The Black Heart Crypt

Barnabas and the other ten remaining Ickleby souls surrounded the pentagram, each man standing where an unlit candle stood.

They stared down at the quivering body of their heir, Norman Ickleby.

They made the witchy woman feel an icy prickle of fear and foreboding up her spine.

“Let me enter the body!” demanded Cornelius, the notorious embezzler.

“Fie upon it,” cried Silas, who in 1789 had been executed for treason. “I have suffered in this interminable limbo far longer than he!”

“I want to live again!” whined Rilke, the mass-murdering scoundrel.

“Silence,” rasped Barnabas. “I have made my decision. Isador? Enter this newfound flesh.”

“Sure, sure,” said Crazy Izzy, the gangster from the 1930s. “I’ll give little Zack Jennings the big kiss-off. I’ll bump off his mutt, too!”

“Go! Steal Norman’s body! Use him to do all the things I command you to do!”

Crazy Izzy transmogrified into a throbbing ball of searing ultraviolet light.

“I get first dibs ’cause them Jennings bumped off my son and my grandson—Little Paulie and Eddie Boy. Right?”

“No,” said Barnabas, his eyes burning brightly inside the slits of his mask. “You are given this chance simply because you, like I, have no qualms about killing children.”

Crazy Izzy’s soul shot across the threshold between the living and the dead.

He took over the body of Norman Ickes.