The Hanging Hill

by Chris Grabenstein

  ALSO BY CHRIS GRABENSTEIN

  The Crossroads

  for Erick Tavira, Charlene floyd,

  and all the other students and tutors at

  Homework Help

  1

  There’s this thing about ghosts: Once you’ve seen one, you can basically see them all.

  At least the ones that want to be seen.

  At the age of eleven, Zack Jennings was learning the rules of the spirit world pretty quickly. He’d only seen his first real-live (make that “real-dead”) spook maybe a month or two ago. Now they seemed to be everywhere. When he went to summer camp in the middle of July, he met the boy who’d drowned in the lake.

  Back in 1973.

  When he hung out at the library, he occasionally saw this pudgy woman reading over people’s shoulders because she couldn’t flip the pages herself anymore, what with being dead and all.

  His mother had always claimed that Zack had a hyperactive imagination, but even he couldn’t make this stuff up. The ghosts he saw were as real as electricity, wind, and gravity—things nobody could see but everybody knew were there.

  Some called being a Ghost Seer a gift. Well, if it was, Zack figured it was like getting a paisley-and-plaid sweater for Christmas when what you really wanted was an iPod. Seven weeks after learning he could see spirits, Zack was already tired of being special.

  Being special could wear a guy out.

  On the first Saturday of August, as he stepped into the brightly lit breakfast room of the Marriott extended-stay hotel near North Chester, Connecticut, it happened once again: He saw an apparition lurking near a small table in the far corner of the room.

  Zack could tell: This one was a demon.

  Zack and his family—his dad, his new stepmom, and his dog—were currently residing at the hotel because their house had burned down when Zack had battled the evil spirit haunting the crossroads nearby. The fire had been Zack’s fault, and his allowance would be docked for the damages until he turned twenty-one. After that, Zack’s dad would probably do payroll deductions. And now, here Zack was, less than twenty feet away from yet another fiend, who probably wanted to destroy some other part of Zack’s life when all Zack wanted to do was grab a bowl of cereal and maybe a banana from the breakfast buffet.

  Zack had come down to the lobby on his own.

  His dad, who didn’t believe in ghosts anyway, had gone into New York City for weekend work at his office.

  His stepmom, Judy, an author, was upstairs, busily working on last-minute rewrites to Curiosity Cat, a new musical, based on her children’s books, that was about to have its world premiere at a theater called the Hanging Hill Playhouse.

  His trusty dog, Zipper, was also upstairs—snoozing between the cushions of a very comfy hotel couch.

  There were other people in the breakfast room, the same ones Zack saw most mornings: Divorced Guy, Moving Family, Vacationing Family, Businessman, Other Divorced Guy.

  The ghost was new.

  Zack could tell that the man sitting at the table in the far corner of the breakfast room was a ghost because he was wearing old-fashioned clothes—the kind convicts in chain gangs sometimes wore in the movies. Old movies.

  The ghost was, or had been, a hulking giant with a serious scowl carved into his watermelon-sized head. He wore a denim prison jumpsuit, loosely laced work boots, and a tin hat that looked like an upside-down spaghetti strainer with electrical cables clamped to battery posts where its legs should have been.

  He’d shown up sitting in his own chair: a colossal throne made out of thick planks of rough-hewn lumber. Wide, double-holed leather belts were buckled tight across his chest, arms, and legs.

  Zack suddenly realized the guy was strapped into an electric chair, the thing they used fifty years ago to execute hard-core criminals on death row in the state penitentiary.

  The giant caught Zack staring.

  “Pssst! Hey, kid!”

  Zack pretended not to see or hear the man.

  “I know you can see and hear me, kid.”

  So much for pretending.

  “Come here. Undo these belt buckles!”

  Slowly, very slowly, Zack turned his back on the ghost so he could face the breakfast buffet and make like he was picking out a banana. Behind him, he heard the sizzling sputter of sparks. He smelled ozone, like when an electrical outlet short-circuits and scorches the toaster plug. Zack whipped around just in time to see the last zig of a lightning bolt zap and zizz off the big guy’s metal cap. Smoke wafted up from his razored scalp.

