The Smoky Corridor

by Chris Grabenstein

  Zack’s dad sighed. “Nice being back in the old building. You know, Grandpa Jim went to Pettimore when he was your age.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “His father, too.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yep. There’s a lot of ghosts walking around inside those walls.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “You know—memories, history. Of course, when I was your age, the older kids tried to spook us, telling us stories about a crazy ghost called Scary Arie.”

  “Who was he?”

  Zack’s dad hesitated. “Nobody, really. Just a story somebody made up about a crossing guard who died saving a boy who almost got run over by a turnip truck. The truck killed Arie. Now he wanders around those twisty halls at night, looking for someone else to save. Then, of course, there’s the tunnel to hell.”

  “The what?”

  “That’s what my buddy Stuart Seiden always called it. You’ll see. In the winter, there’s this weird strip of grass where the snow always melts. It’s about six feet wide and runs from the back of the old Pettimore house all the way out to the gym.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why doesn’t Mr. Crumpler like you?”

  “The assistant principal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t really remember.…”

  “He does.”

  “Oh, he does, does he?”

  “Yeah. He says he’s gonna keep his eye on me. I think because of something you must’ve done.”

  “You met Mr. Crumpler tonight?”

  Zack nodded. “When I was looking for the bathroom.”

  “He’s been assistant principal at Pettimore for close to forty years.”

  “Wow. How come he never became principal?”

  “I think he likes yelling at kids too much.”

  “So why did he yell at you?”

  Zack’s dad scrunched up his face. “It had something to do with Stinky.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s what we called Stuart Seiden.”

  “Oh.”

  “Okay. I remember: Mr. Crumpler accused Stinky of stealing milk cartons from the cafeteria. A whole crate of chocolate milk. So I told Stinky I’d defend him and dug up evidence that proved he was innocent.”

  “Cool. Your first lawyer job.”

  Zack’s dad chuckled. “Yeah.”

  “So, Dad … do you believe in ghosts and tunnels to hell and stuff?”

  Again his father hesitated. “No. Not really. They’re just, you know, stories. That’s all.”

  Right. Zack would have to tell that to the Donnelly brothers the next time he bumped into them in the smoky corridor.

  11

  They drove up Stonebriar Road to their brand-new (and recently repaired) Victorian-style house.

  Their home had been seriously damaged the past June in a horrible fire. A fire started by Zack when he’d tried to get rid of the ghost haunting a tree in the backyard.

  His father had never seen that ghost and probably wouldn’t have believed in it, either.

  Fortunately, his stepmother, Judy, had.

  Unfortunately, Zack couldn’t take his stepmom to school with him every day to help him deal with the Donnelly brothers, not to mention Assistant Principal Crumpler and whatever bullies were hanging out in the halls of Horace P. Pettimore Middle School, just waiting for a skinny kid with glasses to show up.

  Yep, starting the next day, from early in the morning till late in the afternoon, from the first week of September till the middle of June, Zack Jennings would have to take care of himself.

  12

  The ghost of Captain Horace P. Pettimore stood over his slumbering zombie in the cavernous dining hall Pettimore had designed and had built underneath the cemetery.

  “Wake,” he whispered to his mindless slave. “Someone has breached the barrier. They’ve blasted a cannonball hole through the root cellar wall. You must stand guard. You must protect my treasure from intruders!”

  The skeleton-thin zombie stirred. Opened his dull, glazed eyes.

  He had been hibernating for more than two decades.

  He would be hungry.

  No matter. A fresh corpse had been buried in the graveyard just that morning. All the zombie needed to do was sniff it out and tear away the dirt underneath the coffin, and it would tumble down into this subterranean chamber, where the ghoulish beast could rip open the box and feast upon the rotting flesh inside.

  The ghost of Horace Pettimore studied the zombie’s vacant face, vaguely remembering when the creature was a man named Cyrus McNulty, a Union army soldier who had died April 9, 1864, at the battle of Deadman’s Knob in Louisiana.

