The Hanging Hill

73

Wilbur Kimble dragged himself across the closet floor.

He had been locked up in the dark for nearly a full day. He was thirsty. Starving. Too weak to even speak, let alone cry out for help.

The closet door was so warped it made a tight seal along the bottom edge where it met the concrete floor. No light seeped in under it and the key was still down the drain, where he had dropped it when the sizzling ghost in the electric chair had made him all kinds of jumpy.

Wilbur Kimble was trapped. There was no way out.

His jailor, the spook who called himself Mad Dog Murphy, had vanished, threatening, of course, to come back.

He leaned against the closet door, closed his eyes, and dreamed of Clara—the one ghost he wished would come visit him.

“O, magnus Molochus.”

Kimble almost had a heart attack! Someone was out in the basement reciting the words!

“Nos duo vitam nostram damus ut vos omnes qui hue arcessiti estis vivatis.”

This couldn’t be happening! The words! Spoken once again by a young boy. That pampered Hollywood brat Derek Stone!

Kimble attempted to pound his fist against the door but he couldn’t find the strength to lift his arm.

“Help.” His cry came out as a scratchy peep while the boy, oblivious to Kimble’s presence in the nearby closet, pressed on.

“Puer et puella, puri et fideles, morimur ut vos resuscitet.”

Puer et puella. Boy and girl.

Puri et fideles. Pure and true.

Kimble knew these words.

Could translate them from the Latin, because they were the very same words Professor Nicodemus had made him utter the day Clara died.

Now someone had brought the words back into the Hanging Hill Playhouse.

Kimble had failed. He hadn’t scared anyone away.

The moon would be full tonight, and the children—a boy and a girl—would still be in the theater.

Soon they might never be able to leave!