The Hanging Hill Read online

  “There will never be another cat like that!”

  He looked up.

  Meghan McKenna and Derek Stone were reading the scene that led up to the song about the missing cat.

  “No, sir. Not in a million years!”

  Jinx.

  Grimes wondered if he could add a feline name to the list of souls to be resurrected.

  Jinx might like to sit on his lap purring contentedly while he, Reginald Grimes, sat on his throne ruling the world!

  65

  It was only eleven a.m. but Zack was already exhausted.

  He sat on the top step of the spiral staircase and gazed down into the basement below.

  Okay. He had to figure out this “Beware Pandemonium” thing. Buckingham had just said it. The janitor had said it yesterday.

  Zack knew that the Pandemonium Players was the name of the theater’s resident acting company, but why should he be afraid of them?

  He felt a chilling breeze drift up the corkscrewing metal steps. He leaned forward and saw yet another ghost materialize—a woman with wildly curly hair. She wafted away from the staircase and weaved a fluid path across the clutter of props and boxes stored underneath the main stage.

  Wait a second.

  Zack had seen the back of this particular specter before.

  In North Chester!

  Sitting in the breakfast room of the Marriott extended-stay hotel across from a guy sizzling in an electric chair.

  It was Doll Face!

  Mad Dog Murphy’s girlfriend.

  Zack clanked down the circular staircase as fast as he could to find out what the heck she was doing here.

  66

  Zipper was dreaming about squirrels again.

  He liked the pillows on the bed at this new place. Nice and lumpy, squishy and mushy. He felt like he was in heaven, sleeping on top of a giant fleecy squeeze toy stuffed with Snausages.

  And the sun hit these particular pillows perfectly! In fact, he was currently nestled in the most exquisite patch of sunshine and warmth. He figured that it was probably what lying on a beach blanket was all about for humans. He’d seen stuff on TV. Commercials for a place called Florida.

  Zipper was in a happy, happy sunshine state.

  Until something blocked the sunbeam streaming through the room’s dormer window.

  Probably one of those puffy white things up in the sky. Yesterday, Zipper had seen one that reminded him of a poodle. Another one sort of looked like Spencer, a golden retriever he knew.

  Slightly chilled, Zipper stood up. Stretched. Yawned and dipped into a back-bending arch. Then he turned around in a circle, trying to find that perfect sun spot he had just been snoozing in. Couldn’t find it, couldn’t find it. So he changed directions. Circled back the other way. Still couldn’t find it, still couldn’t …

  He heard a hiss outside the window.

  He cocked an ear. Looked. Sniffed.

  Yep.

  There was a cat out there. On the windowsill. Gray and sleek with yellow eyes.

  Zipper wagged his tail.

  He didn’t mind cats. They were fine—just, you know, different. Slept a lot. Tossed their own toys. Played with tin foil. Didn’t know how to sit or stay. Pooped in a box.

  But basically, cats were okay.

  So he wagged his tail to let the gray cat out on the window ledge know he was happy to say howdy.

  The cat shot out its claws. Yowled. Swiped at the window—scratching the glass.

  Okay. Maybe this was a different kind of cat. A breed Zipper had never encountered.

  For one thing, it was huge. Nearly the size of that raccoon he chased up a tree one time. For another, it looked sort of psychotic. Eyes all buggy and bulgy. Like Chico, this crazy Chihuahua who used to yap-yap-yap at him all the time when he was a puppy living in a kennel at Dr. Freed’s animal hospital.

  The cat hissed again. Furious and vicious.

  Its eyes were glowing like the yellow warning lights Zipper had seen on the highway. Foam drooled out of its wide-open mouth. Saliva dripped off its fangs.

  As the hackles rose on his back, Zipper figured that this feline visitor was a few rabies shots short of a complete checkup.

  He was just about to bark when the cat vanished. Disappeared!

  Just like those ghosts back at the crossroads.

  Which was fine by Zipper.

  The fat cat had been the one blotting out the sun.

  The pillow was perfect again. Like warm mud in July.