  A few years before that fateful battle, during the Yankee blockade of New Orleans, Captain Pettimore had first learned of voodoo, a mystical religion brought to Haiti and the American South on slave ships from Africa.

  It was in New Orleans that he had met a voodoo queen named LaSheena, who, for a sackful of gold coins, had taught Pettimore everything he’d needed to know to become a bokor: a voodoo witch doctor.

  “I will give you much power, which your soul will carry in this life and into the next!” Queen LaSheena had promised.

  Pettimore learned quickly. Seemed to have a natural talent for sorcery. Before long, he could do more dark deeds than even his instructor.

  He could paralyze his enemies by sprinkling secret powders on the ground where they walked.

  He could create undreamed-of misery by ritually damaging a voodoo doll depicting whomever he wanted to hurt.

  But his greatest power was his ability to raise zombies.

  To resurrect corpses.

  To turn dead men into mindless slaves to do his bidding.

  Using the spells taught to him by Queen LaSheena, Pettimore first sucked Cyrus McNulty’s soul out of its body and sealed it in a jar—a jar still hidden in this labyrinth of tunnels beneath the school and the cemetery behind it.

  Private McNulty had been buried in a mass grave along with sixty-five other dead soldiers. Captain Pettimore had resurrected them all. He’d snuck out to the burial grounds at midnight the day after they’d all died. He carried with him a list of their names and rode in a buckboard wagon filled with sixty-six empty glass jars.

  First he dusted the ground with lightning powder; then he chanted the queen’s mambo spells; and finally, he called the dead soldiers forth, chanting each buried soldier’s name three times.

  “Cyrus McNulty. Cyrus McNulty! Cyrus McNulty!”

  Since McNulty, a farm boy from Indiana, had no family in Louisiana to seal up his ears with clay to make him deaf to the sorcerer’s call, his wispy soul flew up through the mucky soil to be trapped as easily as a firefly in a jar. Then the lifeless body, lacking a soul and, therefore, drained of all free will, had no choice but to crawl out of his casket and dig his way back into life.

  On that fateful April night, Cyrus McNulty and sixty-five other men rose from the dead to become Pettimore’s army of slaves.

  Yes, even after Pettimore died, McNulty, the one zombie he had kept, to act as his treasure guardian, had to obey his every command.

  And what an ideal slave the living dead man was!

  McNulty barely spoke. He had no desires, no ambitions, no memories or consciousness. Since he was already dead, nothing could kill him—as long as he avoided fire and no one released his soul from the jar where Pettimore had trapped it.

  The resurrected McNulty was three times stronger than he had been when he was alive, making him the ideal beast of burden and protector. The zombie would fiercely guard Captain Pettimore’s gold until the day when, using the darkest black magic spells ever taught him by Queen LaSheena, Horace P. Pettimore himself would rise from the dead to reclaim his treasure.

  All he needed was one very special child.

  The one he had been seeking for more than a century. The one he had used a voodoo charm of magic powder, herbs, dove feathers, and a pint of his own blood
to attract to this place.

  A blood relative.

  Just one!

  A new school year was about to begin, and Pettimore hoped, as he did every autumn, that the special child he sought would soon walk through the doors of Pettimore Middle School.

  13

  The next morning, Zack sat with Judy in the breakfast nook, swirling soggy cereal around a bowlful of milk.

  Judy yawned and sipped coffee. She had gotten home very late.

  “At least it’s a short week,” she said with a faint smile. “Just Thursday and Friday. Two days.”

  “Yeah,” muttered Zack. His new school shirt itched at the collar. His pants were so stiff they felt like they were made out of cardboard.

  Over in his dog bed, Zipper looked like Zack felt: totally bummed out because summer was officially over. His head was slumped between his paws. This was Zipper’s first autumn ever. He probably sensed that something was different but couldn’t figure out what it was besides the smell of dead leaves and wilted flowers. So every now and then, he exhaled a huge dramatic sigh. Zipper had lost all his zip.

