Spaulding’s teeth clacked against each other as his bike bounced down the old gravel road leading to Blackhope Pond. The moment he’d gotten home from school, he’d grabbed his bike and left. (He did stop in the kitchen, despite feeling ridiculous, to pour a handful of salt in his pocket. Lately, some of his parents’ ideas didn’t seem so stupid.)
He made sure he was gone before Kenny showed up. He didn’t want to talk things over or listen to Kenny try to pretend they were really friends. It was easier this way.
At the clearing, the pond was as black and silent as ever. He scanned the woods carefully for anyone hiding there, undead or otherwise, but nothing moved. The only sound was leaves crunching under his feet.
He pulled out his phone. It didn’t have any reception, but that was normal for being this far out of town. Since he was close to where it had acted peculiarly before, he decided to keep it out and watch it for any strange activity. He held it in front of himself and kept one eye on it as he walked even though it made him feel like an extra on Star Trek exploring an alien planet and waving a tricorder around. Thank goodness no one could see him.
But as he thought this, the feeling of being watched crept over him.
At the same instant, his cell phone blared a discordant ring tone he’d never heard before. Spaulding flinched, and the phone slipped out of his hands. It landed faceup, the screen blank. No incoming call. The ringing switched abruptly to vibrate and then stopped altogether.
He wiped his palms on his jeans and retrieved the now-silent phone. So it hadn’t been a fluke when it had acted weirdly before. That must mean he was getting close to—
Snap!
A branch broke nearby. He spun around, heart pounding.
A little distance away, a sheepish face peered out of the bushes.
“Hey,” Lucy said with a feeble wave.
“Jeez, Lucy.” Spaulding slumped over and put his hands on his knees. “For the last time, quit doing that!”
She stuck her lip out. “But I wanted to make sure you were okay! I saw you leaving all by yourself, and I was worried.”
“You came out here just to see if I was all right?”
“Sure. I tried to get Marietta to come too, but she was acting all weird for some reason. Sorry it’s just me.”
“No—I’m glad it’s just you.”
Lucy’s face lit up. “You are?” She burst out of the bushes and ran over to throw her arms around him. Daphne’s case slammed into the back of his knees as he gave Lucy an awkward pat on the back.
Lucy pulled away and glanced around. Her smile wavered. “But, um . . . isn’t it kind of . . . dangerous out here?”
Spaulding’s heart sank. Just because it was a relief for him to have company didn’t mean he could put Lucy in danger. “You’re right. You have to go home. I can’t let you be out here.”
Lucy’s mouth fell open. “Let me? Let me? You’re as bad as Marietta—ever since our parents divorced, she thinks she has to protect me from everything. But at least she has the right to boss me around. She’s my sister! You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I’m not bossing you around, Lucy. I just don’t want anything to happen to you because of me.”
“It isn’t ’cause of you—I’m making up my own mind. This way, we can look out for each other while we . . . um, what are we doing out here again?”
Quickly, he filled her in on his theory about the red mercury.
Lucy pushed her glasses up her nose and looked doubtfully at his phone. “I don’t get it. What’s the point of this red mercury stuff, even if it is here? What’s it do besides mess up phones?”
“Well, the folklore says it can do everything from curing illness to turning common metals into gold to giving power over the dead. I think Von Slecht is collecting it from the pond. I was hoping there might be some kind of evidence out here, but so far there’s nothing.”
Suddenly, Lucy grabbed his sleeve. “Wait—what’s that?”
She was pointing to a large, corrugated metal drainage tunnel that stuck out of the bank of the pond. A stream of dirty-looking water trickled out of it, carrying bits and pieces of trash along with it. One particularly large piece seemed to have caught Lucy’s eye. Spaulding couldn’t see it well from this distance, but it appeared to be a grayish-white stick.
“It’s just a piece of litter,” he said. But he pushed his way through the tangled shrubbery overhanging the bank to get a clearer view.
Suddenly, the soft bank gave way beneath him. His foot plunged down and splashed into the pond. He managed to cling to a few skinny branches to keep himself from falling all the way in, but he still ended up with both feet ankle-deep in scummy water. On the bright side, he got a good close look at the stick—and then kind of wished he hadn’t.
