“Sure,” Nick said, trying to smile. “I’m just trying to figure out a…school project.”
“Why don’t you tell me about this project? Maybe I can help.” Mom folded her arms across her chest and Nick could tell she wasn’t convinced. He frowned. How could he possibly tell her what he needed without giving everything away?
“It’s sort of a science experiment,” he said. “We’re testing how long things take to break down. I was supposed to bring, uh, smoked pig’s flesh.”
Mom’s forehead wrinkled and Nick was sure he was busted. Then she laughed. “You mean sausage?”
Nick stared. “Sausage is smoked pig’s flesh?”
She nodded. “Not completely. But there is smoked pork in lots of things. Sausage, ribs, baloney, ham, barbecue. Even some hot dogs, I think.”
Nick had never considered that ordinary meat might have smoked pig’s flesh in it. It was both exciting and kind of disgusting at the same time. “Do we have any of those things?”
Mom opened the fridge and then the freezer. “Sorry,” she said, and Nick’s heart dropped. “Your dad must have finished the sausage last week, and I used the last of the baloney in your lunch.”
She ruffled his hair. “I can pick something up at the store tomorrow.”
Tomorrow would be too late. And even if he could talk her into going to the store now, the meat would be fresh, not rotten like the ceremony called for. It was too late. He was doomed. “That’s okay.” He tried not to give away how horrible he felt. “I’m sure I can come up with something else.”
As Nick began to shuffle out of the kitchen, Mom said, “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me? You’ve been in kind of a funk all week.”
For a minute he considered telling her everything. It would be such a relief to turn this all over to a grown-up. But what were the chances she’d believe him? And if she did, would she let him go off to the cemetery at midnight? By the time he’d convinced her he really was a zombie, it would be too late to do anything about it. He’d gotten himself into this and now he was going to have to live with it.
Besides, he couldn’t keep stitching pieces of himself back together forever. It wouldn’t be long before she figured it out on her own.
“I think I might be coming down with a cold or something,” he said. “I’ll go take a rest.” He wandered into his room and collapsed onto his bed. He knew he needed to call his friends and tell them he’d failed. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it.
A few minutes later Dad poked his head through the door. “Everything okay, young grasshopper? Your mom says you’ve been looking kind of blue. And for grasshoppers, that’s lethal. Only cure is a frixleberry shake. You want me to whip one up for you before you go to sleep?”
“There’s no such thing as a frixleberry,” Nick muttered. He knew his dad was only trying to cheer him up. But there was nothing that could do that except for breaking his curse. “I’m just going to go to sleep.” He rolled over and buried his face in his pillow. “Unless you happen to know where I could find an alchemist’s handbook.”
“An alchemist’s handbook?” Nick looked up to see his dad beaming. “Is that what you need? Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
Nick sat up as his dad disappeared into the hall and up the stairs. Was it really possible? Could his father really know where to find an alchemist’s handbook? A minute later, his dad’s footsteps came back down the stairs. He tossed a heavy book onto the bed. “College chemistry, to be precise. But as long ago as I took it, it might as well be alchemy.”
Nick stared at the textbook. Would it work? It was better than anything else he could think of.
“I’ve also got an excellent treatise on out-of-date psychology and Discovering the Wheel for Dummies if you need those.” Dad started out the door, then turned back. “You really should clean your room. Your mom’s right. It smells like a chimp cage in here.”
Nick wanted to tell his Dad he might as well get used to it, since he now had barely an hour to find a piece of rotted pig and complete the ceremony.
Dad picked up a brown bag by the door. He took a whiff and made a face. “Whew,” he said, pulling out a plastic baggy. “This is part of the problem.”
It was the lunch Nick’s mom had given him a few days earlier. He’d offered it to Carter with no success. There were few kinds of food Carter would turn down. But one of them was…
Nick jumped off his bed. He ran across the room and snatched the bag from his dad’s hand. In the warmth of his room the sandwich had quickly gone bad. Green mold spores covered the mayonnaise, the bread, and especially the—
“Baloney,” he said. “Rotten baloney.” He squeezed his dad as tight as he could. “You’re the best.”
