backward into a mud puddle that left his butt feeling all kinds of squishy, but finally, he found the opening in the cinder block wall.
He heaved the antique case up and shoved it into the hallway.
More darkness.
Where was a glowing ghost when you needed one?
Zack pushed the trunk up the corridor, figuring it could bulldoze over anything blocking his path. He paused once to catch his breath and heard the skittering claws of what he hoped was just a rat.
Zack pushed faster and hoped he could outrace the rodent.
To the light up ahead!
It was faint and distant but it was, indeed, a light—glowing brightly just beyond the next brick archway.
70
Zack shoved the trunk into what looked like a costume storage room.
Rolling wardrobe racks jammed with clothes hanging in plastic bags ringed the floor. It looked sort of like a dry cleaning museum with a three-hundred-watt bulb burning in the ceiling.
And no rodents.
Zack saw a dressmaker’s mannequin wearing the Curiosity Cat suit being constructed for Tomasino Carrozza. It looked like a scarecrow standing guard.
Or, since it was a cat costume, a scare-rat.
Perfect.
Zack propped the steamer trunk up on its end, unsnapped the heavy clasps, and pushed open the lid. The trunk had a hanging rack on one side and a stack of drawers on the other. It was the sort of luggage people in history books packed when they sailed across the ocean.
Everything inside the trunk was musty. Zack riffled through the clothes. A black topcoat with tails, black woolen pants, a yellowing tuxedo shirt, and a shimmering black robe lined with red silk. He also found, hanging in a bag at the far end of the rod, a purple turban with an emerald green Egyptain beetle brooch pinned to its center.
“Cool.”
When he pulled out the turban to examine the jeweled scarab more closely, he saw a poster plastered to the back wall of the trunk: Professor Nicholas Nicodemus. World-Renowned Sorcerer and Necromancer!
Underneath the headline was an illustration depicting a snooty-looking man in topcoat and tails. His lacquered black hair glistened under the turban, and his arms were folded across his chest. He was wearing the costume inside the trunk!
Zack turned to the stack of drawers on the right and pulled open the biggest one, the one on the bottom.
It was filled with tubes of paper.
He pulled one out, unrolled it. It was a poster showing Professor Nicodemus staring at a human skull with hazy smoke swirling up out of its eye sockets. The curling wisps carried ghostly visions of floating dead people. Little red devils sat perched on the magician’s shoulders, assisting him as, apparently, he summoned dead souls up from the underworld to join him onstage.
Must’ve been some act.
Zack pulled another poster out of the bottom drawer. This one was printed on rough paper the color of a grocery sack and filled with shouting type.
COMING!
PROFESSOR NICHOLAS NICODEMUS
THE WORLD-RENOWNED SORCERER AND NECROMANCER APPEARING IN
“DO THE SPIRITS COME BACK?”
ORIGINAL AND MORE MARVELOUS ILLUSIONS
THAN EVER PERFORMED BY
THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS, THE MYSTICAL PHOENICIANS,
OR THE NECROMANCERS OF INDIA
• • • • •
SEE THE DEAD RISE FROM THEIR TOMBS!
• • • • •
GAZE IN AWE AS SPIRITS SOAR
ACROSS THE STAGE AT HIS COMMAND!
• • • • •
SPEAK TO YOUR DECEASED FAMILY AND FRIENDS
AS PROFESSOR NICODEMUS
UNLEASHES THE FULL POWERS OF RESURRECTION!
At the bottom of the broadside, just under the prices and performance times, was printed the name of the theater where Professor Nicodemus was to appear.
JULY & AUGUST, 1939