“Can you see what it is?” Lucy called down to him.
“Yeah,” he called back. “It’s an arm.”
“Ewww!” Lucy screeched. “Lemme see.” The shrubbery thrashed around wildly. Eventually Lucy’s head popped out, her hair now looking quite a lot like a birds’ nest. She peered down at the arm. Then she glanced around at the gloomy woods. “Um . . . does this mean there’s a relevant wandering around here looking for that?”
Spaulding chewed his lip. “It came down through that big drain tunnel, so I guess the rest of it must be upstream somewhere.”
They were silent for a moment, staring at the arm bobbing in the water.
Suddenly, Lucy gasped and sat bolt upright. “Wait! If they’ve been taking all the dead people to the factory . . . and part of a dead person got here through that drain tunnel . . . doesn’t that mean the tunnel probably connects to the factory?”
Spaulding thought this over for a second. Then a smile broke across his face. “And that means the tunnel goes under the fence. I know we’ll find something at the factory, and now we’ve finally found a way in.”
He looked back at the culvert, and his smile faded. A worm of fear writhed in the pit of his stomach. The tunnel—that gaping, dripping, pitch-dark mouth—that was their road into the factory.
Enclosed dark spaces were not Spaulding’s thing. Especially not enclosed dark spaces that were full of scummy greenish-brown water that had dead-people-parts in it.
Lucy peered into the mouth of the culvert. “It’s not that bad.” She took a step in, her voice echoing hollowly. “You can almost stand up straight and everything.”
“All right, come on, Spaulding,” he muttered to himself, wiping his palms on his jacket. A raindrop splatted onto his head. “It’s just a short pitch-black tunnel that could collapse on you at any moment. It’s not even that deep underground. You’d be able to claw your way out of the rubble eventually, as long as you weren’t crushed or suffocated first—”
“Would you stop that!” Lucy yelled from somewhere ahead.
The rain began to fall faster, trickling under his collar as the wind gusted. He took a deep breath and waded forward.
A few feet in, the last bit of daylight was swallowed up in total darkness. But as always, his trusty flashlight was in his backpack. A moment later, its friendly white beam cut a swath through the black. The tunnel walls stopped pressing in on him.
Spaulding aimed the light so he and Lucy could both see. Every few steps he flashed it ahead to make sure nothing unexpected awaited them. Besides the sounds of their feet sloshing and the occasional drip from the ceiling, the tunnel was silent. The air was cold and moldy-smelling.
Spaulding tried to put himself in a sort of trance—left foot, right foot . . . breathe in, breathe out . . . don’t start imagining what might be about to brush up against you . . . left foot, right foot . . .
Somewhere along the line, the culvert had gotten much wider and taller. It was no longer a corrugated metal tube, but an earth-walled tunnel. He wondered if they had entered an actual mine shaft. At least now it smelled more like cold dirt than mold, and the air circulated more freely—but if they had entered the system of mine tunnels, that mea
nt they could get lost.
“Look!” Lucy whispered suddenly. She pointed ahead. “No, don’t shine the light up there—then you can’t see. It’s daylight!”
She was right. Not far ahead, a faint white glow outlined the tunnel walls. They rushed onward and turned a corner to find themselves at the lip of another short length of corrugated metal tunnel. Pale sunlight filtered through a grating at the end.
Spaulding pressed his face to the grate and tried to see out, but could only make out a few feet of a shallow ditch.
“We’re not stuck, are we?” Lucy asked.
“No, I can get my arm between the bars—I just hope no one’s watching.” Stretching his arm as far as he could, he could just reach the rusty latch on the outside of the grating.
The grate creaked open, and he stuck his head out cautiously. They were at the edge of a field. Before him, the drainage ditch continued for another ten or fifteen feet before disappearing into a veil of rain—the scattered raindrops had become a downpour while they were underground. Further off, the outline of several large rectangular shapes loomed.
“Slecht-Tech,” Lucy whispered.