  “Where’s the bank?” the man in the chair demanded.

  Zack didn’t answer.

  “Used to be a bank right here. Connecticut Building and Loan. Biggest heist of my career.” Watermelon Head grinned. His teeth were the color of coffee beans. “Happiest day of my life, kid. Good times.”

  Zack glanced guardedly around the room. Nobody else could see or hear the ghost reminiscing about his bygone days of glory.

  “Come on! Undo these straps!”

  Now one of the kids in the Moving Family, a girl about six, was gawking at Zack like he was nuts. He didn’t blame her. He probably looked pretty crazy: frozen in place, staring across the room at an empty table, mouth hanging open.

  “Be a pal, kid! I’ve been stuck in this chair since 1959.”

  Zack didn’t budge.

  “You deaf? I said turn me loose!”

  Zack stayed where he was.

  “Oh, I get it,” the trapped beast snarled. “Some kind of tough guy, hunh?”

  Zack shook his head and slid his black-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. He was sort of short and kind of skinny and really didn’t look all that tough, even when he took off the glasses.

  “Do you know who I am, kid?”

  Again, Zack shook his head while the girl, the normal kid, kept gawking at him.

  “Folks called me Mad Dog Murphy on account of the fact that I went bonkers here at the bank. Killed six people. Two of ’em kids! So shake a leg and unbuckle these straps! You think I want to spend eternity sitting on my keester on top of Old Sparky?”

  Now a second ghost materialized directly across the table from the angry giant lashed into his sizzle seat. A woman. Zack couldn’t see her face, just the back of her curly hair.

  “Doll face!” Mad Dog Murphy said with a sinister smile. “What’re you doin’ here?”

  The woman didn’t say a word.

  “What? Forget it, sister! I ain’t leaving the kid alone!”

  The woman raised both arms and the two ghosts began to disappear slowly. As they faded away, Zack heard Mad Dog Murphy’s voice echoing off the walls in some kind of tunnel: “I’ll be back, kid! You’ll see! I’m comin’ back to get you, Zack Jennings!”

  All of a sudden, Zack didn’t feel so hungry. How did this ghost know his name? None of the others ever did.

  He decided maybe he’d skip breakfast, go back to the room, pack his suitcase.

  “Are you okay?” asked the girl who had been staring at him.

  “Yeah.”

  Now her mother was staring at him, too. “Are you sure?” the mother asked. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  2

  Reginald Grimes sat alone in the kitchen of his sparsely furnished apartment, sipping a mug of bitter tepid coffee and flipping through the pages of his dog-eared script for Curiosity Cat.

  Grimes was the artistic director of the Hanging Hill Playhouse. Had been for years. He was famous for his magnificently mounted musicals. Infamous for his rants against anyone who didn’t work as tirelessly as he thought they should.

  “Cut this,” he muttered, scratching a red line through a sentence. “This, too.” Another red line. “Fix this.” A looping red circle.r />
  Rehearsals for the new musical would start first thing tomorrow morning. The author, Judy Magruder Jennings, would be arriving at the theater tonight.

  She’d have work to do.

  The show was good as written. Nearly great.

  But it would be absolutely perfect when Grimes had finished working his theatrical magic.

  He flipped forward through the pages and came to a scene in the second act. Curiosity Cat had gone missing. The two children who love him—a boy and a girl—are out in the dark alleys of a scary city, searching for their beloved pet. They fear he might be hurt or trapped.

  Or worse.

  Grimes read the lyrics to the children’s emotional duet: We’ll never find another cat like that.

  “Just like Jinx,” he muttered, remembering the sleek gray cat with the amber eyes who used to howl out in the alley just below his bedroom window when he was a child living in that horribly dark, dank place.

  The Saint Ignatius Home for Boys.

  The orphanage.

  Grimes would sometimes sneak food from the cafeteria and smuggle it back to his room for Jinx. Perhaps a pinch of tuna fish, if there was any to be found in the nauseatingly crusted-over noodle casserole so often served for supper. Maybe an almost-empty carton of milk retrieved from the big rubber barrel where the boys dumped the scraps and trash from their trays.

