The Smoky Corridor

12

The ghost of Captain Horace P. Pettimore stood over his slumbering zombie in the cavernous dining hall Pettimore had designed and had built underneath the cemetery.

“Wake,” he whispered to his mindless slave. “Someone has breached the barrier. They’ve blasted a cannonball hole through the root cellar wall. You must stand guard. You must protect my treasure from intruders!”

The skeleton-thin zombie stirred. Opened his dull, glazed eyes.

He had been hibernating for more than two decades.

He would be hungry.

No matter. A fresh corpse had been buried in the graveyard just that morning. All the zombie needed to do was sniff it out and tear away the dirt underneath the coffin, and it would tumble down into this subterranean chamber, where the ghoulish beast could rip open the box and feast upon the rotting flesh inside.

The ghost of Horace Pettimore studied the zombie’s vacant face, vaguely remembering when the creature was a man named Cyrus McNulty, a Union army soldier who had died April 9, 1864, at the battle of Deadman’s Knob in Louisiana.

A few years before that fateful battle, during the Yankee blockade of New Orleans, Captain Pettimore had first learned of voodoo, a mystical religion brought to Haiti and the American South on slave ships from Africa.

It was in New Orleans that he had met a voodoo queen named LaSheena, who, for a sackful of gold coins, had taught Pettimore everything he’d needed to know to become a bokor: a voodoo witch doctor.

“I will give you much power, which your soul will carry in this life and into the next!” Queen LaSheena had promised.

Pettimore learned quickly. Seemed to have a natural talent for sorcery. Before long, he could do more dark deeds than even his instructor.

He could paralyze his enemies by sprinkling secret powders on the ground where they walked.

He could create undreamed-of misery by ritually damaging a voodoo doll depicting whomever he wanted to hurt.

But his greatest power was his ability to raise zombies.

To resurrect corpses.

To turn dead men into mindless slaves to do his bidding.

Using the spells taught to him by Queen LaSheena, Pettimore first sucked Cyrus McNulty’s soul out of its body and sealed it in a jar—a jar still hidden in this labyrinth of tunnels beneath the school and the cemetery behind it.

Private McNulty had been buried in a mass grave along with sixty-five other dead soldiers. Captain Pettimore had resurrected them all. He’d snuck out to the burial grounds at midnight the day after they’d all died. He carried with him a list of their names and rode in a buckboard wagon filled with sixty-six empty glass jars.

First he dusted the ground with lightning powder; then he chanted the queen’s mambo spells; and finally, he called the dead soldiers forth, chanting each buried soldier’s name three times.

“Cyrus McNulty. Cyrus McNulty! Cyrus McNulty!”

Since McNulty, a farm boy from Indiana, had no family in Louisiana to seal up his ears with clay to make him deaf to the sorcerer’s call, his wispy soul flew up through the mucky soil to be trapped as easily as a firefly in a jar. Then the lifeless body, lacking a soul and, therefore, drained of all free will, had no choice but to crawl out of his casket and dig his way back into life.

On that fateful April night, Cyrus McNulty and sixty-five other men rose from the dead to become Pettimore’s army of slaves.

Yes, even after Pettimore died, McNulty, the one zombie he had kept, to act as his treasure guardian, had to obey his every command.

And what an ideal slave the living dead man was!

McNulty barely spoke. He had no desires, no ambitions, no memories or consciousness. Since he was already dead, nothing could kill him—as long as he avoided fire and no one released his soul from the jar where Pettimore had trapped it.

The resurrected McNulty was three times stronger than he had been when he was alive, making him the ideal beast of burden and protector. The zombie would fiercely guard Captain Pettimore’s gold until the day when, using the darkest black magic spells ever taught him by Queen LaSheena, Horace P. Pettimore himself would rise from the dead to reclaim his treasure.

All he needed was one very special child.

The one he had been seeking for more than a century. The one he had used a voodoo charm of magic powder, herbs, dove feathers, and a pint of his own blood to attract to this place.

A blood relative.

Just one!

A new school year was about to begin, and Pettimore hoped, as he did every autumn, that the special child he sought would soon walk through the doors of Pettimore Middle School.