The Hanging Hill Page 18

  A sixth bullet exploded.

  That was when Zack heard metal start to screech.

  Up near the top of the statue.

  Near its mouth.

  112

  “This isn’t good,” said Judy, peering down at her stepson.

  “Hold on,” said Kimble. “Steady.”

  Zipper sank to his belly. Whined.

  “Did that statue just move?” asked Mrs. McKenna.

  Judy nodded. “This definitely isn’t good.”

  113

  A deafening squeal echoed off the walls. Metal twisting and turning against metal. The bull’s muzzle creaked open.

  “Moloch has girls,” rumbled a voice deeper than a canyon at the bottom of the ocean.

  Even Grimes seemed amazed.

  The statue was talking.

  “Have girls. Need boy.”

  Grimes stepped forward. “You have girls?”

  The bull’s head nodded once with a thunderous clatter.

  “The child my grandfather sacrificed. Plus my sister?”

  Another cacophony of clanking as the beast nodded again.

  “So you only need the boy?”

  Another earth-trembling nod. “Feed me the one called Zack. Need boy.”

  With that, the bull became silent.

  114

  “I’m going down there!” said Mr. Kimble. He stood up, clutched the cable.

  “I’m going with you,” said Meghan’s mom.

  “Wait,” said Judy.

  “Zack needs our help!” said Kimble.

  “Well,” said Judy, as calmly as she could, “I think we might have a better shot at helping him from up here.”

  With that, she handed each of them something from the wooden box.

  “Wait till Zack gives us the signal!”

  Zipper barked.

  He wasn’t waiting. He took off running.

  115

  “Let Meghan go!” shouted Zack. “You don’t need her anymore.”

  “No, Zack. I’m staying here with you.”

  “Meghan, it isn’t safe.”

  “Zack?”

  “Get out of here!”

  Grimes flung up his crippled arm. “You heard the boy! Go! Leave! My sister died so you might live!”

  Meghan gave Zack a confused look.

  He nodded toward the sliding steel doors. “My glasses have sports lenses.”

  “What?”

  “They’re like safety goggles. You’ll be better off behind those big steel doors. In case, you know, the sparks start flying when I hit the fire.”

  Meghan nodded like she understood. She ran over to the open doors. Hid behind them.

  “Where’s my grandfather?” Grimes spun around, stared at the floor. “Where’d he go?”

  “He’s fading,” said Hakeem. “They are all fading. We must begin!”

  Badir and Jamal stepped forward. Jamal raised his revolver. Aimed it at Zack’s head. “Say the words, boy!”

  “And do not worry about climbing up,” added Badir. “We are going to throw you!”

  Zack closed his eyes. Took in a deep breath. Shook out his fingers. Took in another breath.

  “Mr. Jennings?” said Grimes. “Now!”

  “I need to focus on the words.”

  “Now!”

  “Hey, Zack!” It was Derek. Behind him. Breathing heavy. “I’m back.”

  It was showtime.

  Zack stepped toward the statue.

  “O, magnus Molochus!”

  “Excellent!” said Grimes.

  “Nos duo vitam nostram damus ut vos omnes qui hue arcessiti estis vivatis.”

  “He memorized it so quickly! Go on, boy! Go on!”

  Zack moved close enough to hear the brass statue creak and warble as its heated metal began to expand.

  “Puer et puella…”

  “Go on!” urged Grimes.

  “Puri et fideles…”

  “Pure and true, yes, yes!”

  “Morimur …”

  “You die!”

  “Ut vos resuscitet.”

  “That they may be resurrected! He said it. He said it all!”

  The fire and Grimes roared and cackled.

  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

  Zack finally heard the sound he’d been hoping to hear: an annoying mosquito with a microphone. The nasal whine of Derek Stone’s tweaked-out monster truck flying across the floor.

  Thwack!

  That was the second sound Zack had hoped to hear: the remote-controlled truck slamming into Badir’s ankles like it had slammed into his!

  Clunk!

