The Hanging Hill Read online

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Lock the door. No one is to be allowed into this room until I am finished giving my notes.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  As the stage manager assembled all the actors, Grimes stood silently in a dark corner, hidden in the shadows behind a funnel of dusty light cascading down from a dim ceiling fixture. Dressed in a black turtleneck and black slacks, he all but disappeared, although there was no mistaking the sheen from his gleaming coal black eyes. He stroked his pencil-thin mustache. Smoothed his eyebrows with the middle finger of his one good hand.

  He waited.

  Soon the entire company was standing in a hushed half circle in front of him: Thurston Powell in cape and fangs; Amy Jo and Laura Joy Tiedeman, the actresses playing the tap-dancing Transylvania Twins; the chorus boys and chorus girls decked out in their werewolf and bat costumes.

  Grimes didn’t say a word. Not at first. He let his stillness fill the terrified thespians with dread. An actor’s life was a hard one. Paying jobs were few and far between and it was the director who determined which actors worked and which went back to the unemployment line. Grimes had the power to crush each and every one of their dreams as surely as that horribly antique wringer washer had crushed his.

  Finally, he spoke.

  “I saw the show tonight.” He let his words hang like icicles in the air. “I have a few notes.”

  Thurston Powell, the dashing leading man, nodded eagerly, pretending to be delighted to hear an honest critique of his performance. The man was a complete suck-up. No wonder he played such a convincing vampire.

  “Kelly?” said Grimes.

  A nervous young showgirl in black tights and sparkling bat wings stepped forward half an inch. The beautiful and talented Kelly Fagan was trembling so much her sequins were shimmering. Her frightened little toes tappity-taptapped against the hard tile floor.

  Well, well, well.

  Hadn’t it been just last weekend that this same young woman had refused Reginald Grimes’s invitation to dinner? Oh, yes, she had smiled when, quite politely, she said, “I’m already dating someone,” but Grimes was certain he had registered the slightest hint of revulsion crossing her pretty face as she contemplated the prospect of being seen in public with a gimp.

  Fine. Tonight he would extend her another invitation: to kindly go home.

  “You were late for your entrance, Miss Fagan.”

  “I know,” she said, her voice a frightened bird twitter. “We had some trouble making the costume change.”

  “You were late.”

  “Right. The bat wings wouldn’t…”

  “You. Were. Late.”

  “I just missed my entrance by a beat or two …”

  “No, Ms. Fagan. You missed it by a full measure. Four counts.” He tapped his right hand against his stiff left arm. “Five, six, seven, eight! You see, Ms. Fagan, unlike some members of my cast, I pay very strict attention to the conductor waving his baton up and down in the orchestra pit.”

  “But, I …”

  “You’re fired.”

  “What?”

  “Your services are no longer required. I am terminating your contract, effective immediately.”

  “But…”

  He turned to the others in the cast. “Let this be a warning to you all. I will not tolerate unprofessional behavior!”

  “But… my parents,” Fagan sniffled, “my parents were in the audience tonight.”

  “Really?” said Grimes. “How nice. They were able to see your final performance at the Hanging Hill Playhouse!”

  Feeling better than he had in weeks, Grimes climbed a winding staircase to the second floor and entered his office.

  There was a swarthy man waiting for him.

  “Mr. Grimes?”

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Reginald Grimes?”

  “Yes.”

  “The orphan child?”

  Grimes’s pale skin blanched even whiter. “Who. Are. You?”

  “My name is Hakeem. We have much to discuss.”

  11

  It was eleven p.m. when Zack, Judy, and Zipper finally pulled off the interstate at the exit for Chatham and the Hanging Hill Playhouse.

  The theater was listed on the reflective green sign! Zack was impressed. That meant it was famous. A landmark.

  “You know why they call it the Hanging Hill Playhouse?” Judy asked as the Saab eased down the ramp.

  Zack had no idea, so he made one up: “Um, it’s on top of a hill that sort of hangs out over the river?”

