The Hanging Hill

by Chris Grabenstein

  Kimble sprang for the door. Tried to slide his key into the lock. His hands were trembling.

  “Drop it!” Mad Dog’s fetid breath came at Kimble like a gust of wind blasting up from a sewer grate. It blew out the flickering candle.

  That startled Kimble, made him flinch, made him drop his key.

  He heard it clink against something metal, then rattle and clank its way down a pipe.

  He had dropped the key into a floor drain. He was trapped inside an unlit closet.

  “Give it up, old-timer,” said the man in the chair as bursts of blindingly white light flared up from his metal skullcap. “You can’t talk to Clara! Not now, not never again!” Another laugh. More stench. “What’s that old saying? When one door closes, another door opens? Too bad it ain’t gonna be that closet door. It’s gonna be ours! The doorway of the damned is all set to swing wide open, pops! Tomorrow night! Tomorrow night!”

  44

  Zack found his room key and opened the door.

  “I heard something fall over here,” said Judy. “A crash.”

  “Yep.” Zack pointed to the shards of shattered glass near his chest of drawers. “I packed a picture. Guess it must’ve fallen off the dresser.”

  Judy bent down and picked up the photograph underneath the sheet of splintered glass. It was a snapshot of the new Jennings family: Judy, George, Zack, and Zipper.

  “Well,” said Judy, “the photograph isn’t damaged. We can always buy a new frame.”

  “Wonder how come it fell.”

  “Me too,” said Judy, standing up. “Did you put it near the edge?”

  “Nope. I put it on top, right there in the middle.”

  “And the window’s closed, so a breeze didn’t knock it over.”

  “Judy?”

  “Yes, Zack?”

  “I think we might have ghosts again.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I saw some stuff downstairs in the basement.”

  “You went where the janitor told you not to?”

  “Sorry.”

  Judy smiled. “I would’ve done the same thing.”

  “Meghan McKenna told me every theater she’s ever worked in was haunted. Probably because there’s so many emotions stirred up inside ’em. Plus, you know actors. If they have a good part, they never want to leave the stage.”

  “Meghan might be right. I just saw a very strange lady walking down the hall. Actually, it looked like she was gliding down the hall.”

  “You know, Mom, you’re one of the few adults who can see ghosts during the day.”

  “Lucky me. I think she may have come in here, even though both doors were locked.”

  “Probably oozed her way in.”

  “Then she walked out—right through the wall.”

  “Was she juggling?” Zack asked.

  “No. No juggling. Just, you know, silently drifting.”

  “One of the ghosts Meghan and I met juggles.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Mostly in the stairwell.”

  “I see.”

  “Another one is a Pilgrim. He hangs himself. Then there’s the actress who comes onstage for her standing ovation, and the Shakespearean actor with the sword, and the sad Indian girl…”

  “You and Meghan McKenna have seen that many ghosts?”

  “Well, she hasn’t seen the Pilgrim guy or the actress taking her bows.”

  “But Meghan sees ghosts? Like we do?”

  “Yep. But Derek doesn’t.”

  They finished picking up the broken glass and tossed the pieces into a wicker trash basket.

  “So, do you think it was a ghost lady who knocked the picture frame off the dresser?”

  “I don’t know, Zack. The ghosts back in North Chester couldn’t really do anything, remember?”

  “True. But I’ve read that if they concentrate all their energy, if they get, let’s say, really mad or incredibly sad, they can rattle chains and push stuff around.”

  “You’ve been reading books about ghosts?”

  “Sure. After that night in the crossroads, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah. About a dozen. Everything the library had.” Judy stared at the door. “Wow. I wonder who she was.”

  “Just another actress who never heard her cue to exit. So, you hungry?”

  “Starving.”

  “I told Meghan that we might join her and her mother across the street at the diner.”

  “Great.” Judy remembered something else from back at the crossroads. “Your new friend Meghan’s not a ghost, is she?”

  “Nah. I saw her eat a hunk out of a doughnut this morning.”