Dad scratched the back of his head and shrugged. “College chemistry and a moldy sandwich. What more could a boy ask for?”
Nick lowered his head and pedaled as fast as he could, disappearing from the illuminated circle of one streetlamp and reappearing in the next as he raced along the black asphalt. He’d wasted more than fifteen minutes lying quietly in his bed, waiting for his parents to go to their room. If they tried to check on him and discovered he’d climbed out the window, he would be grounded for life. But he couldn’t worry about that now.
By the time he reached the cemetery, it was 11:35 and the gate had long since been closed and locked. He spotted tire tracks in the cemetery grass and realized Angelo must have thrown his bike over the fence.
Nick did the same thing, although he could barely manage to get his bike over. Being careful not to catch his clothes on the metal spikes at the top of each pole, he climbed the fence and jumped to the damp grass. His aunt’s pot tet and the amulet clinked against each other in his pocket. He followed the tracks between rows of ghostly white grave markers, and a minute later found Angelo standing between a pair of tall headstones.
“Where’s Carter?” Nick asked, leaping off his bike.
Angelo shrugged. “No clue. I’ve been waiting here for more than fifteen minutes by myself. It was creepy.” He looked over his shoulder. “I was starting to feel like there was someone spying on me.” Something that sounded a little like a human voice floated on the night air, and both boys glanced nervously around.
Nick checked his watch. Time was getting short. “Sorry. I had a little trouble finding all the stuff. How did you do?”
Angelo picked up a black backpack by his feet and pulled out a pearl-handled dagger.
“Nice,” Nick said, admiring the sharp silver blade. “Where’d you get that?”
“It’s actually a letter opener. But the blood on the tip is real.” Angelo held out a finger with a bandage wrapped around it.
Nick winced. “Ouch. Thanks, man.” He took the dagger and dropped it into his bag.
“I was stumped on the human bone until I remembered the time I fell off my bike and broke my leg,” Angelo said. Nick remembered. It had been a really bad break and Angelo had been on crutches for nearly three months.
Angelo took a small silver rod out of the backpack and held it up to the moonlight. It took Nick a moment to realize what it was. “They put this pin in my leg to hold the bones in place while they healed,” Angelo said, turning the rod in his hand. “The doctor gave it to me after they took it out. If you put it under a microscope you can see tiny bits of bone on it. It’s not much, but the book didn’t say you had to have a certain amount.”
It was brilliant. Nick began to think this might really happen—if Carter got there. He checked the time and saw there were now less than twenty minutes left.
Angelo dipped into his bag again and Nick was sure he was going to pull out a Barbie head or something like that. But when Angelo showed him the voodoo doll head, it looked just like something you’d see in one of those horror movies where people stick pins in a doll to get revenge on their enemies. “I made it myself,” Angelo said. “There were detailed drawings in the library book.”
As Nick stared
into the tiny cloth face, with its black beads for eyes and a stitched mouth sewn into a seriously spooky smile, a shiver ran down his back. Did they understand what they were messing with here? They were just a couple of kids, standing in the middle of a cemetery at midnight, thinking about performing a ceremony from a book written before their parents were born—and maybe before their grandparents or even great-grandparents.
A cold wind blew his hair back from his face and something moved in the bushes to the left. Nick stared at Angelo. His friend looked just as scared as he was. Nick opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, a figure leaped out of the darkness. Torn clothes fluttered from its thin arms and legs and its face was matted with dirt and grass. Sure it was a corpse come to life, Nick backed away until a familiar voice said, “Thanks for nothing!”
“Carter?” Nick asked. “What happened to you?”
Carter rubbed his hands on the front of his shirt, leaving green and brown smears. “I got stuck on the fence. I kept shouting for you guys, but you never came. Finally I had to rip my pants to get down.” He turned around, revealing a hole in the back of his jeans with a pair of yellow smiley-face boxers showing through. “Once I got loose, I fell straight into a mud puddle.”
“Sorry,” Nick said. “We heard something, but we didn’t know it was you.”