They scrambled out of the tunnel and up the bank of the ditch, heading toward the ghostly silhouette. Gradually, the smokestacks appeared through the mist. Smoke billowed above them—the factory was running.
The ditch led to the wall of the largest building, where several pipes protruded over the water.
Lucy plugged her nose. “Ugh, it stinks! What is that?”
“Shh!” Spaulding grabbed her wrist and pulled her down into the tall grass.
At the edge of a small courtyard in a corner of the main building, a door opened. Dr. Darke emerged, speaking into a cell phone. She looked annoyed.
“I still say you’re overreacting, Werner,” she said, striding briskly across the courtyard. “I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with her.” She paused, listening, then gave an angry snort. “Yes, yes, I’ll be there in a moment. It isn’t as if I have any actual work to do, after all.” She hung up the phone and disappeared around a corner, her footfalls echoing across the featureless cement walls.
“Quick,” Spaulding whispered. “Let’s see if she left that door unlocked.”
They scrambled through the tall grass to the cracked pavement of the courtyard. Luckily, the only windows facing them were boarded up, so there was no fear that anyone would see them. The door was not only unlocked, but ajar. Spaulding peered through the crack to make sure it was empty and then slipped inside, Lucy on his heels.
They found themselves in a laboratory. Gleaming steel tables held all kinds of scientific equipment—computer monitors, microscopes, racks of test tubes, Bunsen burners. Rows of white cabinets lined the walls.
Lucy picked up a jar from the nearest table and read the label. “Preservative formula #31.” She made a face. “Preservatives? Yawn! I thought it would be eye of newt or frog’s breath or something. Does that mean Slecht-Tech just does, like, food science?”
Spaulding glanced at the jar. “I’m guessing it’s the workers that need preserving.” He began working his way down the rows of cabinets, peering into each one. “Look at this.” He pulled out a large, unlabeled metal canister. A fine red grit coated the rim. “I think that’s red mercury. There are tons of these canisters in the cabinets.”
Lucy moved on to inspect a bookshelf in the corner. “Whoa—check this out. Is it some kind of really old science book?” She held a thick, dusty volume out for his inspection.
Carefully, he turned the crumbling pages. “I don’t think that’s about science. Those symbols are runes. And the title of this drawing here . . .” He pointed at an engraving that depicted a man crouched over a prone figure that appeared to be either sleeping or dead. “Nekro . . . something something . . . logos. That’s something about ‘language of the dead’ in Greek. I think this is a spell book.”
He started to read more closely, but Lucy grabbed his wrist. “We don’t have time! She might come back any second.”
Spaulding chewed his thumbnail, weighing the book in his other hand. A real spell book. One that apparently worked. If he showed his parents this, they’d have to listen to him.
“Come on, Spaulding,” Lucy whispered. She opened the door a crack and peeked out.
While her back was turned, Spaulding made up his mind. He shoved the book under his T-shirt and his bulky sweatshirt, the leather binding warm against his skin. If he kept his arm tight against his side, you couldn’t even tell it was there. Lucy would make a fuss about it if she knew, and he didn’t want to argue. It wasn’t going to hurt anything to take it, he told himself. It was for research.
Ignoring the little alarm bell going off in the back of his mind, he ran after Lucy.
“Where to next?” Lucy asked, keeping her voice low.
Spaulding glanced around. The direction Dr. Darke had gone was out, obviously. That left one other choice: a rusty door in the building across from the lab.
The door opened into a long, dim room. The only light came from cracks around the boards that covered the small windows high above. Ancient, hulking machinery, blanketed with rotting tarps, filled the space. Clearly, this part of the factory really was abandoned and had been for a very long time.
Lucy tugged on his sleeve and pointed at a set of metal doors in a corner behind a pile of broken mine carts. “That looks like an elevator,” she whispered. “Do you think it still works?”
The control panel next to the doors had only one button—down. Spaulding pressed it, not expecting anything to happen. But instantly there was a bone-shaking clamor of machinery grinding to life in the walls. The doors screeched open.
“I’m not riding in that thing,” Lucy said, staring into the tiny metal box. “You shouldn’t either. It looks like it’ll fall apart if you breathe on it too hard.”