  Judy laughed. “No. It used to be a tavern. A place for weary travelers to eat and drink and sleep. A man named Justus Willowmeier built the original Hanging Hill Publick House back in 1854. It was a combination bar, restaurant, hotel, and all-purpose gathering place.”

  “Have you been talking to Mrs. Emerson again?”

  “Yep,” said Judy. “She knows everything. She even knows what she doesn’t know. The unknown, she looks up.”

  Mrs. Jeanette Emerson was the librarian back in North Chester and one of Judy’s best friends. The two of them could talk about anything and nothing for hours.

  They reached a main boulevard and Judy guided the car into the right-hand lane. Zipper, sensing that they must be getting close to wherever they were going, sprang up in the backseat and leaned his front paws against the window ledge to check out the scenery. Well, it was too dark to see much. So he mostly sniffed.

  “We should be able to catch Bats in Her Belfry sometime this week. That’s the show they’re doing on the main stage while we rehearse. It was originally staged at the Hanging Hill, then moved down to New York, where it was extremely successful on Broadway back in 1955. Made Kathleen Williams a star. She sang ‘Bitten and Smitten.’ Became a top ten hit.”

  “Cool.”

  Judy started to hum.

  Then sing.

  “I’m bitten and smitten and falling in love. He’s flittin’ and flappin’ so high up above….”

  “That was a hit?”

  “Yeah.”

  Zack figured they’d never sing it on American Idol.

  Now they moved through the small-town streets of Chatham, following directional signs for the “World-Famous Hanging Hill Playhouse.” At this hour, most of Chatham’s shops and restaurants were closed. Cast-iron streetlamps lined the empty sidewalks.

  “Wow,” said Judy. “What time is it?”

  Zack checked his watch. “A little after eleven.”

  “Guess we got a pretty late start.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hope Mr. Grimes is still at the theater. Zack?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Grimes, the director, he has a, well, a reputation.”

  “Good one?”

  “For staging brilliant productions, yes. But as a person, well, they say he can be difficult. Rules the theater with an iron fist.”

  “Does he make actors cry?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What about authors?”

  “Maybe. I hope not. Anyway, he’s the best director for the show. Everybody says so.”

  “Then,” said Zack, “I’ll cut him some slack. Won’t whip out my iron fist unless I have to.”

  Judy smiled. “Thanks, hon.”

  “No problem-o.” Now it was Zack’s turn to say it: “Wow!”

  They had just rounded a bend and could see an all-white building glowing atop a hill high on the horizon. Floodlights aimed up toward the ornate molding illuminated the whole front of the five-story-tall mansard root mansion. Only a few windows were lit: one on either side of the fifth floor, one in the middle of the third, and a whole string along the first. The glowing windows gave the Hanging Hill Playhouse two eerily empty eyes, a creepy nose, and a straight-line scowl of square teeth, turning it into a gigantic jack-o’-lantern.

  Cars were streaming out of the gravel parking lots on both sides of the building.

  “Guess the show just let out,” said Judy, maneuvering th
e car upstream against the tide of theatergoers headed home. They parked in a small lot facing the front porch.

  “Let’s leave the suitcases in the trunk until we find our rooms.”

  Since the building used to be a hotel, Zack and Judy would be staying in bedrooms on the upper floors until the show opened.

  “Do you know which rooms are ours?” Zack asked.

  “Nope. Somewhere up top, I hope.”

  Zack studied the towers and turrets jutting up from the roof, the clustered stacks of chimneys.

  “Cool,” he said. “Is there an elevator?”

  “I hope so,” said Judy.

  “What about Zipper? Should we bring him in?”

  Zipper, who had been so excited five minutes earlier, was napping again in the backseat. He seemed to be having a dream that involved chasing squirrels: Every so often, his hind legs twitched and kicked.

  “Let him sleep,” said Judy. “But make sure to leave your window open a crack.”