  He’d slink with his treasure back to his bedchamber, wait for the other boys to fall asleep, then creep over to the window, pry it open, and place Jinx’s dinner outside on its filthy sill. Grimes would even try to fashion the waxy box into something resembling a bowl—even though this was extremely difficult, given his unusual deformity. Then he’d lie on his bed, the one nearest the window, and sleep with one eye open, waiting for Jinx to spring up to the ledge, tightrope-walk over to the milk, and lap up his feast, which, of course, he always did.

  Until the day he didn’t.

  The last carton of milk stayed outside the window for two full weeks. The sun soured it. Maggots writhed in the curdling slime. Still, Grimes would not remove the milk—hoping against hope that Jinx would return, knowing the cat would be ravenously famished, and therefore not very finicky, when it did.

  Soon the rancid milk began to smell. The nuns who ran Saint Ignatius scoured the building, searching for the source of the foul odor, and found it perched outside the window near young Reginald Grimes’s bed.

  “It was for my friend, Jinx the cat,” he told them after a prolonged interrogation. “I was attempting to feed the hungry.”

  Grimes hoped the nuns might forgive him, perhaps even praise him. After all, wasn’t that what the Bible said to do, feed the hungry?

  “Young man,” Sister Beatrice, the sternest of the stern lot, had snapped at him, “that commandment does not apply to stray dogs, pigeons, or alley cats!”

  Grimes was severely punished. For stealing food. For endangering the health and hygiene of everyone in the building. For misinterpreting Scripture.

  Grimes pushed the Curiosity Cat script aside.

  “Bah!” he said, rubbing his watery eyes. “Silly, emotional sap. Going all weepy for a flea-infested feline?” He tsked and sounded just like Sister Beatrice.

  Good.

  He didn’t have time for silly saccharine-soaked sentimentality.

  There was a new show to put on.

  He needed to: Concentrate. On. His. Work.

  Still. That song. It haunted him.

  We’ll never find another cat like that.

  It had been thirty-five years since he had last seen Jinx. The cat had been dead for three decades and more.

  Still.

  Reginald Grimes wished he could see Jinx again.

  Wished he could hear his throaty, contented purr.

  He wished he could bring that yellow-eyed cat back from the dead, because it might be nice to have at least one friend.

  There was a noise at the window over the kitchen sink.

  A low rumble.

  A purr?

  “Meow.”

  For an instant, maybe half an instant, Reginald Grimes saw his childhood companion. Sleek and gray. Glowing amber eyes. Jinx was perched right outside his kitchen window!

  Claws out, Jinx hissed and swatted at the glass.

  And then, before Grimes was even certain what he had seen, the cat was once again gone.

  3

  “Sorry we’re so behind schedule,” said Zack’s step-mom, Judy.

  “That’s okay,” said Zack. He was just glad no ghosts had shown up in the hotel suite to help them pack their bags for the three-week trip to Chatham. It was almost seven p.m. and getting dark outside. He dumped an armload of socks into his open suitcase. All the fuzzy balls were mismatched: red socks with blue, white with sort-of-white, ankle-striped athletic with ankle-logo sport.

  “What’s up with the socks?” Judy asked.

  “I think I lost some in the laundry room.”

  “Maybe the sock gremlins got ’em!”

  Zack, not really in the mood to joke about supernatural stuff, faked a pretty good chuckle anyhow.

  Judy’s big brown eyes lit up with a fanciful idea. She got a lot of them. In fact, she got more than anyone Zack had ever met except maybe himself. “You know, Zack, this hotel is brand-new,” Judy said in her hushed storyteller voice. “So, maybe … just maybe … they built it on top of a fairy kingdom where all the wee people slumber inside stolen socks instead of sleeping bags!”

  Zack played along—even though he knew there used to be a bank on this plot of ground, not a fairy kingdom. He Googled it. Mad Dog Murphy had, indeed, robbed the North Chester branch of the Connecticut Building and Loan back on August 3, 1959—the happiest day of his life.