  He needed a nap.

  He yawned.

  Snuggled into position.

  Dreamed about squirrels. The slow ones—loaded down with acorns—the ones that were easy to catch.

  67

  Zack followed the curly-haired lady through the storage area under the stage, down the hallway on the left, through an open double door, and into a dimly lit passageway.

  “Excuse me?” he cried out. “What are you doing here? Did you follow me? Why aren’t you back in North Chester?”

  Doll Face stopped moving forward. Drifted in place. Her clothes—a simple robe of some sort—and her tangle of coiled hair bobbed up and down as if she were underwater.

  “Beware Pandemonium,” the woman whispered, without turning around.

  Her, too?

  Zack felt fear crawl across his skin, then drop a bucket of ice down his spine. The lady’s voice sounded strangely familiar. Did Zack know her? Doubtful. He didn’t know many dead people, especially ones who hung around with convicted killers from 1959.

  The curly-haired woman drifted down another passageway.

  “Were you the ghost Judy saw going out of my room? Why’d you follow us here? Did you knock that picture frame over on purpose?”

  The woman froze again.

  Zack knew that if she had knocked over the picture frame, she must’ve been really mad or really sad, because that was the only way ghosts could make physical objects move.

  The woman resumed her forward drift.

  Doll Face was one weird ghost. Unlike chatty old Bartholomew Buckingham or Justus Willowmeier III, she hardly said a word—just “Beware Pandemonium,” and everybody seemed to be saying that lately.

  Also, her clothes didn’t seem very old. Her robe was the soft gray of dove wings but looked kind of modern, so whoever she was, or had been, she hadn’t been dead very long. Either that, or heaven had shopping malls.

  They made their way past some dusty scenery pieces.

  Doll Face turned left, walked under a brick archway.

  Zack followed, wondering why Mad Dog called her that, because he hadn’t even seen her face yet.

  There seemed to be a golden halo of light rimming her body now, which was a good thing—otherwise the hallway would be totally dark. The overhead light sockets were bulbless. Apparently, they were moving into a section of the basement where nobody ventured—not even the cranky janitor.

  Suddenly, Doll Face ducked down and stepped over a low cinder block wall, through a very narrow opening that led into some sort of dank crawl space.

  The air here was damp, thick with the scent of mildew. The floor was dirt, maybe mud. Zack, who wasn’t all that tall, had to walk hunched over to avoid scraping his head against the rough beams in the ceiling.

  Doll Face leaned forward and floated.

  “Are we still under the theater?” Zack asked. “I think I hear the river. Do you smell it?”

  No answer.

  Maybe ghosts couldn’t smell.

  Zack had a funny feeling he had been led down here for a reason, and maybe not a particularly nice one. Maybe this ghost was the demon sent to slay the demon slayer.

  “You know what? I think it’s time I headed back upstairs. My mom’s probably wondering where I am.”

  Once more, Doll Face froze.

  This time, however, she slowly raised her right arm and pointed at something on the ground directly in front of her.

  Zack moved forward. The ghost’s stiff finger seemed to glow and ill
uminated a shadowy rectangle near her feet.

  A steamer trunk.

  An old-fashioned footlocker about four feet long with riveted ribbons along all its edges. Two hinged hasps flanked a lock that was already flipped up and open.

  Aha! Doll Face had switched teams and was now working with Bartholomew Buckingham, whose spies had reported seeing two burly hooligans hiding a theatrical trunk.

  Zack read what was stenciled in faded paint above the lock clasp: Professor Nicholas Nicodemus.

  Suddenly, the crawl space went dark.

  Doll Face had disappeared, taking her glowing light with her.

  68

  “Hello? Hello?”

  Yep. Doll Face was definitely gone. Zack was alone. In the dark.

  Never his favorite place to be.

  It was where he saw her sometimes.

  His dead mother.

  She was gone and buried, but in the dark, when he was alone with nothing but his feelings of guilt, scary memories, and wild imagination, Zack sometimes heard her.

  “You’re the reason I had to die! I had to get away from you!”