  “Roger,” said Zack, toggling the rocket switch again. Then he and Judy climbed the porch steps and went into the Hanging Hill Playhouse.

  12

  His soul swirls in the churning ectoplasm where it has spun in a spiral of overlapping circles for longer than he dares to remember.

  He had been roasting in this eternal damnation when he first heard a voice calling him.

  “Come forth, Michael Butler, I command you! Diamond Mike, come forth!”

  And so he did—carrying his bloody meat cleaver.

  He felt his soul chill, then rush up through a swirling current as if trapped under the earth’s crust inside a raging geyser. His spirit raced up from the underworld to the brink of life, never quite bursting free or crossing the threshold to the other side of death, never quite coming back to life.

  Still, he recalls floating for brief moments across a vast expanse of darkness.

  He remembers being hit with blindingly bright lights.

  He remembers voices. Screams. Hushed murmurs. Angry men. Terrified women. The sparkle of jewels. Panic.

  An audience.

  Yes. He had been called into a theater, his summoned spirit put on momentary public display, his movements and very presence orchestrated by a coal-eyed man in a purple turban.

  He remembers the turban.

  The luminous green jewel shaped like a cockroach sitting at its center.

  And then he remembers the man casting him away, sending him back into this numbing limbo to wait until he was called forth once more.

  At every appearance, no matter how brief, Diamond Mike Butler longed to be restored to full existence. To be back in his living, breathing body. To rob and steal and kill again.

  One time, he nearly made it all the way back.

  One time, he almost crossed the threshold.

  One time.

  Perhaps he will get another chance.

  Until then, the demon known in life as Diamond Mike Butler, the Butcher Thief of Bleecker Street, will wait.

  He will wait in the churning nothingness beneath this place he remembers hearing the turbaned man calling the Hanging Hill Playhouse.

  He will wait.

  13

  “Mr. Grimes said he’d meet us in the lobby,” said Judy.

  The lobby was empty.

  “What time?” asked Zack.

  “I think I told him seven.”

  In perfect sync, Judy and Zack both glanced at their wristwatches. Eleven-thirty p.m.

  “Oops,” said Zack.

  “Guess we shouldn’t have stopped for gas.”

  “Or dinner.”

  “Or ice cream cones,” said Judy.

  Zack said it again: “Oops.”

  “Tell you what: We’ll take a quick look around. If he’s already gone home, we can stay at that Holiday Inn we passed on the way into town.”

  “Okay.”

  “You take the auditorium. I’ll head upstairs and see if he’s in his office.”

  “Cool.”

  “We meet back here in five minutes.”

  “Check.”

  And they split up.

  Judy headed up a staircase with an elaborately carved banister. Zack pulled open a door to what he thought was the auditorium.

  Turned out it was another staircase. A sign on the wall said Box 2-B and had an arrow pointing up. Fine. He could check out the whole auditorium from an elevated post in the box seats. He bounded up the steps, pushed through a velvety curtain.

  “Hello?” he called out. “Mr. Grimes?”

  The auditorium was pitch-dark except for the bright light cast from a bare bulb on top of a pole at center stage.

  “Mr. Grimes?”

  No answer. Just his own voice echoing from the darkness. Zack shrugged and headed for the curtained alcove to take the stairs back down to the lobby.

  “Thank you! Thank you all!” a lilting voice called out.

  Okay. Mr. Grimes wasn’t here, but somebody else sure was.

  “Bless you, darlings! Bless you all!”

  Zack turned around and made his way back to the edge of the box so he could look down at the shadowy sea of seats. Nothing. Nobody.

  “You were a marvelous audience! Marvelous!”

  Now he looked toward the stage. The single bulb blinded him a bit, but his eyes soon adjusted.

  There, at the lip of the stage, in the shadowy darkness just above the first row of seats, he saw a very grand woman in a jeweled headdress and a ruffled gown. Her crinkly gloves reached up past her elbows. She clutched a bouquet of plump roses and kept bowing and bowing, over and over again.

