The Black Heart Crypt

“Yes, dear?”

  “When we accidentally opened the black heart stone, would that automatically make the lock on the Ickleby crypt pop open, too?”

  “No, dear. The black heart stone functions on a different metaphysical plane than an actual lock.”

  “Then somebody broke open the real one, because it was clamped shut the last time I was up here.”

  Judy gasped. “Horse poop!”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Aunt Hannah.

  “The TV said Norman stole a horse.”

  “Oh, my,” said Aunt Sophie.

  “Zack’s right,” said Judy. “The dybbuk could still be here. We need to call the police.”

  Just then, a ghost materialized—at the entrance to the Ickleby crypt!

  Zack was standing closest to the ghost.

  This one was wearing a three-piece striped suit, a necktie with hula girls painted on it, and an old-fashioned fedora. He looked like the mobsters in black-and-white movies. He also looked like he’d just lost a boxing match or something.

  “Go ahead, you dirty rats,” the ghost groaned, doubled over with pain. “Call the coppers. See if I care! That grifter turned me into a stinking patsy.”

  “Um, are you Crazy Izzy Ickleby?” Zack asked, remembering the name from the TV news.

  “Yeah, kid. That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.”

  “Crazy Izzy!” shouted Aunt Sophie. “That’s our Ickleby! The one we’re looking for!” She sparked the tip of a sage flare and tossed it at Crazy Izzy’s feet. “Hurry, girls! We’ve got him!”

  “Wait,” coughed Izzy, who, thanks to the sage, couldn’t budge. “Cut me some slack, toots.…”

  Aunt Sophie started chanting.

  “It is time for you to leave here.”

  Hannah and Ginny joined in.

  “All is well. There is nothing here for you now.”

  Crazy Izzy was starting to fade. “You ditzy dames. Why you doin’ this to me? I ain’t done nothin’ to youse!”

  The three sisters chanted faster.

  “Itistimeforyoutoleavehere. Alliswell. Thereisnothinghereforyounow.”

  “I ain’t the one you want!”

  Crazy Izzy vanished.

  “Quick,” said Aunt Ginny. “Look for Norman Ickes. The dybbuk was foolish enough to exit his body. Hopefully, the real Norman is somewhere close by and is still in possession of the original black heart stone!”

  “Mr. Ickes is most likely exhausted by his unwelcomed possession,” said Aunt Hannah. “He could be sleeping it off.”

  “The crypt!” said Aunt Sophie. “He’s probably inside the crypt, taking a nap!”

  “Hurry,” said Aunt Ginny. “If he still has the charm, we can lock them all away again!”

  Zipper barked.

  Zack bolted for the mausoleum doors.

  Before he could grab the handles, another ghost materialized—right on the front step!

  Zack yanked back his hand. His arm prickled with icy goose bumps as it passed through the specter’s materializing form.

  This Ickleby ghost looked like a riverboat gambler.

  “My goodness, Zachary, back again? You certainly are a bothersome brat, much like a booger we simply can’t thump off.”

  “Where’s Norman Ickes?” said Zack.

  “The hardware-store clerk?”

  “Yeah. We need to talk to him.”

  “Oh, Norman’s not talking to anyone tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “Barnabas won’t let him.”

  Barnabas Ickleby, disguised as Jack the Lantern, used Norman Ickes’s body to mark off ten paces from the door of the original Ickleby crypt to the center of the empty tomb.

  “… eight, nine, ten.”

  When he reached that spot, he turned to the south and marked off ten more. He turned once more and marched off five long strides.

  Then he stopped and gazed down at the scuffed soil near the pointy tips of his riding boots.

  “Is that where you hid your weapons?” asked Father Abercrombie, cowering under a cramped stone archway.

  “Yes!” croaked Jack. “Before I died, I built this crypt and secretly hid my treasures! The gold, which you, good father, stole from me, and a fine arsenal of hand-tooled weapons!”

  Jack dropped to his knees to claw at the dirt with his fingers.

  “Guns will provide the quickest means for me to replenish the treasure you purloined. And what’s the sense of being alive if I am not rich, as well?”