  Sound three. Badir dropping his gun.

  Now Zack reached into his pockets and grabbed two fistfuls of fireworks.

  He tossed them into the fire pit.

  The Fourth of July started shooting out the bull’s nostrils and up through its chimney horns.

  “I’ve got the gun!” screamed Derek.

  “Heave it in the fire!”

  Derek tossed the weapon into the blaze just as another sky rocket blasted off. This one streaked straight up, whistled into the exhaust hood, and screeched through the ductwork like a mortar shell until, Zack was certain, it exploded into a shower of cascading sparks right over the roof of the Hanging Hill Playhouse.

  “I’m going upstairs to rescue my mom!” Derek shouted.

  “Hurry!” said Zack.

  As Derek ran out the doors, Grimes lurched toward Zack.

  “You insolent child!” he howled.

  Then Zack heard an even louder howl. A cat?

  Now a bark! Zipper.

  Grimes dropped to his knees, held open his arms. “Jinx?”

  A hell cat the size of a beaver came charging out of the shadows with Zipper in hot pursuit. The giant cat looked ready to claw somebody’s eyes out.

  It yowled, then leapt up at Grimes. Clung on to his head. The madman looked like he was wearing a fur face mask.

  “Fire away!” Zack screamed to Judy. “Fire!”

  Judy was a pretty good shot with the bottle rockets.

  Mrs. McKenna, too.

  But it was a good thing Meghan was hiding behind the blast doors. Some of the moms’ misguided missiles spiraled around the room like out-of-control comets.

  Mr. Kimble? He had juggled knives when he was a kid.

  He still had the stuff.

  He nailed the screaming, cat-wrestling Grimes in the butt with a lumbo whistling starburst rocket. So on top of the wild caterwauling, Zack now heard tuxedo pants sizzling.

  Next Kimble tagged Hakeem with a plastic-tipped missile in the side of his felt hat. Flaming embers spewed up and made it look like the poor guy was taking a sparkle shower underneath a rainbow-colored Niagara Falls.

  Badir and Jamal ran out the doors.

  Judy and Mrs. McKenna tossed down more rockets, the kinds that made starbursts and lots of siss-boom-bang noises up in the sky. Zack hurled them all into Moloch’s fire so his hollowed-out horns would keep shooting off distress signals like the big finale in a fireworks show.

  Hey, if you couldn’t call the cops, sometimes it was a smart idea to send up a flare.

  116

  The crazed cat had vanished but Mr. Grimes’s face was a scratched and bloody mess. Zack guessed the full moon meant ghost claws were real for the night, too.

  “Let me assist you, Exalted One.” Hakeem—his hat fried, his hair scorched—limped over to where Grimes teetered to his feet. “Do not despair. We shall try again, next August…”

  Now Zack heard the whoosh he had heard last night in the elevator.

  “I won’t go back!”

  The butcher with the meat cleaver materialized in front of Grimes.

  “I won’t go back!” Suddenly, he stopped ranting and stared at Grimes’s turban.

  “Is that an emerald?”

  Grimes nodded.

  “Give it to me!”

  “Never!” Grimes tried to roar. “Return below, foolish demon. I summoned you hence. Now I com
mand you to depart!”

  “I will not depart without that shiny green jewel!”

  “Return below! I command you!”

  The demon laughed. “You cannot command me to do anything!”

  “I am the lord high priest of …”

  “Careful!” warned Hakeem. “Remember: Those summoned can quickly turn against the summoner.”

  This one sure did.

  He swung his meat cleaver like an executioner’s ax and lopped off the high priest’s head, sending the precious emerald and the turban and Reginald Grimes’s skull rolling across the concrete floor like a bloody, free-kicked soccer ball. It stopped at Hakeem’s feet.

  Another whoosh, a tormented scream, and the demon butcher was sucked down into the concrete floor. He disappeared. His cleaver clunked to the ground. The thing remained real. The man did not.

