The Black Heart Crypt

Kathleen Williams turned into Susan Potter Jennings.

Zack’s dead mother.

The way she’d looked right before she died. Shrunken and shriveled. Tufts of hair sprouting out on top of her vein-riddled head. A surgeon’s scar rippling down her throat until it disappeared beneath the collar of her hospital gown, the gown she had died in after wasting away to little more than ninety pounds, her whole body wracked by the poisonous drugs meant to kill her cancer.

You did this to me, Zack remembered his mother wheezing at him as she was dying. You ruined my life.

In his head, Zack now knew that what his mother had said wasn’t true. But sometimes, when it was dark and he was alone, Zack wondered if he had somehow magically killed Susan Potter Jennings so he could get a do-over, a happy new life with a mom who actually loved him. His stepmother. Judy Magruder Jennings.

Now Zack could hear wet mucus rumbling around inside his dead mother’s leathery lungs. Her eyes went wide, frantically searching the room.

“Zachary?”

She moaned from the foot of the bed.

“Zachary?”

She stretched out her skeletal arms as if to hug him, something Zack couldn’t remember her ever doing while she was alive.

“Where are you?”

Zack tried to shut his eyes even tighter, but he couldn’t make the ghostly apparition disappear, because his dead mother wasn’t there as a ghost—she was trapped inside a dream.

“Zachary!”

Uh-oh.

Zack’s dead mother only called him Zachary when she was totally mad at him—like when he embarrassed her in front of her rich girlfriends or made up a stupid story or played with his action figures, which she called his dollies.

Okay, she had pretty much called Zack Zachary every minute of every day for the first nine years of his life.

But this “Zachary” sounded, well, different. Not angry but scared. Terrified.

Even though Zack could see her, could feel the weight of her emaciated body on his bed, she couldn’t see him. She kept clawing at the air with hands as gnarled as eagle talons.

“I will come,” she said, her voice weak and thin. “I will come for you, Zachary!”

No thanks, Zack wanted to say. Stay in hell or purgatory or limbo or wherever they’ve got your soul locked up these days.

But he couldn’t say anything.

It was still a dream. The worst dream he’d ever had in his whole life.

“Wake up, Zack,” said a new voice. A man’s. His tone firm and gentle. “Wake up, champ.”

Zack pried open an eye.

The only creature on the edge of his bed was Zipper, who was snoring and kicking his hind legs probably because his dreams involved chasing squirrels.

Zack sat up. Felt his dog’s very real, very warm fur. Okay. Zack was definitely awake.

“We’ll get through this thing,” said the unseen man. “We’ll do it together.”

Zack looked toward his homework desk and saw an athletic man with a shock of white hair. The man was wearing a familiar sheriff’s uniform.

“You better go back to sleep, champ. Trust me—you’ll need your strength when my sisters show up.”

“Grandpa Jim?”

The old man winked.

Then he disappeared.

Zack’s grandpa Jim had died three years earlier, just before Zack’s real mother passed away.

Grandpa Jim wasn’t part of the dream.

Grandpa Jim was a ghost.