  Raking his hands across the hard-packed soil, he gouged out first a shallow hole and then a deeper trench.

  “Huzzah!” he shouted when he uncovered his first glimpse of the strongbox’s rusty steel lid. “I am once more complete!”

  “So where exactly is Norman Ickes?” Zack asked the ghost of the riverboat gambler. “We need to find him.”

  “He went for a horseback ride.” The gambler looked past Zack and sneered at the three great-aunts. “Good evening, ladies.”

  “Where’s Norman?” Zack asked again, louder this time.

  “Silly boy. Barnabas and the hardware-store clerk are long gone.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Judy. “Crazy Izzy was the one inside Norman at the diner.”

  “Yes, but that was before Barnabas decided it was his turn to pillage and plunder.”

  Another Ickleby faded into view. This one was wearing a powdered wig and looked like the guys who signed the Declaration of Independence. “You simpering fools. Barnabas, my villainous grandfather, has absconded with the body you seek.”

  “Barnabas was evil, too?” said Zack.

  “Ha! He was the most evil of us all!”

  Three more Icklebys, all from the 1800s, judging by their clothes and goofy sideburns, appeared outside the crypt.

  “He longed to ride again!” said one.

  “To terrorize the king’s highway as Jack the Lantern,” said another.

  “Who’s Jack the Lantern?” asked Judy.

  “The infamous child snatcher,” said the man in the Paul Revere wig. “The blackest sheep of our entire family! The one who showed us all the way, who set us on the path to perdition!”

  “Why, if it weren’t for Barnabas,” said the riverboat gambler, “we all would have lived very boring lives.”

  “Deaths, too!” added one of the guys with mutton-chop sideburns, which connected under his nose.

  Now all nine of the lingering Ickleby souls were laughing outside the mausoleum bearing their name.

  “Barnabas done took off,” wheezed a toothless gold miner in a beat-up ten-gallon hat. “And y’all ain’t never gonna catch him, neither! Come on, fellers, let’s vamoose before these three set in to tossin’ Injun sage sticks at us.”

  All of a sudden, the nine gloating ghosts looked lost. Like kids in the mall who can’t find their parents.

  “Capital idea,” said the one in the powdered wig. “But where shall we flee?”

  “How the heck should I know?” said the gold miner. “I ain’t no Barnabas.”

  “Well, we need to flee—somewhere.”

  And then they started bickering.

  “Well, if I knew where in tarnation to flee, I would have already fled there!”

  “Barnabas deserted us.”

  “We must fend for ourselves!”

  “A most excellent suggestion. Tell me how, and I shall!”

  “Wait,” said Zack. “The black heart stone! Where is it?”

  “Why, we haven’t a clue,” sneered a vain dandy with golden ringlets. “None of us has ever ventured beyond this cemetery.”

  “Then who hid the stone?” demanded Zack.

  “Why, Crazy Izzy, of course. I’m sure he’d be happy to tell you exactly where Barnabas told him to stash the stone, but, alas, he no longer can.”

  “ ’Cause you dang fools done chanted him off to kingdom come!” wheezed the miner, slapping his dusty knee. “You ain’t never gonna find that dang stone!”

  All nine ghosts—none of
whom, it seemed to Zack, could think, scheme, or plan without Barnabas’s help—were weeping with laughter when they really should’ve been busy escaping.

  However, all nine stopped chuckling the instant they heard a cat howl so loudly it made Zipper jump behind a gravestone to hide.

  The first ghost cat Zack saw materialize was black and rippled with muscles—just like the Black Shuck dog.

  It was also headless.

  “Grizzmaldo!” gasped Aunt Ginny. “That’s our cousin Harriet’s kitty!”

  Fiendishly angry at the Icklebys for what they had done to him on that long-ago Halloween night, Grizzmaldo swiped at the nine terrified ghosts with claws as long and as sharp as steak knives. He shrieked at the trembling demons through the gaping hole that used to be his throat.

  Now the cemetery was swarming with hissing ghost cats. A dozen. Then two dozen. Then a hundred. Maybe two hundred. And all of them looked like they had been abused in life. Some had charred tail fur. Others limped. Several were missing eyes or ears or limbs.