  “It’s not true!” Zack yelled. His voice echoed off the low ceiling. “I. Did. Not. Kill. You!”

  Finally. He had said it out loud. Okay, he had said it out loud in the dark in a crawl space but he had said it.

  He did not kill his mother.

  She caught cancer because she smoked too many cigarettes. She smoked too many cigarettes because she was miserable and sad, not because Zack was horrible and bad. She made her own choice. Zack did not make her make it.

  Stumbling in the dark, Zack felt up and down the sides of the trunk until he found one of its leather handles and gave it a yank.

  This was what Buckingham had wanted him to find.

  Somehow, it would help him save Meghan, Derek, and Judy. That was what he was going to do. He wasn’t going to sit in the dark being afraid.

  “So quit bugging me, okay?” he yelled at the blackness, hoping his real mother would get the message: He was absolutely, totally, and completely finished feeling guilty about doing something he hadn’t even done.

  69

  Zack dragged the steamer trunk out of the crawl space.

  He bumped into a few support posts, tripped over a crusty pile of rubble, and fell backward into a mud puddle that left his butt feeling all kinds of squishy, but finally, he found the opening in the cinder block wall.

  He heaved the antique case up and shoved it into the hallway.

  More darkness.

  Where was a glowing ghost when you needed one?

  Zack pushed the trunk up the corridor, figuring it could bulldoze over anything blocking his path. He paused once to catch his breath and heard the skittering claws of what he hoped was just a rat.

  Zack pushed faster and hoped he could outrace the rodent.

  To the light up ahead!

  It was faint and distant but it was, indeed, a light—glowing brightly just beyond the next brick archway.

  70

  Zack shoved the trunk into what looked like a costume storage room.

  Rolling wardrobe racks jammed with clothes hanging in plastic bags ringed the floor. It looked sort of like a dry cleaning museum with a three-hundred-watt bulb burning in the ceiling.

  And no rodents.

  Zack saw a dressmaker’s mannequin wearing the Curiosity Cat suit being constructed for Tomasino Carrozza. It looked like a scarecrow standing guard.

  Or, since it was a cat costume, a scare-rat.

  Perfect.

  Zack propped the steamer trunk up on its end, unsnapped the heavy clasps, and pushed open the lid. The trunk had a hanging rack on one side and a stack of drawers on the other. It was the sort of luggage people in history books packed when they sailed across the ocean.

  Everything inside the trunk was musty. Zack riffled through the clothes. A black topcoat with tails, black woolen pants, a yellowing tuxedo shirt, and a shimmering black robe lined with red silk. He also found, hanging in a bag at the far end of the rod, a purple turban with an emerald green Egyptain beetle brooch pinned to its center.

  “Cool.”

  When he pulled out the turban to examine the jeweled scarab more closely, he saw a poster plastered to the back wall of the trunk: Professor Nicholas Nicodemus. World-Renowned Sorcerer and Necromancer!

  Underneath the headline was an illustration depicting a snooty-looking man in topcoat and tails. His lacquered black hair glistened under the turban, and his arms were folded across his chest. He was wearing the costume inside the trunk!

  Zack turned to the stack of drawers on the right and pulled open the biggest one, the one on the bottom.

  It was filled with tubes of paper.

  He pulled one out, unrolled it. It was a poster showing Professor Nicodemus staring at a human skull with hazy smoke swirling up out of its eye sockets. The curling wisps carried ghostly visions of floating dead people. Little red devils sat perched on the magician’s shoulders, assisting him as, apparently, he summoned dead souls up from the underworld to join him onstage.

  Must’ve been some act.

  Zack pulled another poster out of the bottom drawer. This one was printed on rough paper the color of a grocery sack and filled with shouting type.

  COMING!

  PROFESSOR NICHOLAS NICODEMUS

  THE WORLD-RENOWNED SORCERER AND NECROMANCER APPEARING IN

  “DO THE SPIRITS COME BACK?”

