The Hanging Hill (20 page)

110

Judy, Mr. Kimble, and Meghan’s mom were kneeling on three sides of the open trapdoor.

Zipper sat on the fourth side.

“What’s Zack doing down there?” Judy asked.

“Bein’ mighty brave, you ask me,” said Mr. Kimble.

She looked around the scene shop. Saw the crate. Read the stenciled warning.

“Then we’d better help him!” She stood up and dragged the box closer to the trapdoor.

111

Zack pretended he was the one operating the cable, lowering the harness.

“Let Derek go!” he said to Grimes as soon as his feet touched the floor. Or else I’ll change my mind.”

Again Grimes looked to the floor. “Grandpa?”

Zack could see through the floor. Down below, there was an old man with a purple towel wrapped around his head. The throbbing glow from a fire smoldering under his feet deepened the furrows in his face and made him look terrifying.

“Can I let the other boy go, Grandpa?” Grimes asked.

The demon under the floor sneered up at Derek. He flicked out his tongue. “Fine.” He huffed. “Let the coward run away. He won’t get far.”

“Hey!” Derek protested. Then he heaved a raspy wheeze.

Zack put his hand on Derek’s shoulder. “Go upstairs, Derek.”

“What? I want to help you guys!”

“You know, I’ll never forget when we first met,” Zack said, sounding all choked up. “How you gunned your little truck.”

“What?”

“Go upstairs. Play with your truck.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Go. Gun. Your truck.”

Derek stared at Zack. Zack raised his eyebrows. Twice.

“Oh.” Finally. Derek understood what Zack was trying to tell him. “Yeah. My truck. Good idea.” He bolted for the open door, running faster than anyone with allergies should be able to.

“How you holding up?” Zack whispered to Meghan.

“This is scary, Zack. They want to toss us on the grill.”

“I know. It’s what they did to Juggler Girl. Mr. Kimble told me.”

“Silence!” Grimes shouted. “We have wasted enough time. The dog moon has risen. It is time for the hounds of hell to rise with it! Say the words.”

Zack needed to buy a little more time. Not much. Just enough.

“Hakeem? Hand him the scroll!”

The swarthy man handed Zack a rolled-up tube of ancient papyrus.

“Recite the words!”

Zack adjusted his glasses and dropped the scroll. The brittle document shattered.

“Whoops. Sorry!”

He bent over to pick up the pieces off the floor. Scanned the room. Two guys with guns.

He wished there was only one. They’d have a better chance with just one. Two was going to be tough. He looked up at the trapdoor.

Very tough. Maybe impossible.

“Hurry up, Zack Jennings!” snarled a familiar demon: Mad Dog Murphy. He and his electric chair were under the floor with the others. “I told you I’d be comin’ back to get you, boy!”

They’d have one chance. One shot.

“Mr. Jennings?” said Grimes. “Recite the words! Now! Miss McKenna? Prepare to enter the vast unknown!”

“No!” said Meghan. “I won’t do it. You can’t make me!”

One of the thugs raised his gun, pointed it at Meghan’s heart. He cocked the trigger. Zack heard the sharp metallic click.

“Wait!” said Zack. “If you shoot Meghan, Moloch won’t get his live human sacrifice!”

“Give me that gun!” Grimes wrestled the revolver out of the muscleman’s hand. “The boy’s right! The ritual will only work if we exchange their lives for the lives of those down below.” He hurled the pistol into the fire pit under the grill.

The gunpowder inside the shells exploded like lethal popcorn. Zack heard five bullets ping against metal.

Good.

Meant they only had one gun now.

“Are you happy, little Miss Movie Star?” Grimes screamed. “Nobody’s going to shoot you. We’re just going to roast you alive like my father tried to roast me! Like he roasted my sister!”

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 command 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.