  The swarm of cats let loose a chorus of bawling caterwauling so deafening, Zack thought he was at a day care center where they had forgotten to feed all the babies.

  And he remembered the cat cries he had heard when he and Zip chased the Black Shuck dog up Haddam Hill.

  Zack figured that the headless cat, Grizzmaldo, had been biding his time—watching the Ickleby crypt, waiting for his chance to wreak revenge by mustering up his own phantom army of mistreated mousers.

  As the undulating ocean of ruffled fur, mangled tails, and flared fangs prowled closer, the nine Ickleby fiends stood cowering at the door to their crypt.

  “Sisters?” whispered Aunt Ginny. “Sage candles! Quickly, now!”

  All three sisters lit smudge sticks and hurled them up over the writhing wall of ghost cats.

  Three volleys of three flares.

  Nine all together.

  One for each immortal soul.

  When the Ickleby ghosts froze, the sisters started to chant.

  “There is nothing here for you now.…”

  Father Abercrombie watched as Jack the Lantern hoisted the corroded strongbox out of the ground and pried the chest open.

  “There you are, my pretties,” he said, removing the first of several cloth-wrapped bundles. Unfurling the sheathing, he revealed a gleaming pistol with a shiny brass barrel, ornate scrolling on the trigger, and a stock made of burnished wood.

  “A fine-quality English flintlock pistol, handcrafted for me in 1740,” the monster sighed. He quickly unwrapped another pistol, a powder cask, and a leather bag full of bullets that clacked against each other like lead marbles.

  He tucked the two pistols into his wide leather belt.

  He reached into the open metal trunk one more time and pulled out the last weapon: a sinister-looking sword with rust stains splotching the blade.

  As if he could read the priest’s mind, the demon in the tricornered hat looked up, the devil’s own grin slashed across his mask.

  “That isn’t rust, Padre. It’s blood.”

  The nine ghosts were gone before the aunts finished chanting “there is nothing here for you” the second time.

  Aunt Sophie pulled out a tiny spiral notebook and a stubby miniature-golf pencil. “Let’s see. These nine, plus Crazy Izzy, Little Paulie, and Eddie Boy. Nine plus one, carry the one, plus one, plus …”

  “That is all twelve, Sophia,” said Aunt Hannah.

  “Leaving us Barnabas,” said Aunt Ginny. “Who, they now inform us, was the worst Ickleby of all.”

  Aunt Hannah nodded. “We must imprison the great deceiver’s soul.”

  “We will,” said Aunt Ginny. “Just as soon as we forge a new sealing stone.” She unclasped her carpetbag and rummaged around inside. “Ah! Just what the doctor ordered.” She pulled out a pair of long-handled pliers. “Or, in this case, the dentist.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Zack.

  “March into that crypt and yank out another tooth from that old phony’s skull!”

  Jack the Lantern marched Father Abercrombie out of the empty Ickleby crypt, past the church.

  “You will now drive me south to Spratling Manor,” he said, poking the priest in the ribs with both pistols.

  “Spratling Manor? In North Chester?”

  “Yes! The town where you shipped our boxed-up bones all those years ago. I must go there to slay the youngest member of the Jennings clan.”

  “The sheriff’s grandson? Why?”

  “To avenge my family’s honor. Once the lad is dead, I will rebuild my fortune.”

  “How?”

  “Stealing children. Holding them for ransom or selling them into slavery. I have always found child snatching to be a swift path to riches.”

  They reached the car. Its owner, Mr. Lawson, was still conked out behind the wheel.

  “Oh, my,” gasped the priest.

  Jack yanked the unconscious driver out of the car.

  “Just leave him in the ditch!” the voice of Norman suggested in Jack’s head.

  “I should slay him,” Jack thought back.

  “Don’t waste your ammunition on a pawn! Save your bullets for snatching children and killing Snertz.”

  “But …”

  “If you kill him, more police will be on your tail. They will hunt you down and slap you in irons before you reap your riches.”

  “The move you suggest seems wise.”

  “Of course it is! I was captain of the chess team! Leave him here and flee the scene!”

  Jack cocked back the hammers on both pistols. Aimed them at Father Abercrombie.