  ORIGINAL AND MORE MARVELOUS ILLUSIONS

  THAN EVER PERFORMED BY

  THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS, THE MYSTICAL PHOENICIANS,

  OR THE NECROMANCERS OF INDIA

  • • • • •

  SEE THE DEAD RISE FROM THEIR TOMBS!

  • • • • •

  GAZE IN AWE AS SPIRITS SOAR

  ACROSS THE STAGE AT HIS COMMAND!

  • • • • •

  SPEAK TO YOUR DECEASED FAMILY AND FRIENDS

  AS PROFESSOR NICODEMUS

  UNLEASHES THE FULL POWERS OF RESURRECTION!

  At the bottom of the broadside, just under the prices and performance times, was printed the name of the theater where Professor Nicodemus was to appear.

  JULY & AUGUST, 1939

  THE HANGING HILL PLAYHOUSE—CHATHAM, CONNECTICUT

  A PANDEMONIUM PRODUCTION

  Pandemonium.

  There was that word again.

  Zack had to find a dictionary.

  Or talk to Meghan.

  After all, she knew what “vicariously” meant. Maybe “pandemonium” was one of her vocabulary words, too.

  71

  All around him, actors were acting, singing, and laughing but Reginald Grimes wasn’t paying any attention.

  It was nearly noon and he was thinking about his grandfather: Professor Nicholas Nicodemus. A brilliant man who had failed so miserably.

  Hakeem had told him the story: how the great one had blundered when he’d attempted to throw open the doors to the underworld and had completed only half of the resurrection ritual before being hauled away by the authorities to live out the rest of his days in an insane asylum!

  “From the top again?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Would you like us to take it from the top again?” the composer asked from the piano bench.

  “Yes. Again! From the top.”

  He’d work the cast hard today. Wear them out. Exhaust them with vocal gymnastics and grueling dance routines. He’d run this rehearsal like an aerobics class in a sauna! He’d tell Hakeem to turn off the air-conditioning, let the room fill with the unrelenting humidity of August’s dog days. After six more hours of strenuous exercise, every bone-weary member of this cast and crew would be too exhausted to venture back to the theater tonight and interfere.

  Meghan and Derek he would dismiss early, as there was no pressing need to fatigue or drain them. Besides, the boy needed time to work on his new lines.

  It was Monday.

  That meant the theater would be dark.
There would be no performances of Bats in Her Belfry. No audience. No uninvited interlopers.

  In just over seven hours, Reginald Grimes would succeed where his forefather had ultimately failed!

  The music stopped. The singing ceased.

  “Lunch break!” said the stage manager.

  “What?” said Grimes, sounding half-asleep.

  “Lunch break, sir. You said you wanted to take an hour break at noon?”

  “I suppose I did. Meghan? Derek? You two are done for the day. Go work on your lines.”

  “Yes, sir!” said Derek.

  “I will see you again at seven,” said Grimes. “The rest of you, be back at one. We will begin to choreograph the dance numbers. Be sure to wear your gym clothes. I want to see you sweat!”

  “That’s one hour for lunch!” said the stage manager.

  The cast and crew shuffled out of the rehearsal room.

  “Hakeem?”

  “Yes, Exalted One?”

  “Turn off the AC!”

  72

  So far, Judy wasn’t impressed with her brilliant director.

  He didn’t even pay attention during the read-through. Jeff Woodman, the actor playing the father, kept calling Curiosity Cat “Monstrosity Cat” and Grimes hadn’t said a single word.

  She approached the head table.

  “Mr. Grimes?”

  He didn’t look up. He was still completely engrossed in that big leather book, the one with Professor Nicholas Nicodemus embossed in gold letters on the cover.

  “So who’s Professor Nicodemus?” she asked.

  That got his attention.

  He looked up. Stroked his mustache with a single finger.

  “My grandfather. It was a stage name, of course. Professor Nicodemus was one of the greatest magicians who ever lived! He even performed here.”

  “When?”

  “During vaudeville. Back in the 1930s.”

  “What’s in the book?”

  “Secrets. Illusions.”