  “Thank you! Bless you! You’re too, too kind.”

  Zack knew the elegant woman had to be a ghost. Nobody had dressed like that since maybe World War I.

  “Come back again, my darlings!” she called out to the invisible crowd giving her what must have been the world’s first silent ovation. “I’m here for three more weeks!”

  Great.

  Zack and Judy would be here for three weeks, too.

  14

  Zack raced down the steps to the lobby.

  Now he had another ghost not to tell Judy about. How could he? She had a script to worry about plus a mean director to deal with. She did not need to know about an old-fashioned actress in a jeweled cap who somebody needed to haul offstage with a hook—like they did sometimes in Bugs Bunny cartoons—so they could remind her she was dead!

  Judy was waiting for Zack underneath one of the lobby’s crystal chandeliers as he slammed the door to the box seats.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” said Zack, a little short of breath after scampering down the staircase. “I just thought I’d, you know, get a little exercise. We’ve been cooped up in that car for a couple hours. Needed to stretch my legs.”

  “So you ran down a staircase?”

  “Yeah,” Zack panted. “Ran up it, too.”

  “Well, I walked up to the second floor. Mr. Grimes wasn’t in his office.”

  “He wasn’t in the auditorium, either.”

  “Guess he got tired of waiting for us.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’d better hit that Holiday Inn.”

  “Can Zipper stay with us?” asked Zack. “In a hotel?”

  “I think so. A lot of hotels are pet-friendly these days. If this one isn’t—”

  Suddenly, the chandelier over their heads went dark. So did the lights lining the walls. Then the lights in the box office. Zack and Judy were being systematically plunged into darkness, which made the vast expanse of the lobby, with its columns and arched ceilings, as creepy as an empty tomb at midnight.

  “Closin’ up,” called a gruff voice from off in the distance. Zack heard another circuit breaker being thumped off.

  “Hello?” Judy called out.

  “Closin’ up,” came the reply from a man they couldn’t see.

  “Uh, okay. I’m Judy Jennings.”

  “Aya,” said the voice. “We’
re closin’ up.”

  “Judy Magruder Jennings.”

  “Aya.” More switches were flipped with a spring-loaded flick-click, flick-click.

  “I wrote Curiosity Cat?”

  “Do tell,” said the man, a silhouette moving through the gloom toward them. He was tall and lanky and wore a floppy billed cap that reminded Zack of the hats his toy Confederate army soldiers wore.

  “We were supposed to meet Mr. Grimes,” said Judy.

  “Mr. Grimes is gone,” said the shadow.

  “I see. Do you work here?”

  “Aya.”

  “I wonder, could you show us to our rooms?”

  Now the man stepped into a shaft of soft moonlight streaming through the windows. He was gaunt and grizzled, his cheeks stubbled with the kind of patchy white beard you see on grandfathers who’d forgotten to shave.

  He eyeballed them hard. “What rooms?”

  “My son and I. We’re staying here.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Um, I think we can. It’s in my contract. The theater is supposed to provide housing until opening night,” said Judy. “They gave us rooms. Upstairs.”

  “Don’t know nothin’ about any rooms. Then again, I’m just the janitor.”

  The janitor. Zack wondered if that was why the man looked so worn out. His face sagged; his baggy eyes drooped; and his lips were frozen in a frown. He appeared to be at least seventy years old and totally tired of mopping floors.

  “Okay,” said Judy. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”

  The janitor narrowed his eyes. Glared at Zack. “No children are allowed in this theater.”

  “What?” said Judy.

  “No children allowed.”

  Judy laughed. “I think that’s impossible.”

  “No children!”

  “Sir, Curiosity Cat is a family show. Families have children.”

  “Shouldn’t.”

  “What?”

  “Shouldn’t bring children into this theater. Children bring nothing but trouble.”

  “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  Zack figured the janitor hated kids because they stuck wads of gum and boogers under their seats and he was the one who, months later, had to scrape it all off with a putty knife.