The Smoky Corridor

98

Captain Pettimore finally piloted his new body to the boiler room and the smokestack chamber, his final defense against any intruders.

Now he saw an unknown man stoking the firebox.

“Who in blazes are you?” he had Azalea say for him.

The man turned around and Captain Pettimore could tell: He wasn’t a man anymore. He had the unstaring, unseeing, unfocused eyes of a soulless zombie.

“Who turned you, boy? Who is your bokor? Your voodoo sorcerer?”

“He’s ours, little girl!” two voices answered.

It was the Donnelly brothers. The blustering bully, Joseph, and Seth, the puny little clairvoyant whom the ghost of John Lee Cooper had once used to communicate with his kin, that foolish math teacher Patrick J. Cooper, one of the many Coopers to come north over the years to try to claim the captain’s gold as their own.

In short, the Donnelly boys had aided and abetted his sworn enemies! He had Azalea sneer at them. “I am Horace P. Pettimore! How’d you two worthless souls master the voodoo to raise a zombie from the dead?”

“We didn’t have to!” said the one called Joseph. “Yours bit the poor feller. Ain’t that so, zombie?”

The zombie stood there drooling.

“Answer my brother,” said the small one, Seth.

“Yes, master.”

“Well done, Seth,” Pettimore jeered through Azalea’s lips. “You taught your zombie to speak. Bravo. You should know, then, that his fate is forever linked to the fate of the slave I call McNulty.”

“Huh?” said the brutish boy, Joseph.

“If anything were to happen to my zombie, why, yours would simply become a man again, because you did not trap his soul in a jar, did you?”

“We didn’t need to!”

That made Pettimore grin. “Perhaps. But I always found it wise to keep one’s possessions tightly sealed and hidden away. Now, if you will excuse me …”

“Talking’s not the only thing our zombie knows how to do, pal!” boasted Joseph. “Now that your spirit is walking around inside the body of a little girl, my brother can have his zombie rip you to shreds and eat out your brain.”

“That’s right,” said Seth. “I can!”

Pettimore made the girl’s lips curl even higher. “I’d like to see you try.”

Seth hesitated. He clearly lacked the bloodlust to be a ruthless slave driver.

His brother, however, did not.

“Sic him, Seth! Do it now!”

“But she’s a girl.…”

Pettimore laughed.

Perhaps that was a mistake.

Anger flared in the younger ghost’s eyes. “Kill her!”

“Yes, master.”

The zombie lurched forward.

Pettimore had Azalea calmly show the zombie the amulet dangling off her necklace:

It was the same symbol he used to corral his own zombie, to keep McNulty from straying where he did not want the beast to go.

“What is that chicken-scratching?” asked Joseph.

Pettimore had Azalea chuckle. “You two fresh fish have much to learn if you ever hope to become true voodoo masters. This is the veve of Baron Samedi, a loa of Haitian voodoo!”

“A what?”

“He is one of the mystères, the invisibles, the saints of the voodoo religion! Baron Samedi is the loa of the dead! It is he who ferries souls to the underworld. No zombie dare anger him or attack a human under Samedi’s protection!”

The zombie backed away.

“Now, boys, if you will excuse me.…”

Captain Pettimore had the girl walk over to the boiler and open the fourth firebox door on the furnace below, the door with flames painted on its glass window because it wasn’t really a firebox at all. Pettimore had Azalea lift the latch and crawl inside. This part of the furnace was cold, an insulated cubbyhole with a bank safe for its floor, making it a trapdoor—if you knew the combination to the lock.

Captain Pettimore, of course, did. In fact, he was the one who, more than a century ago, had etched it into the steel walls.

CE-18, P-12, W-18

A simple back-and-forth numbers-letters code that translated to 35-R, 16-L, 23-R.

He opened the door in the floor and made Azalea climb down the ladder riveted to the wall.

“I’ll be downstairs, lads. Collecting my treasure!”