The Hanging Hill

43

Wilbur Kimble hurried back to the basement.

The audience would start arriving for the Sunday matinee soon. Time to put things away downstairs.

Earlier, from his hiding place, he had watched the blond boy run away while the other two children discovered his movie projector. The imitation ghosts didn’t seem to frighten those two in the slightest. In fact, the encounter only seemed to make them more curious.

Just like that blasted cat in the new musical.

No, these two children would not be easy to run off. He would need to speak directly with Clara.

He went into a cramped, windowless closet, closed and locked the door. He struck a match and lit a small fluttering candle so the room wouldn’t be completely dark. He placed the candle next to his antique Ouija board on an upturned apple crate.

Kimble creaked down into a folding chair and placed his fingertips atop the Ouija’s planchette—a small heart-shaped piece of wood with a glass eye in its center that acted as a movable indicator so the board could spell out messages from the great beyond. It was the only way he knew to communicate with the dead.

“Weird and mysterious Ouija,” Kimble muttered, “allow me to speak once more with Clara.”

He closed his eyes and waited.

“Clara, can you hear me?” he asked.

He felt the pointer begin to glide, up and to the left, skating across the board to the smiling sun and the word “YES.”

Kimble maneuvered the reader back to the center.

“Clara, have you seen the children who recently arrived here?”

He waited. Felt another tug. Let the heart-shaped pointer move where it wanted to move.

YES.

“Clara,” he whispered, “the moon is nearly full! Do you realize what danger these youngsters bring with them?”

Once again, the reader took his hands to the upper left corner.

YES.

He pulled the pointer back to the center.

“Will you help me scare them off?”

The reader did not move.

“Clara? Will you help me rid this theater of its children?”

Suddenly, the pointer zipped up to the far right corner.

The scowling quarter moon. The Dog Star. Billowing black clouds.

NO.

Kimble pressed down hard, tried to drag the reader back to the center. It wouldn’t budge.

“Please!” He exerted more pressure, made his fingertips tremble with the effort.

The reader remained glued to “NO.”

“Clara? Please!”

“Clara isn’t here, pops.”

Kimble looked up and nearly had a heart attack.

There was a man strapped into an electric chair sitting on the opposite side of the apple crate.

“You shouldn’t play Ouija in the dark, pops. You do, you might start seeing ghosts!” The man tossed back his head and laughed. The air in the cramped closet reeked of hot, rotting beef.

“Who are you?”

“Mad Dog Murphy. I kill people.”

Kimble sprang for the door. Tried to slide his key into the lock. His hands were trembling.

“Drop it!” Mad Dog’s fetid breath came at Kimble like a gust of wind blasting up from a sewer grate. It blew out the flickering candle.

That startled Kimble, made him flinch, made him drop his key.

He heard it clink against something metal, then rattle and clank its way down a pipe.

He had dropped the key into a floor drain. He was trapped inside an unlit closet.

“Give it up, old-timer,” said the man in the chair as bursts of blindingly white light flared up from his metal skullcap. “You can’t talk to Clara! Not now, not never again!” Another laugh. More stench. “What’s that old saying? When one door closes, another door opens? Too bad it ain’t gonna be that closet door. It’s gonna be ours! The doorway of the damned is all set to swing wide open, pops! Tomorrow night! Tomorrow night!”