  Now Hakeem picked up his high priest’s head, cradled it to his chest, and began to blubber.

  “He was the last of his royal line! Our final hope! I must bring him back to life! I must resurrect the high priest of Ba’al!”

  He turned to the statue.

  “Take me, Moloch! I will be the boy! Take me!” And he began the incantation: “O, magnus Molochus….”

  Zack closed his eyes.

  He didn’t want to see this.

  “Aaaiiieeeee!”

  He heard a whomp! A roar of flames. Horrible screams. Shrieks.

  Hakeem had willingly leapt into the fire.

  Zack kept his eyes closed.

  Until he heard what sounded like a disgusted burp, the roaring clatter of brass, and a very queasy groan.

  “Oooh.”

  Zack dared to peek up at the statue.

  The Minotaur looked like he might puke.

  “Bad boy,” urped the statue. “Very, very bad.”

  Hakeem must not have been pure or true.

  At long last, Zack heard sirens in the distance.

  117

  It took several hours for Judy and Mrs. McKenna to explain to the police and firefighters what had happened.

  And what they told the officers wasn’t a complete lie.

  Hakeem had, in a way, killed Grimes. Calling him Exalted One. Making him think he was more special than anybody in the world. Because Hakeem’s charred carcass was discovered clutching Grimes’s skull inside the doused fire pit and because the police had the murder weapon (the meat cleaver) it was pretty much an open-and-shut case: murder/suicide.

  Paramedics rolled Mrs. Stone on a gurney to an ambulance parked in front of the Hanging Hill Playhouse. She was still conked out.

  “I’m riding with her to the hospital,” said Derek.

  “Thanks for coming back,” said Zack.

  “Yeah,” said Meghan. “Thanks! That was extremely brave.”

  “Sorry,” Derek said with a wink. “Can’t do an autograph now. Catch me later!” He hopped into the back of the ambulance. Zipper barked to say goodbye. “Catch you later, Zip!”

  “I’ll call the scrap metal folks first thing in the morning,” said Mr. Kimble, who was standing on the porch with Zack, Judy, Meghan, and Mrs. McKenna. “Have ’em cart away the brass statue. Melt it down to make buttons. Door knockers.”

  It was nearly midnight when the last official vehicle finally pulled out of the gravel parking lot.

  Meghan came over to where Zack stood and kissed him.

  “Zack Jennings,” she whispered, “you’re my hero!” While Zach was totally stunned, Sassakus showed up on the front lawn.

  118

  The noble Native American ruler materialized accompanied by his daughter, Princess Nepauduckett.

  She wasn’t crying anymore. In fact, she looked happy.

  The towering chieftain gestured for Zack to come down and join him on the dewy patch of grass. Zack did. Meghan and the adults followed him down the porch steps.

  “Do you know who I am?” the apparition asked.

  “I think so.”

  “You’re Sassakus!” said Mrs. McKenna, the history buff.

  “I cursed this land because I knew white men to be demons. They accused my daughter of stealing corn. They executed her here on Hangman’s Hill.” When Sassakus stepped forward, his necklace of shells rattled like a skeleton’s tambourine. “But I have seen what you have done this day. Why did you take the other boy’s place?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Zack answered honestly. “It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I wanted to help.”

  Sassakus nodded thoughtfully. “You are not like the others. You are not a demon. You are the demon slayer?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I just wanted to help out the good guys.” Zack turned around to point up at the moonlit theater building and wasn’t at all surprised to see that, once again, a whole host of ghostly actors and stagehands were crowded in the glowing windows on all five floors—even up in every turret and tower.

  “You are special, Zack Jennings, yes?”

  “He is,” said Judy, standing behind Zack, placing her hands on his shoulders. “Very special.”

  “Very well.” Sassakus clapped his hands. “The ones below are banished forever. I remove my curse and forgive the evil done unto my daughter, for I do not wish that same evil to rule my soul for all eternity.”