“Okay, you wait here, then. If anyone comes along while I’m gone, just hide until I come back.”
Without waiting for her to argue, Spaulding stepped into the elevator and pressed the down button. The elevator sank slowly, shaking and clanking all the way. At last, it ground to a halt and the doors rolled back.
Spaulding stepped out onto a metal catwalk overlooking a cavernous, windowless room. It was crowded with people and echoing with the noise of machinery. Quickly, he ducked behind the railing of the catwalk. After a few seconds, when no one raised an alarm, he risked a peek over the edge. His eyes widened.
“I guess I found the revenants,” he muttered.
The place was full of them. They shuffled around carrying boxes; they pushed buttons and pulled levers and loaded crates. It wasn’t too different from any manufacturing plant, except that no one spoke or looked at each other or stopped their tasks even for an instant.
At one end of the room, a row of empty metal canisters, the same kind they’d seen in the laboratory, moved down a conveyor belt. As they passed under the mouth of a large funnel, a stream of dark red powder gushed out and filled each canister. Then a mechanical arm clamped a cover on, and a revenant stowed the filled canisters in a crate.
As Spaulding watched the revenants slaving away, he was startled to find he recognized one relatively well-preserved specimen shuffling along with a crate of canisters in its arms. One hand was missing a few fingers.
Spaulding felt oddly pleased to see the old guy. He must have wandered out of the factory that day they’d seen him in the woods. Maybe he’d been trying to escape. Maybe he’d done it more than once, too, and that was how he’d ended up at the pond the first time Spaulding had seen him.
It was kind of sad, now that he thought about it. Maybe somewhere deep down, all the revenants longed for the peace of the grave. They certainly didn’t sound very happy—as they worked, they groaned and sighed continuously.
And what was the point of all their work, anyway? Was Von Slecht really raising the dead just to make red mercury, which he then used to . . . raise the dead? There had to be more to it.
Spaulding stepped back into the elevator. There was one more button—B2. A sub-basement.
The elevator seemed to travel down a lot longer this time. When the doors finally opened again, the first thing Spaulding noticed was the smell of cold earth. He was deep underground now. The roof of the cavern was far overhead, lost in the dark. And it was a cavern, not a building. The walls and floor were jagged stone.
Everywhere Spaulding looked, hundreds of revenants were digging, swinging pickaxes, and even driving bulldozers as they carved out tunnels branching off in every direction. It reminded Spaulding of an enormous ant farm—except he kind of liked ants.
Spaulding swallowed hard. He thought he’d gotten used to the undead, but seeing this many was making his stomach tie itself in a knot. It wasn’t just the smell or the sight of the occasional head suddenly falling off its owner. It was the realization that whatever Von Slecht was up to, it was bigger than Spaulding had ever suspected.
Lucy was hiding under an ore cart when he got back upstairs. The instant he stepped off the elevator, she burst out of her hiding place and rushed him.
“There you are!” She grabbed his sleeve and hauled him to the door they’d come in by. “What took you so long? What did you find out?”
Spaulding thought about the cavern and shivered. “I’ll tell you about it once we’re outside. Right now, I just want to get as far away from here as possible.”
After the noise of the cavern, the aboveground parts of the factory seemed eerily quiet. They crept along the edge of the main building, keeping close to the walls, and were almost back to the courtyard when the sound of a door slamming nearby made them freeze in their tracks.
“Would you please stop fretting, Werner?” Dr. Darke snapped. “Griselda is fine. Or at least, as fine as she ever is. You won’t help anything by mooning around the lab while I look at her.”
Spaulding and Lucy managed to duck behind a Dumpster just before Dr. Darke and Mr. Von Slecht came around the corner. Von Slecht was escorting a woman who Spaulding figured must be his wife. She was extremely pale, with wavy dark hair and an elegant black dress, like some glamorous old-time movie star who’d stepped right out of a black-and-white film without getting colorized. She didn’t say a word as Von Slecht herded her along ahead of him.
The Haunted Serpent Page 10