  “I don’t know who’s going to miss you more,” said Judy. “Me or Zipper.”

  “I’m gonna miss you guys, too.”

  Judy reached across the countertop. Squeezed Zack’s hand. He always felt better whenever she did that.

  “Your dad caught the six o’clock train into the city,” she said. “He said to wish you good luck and to tell you to say hi to Scary Arie for him.”

  “Okay.”

  “So who’s Scary Arie?” Judy asked.

  “The ghost of a crossing guard who haunts my new school.”

  Judy put down her mug. “You’ve seen another ghost?”

  Zack shook his head. “Dad just told me about this dead guy, Scary Arie, who kids used to talk about back when he went to Pettimore.”

  “So the school isn’t really haunted?”

  “Well, not by a crossing guard.”

  “Zack? Who did you see?”

  “Joseph and Seth Donnelly. The brothers who died back in 1910.”

  “At the school?”

  “Yeah. But they also told me, ‘We’re sons of Daniel Boone,’ which made absolutely no sense, because then they’d be the Boone brothers, right? Plus, the younger one, he said he was Johnny Appleseed and asked me to be their Kit Carson.”

  “Wow. Confusing.”

  “Yeah. Maybe they were in the drama club or something and were putting on a show for Pioneer Day and they can’t move on until they complete the cast and get a kid to take the part of Kit Carson or something.”

  “Could be,” said Judy. “How exactly did they die?”

  “Well, according to dad, they were playing with matches and started a fire. A teacher died trying to rescue them.”

  “How horrible. No wonder they’re still haunting the hallway.”

  “Yeah,” said Zack. “To be safe, maybe I should just skip classes for a year or two. You could homeschool me. If they want me to play Kit Carson in their show, I’d probably have to die first.…”

  “Honey?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know you don’t like school, that the thought of going—”

  “I’m not making this stuff up just to get out of going to school.”

  “I know,” Judy said gently.

  That made Zack feel better, because his real mother used to say that all he ever did was make up lies to get what he wanted.

  “But maybe the two brothers are friendly spirits,” said Judy. “Like some of the ghosts you met over in Chatham.”

  Grudgingly, Zack nodded. “They didn’t try to spook me or anything. I think they just wanted me to play with them.”

  “Well, see? You haven’t even started classes and you’ve already made two new friends.”

  Zack laughed. “Yeah. Two guys who’ve been ‘held back’ since 1910!”

  Judy smiled. “Hey, Zack, what if things are different this year? A couple guys in the neighborhood already think you’re pretty cool.”

  “True. But their parents don’t.”

  “Zack?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Their parents won’t be going to school with them.”

  Judy was right. Some of the guys who lived close by, like Benny and Tyler, thought it was pretty awesome how Zack and his pal Davy Wilcox had dealt with the haunted tree. A couple had even come to the Hanging Hill Playhouse to see Curiosity Cat, and Zack had taken them on backstage tours and introduced them to his new Hollywood movie star friends in the show.

  “All I’m saying,” Judy continued, “is it’s a different school and you’re a completely different person from who you were last school year.”

  Also true. Zack hadn’t had a cool new stepmom last September. He hadn’t even slain his first real demon until school was over and they moved up there.

  He slurped down his cereal.

  “Bus comes at seven-thirty,” he said between soggy spoonfuls.

  “You want me to walk you down the block to the bus stop?”

  “Nah.”

  “Okay. And I promise: As soon as I get a chance, I’ll head over to the library. See if Mrs. Emerson knows anything about the two Donnelly brothers.”

  “It’s no biggie,” said Zack. “I was just curious.”

  “So am I. And when it comes to curiosity, I wrote the book!”

  14

  Judy sipped some coffee from her mug and watched as Zack hurried down the driveway to the street, headed for his bus stop.

  Zipper whined and whimpered, the way he did when he couldn’t reach his favorite squishy ball under the furniture.