Carter grunted. “You’re going to owe me huge when this is all over. But we don’t have time for that now.” He reached into his pants pocket and took out a couple of long blond hairs. “Okay, here you go. I pulled these straight off my little sister’s head.”
Nick glanced at Angelo. “Um, didn’t the book say the hairs of a rat?”
Carter nodded, handing the long strands to Nick. “Trust me. She is. Every time I do something wrong, she goes straight to my parents and rats on me.”
Nick shrugged and tucked the hair into his flannel bag. If moldy baloney counted as rotted flesh of a smoked pig and his dad’s chemistry book could be substituted for an alchemist’s handbook, why couldn’t Carter’s little sister be a rat?
“Hurry up,” Angelo said, rubbing his arms. The wind was starting to pick up and the temperature was dropping.
“Okay, okay.” Carter reached into his pocket again and pulled out a sock so stiff with sweat and dirt that it actually crackled as he waved it back and forth.
“Is that your sister’s too?” Nick asked.
“No way,” Carter said with a big grin. “Only my brother has feet this stinky.”
As the horrible odor wafted across to him, Angelo plugged his nose. “That definitely counts as the stench of death to me.”
Nick pinched the tip of the sock between his finger and thumb, holding it as far away from him as he could before dropping it into the bag.
“And last of all…” Carter dug into his pocket and pulled out a handful of something powdery and white.
“Is that really powdered bat?” Angelo asked, adjusting his glasses as he studied the pale substance.
Nick leaned forward and sniffed. “It smells like…sawdust.”
“It is.” Carter laughed. “I thought I was going to be stuck until I realized it didn’t say what kind of bat it had to be.”
“A baseball bat!” Nick said, laughing too.
Carter nodded and dropped the sawdust into the bag. “I sanded it off myself with my dad’s belt sander.”
Now it was Nick’s turn. He snapped the plastic Raiders ring in half and dropped it in. “The broken ring.” Next he put in the piece of moldy baloney, explaining what he had learned from his mother about smoked pork. Last of all, he lit a match and burned a page from his father’s old chemistry book, sprinkling the ashes into the bag. “Well, I guess this is it.”
Angelo and Carter nodded silently, their faces pale in the silvery moonlight.
Nick took the black birthday candle out of his jacket pocket and stuck it in the ground, close to a headstone to block the wind.
“It’s not very big,” Carter whispered.
Angelo took the ancient book from his backpack and opened it to the right page. “We’ll have to read fast before it burns out.”
With shaking fingers, Nick tried to light another match. The first two times he failed. Finally, on his third try, the match flared to life and he held the wavering flame to the candle’s wick.
“Hold the bag over the flame,” Angelo said. “And repeat exactly what I say. We don’t have time to do this twice.”
Nick checked his watch. The minute hand was four marks away from midnight. The second hand seemed to be racing much too fast.
“Avec cette bougie noir,” Angelo read, his voice soft and trembling.
“Avec cette bougie noir,” Nick repeated, trying to say the words the same way Angelo did.
“Je supplie cette malédiction de s’écarter.” At Angelo’s words the wind began to howl and Nick had to raise his voice to be heard over it. Strangely, the candle flame didn’t flicker at all. If anything, it seemed to burn brighter.
Nick had no idea what Angelo was saying as he read line after line from the book. But something was obviously happening. The night grew dark around him as if a giant hand had covered the moon. Icy wind ripped at his face. The ground beneath his feet started to tremble.
Something caught his eye and he turned to see a white shape rise from a grave a few feet to his left. “What is that?” he yelled, drawing back.
Carter and Angelo followed his gaze, but neither of them appeared to see what he was seeing. “What’s what?” Carter yelled. His voice seemed far away even though he was standing right beside Nick. Another shape rose from the grave to his left and a pair of hungry eyes glared at him from a face that appeared to be made completely of smoke. Another of the transparent shapes rose out of the ground, and another.
“Ghosts!” he yelled. “Everywhere. Can’t you see them?”
