The Smoky Corridor (12 page)

“Uh-oh,” said Ms. DuBois.

Malik raised his hand.

“Yes, Mr. Sherman?”

“If animal control comes, they will undoubtedly want to take Zipper to the dog pound. I think it would be wise for us to hide him.”

“Where?” asked Ms. DuBois.

“We’ll find a place,” said Zack.

Ms. DuBois gestured for them to hurry. “Go on, boys.
I’ll call your mother, Zack, to tell her to swing by and pick up the dog. Meet her out front in the visitor parking lot after the next bell.”

“Thanks, Ms. DuBois! You’re the best!”

“Hurry! Before Mr. Crumpler sees you!”

So Zack grabbed Zipper; then he and Malik hightailed it out the door.

45

Mr. Crumpler
and his new janitor, Captain Cornpone, had cleared the cafeteria and the wood shop and had entered the infamous smoky corridor when he noticed an open door.

The DuBois woman’s classroom.

“This way!” he said, and they stepped inside.

“Hello, Mr. Crumpler,” said the history teacher, who had the same sort of Southern drawl as the new mop pusher.

“Your door. Has it been open long?”

“Not very.”

The classroom was full of students. Two desks, however, were suspiciously empty.

“Is there some sort of problem?” asked Ms. DuBois.

“Yes!” said Mr. Crumpler. “I am looking for a dog. Have you seen one?”

Ms. DuBois rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “A dog? Hmmm …”

Some of the kids giggled.

“Oh, you mean that sweet little pooch who just jumped out our window?”

“What?”

“Heavens, I almost forgot. See, we had the window open—this old room gets stuffy sometimes—and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the cutest little doggy you ever did see comes scootin’ through that door, zips up the center aisle, and with a hop, skip, and a jump leaps out the back window.”

“You let him get away?”

“Why, we barely knew he was here before, zip, he was gone.”

“Which way did it go?”

“Heavens, I couldn’t say.”

Mr. Crumpler narrowed his eyes. “Who sits in those two seats?”

“The two empty desks?”

“That’s right.”

“Nobody. I believe that is why they are empty.”

The children looked ready to giggle again.

So Mr. Crumpler gave them his glare. The one that said,
I’ll see you all in detention hall if you so much as breathe!

That shut ’em up.

“If the dog returns, call the office!”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Crumpler straightened his tie and strode out the door.

When he hit the hall, he wasn’t sure, but he thought he might’ve heard children tittering behind him.

No. That was impossible.

The children feared Carl D. Crumpler far too much to laugh at him behind his back.

46

“We should
head downstairs and double back!” shouted Zack, hugging Zipper close to his chest.

The dog kept licking him. First the chin. Then the nose.

“Excellent idea!” said Malik.

They raced down a staircase to the basement.

“We need to stay close to the main entrance!”

“Well, we can’t take him up to the cafeteria,” said Malik. “And if we head out to the parking lot too early, Mr. Crumpler might see us.”

“How about the janitor’s closet?” said Zack.

“Excellent! It’s dead ahead. Is it unlocked?”

Zack jiggled the knob. “Yes!”

“Hurry.”

They scurried into the dark room and closed the door.

“Lights?” Malik asked.

“No,” said Zack. “Someone might see it under the door.”

Zipper grumbled and squirmed, so Zack put him down on the ground.

“Stay right here, Zip, okay? Judy’s on her way. How much time till the bell?”

Malik pushed a button on his wristwatch and the numbers glowed. “Twenty-five minutes.”

Zack exhaled. “Ms. DuBois is so cool … covering for us.”

“Yeah.”

And then the boys heard the
tick-tick-tick
of dog claws on concrete.

“Zipper?” Zack said in a tense whisper. “Come back here. Zip? Zipper!”

Zipper started to whine. And then scratch. And then dig the way he did when his ball got stuck in the corner of the couch.

A flashlight clicked on.

