The Smoky Corridor

48

Horace Pettimore had not been this joyful in ages.

Not since the steamy Louisiana night when he’d stolen sixty-six dead men’s souls and sealed them up inside glass jars.

He had just slipped into the portrait hanging on the wall of the old root cellar, where he observed the new boy, the one with a long family history in this corner of Connecticut, as the boy discovered the secret marker.

It had to be a sign. An omen.

Zack had to be the one.

The one he had been seeking for more than a century. The one he had lured there with the buried voodoo charm.

The time was drawing nigh. Soon he would slip his soul into the boy’s body and use it to retrieve his treasure.

Of course the scrawny child would lose his soul in the exchange, exactly twenty-four hours after Pettimore’s soul shoved it out of the boy’s body.

But that did not matter.

Because Captain Horace P. Pettimore would live again!