Angelo shook his head. “It must be because you’re undead. Ignore them and keep repeating the words.”
Nick tried to ignore the shapes coming closer and closer, focusing on the words Angelo was reading.
“Hurry!” Carter screamed. “We’re out of time.”
Nick looked at his watch and had a sudden sense of déjà vu. It was 11:59, and the second hand was ten spaces from the top, just like it had been in the cemetery behind his aunt’s house. Only then he’d been about to become a zombie. Now he was trying to stop being one.
Click. Nine. Click. Eight. “Last line,” Angelo said. Holding the book close to his face, he read, “Retournez ma vie à moi.”
Nick gulped. The ghosts were right on top of him now and he didn’t dare meet their gazes. “Retournez ma vie à—”
As Nick was about to repeat the last word, something soft and black brushed past his leg and snuffed out the candle’s flame. The second hand on his watch jumped forward and the minute hand clicked to midnight. All around him the wind stopped and the sky cleared. He looked down to see a black cat casually licking its paw.
It was too late. He’d missed the deadline. He was going to be a zombie forever.
“What happened?” Angelo asked, looking up from his book.
“It was that stupid cat,” Carter said. “It put out the candle on purpose. I saw it.” He pulled back his foot to kick, but the black cat jumped gracefully out of reach, staring at him with its green eyes as though asking, “Is that really necessary?”
“Maybe we can try again,” Nick said. But even as he was saying it, he knew it was no good.
Angelo slammed the book shut and hung his head. “It’s too late. Can’t you feel it? I actually think the ceremony was working. But the energy is gone now.”
Nick glared at the black cat sitting a few feet away. It was the same one he’d seen watching him a couple of days earlier on his way to school, he was sure of it. And it still reminded him of another cat. One he’d seen somewhere before. He just couldn’t quite…
“Excuse me,” an odd-sounding voice said. Nick turned around, ready to tell Carter this was no t
ime for joking. Instead he found a man looking at him with a pleased grin on his round face. The man was wearing an old-fashioned suit and holding a hat with a curved top in his hands. Nick took a quick step backward. He could see right through the man’s body.
“I hate to trouble you,” the man said, turning his hat around and around in his hands. “But I couldn’t help overhearing you earlier, talking about a baloney sandwich.”
“S-sandwich?” Nick stuttered. Carter and Angelo looked at him as if he’d suddenly gone crazy.
“I can’t believe you’re hungry at a time like this,” Carter said. “But since you brought it up, I guess I could eat something too.”
“Yes. Well, I was just wondering if you might happen to have a hot pastrami?” the see-through man asked Nick. He spoke with a stiff-sounding accent, his lips barely moving with each word. “On dark rye with spicy mustard and perhaps a dill pickle or two?” The man rubbed his transparent stomach with a transparent hand.
Nick pointed toward the man. “There’s a g-ghost,” he whispered. “Right there. Can’t you see him?”
“A ghost?” Angelo shoved the book into his backpack and grabbed his monster notebook. “What does it want?”
Nick clutched his hands together, trying to keep from all out panic. “I think he wants a pastrami sandwich.”
“Where is it?” Carter asked, poking his hand right through the ghost’s rather large belly.
Angelo scribbled quickly in his notebook. “Can ghosts eat food?”
“What? You want me to ask it?” Nick rolled his eyes.
Angelo nodded. “This could be important information in the study of parapsychology.”
Nick looked at the ghost, wondering if this whole thing might be in his head—if turning into a zombie had finally driven him bonkers. “Can you…eat a sandwich?”
The ghost sighed mournfully. “No. And it’s the most terrible thing. But if I concentrate hard enough, I think I might manage to smell it a little. Oh, how I love the aroma of well-cured pastrami.”
Another ghost edged up on Nick’s left. This one was a tall man with a bushy mustache on his narrow face. “If it’s not too much trouble,” the ghost asked, “could you possibly find me some shoes?” The ghost wriggled his toes and Nick saw he was only wearing a pair of ragged socks. “I was buried without my shoes on and my feet are simply frigid.”
Case File 13 Page 12