“I found it on a shelf,” said Malik. He handed it to Zack.

Zack shone the beam over to where Zipper was pawing furiously at the leg of an industrial shelving unit crammed with jugs and bottles and boxes of toilet paper.

“Zipper? You’ve got to be quiet. There’s no food on those shelves. It isn’t like the pantry. It’s just a bunch of janitor junk.”

Zack leaned on the shelving unit to make his point.

“Leave it alone.”

And when he let go, the whole steel rack slid forward.

“Wow! What is that?” asked Malik, who had grabbed a second flashlight and was examining the opening in the wall.

“I dunno,” said Zack. “Some kind of secret entrance?”

“To what?”

“Good question. Come on! But watch your step. There’s a low stone wall.” He stepped over the short barrier and sniffed the air. “It smells different back here.”

“Indeed,” said Malik. “Earthy.”

Wooden, not steel, shelves lined the walls on the other side of the secret entryway. A few held old-fashioned glass jars. Malik picked one up. Blew the dust off the lid. “‘Wild indigo root compound,’” he read. “‘Prepared 1875.’ Amazing. This must be the root cellar for the old Pettimore estate. This is where they would store food for the winter.”

“Zipper must’ve liked the smells leaking under the hidden panel.” Zack swung the flashlight across the dirt floor. “Zip? Zip?”

Finally, the light hit Zipper. He was standing in front of a hole in the stone wall, pawing at something on the ground.

“What’d you find this time? An antique cheeseburger?”

Zipper whimpered and kept scratching at the ground.

“What is it, boy?” Zack asked.

And then he and Malik saw what Zipper had just uncovered.

47

“Well,” said
Zack, “the middle part is obviously a warning, like a No Trespassing sign. But the rest? Maybe they’re Egyptian hieroglyphics or something.”

“No,” gasped Malik. “It’s code!”

They studied what someone had carved into the stone:

“It appears to be a diagrammatic cipher,” said Malik.

“Huh?”

“It substitutes symbols for letters instead of letters for letters as you might find on a decoder ring.”

“What’s it say?”

“Not certain. But I believe the coder is using what is called the pigpen cipher, a substitution code often used by the Masons. Each clustering of letters indicates a new word.…”

“How much time do we have until the bell rings?”

Malik checked his watch. “Not much. Perhaps I should take a rubbing of the inscription. That way, we can finish cracking the code at a more convenient time.”

“Yeah,” said Zack.

“We need a sheet of paper and a crayon of some kind.”

Zack scanned the room with his flashlight. On the wall he saw some rock concert posters and another one of those prints of Horace Pettimore. They might work. Then, on a rack, he saw a stack of brown paper grocery sacks. “There’s your paper!”

“Excellent!” Malik grabbed a bag and tore out a flat panel.

Zack turned his flashlight left. Saw more jars of pickled preserves. A pile of moldy potatoes. A stack of candles, some white, some black.

“Hey, how about a black candle for your crayon?”

“Perfect! I should be able to pick up the impressions using the same technique one would employ to do a gravestone rubbing.”

“Do you need the light?”

“No.”

Malik started rubbing. Zack moved his flashlight beam up to the jagged hole in the wall just past the spot where they’d found the secret message. The fieldstones circling the three-foot-wide opening were scorched black. Zipper sniffed the edges.

“Careful, boy,” said Zack. He didn’t want Zipper falling
through the hole. There was some kind of chute, like an enclosed playground slide, on the other side. Maybe that was what the warning was all about: descending into whatever hell was down there in the darkness.

He couldn’t risk it. Zack scooped his dog off the ground. Cradled him in his arms.

“Finished!” said Malik.

“Great. How much time till the bell?”

Malik rolled up his paper and checked his watch. “Two minutes.”

“Okay, Zipper, under my shirt. We need to smuggle you out of the building.”

The boys made their way through the swiveling shelves to the janitor’s closet—shoving the shelf unit back into place.

