Fablehaven: The Complete Series (43 page)

Even though he knew Kendra and Errol were close by, facing the forbidding mortuary was a lonely feeling. Glancing back at the Volkswagen van, Seth could not see the occupants inside. He knew they could see him, though, so he tried to look relaxed.

Beyond the illuminated sign at the edge of the yard was a neatly trimmed lawn bordered by tidily rounded hedges that came no higher than his knees. Large potted plants crowded the shadowy porch. Three balconies with low railings projected from the upper story. All the windows were dark and shuttered. A pair of cupolas crowned the mansion, along with several chimneys. Even forgetting the dead bodies inside, the house looked haunted.

Seth considered turning back. Going into the funeral home with Errol and Kendra had sounded like an adventure. Going inside alone felt like suicide. He could probably stomach a spooky house full of dead bodies. But he had seen amazing things at Fablehaven—fairies and imps and monsters. He knew such things really existed, and so he knew there was a serious possibility that he was walking into an actual zombie lair, presided over by a real-life vampire (regardless of what Errol called him).

Seth fidgeted with the garage-door opener. Did he really care this much about getting rid of the kobold? If Errol was such a pro, why was he having kids do his dirty work? Shouldn’t somebody with more experience tackle this sort of problem, instead of a sixth-grader?

If he had been unaccompanied, Seth probably would have walked away. The kobold alone was just not worth it. But people were watching, expecting him to do this, and pride would not allow him to wimp out. He had followed through on some intimidating dares—going down steep hills on his bike, fighting a kid two grades older, eating live insects. He had almost died climbing an escalating series of wooden poles. Yet this was the worst so far, because going into a zombie lair alone not only meant you could die, it meant you could die in a really upsetting way.

No cars were coming down the road. Pressing the button on the garage-door opener, Seth hustled across the driveway. The door opened loudly. It made him feel conspicuous, but he told himself that anybody who saw a person going into a garage would not think twice about it. Of course, any zombies inside the mortuary now knew he had arrived.

An automatic light brightened the garage. The black, curtained hearse did little to make the mansion feel more cheery. Neither did the assemblage of taxidermic animals positioned on a workbench along one wall: a possum, a raccoon, a fox, a beaver, an otter, an owl, a falcon—and, in the corner, a huge black bear standing upright.

Seth entered the garage and tapped the button again. The garage door shut with a prolonged mechanical groan. He hurried to the door that would lead into the funeral home. The knob turned, and Seth eased the door open. He heard an immediate beeping. Light from the garage spilled into a hallway.

To the left of the door was a keypad, exactly where Errol had described. Seth punched in 7109 and hit enter. The beeping stopped. And the growling started.

Seth whipped around. The door was still open, and light from the garage revealed a mass of white dreadlocks approaching down the carpeted hall. At first Seth thought it was a monster. Then he realized it was a huge dog with such thick cords of fur that one of its ancestors must have been a mop. Seth did not know how the animal could see, it had so much hair dangling in its eyes. The growls continued rumbling, deep and steady, the kind of sound that meant at any second the dog might make a violent charge.

Seth had to reach a quick decision. He could probably leap out the door and shut it behind him before the dog reached him. But that would be the end of going after the statue. Maybe it would serve Errol right, for carrying out such lousy reconnaissance.

Then again, he was holding a dog biscuit. Surely the statue would not need the whole thing. “Sit,” Seth commanded, calmly but firmly, extending his hand palm outward.

The dog grew silent and stopped advancing.

“That’s a good dog,” Seth said, trying to exude confidence. He had heard that dogs could sense fear. “Now sit,” he ordered, repeating the gesture.

The dog sat, its shaggy head higher than Seth’s waist. Seth snapped the biscuit in two and tossed half to the dog. The canine caught the biscuit on the fly. Seth had no idea how it saw the treat coming through all that fur.

Seth approached the dog and let it sniff his hand. A warm tongue caressed his palm, and Seth rubbed the top of the animal’s head. “You’re a good boy,” Seth said in his special voice reserved for babies and animals. “You’re not going to eat me, right?”

The automatic light in the garage switched off, plunging the hall into darkness. The only glow came from a tiny green bulb on the security keypad, so faint that it was useless. Seth remembered the shutters covering the windows. Even moonlight and the light from the sign could not penetrate the house. Well, that probably meant that people on the outside would not notice his flashlight, and he could not risk zombies sneaking up on him in the blackness, so he turned it on.

Once again he could see the dog and the hall. Seth moved down the hall to a large room with plush carpeting and heavy drapes. He swung the beam of his flashlight around, checking for zombies. Several couches and armchairs and a few tall lamps lined the perimeter of the room. The center of the room was empty, apparently so mourners could mingle. There was a place on one side where Seth figured they laid the casket for people to view the deceased. He had visited a room not too different from this one when his Grandma and Grandpa Larsen had died just over a year ago.

Several doors led out of the room. The word
Chapel
was written above a set of double doors. Some other doors were unmarked. A brass gate blocked access to an elevator. A sign above it announced, “Authorized Personnel Only.”