  For a second, Zack wondered if Sassakus was talking about the kind of evil done to Zack by his mother, Susan Potter. Maybe she had tried to help him. Maybe she had shown up back at the hotel to protect him from Mad Dog Murphy. It was a possibility.

  So was it time for him to forgive her?

  Time to move forward without constantly looking back?

  Maybe. Maybe not. Hey, it took Sassakus what? Four-hundred some years. Zack might need a little more time, too.

  “Come, daughter. We must move on.”

  “Where to?”

  “Someplace much happier. Our time here is ended.”

  With that, they disappeared.

  “Huzzah!” the phantom actors shouted from every window. “Huzzah!”

  “Attaboy, Zachary!” shouted Mr. Willowmeier from way up in the highest tower. Zack heard two girls giggle. He figured Mr. Willowmeier was throwing another one of his famous cast parties.

  “So many,” said Kimble.

  “Can you see them, Mom?” Meghan asked.

  “Yes, dear. How could I not?”

  Wilbur Kimble shook his head in awe. “So, so many.”

  “Mr. Kimble?”

  “Aya?”

  “Well, sir, I finally saw my dead mother today.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, sir. I think it’s because I really, truly believe I wasn’t the one who made her miserable or killed her. The same way you didn’t kill your sister.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Hey, I just met the guy who did. He should change his name from Professor Nicodemus to Doctor Nutjob.”

  “I just wish I could’ve stopped him.”

  “You were ten years old!”

  “Aya.”

  “Plus, you didn’t have any pyrotechnical devices or an ace gunner covering your back!”

  “You’re right. Nicodemus killed Clara. Not me.”

  “I think Clara agrees.”

  “You do, do you?”

  Zack smiled. “But don’t take my word. Ask her yourself.”

  Kimble turned around and saw what Zack had already seen; his sister, standing on the porch, juggling six spinning balls high above her head.

  “Clara?”

  “Hello, Wilbur! It’s wonderful to see you again!”

  As Mr. Kimble wiped away a tear and went up the steps to join his sister, Judy came over to Zack and gestured toward the building. “So, Zack. Is your mother up there?”

  Zack shook his head. “Nope. She’s standing right next to me.”

  “I meant your real mother.”

  “I know. Me too.”

  When Zack said that, Judy kissed him, too.

  Acknowledgments

&nbs
p; I want to thank my incredible editor, R. Schuyler Hooke, who truly knows how to help a writer find the story buried underneath all the words.

  Elizabeth Mackey Johnson, Lisa McClatchy, Jenny Madden, and all the wonderful people at Random House who treat their authors so well.

  My agent, Eric Myers.

  My incredible wife, cheerleader, and first reader, J.J.—you should hear her do all the voices!

  Meghan, Sam, Rodman John, Anna, Riley, Maddie, Wendell, Wesley, Timothy, and all my other early readers.

  Our gray cat Parker, who so graciously posed for me during the creation of Jinx.

  Our dog, Fred, who is a big Zipper and a constant inspiration. I’m so glad he had to do his business that one time at three a.m.

  And most especially, I’d like to thank all the teachers, students, parents, and librarians who have taken Zack and Judy into their hearts and homes. You guys are the best.

  Chris Grabenstein is the author of The Crossroads, which Booklist called a “rip-roaring ghost story” in its starred review, as well as six critically acclaimed adult mysteries and thrillers. In fact, his first book, Tilt-A-Whirl, won the Anthony Award for best first mystery. If any of that sounds like a TV commercial, maybe it’s because Chris wrote copy for TV and radio ads for too, too long. He also wrote for Jim Henson’s Muppets and co-wrote the CBS TV movie The Christmas Gift, starring John Denver. Right out of college, Chris did improvisational comedy with some of the top performers in New York City, including one guy named Bruce Willis. Chris and his wife, J.J., live in Manhattan with three cats and a dog named Fred, who starred on Broadway in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. You can visit Chris and go behind the scenes of The Hanging Hill at www.ChrisGrabenstein.com.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2009 by Chris Grabenstein

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.