  “Good.”

  45

  He hears the ancient command: Ego sum te peto et videre queo.

  “I seek you and demand to see you.”

  He hears his name being called.

  “I seek you, Michael Butler, and demand to see you.”

  He zooms up through the gloom. Races toward the light.

  He sees the new necromancer. Faintly. Dimly. As if he were looking at the man through a gauzy veil.

  “You will find me to be a stern but benevolent master, Mr. Butler!” the sorcerer declares. “You may remain in this realm until four a.m. Then you must return below and await further instructions! Do you understand?”

  He nods.

  “Excellent!” the new master decrees. “Soon I will send you out to do my bidding!”

  Fascinating.

  Maybe this new necromancer intends to give him back his body.

  Maybe this time he will be fully restored to life.

  Maybe he will once again be able to do all the things he used to do!

  Maybe he will be able to kill again.

  46

  Judy and Zack sat with Meghan and her mother at a diner table with chrome legs and a speckled top.

  “You’re Meghan McKenna!” said a fan about thirteen years old, trembling near their table, flapping a napkin and a pen.

  Meghan smiled. “Hi. Would you like an autograph?”

  “Yes! Ohmigoodness!” The fan had just recognized Judy, too. “You’re Judy Magruder! I’ve read all your books!”

  Judy’s turn to smile. “Do you have another napkin?”

  “Here,” said Mrs. McKenna. “You can use mine. No body ever asks for the mother’s autograph.”

  “Or the stepson’s,” said Zack.

  “Guess we’re just not very interesting, hunh?”

  “True. But we do get to eat first!”

  After Judy had signed about a dozen napkins (to Meghan’s fifty), she watched Zack and Meghan devour their late lunch, made even later by the flurry of fans that descended on their table once word hit the street that Meghan McKenna was “inside eating!” Both kids wolfed down hamburgers and french fries from tissue-lined baskets and sucked hard on extraordinarily thick chocolate milk shakes. The talented young movie star had quite an appetite; Judy was confident she wasn’t a ghost.

  “So,” Judy said to Mrs. McKenna, “is this your first trip to Connecticut?”

  “No. Meghan did a movie here once. Something about a horse.”

  “Fredericka the Faithful Filly,” said Meghan.

  “Don’t talk with you mouth full of food, honey.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Your daughter’s a terrific actress,” said Judy. “I wasn’t surprised when she was nominated for an Oscar.”

  Mrs. McKenna shrugged. “She’s having fun. As soon as it isn’t fun …”

  “We’re done!” said Meghan, dabbing at her lips with a napkin.

  “Meghan has a gift,” said Mrs. McKenna. “However, I refuse to become a stage mother, making my kid miserable by dragging her off to auditions when she’d rather be home playing soccer in the mud. I will not live vicariously through my daughter’s triumphs.”

  “What’s ‘vicariously’?” asked Zack.

  Meghan raised her hand and answered: “Vicariously: Experienced through another person, rather than fi
rsthand.”

  “Very good,” said Mrs. McKenna. “I’m glad to see you studied your vocabulary words. However, we still have math homework to do tonight. Science, too.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “You’re Meghan’s teacher?” asked Judy.

  “When she’s on the road, which it seems like we have been for over a year. Before my daughter became an actress, I taught middle school. My husband still does.”

  “You still teach, too, Mom,” said Meghan.

  “Yes, but only one student in a one-room school-house,” Mrs. McKenna said warmly. “Typically a hotel room or trailer near a movie set. I have my master’s degree in history.”

  “I’m impressed,” said Judy.

  “Don’t be. It’s why we almost didn’t do your show.”

  Now she was confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” said Mrs. McKenna hesitantly, “let’s just say the Hanging Hill Playhouse does not have a very good history when it comes to productions featuring children.”

  “Really?”

  “The Music Man was the last show they did with any children in the cast and it closed after two performances because the young actor playing the part of Winthrop refused to come out of his dressing room!”

  “Why?”