The dog followed Seth as he crossed the room to the elevator. When Seth pushed the gate sideways, it collapsed like an accordion. Seth entered the elevator and shut the gate, preventing the dog from following. Black buttons projected from the wall, looking very old-fashioned. The floor buttons were marked “B,” “1,” and “2.” Seth pushed “B.”

The elevator lurched downward, rattling enough that Seth wondered if it was about to break. Through the gate Seth could see the wall of the elevator shaft scrolling by. Then the wall of the shaft disappeared. With a final squeal the ride came to an abrupt halt.

Without opening the gate, and keeping one hand near the elevator buttons, Seth shone the flashlight around the room. The last thing he wanted was to get cornered by zombies inside of an elevator.

It appeared to be the room where the bodies were prepared. It was much less fancy than the parlor above. He saw a worktable, and a table with wheels that had a casket on it. There were multiple storage cabinets and a big sink. Seth estimated that the casket would barely fit inside the elevator. One side of the room had what appeared to be a large refrigeration unit. He tried not to dwell upon what was kept in there.

He saw no statues, toadlike or otherwise. There was a door marked
Private
on the wall opposite the elevator. Satisfied that the room was zombie-free, Seth slid the gate open. He stepped out, tense, ready to leap back into the elevator at the slightest provocation.

The room remained silent. Walking between the worktable and the casket, Seth tried the private door. It was locked. The knob had a keyhole.

The door looked neither particularly strong nor unusually flimsy. It was built to open into the next room. Seth tried kicking it near the knob. It shuddered a bit. He tried a few more times, but, despite the repeated shuddering, the door showed no sign of weakening.

Seth supposed he could use the wheeled table to ram the door with the casket. But he doubted he could generate enough speed to strike the door much harder than he could kick it. And he could picture knocking the casket off the table and creating a huge mess. The casket might not be empty!

Another door, this one unmarked, also led out of the room. It was against the same wall as the elevator, so Seth had not seen it until after he had stepped into the room. Seth found that door unlocked. Behind it was a bare hall with doors along one side and an open doorway at the end.

Seth cautiously ventured down the hall. He realized that if zombies came at him from behind, he could become pinned in the basement, so he listened very carefully. The large room at the end of the hall was crammed almost from floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes. Seth hurried through the narrow aisles that granted access to the room, scanning for the statue. All he found was more boxes.

Back in the hall, Seth tried the other doors. One led to a bathroom. Behind the other door was a large storage closet full of cleaning supplies and various tools. One object among the mops and brooms and hammers caught his attention: an ax.

Seth returned with the ax to the private door. So much for stealth. If the garage door and elevator had not alerted the zombies, this should do the job. The ax was fairly heavy, but, choking up a little, he gave it a solid swing, and the bit crunched into the wood about a foot away from the doorknob. He wrenched it free and attacked the door again. A few more strokes and he had chopped a hole in the door large enough to reach his hand through. Seth wiped the handle of the ax with his shirt before setting it aside, just in case vampires knew how to check for fingerprints.

Seth shone his flashlight through the hole in the door. He could not see any reanimated corpses, but a zombie could easily be standing off to the side, out of view, waiting for his hand to appear. Reaching into the splintery hole, worried that clammy fingers might close around his wrist at any second, Seth felt the doorknob on the far side and unlocked it. Twisting the knob, he pushed the door open. Seth used the flashlight to examine the room. It was large and L-shaped, so the entirety was not in view at once. Funeral paraphernalia littered the room: nameless headstones, caskets lying horizontal or upended, easels with colorful wreaths of fake flowers. A long desk with a rolling chair and a computer was covered with a mess of papers. Beside the desk stood a row of tall filing cabinets.

Half-expecting slobbering zombies to burst from the caskets at any moment, Seth wove through the cluttered room until he could see around the corner of the “L.” He found a red felt pool table underneath a ceiling fan. Inside an arched niche beyond the table, a statuette squatted atop a variegated block of marble.

Seth rushed to the recess in the wall. The statue was not on all fours like a toad. Rather, it sat upright on two legs with a pair of short arms folded across its chest. The figurine looked like a pagan idol with froglike features. A polished dark green, it appeared to be carved out of speckled jade, and stood about six or seven inches tall. Above the statue a sign read:

The brief message filled Seth with foreboding. What exactly would happen once he fed the frog? Errol had made it sound like it would simply enable him to carry the statue out of the mortuary.

The statue did not look too heavy. Seth tried to pick it up. The figurine would not budge. It felt welded to the block of marble, which in turn felt firmly anchored to the base of the niche. Seth could not even slide the statuette or slightly tip it. Maybe Errol knew what he was talking about after all.

Not wanting to spend more time than necessary inside the funeral home, Seth held out the remaining half of the dog biscuit. Would the statuette actually eat it? Seth inched the treat forward. When the biscuit was almost touching the mouth, the froglike lips began to twitch. He moved the treat back, and the lips stopped moving. Holding the biscuit closer than ever, he saw the lips pucker outward, quivering.