And then, at the sound of the bell, they ran out the door faster than either one of them had ever run before.

48

Horace Pettimore
had not been this joyful in ages.

Not since the steamy Louisiana night when he’d stolen sixty-six dead men’s souls and sealed them up inside glass jars.

He had just slipped into the portrait hanging on the wall of the old root cellar, where he observed the new boy, the one with a long family history in this corner of Connecticut, as the boy discovered the secret marker.

It had to be a sign. An omen.

Zack had to be the one
.

The one he had been seeking for more than a century. The one he had lured there with the buried voodoo charm.

The time was drawing nigh. Soon he would slip his soul into the boy’s body and use it to retrieve his treasure.

Of course the scrawny child would lose his soul in the exchange, exactly twenty-four hours after Pettimore’s soul shoved it out of the boy’s body.

But that did not matter.

Because Captain Horace P. Pettimore would live again!

49

“Hi, Mom!
You remember Ms. DuBois?”

“Sure.”

Zack didn’t have time for much more than a quick pass off of Zipper through an open car window.

“I am so sorry about this,” Judy said to Ms. DuBois.

“I’m sure Zipper just missed Zack,” said Ms. DuBois. “No harm, no foul, as they say.”

“From now on, he doesn’t go outside without bodyguards.”

“Well, we best hurry back inside,” said Ms. DuBois. “If we’re not in the cafeteria for our lunch period, Mr. Crumpler might become suspicious.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Zack said.

Judy blew him a quick kiss. Zipper had his paws pressed against the edge of the window, a huge smile on his snout.

“You’re riding shotgun, pal.” Judy picked Zip up and placed him on the passenger seat. “In fact, you might want to lie low until we clear the school zone.”

Zipper seemed to understand. He hopped down to the
floorboard, where he hunkered on the rubber mat, head tucked between paws in sneak-attack mode.

“See you after school, Zack!” Judy said as she pulled away.

“See you, Mom!”

“Love you!”

“Love you, too!”

The second bell rang.

“Come on, Zack,” said Ms. DuBois. “Back inside. So, where did you boys hide?”

Zack was just about to tell Ms. DuBois about the swiveling supply shelf in the janitor’s closet and the root cellar and the cool carved stone when he saw Mr. Willoughby walk through a door. Not a doorway, a door.

He was shaking his head and mouthing a single word over and over: “No!”

“Um, here and there. No place special.”

“Well,” said Ms. DuBois, “it worked!”

Yeah.

But apparently, Zack couldn’t tell any grown-ups about the root cellar, either!

50

Zack’s terrible
day got even worse after school officially ended.

His final class was technology education with another really cool teacher, named Mr. Bill Green, who told them that starting the next day, they’d each be designing, engineering, and constructing a ping-pong catapult to do a trajectory-analysis project.

“That should be fun!” said Malik as he and Zack headed up the crowded corridor toward their lockers. Everywhere Zack looked, he (and no one else) saw guardian ghosts. Some were escorting their relatives up and down the hall. Others were hanging out inside open lockers. One was trying to get a drink from a water fountain but her palm kept passing through the on button.

Two, who looked like a mismatched set—one a lady in a bright green dress, the other a man in a funny bowler hat, both with bullet holes in the center of their heads—stood behind the newest janitor, who was working a push broom down the hall. The newly arrived ghosts were holding their noses and shouting stuff like “Stay away
from this one!” and “He’s nothing but trouble!” to anyone who’d listen.

Zack, of course, was the only one who could listen, and frankly, he had enough to worry about without adding a new janitor to the mix, thank you very much.

The couple followed the janitor, blowing unheard raspberries at him as he swept the corridor clean.

Zack and Malik were headed the other way.

They pulled open a door and there was Azalea Torres, working her locker open on the wall outside Ms. DuBois’s classroom.

“Hey, you guys! I just had this awesome idea. It’s October already. Halloween’s coming. We should go on a cemetery crawl!”