The Black Heart Crypt

Thirteen demons stared at the gravedigger through the cold stone walls of the Ickleby crypt.

“Let us out!” screamed the youngest soul trapped inside. “Let us out, you grody gravedigger, or I’ll ice you, man!”

His elders shook their heads. They knew that all the gravedigger would hear of the young man’s rant was the howl of a distant wind.

“Quiet, boy,” rasped Barnabas, the family patriarch and the oldest Ickleby entombed on Haddam Hill. “The gravedigger cannot hear you.”

“I don’t care, man. Someday, I’m gonna bust down these walls and break outta here!”

“Ah, you’re all wet, ya sap,” said the ghost of Crazy Izzy Ickleby, a gangster who had made his fortune running rum with Al Capone during Prohibition. “Besides, it ain’t the stones locking us in.”

“It is the spell,” said Barnabas. “The cursed spell!”

Barnabas, who had died in 1749 and, even as a ghost, still wore his bandit mask and tricornered hat, kept an eye on their unexpected visitor, the young boy in the glasses, as he disappeared down the hill with his dog.

“That child.” His voice was the husky croak of a strangled crow.

“What about him?” snapped the tough-talking gangster.

“When he leaned up against the wall, I felt a most peculiar chill. He is a Jennings.”

The twelve other demons hissed when he said the name.

The Icklebys hated the Jenningses.

They had hated them ever since the day thirty years ago when certain members of the Jennings clan had confined these thirteen Ickleby souls to this cramped crypt.

“We shall have our revenge on that boy,” said Barnabas. “And soon. Very soon.”