  “Of course,” said Judy, “there might be a more logical explanation.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, they are socks, Zack. They could’ve grown feet and walked away.”

  “True,” said Zack.

  “They could’ve run away and joined a sock puppet circus.”

  Now Zack laughed for real. Judy was the only adult he knew with an imagination even crazier than his. It was probably why she was a writer. And why they got along so well.

  “Maybe it was another ghost,” suggested Zack, testing the waters. “A sock-lifter spirit.”

  Judy closed her suitcase. Studied his face. “Have you seen something, hon?”

  “Nah,” he lied. “Not, you know, recently. I’m just goofing around.”

  “You can tell me if you do.”

  “Okay.”

  “No matter what. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah.” He smiled, so she did, too. Zack knew he could talk to Judy about ghosts and gremlins and sock-swiping nymphs, because they both understood that the supernatural world was very, very real. In fact, they had spent some quality time there together. However, Zack didn’t think this was such a hot time to let Judy know that one of Connecticut’s most notorious criminals had shown up downstairs just in time for the breakfast buffet.

  She had enough to worry about. Curiosity Cat was the first show Judy Magruder had ever written, and since it was about to be produced, live onstage, at one of the biggest, most famous summer stock theaters in all of America, she was, well, to put it mildly, freaking out!

  Therefore, Mr. Mad Dog Murphy and his traveling companions, Old Sparky (according to the Internet, that was what people had called Connecticut’s electric chair) and the curly-haired lady he called Doll Face, would remain Zack’s secret.

  Besides, they were about to get into a car and drive far, far away. Murphy, his chair, and his ghostly girlfriend would soon be nothing more than a distant memory, a bad dream forgotten just like the dragon-sized bee who’d been chasing you with an earsplitting buzz that was really your alarm clock telling you it was time to wake up.

  “Hey! Easy, boy!”

  Zipper, Zack’s feisty little Jack Russell terrier, hopped up on the bed and started nuzzling his muzzle inside the sui
tcase, rooting around in the crannies between stacks of Zack’s clothes.

  “You sure those socks are clean?” Judy asked, cocking a quizzical eyebrow.

  “Yep. Completely stink free.”

  Zipper kept digging, pawing a tunnel between some T-shirts and jeans.

  “Did you pack any dog treats?” Judy asked with a laugh. “Peanut butter biscuits? Liver snaps? Bones?”

  “Nope. Just this ball!” Zack dug out Zipper’s favorite toy: a spongy ball with half its outside color chipped off. “Go get it, Zip!”

  He tossed the ball across the hotel room. The dog leapt off the bed and flew after it. Zack saw his chance and slammed his suitcase shut.

  It was time to hit the road.

  They had a show to put on.

  4

  At seven-thirty p.m., Kelly Fagan was sitting in front of her makeup mirror in a dressing room backstage at the Hanging Hill Playhouse, getting ready for the Saturday-evening performance of Bats in Her Belfry, a Broadway musical from the 1950s about Dracula and the women who loved him.

  The summer stock revival was a smash hit—just like all of Reginald Grimes’s productions at the Hanging Hill.

  The man was a genius. Dark, brooding, mysterious.

  Kelly couldn’t wait to introduce her famous director to her parents, who had driven all the way from Canton, Ohio, to Chatham, Connecticut, just to see her sing and dance in her first big show. She was one of the dancing bats. All the chorus girls were bats. The guys were werewolves.

  She leaned in closer to the mirror. Becoming a bat involved applying a great deal of black and red greasepaint to her face, especially around the eyes.

  She dabbed on a dollop of makeup and felt a chill tingle down her spine.

  Goose bumps sprouted on both arms.

  The pretty face smiling back at her from the mirror wasn’t her own.

  Kelly gasped.

  The face disappeared.

  “Everything okay, Kelly?”

  It was Vickie, another chorus girl, who had just stepped into the dressing room.

  “Yeah.”

  Vickie was carrying an old record album.