  “There are rumors that the theater is haunted.”

  Judy pretended to be surprised. “Is that so?”

  “I did a little research. Dug up all sorts of stories about frightening ‘presences.’ Stage lights going on and off by themselves. Footsteps and voices up on the catwalks when nobody’s there. Odd breezes and odors. There’s even an actress named Thelma Beaumont who died of a heart attack, right at center stage when the audience rose to give her a standing ovation. They say she keeps coming back to take one more curtain call.”

  There was a clink.

  “Sorry.” Zack had just dropped his fork.

  “Even Mr. Justus Willowmeier the Third is rumored to show up from time to time.”

  “Is he the one who built the Hanging Hill Publick House?” asked Judy.

  “No, he was that Willowmeier’s grandson and the one who transformed the hotel and tavern into an entertainment emporium. Justus the Third loved show people. Particularly showgirls. He was seldom seen without a cigar in his mouth and a pretty woman on each arm. He also kept one of the apartments on the top floor. Liked to host rowdy parties up there, and according to several of the stories, he still does!”

  “That’s where we’re staying,” said Judy. “The top floor.”

  “Us too. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll all get invited to one of his cast parties!”

  “So all these ghostly presences scare the kids away?”

  “Yep.”

  “I wonder why the theater wanted to do my show,” said Judy.

  “Maybe because your script only needs two children,” said Mrs. McKenna. “But—I’ll be honest—if Meghan didn’t love your books so much, well, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “Why?”

  Mrs. McKenna took in a deep breath. “Seventy years ago,” she said, “a child performer died here. A girl.”

  Judy was horrified. “In a show?”

  “I’m not sure. My information right now is sort of sketchy. Got it from Florence, the ninety-year-old sweetheart who volunteers in the box office. Anyway, Florence told me there was a fire ‘of suspicious origin’ back in the late 1930s and she vaguely remembers the police arresting a man, one of the touring vaudeville performers, charging him with arson and first-degree felony murder.”

  “Oh my.”

  “The little girl who died in the blaze was also on the vaudeville bill. Part of a brother-sister juggling act.”

  Now there were two clinks.

  This time, both Zack and Meghan had dropped their forks.

  47

  Right after lunch, Zack and Judy went with Meghan and her mom to the three p.m. Sunday matinee of Bats in Her Belfry.

  Meghan and Judy had to sign a bunch more autographs before they could sit down.

  Zack and Mrs. McKenna did not.

  Zack thought the show was pretty neat. Dracula made an extremely cool entrance—floating down through a huge window in his castle. Since it was a musical comedy, the window wasn’t open.

  The renowned vampire hunter Van Helsing attempted to expose the smooth and debonair count by inviting him to a big banquet where all they served was spaghetti in garlic sauce and garlic bread. One neat scene showed Dracula getting locked in his coffin, which was then chained inside a concrete crypt like in a magic show. Some townspeople turned the box around and around and it didn’t look like there was any way for the actor to escape through trapdoors in the floor, because the crypt was on an elevated platform, but when the vampire hunters undid the chains, all they found inside the tomb was a single dead rose.

  In the second act, the lady playing Lucy, one of the women falling in love with Dracula, started singing that “Bitten and Smitten” song Judy had sung in the car.

  She wasn’t alone.

  Every move she made and every note she sang was mirrored by a second woman wearing a slightly different costume and wig. They were only inches apart and moving in complete sync across the stage—like those swimmers at the Olympics. Zack thought this was hilarious.

  Except he realized: Nobody in the audience was laughing.

  Maybe because they couldn’t see the Lucy double.

  He turned to Meghan on his right.

  “Yep,” she whispered. “It’s a ghost.”

  He turned to Judy on his left.

  “It’s Kathleen Williams,” she whispered. “From the original cast! She’s really good, isn’t she?”

  Yeah, Zack thought. Especially for a dead person.

