The Black Heart Crypt

Someone else was in the cemetery.

Zipper hunkered down on the ground in pounce mode.

Zack pressed his back against the Ickleby family crypt in an attempt to disappear into the shadows.

Sticky cobwebs attacked the back of his head, making him feel like he’d just brushed up against a giant wad of cotton candy. Peeling away the gooey strands, Zack peered over at a cluster of grime-streaked headstones, where he saw a burly man with a bushy beard, who was dressed in coveralls, sinking his shovel blade into the ground, digging up rocky clumps of dirt. A softly glowing lantern propped atop a nearby headstone projected his hulking shadow up into the tangled tree branches, where it loomed like a floating ogre.

Fortunately, the guy wasn’t a ghost. Zack could tell. Ever since he’d moved to Connecticut from New York City with his dad and stepmom, he’d learned a whole bunch of junk about the spirit world—what ghosts can do and what they can’t. He probably knew more than any eleven-year-old should legally be allowed to.

For instance, he knew that a ghost could take over the body of its blood relative, but unless it did that, it couldn’t do much besides wail and moan and try to scare you into hurting yourself.

A ghost couldn’t hold a shovel, and in Zack’s experience, digging a hole in the ground by lantern light wasn’t exactly something an evil spirit took over a relative’s body to do. He felt pretty confident that the dude digging the hole wasn’t a ghost or a possessed person.

The man started singing as he dug, a tune Zack recognized from recess on the playground:

“Don’t ever laugh when a hearse goes by,

For you may be the next to die.”

Zack looked at Zipper and put a finger to his lips. They would try to tiptoe out of the graveyard without being seen or heard.

“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,

The worms play pinochle on your snout.”

Zack and Zipper crept closer to the gate. The man kept digging, kept up his steady stomp-slice-shook-flump, stomp-slice-shook-flump.

“There’s one little worm that’s very shy,

Crawls in your stomach and out your eye.”

Zack and Zipper made it to the graveyard gate.

The digging stopped.

“Isn’t that right, boy?”

Okay. Zack didn’t remember those lyrics. He pushed open the squeaky gate.

“Freeze!” the gravedigger shouted.

Zack froze.

And this time, Zipper obeyed, too!