  “Drive me south to North Chester. Make haste.”

  “Of course.” The nervous priest climbed into the horseless carriage.

  “Tell the coward to drive slowly!” the voice of Norman instructed his dybbuk. “We don’t want the police pulling you over for speeding.”

  “Drive slowly,” Jack said to the priest. “We are in no rush. I’m certain the good boys and girls of North Chester are all abed at this hour. I shan’t be able to snatch them until tomorrow morning.”

  “You mean when they’re on their way to school?”

  Jack smiled beneath his grinning mask.

  “Why, Padre, what an excellent suggestion!”

  Zack, Judy, Zipper, and Aunt Ginny crept into the Ickleby family crypt on Haddam Hill with their flashlights.

  Aunts Sophie and Hannah would “wait outside, thank you very much.”

  Zack had never been inside a tomb before.

  The flaking plaster walls were caked with black stains, covered with mold and mildew. They were so crackled you could see the exterior blocks and the lumpy mortar slathered between.

  Zack swung his flashlight over to a stack of three coffins. One was dark brown wood; one seemed to be gilded with gold. The third was a rotting pine box with its knotholes popped out. Zack heard a tiny squeak and almost dropped his light when he saw a mouse scurry out of the coffin.

  “Where’s Barnabas?” asked Judy.

  “I’m not sure,” said Aunt Ginny. “The coffins have shifted positions since the workmen placed them here all those years ago.”

  Great, thought Zack. The ghosts have spent thirty-some years in here playing musical coffins.

  “As I recall, the oldest coffin looks like a mummy’s casket made out of iron,” said Aunt Ginny. “The Ickleby family crest and the letter ‘B’ are emblazoned on its top.”

  Zack and Zipper drifted off to explore one corner of the crypt while Judy and Aunt Ginny moved to the opposite end of the dank tomb.

  Zipper barked. Zack raised the beam of his light and saw a long box made out of gray washtub metal. There were handles on the side, a hump in the middle for the chest, and a bigger bump at the bottom for feet. The lid over where the head would be was already open.

  Zack moved forward, saw the family crest and big letter “B” on the coffin cover.

  He looked down into the head hole.
>
  He wished he hadn’t.

  “You guys? I think somebody got here before us.”

  Judy and Aunt Ginny hurried over.

  “Oh, my,” said Aunt Ginny. “That’s inconvenient.”

  “Yeah,” said Zack.

  Inside the coffin was a skeleton.

  Well, the collarbone and rib cage.

  No head, though.

  Someone had stolen the skull.

  Which meant they had taken all the teeth, too.

  “That settles it,” said Aunt Ginny with a defeated sigh. “We must find the original black heart stone. It’s our only hope!”

  “So, this is Spratling Manor?” said the nervous priest as he drove the stolen car under the arched gates at the entrance to the estate.

  “Yes,” croaked his masked passenger.

  “They’re the ones who had the spare burial chamber,” Father Abercrombie prattled on. “The Spratlings. Unusual name. One you remember. Spratling.”

  “Pull up to the carriage house.”

  A black raven cawed at them from its perch on the building’s roof.

  “A crow sitting on a house is an evil omen,” commented the priest. “It means someone will die here. Tonight.”

  The masked man gestured with his twin pistols. “Step out.”

  “It’s late. I really should head back to—”

  “Out! Now!”

  The priest stepped out of the car. The raven swooped down to land with a hollow thud on top of the automobile. Jack the Lantern extended his arm. The bird hopped over to it like a falcon to a falconer.

  “Fly, my dark friend. Seek out the Jennings boy. Bring me word of his whereabouts, for come the new day, I shall head out to strike him down.”

  The bird took off like a shot, its broad black wings blocking out the moon as it circled overhead.

  Much to Father Abercrombie’s surprise, the masked man brought a hand up to his jagged mouth hole and yawned.

  “I must rest. I have become uncomfortably drowsy. I had forgotten how human bodies wear down on a daily basis.”

  “Yes,” said Father Abercrombie urgently. “Sleep will do you good. It’s so quiet and peaceful here, you should sleep quite soundly. No noise at all …”