  48

  After summoning Murphy, Butler, and several other deceased criminal masterminds, Grimes and the Tunisians had taken a four-hour break from conjuring demons, vacating the stage just before the Sunday-afternoon performance of Bats in Her Belfry.

  Immediately after the matinee, however, when the audience was gone, the lobby was empty, and the doors were once again barred, Reginald Grimes returned to center stage to form a necromancy circle with the three other men.

  “Who’s next?” he asked Hakeem without much enthusiasm.

  “Lilly Pruett.”

  The name sounded familiar. A distant childhood memory. Something to do with girls skipping rope.

  His mind was wandering. Grimes was exhausted. Dead tired. He couldn’t remember half of the names of the spirits he had summoned up from the underworld.

  “She was originally summoned by the professor,” Hakeem explained. “Now she must answer to you!”

  “How much more of this must I endure before you unlock the trunk’s final compartment?”

  Hakeem unfurled a long scroll filled with names. “Fortunately, a few of the spirits your grandfather was familiar with still reside here in the theater. William Bampfield …”

  “Bampfield? Who’s he?”

  “An early settler. A Pilgrim, I believe you call them. He stole his neighbor’s cattle, killed his wife and two daughters. Claimed the devil told him to do it. Went to the gallows.”

  “Wonderful,” Grimes said sarcastically. “And what, pray tell, do I want with him?”

  “Mr. Bampfield should prove most eager to steal and kill again.”

  “So?”

  “He’d be delighted to do so for you. To kill, to rob, to pillage, plunder, pilfer, ransack, and loot. So would they all. These evil spirits will do anything you ask of them. They simply need a good director to tell them where to go and what to do.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Grimes. “You’re telling me these ghosts can actually rob banks, steal diamonds, forge checks, embezzle funds, make me rich beyond my wildest dreams and kill anyone who tries to stop us?”

  “Yes. Not now. But soon.”

  “Bah! You keep saying that. ‘Soon! Soon!’ How soon?”

  “Tomorrow. When the moon is full.
When the sacred ceremony is complete.”

  “What ceremony?”

  “The one you will perform with the two children!”

  “Really? And, tell me, Hakeem: What’s in all this for you?”

  Hakeem smiled. “Enough gold and treasure to restore Carthage to its full and rightful glory! It is all we brothers of Hannibal have ever dreamed of for over two thousand years! You, oh high priest of Ba’al, you shall make our dreams at long last come true!”

  49

  Zack had taken Zipper out for a walk right before he and Judy had called it a night and gone to bed—Judy to her room, Zack and Zipper to his.

  Now Zipper was nudging Zack with his snout.

  Apparently, the dog needed to go out again.

  “Mmmfff.” Zack buried his head under his pillow.

  Zipper kept nuzzling, burrowing into the blankets, and prying the pillow away from Zack’s face so he could lick it.

  “What time is it?” Zack mumbled.

  Rubbing his eyes and sitting up, Zack found his watch on the bedside table.

  3:55 a.m.

  Zipper nose-nudged him, poked him in the ribs.

  “Okay, Zip. I get it.”

  Too bad they weren’t at home, where Zack could just open the back door and let Zip out into the yard to do his business. Here in Chatham, if Zipper had to take another pee, Zack had to walk him down five floors to the lobby.

  Zack put on his glasses. Slipped on his bathrobe and sneakers. He didn’t bother tying up the laces.

  “Come on, Zip.” Yawning, he snapped the leash onto the dog’s collar.

  They headed out the door, moved down the hallway past Judy’s room. Zack shuffled while Zipper padded. They made their way to the elevator. Zack pressed the call button, heard its motor whir.

  “At least the elevator’s running,” Zack said through another jaw-stretcher of a yawn.

  Zipper wagged his tail and smiled up at him: a dog’s way of saying “sorry to wake you up, pal” and “thanks for taking me out.”

  “No problem-o,” said Zack, bending down to scratch Zipper behind the ears. “Just hold it until we get outside, okay?” Zack definitely did not want to deal with any grief from that scraggly old janitor if Zipper had an accident.