  “I know, Zip,” said Judy. “I miss him already, too.”

  Judy had meant to tell Zack about the obituary she had just read in the weekly newspaper. Rodman Willoughby, the eighty-something-year-old chauffeur for the late Gerda Spratling (she had been one of the human demons Zack and Judy had battled when they’d first moved to North Chester), had passed away. The newspapers called him “the Spratling family’s loyal and faithful servant since 1940.”

  Zack had saved Mr. Willoughby’s life back in June; now, just three months later, Mr. Willoughby was dead and buried.

  Judy wondered if in his final days Mr. Willoughby had felt any remorse for all the horrible things the wealthy Spratlings had ordered him to do during his years of “faithful service.”

  The unimaginable things he’d almost done to Zack and an innocent baby.

  But Zack had saved the old geezer’s life anyway. Why? “Seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” he had told Judy.

  Remembering that made Judy smile.

  She’d been pretty lucky. Her terrific husband, George, had come with a bonus: a fantastic son, a somewhat shy boy with a big imagination and even bigger heart. Sure, he was a little skinny, wore glasses, and looked like a weakling, but Judy knew the truth: Zack Jennings was a courageous young man who wasn’t afraid to do what was right or to help other people, no matter the consequences.

  But he didn’t need to hear about Mr. Willoughby that morning.

  He had enough ghosts to deal with for one day. The two brothers, some kind of crossing guard—not to mention all the undiscovered monsters lurking in the shadows, the school bullies always looking for a skinny kid in glasses they could pick on.

  Judy hoped they’d leave Zack alone.

  If they didn’t?

  She smiled.

  “You’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’, boys.”

  15

  Zack was actually feeling pretty excited as he hustled down Stonebriar Road to the corner.

  Judy might be right, he thought.

  Not many of the kids at Pettimore Middle School had even met Zack yet, so how could they already hate him? Especially when, like Judy had said, he was a whole new Zack.

  He tugged down on the straps to his backpack. Made ’em good and snug.

  Yep, this year was going to be totally different. School would be cool.
<
br />   Zack let his mind wander.

  A bright yellow leaf fluttered off a nearby tree and Zack imagined confetti streaming from the sky. Tons of it! A whole ticker tape parade, like when someone wins the World Series or walks on the moon.

  Yep, the kids at his new school had probably heard about Zack’s exploits and adventures. How, over the summer, he and his trusty dog, Zipper, had done the sort of incredibly awesome things most mere mortals and their family pets can only read about in comic books.

  Zack passed a house with a Back to School banner flapping on its porch, and in his mind’s eye, he could see the huge banner waiting for him at the school: WELCOME ZACK! Printed in big block letters ten feet tall. They’d probably put blinking lights in all the letters, too—like they did on Broadway.

  And then a marching band would make some kind of formation around the flagpole. Maybe they’d just do a big “Z” for “Zack” and “Zipper” and leave it at that. After all, it was the first day of school and they’d only had that morning to rehearse.

  Then the principal, Mr. Scot Smith, would grab the microphone and make a major announcement: Even though the school year was just beginning, Zack Jennings had already been voted Most Popular and Coolest Kid in the Sixth Grade. He’d also been elected class president. Apparently, the votes in all three instances had been unanimous.

  Judy was right.

  This year was definitely going to be different.

  When Zack closed his eyes, he could see it all.

  Then he collided with something solid and sweaty.

  “Hey! Watch where you’re going, wuss!”

  16

  Zack opened his eyes.

  “I’m sorry.…”

  He had accidentally bumped into the biggest kid waiting at the bus stop—a beefy boy with wild red hair and a sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves, the better to expose his freckled arm muscles. Three equally nasty-looking kids stood behind the giant, sniggering.

  At Zack.

  The neighborhood guys Zack knew, Benny and Tyler, were busy pretending they didn’t know him.

  “You always walk around with your eyes closed, doofus?” the redhead asked.