The speaker stepped through the doorway. Tash gasped, and even Hoole grunted in surprise. It was Dr. Evazan.
“You’re working together!” she cried.
“Naturally,” Evazan said. “I use my great scientific genius to animate the corpses while Pylum uses the superstitions of this backward planet to keep the locals away from the cemetery.”
“It was the perfect cover,” Hoole said. “You used the great supply of bodies here for your experiments. And if anyone did see anything unusual, Pylum simply blamed it on the curse of Necropolis.”
“But why?” Tash asked Pylum. “You betrayed all your beliefs.”
Pylum rolled his eyes. “You are naive, aren’t you? Do you know what it’s like to be taunted and mocked by teenagers like Kairn? To be called a madman for upholding the ancient ways? I believed those legends!” Pylum’s eyes blazed. “When the jokes became too much to bear, I did the unthinkable. I broke into the Crypt of the Ancients to see the grave of Sycorax itself, to prove that the legends were true! But do you know what I found?” Pylum had worked himself into a rage. He strode over to the stone coffins and heaved one of them open. “This!”
Inside the stone box lay a frail skeleton, wrapped in a tattered gray shroud. The skeleton was so thin, so delicate, that it looked a breath might snap its bones. Pylum almost snarled. “This pile of bones is the mighty Sycorax, the bringer of the curse that has cast a shadow over Necropolis for a thousand years!”
“Puh! ” Pylum spat and dropped the stone lid, which crashed back into place with a thunderous boom, sending up a cloud of dust. When the dust cleared, Tash saw that the stone lid had cracked.
Pylum sneered. “Everything I believed in was a lie. There was no curse. I had become the servant of a superstition. When Evazan offered me the chance to make a fortune by helping him, I took it.”
“Precisely,” Dr. Evazan said. “Everything went according to plan until that bounty hunter showed up, followed by that annoying brat.”
“Zak,” Tash whispered. “You killed him.”
Evazan laughed the most evil laugh she’d ever heard. “Why, no, my dear. You killed him. I merely put him in a brief, deathlike coma. You buried him.” Evazan checked his wrist chronometer. “In fact if my guess is correct, right now your brother is either running out of air or running out of room to hide from the boneworms.”
Both were true. In his coffin Zak felt the air become thick and stifling. But that was the least of his concerns.
Above his head he saw the wood of his coffin bulge inward and crack. A fat white wriggling thing appeared, squirming as it tried to enlarge the hole it had made. Using his glowrod Zak poked the worm and it recoiled.
It was a futile gesture. Boneworms were burrowing a dozen holes in his coffin. Confined as he was, Zak couldn’t reach them all.
He saw one of the pale, white worms drop into the coffin with him.
Another, then another, followed. Zak felt a sickly wet slap on his cheek, and he felt something crawl right across his mouth. Something else tickled his ear.
“Yaggh!” Zak thought he would be sick. He pulled the boneworms away from his head and flicked them down toward his feet, where the worms splattered against the coffin wall. The boneworms left a trail of slime where they had crawled on his skin. Zak wiped it quickly away, remembering what Evazan had said about the final ingredient to his reanimation serum.
More and more boneworms plopped through the openings in the coffin. He couldn’t stop them all. Even if he could, his lungs were burning. He was nearly out of oxygen. He tried to get one more lungful of air as more boneworms wriggled wetly across his skin.
Boom!
Something heavy slammed against the top of his coffin.
Boom!
Again the coffin shivered as though struck by a battering ram.
Boom!
On the third blow, the coffin lid shattered. Someone wrenched away the slivers of wood. Then a gloved hand reached into the coffin, grabbed Zak by the shirt, and hauled him out.
It was Boba Fett.
Zak’s head was spinning from lack of oxygen. He saw Boba Fett standing before him, and Deevee standing beside the bounty hunter. He wondered if he was seeing things.
Boba Fett shook him until his head started to clear. Then the bounty hunter rasped, “Where is Evazan?”
Zak tried to speak. “Th-thanks. I thought I was gone for good.”
“You would have been, but you have information I need,” the bounty hunter stated. “Where is Evazan?”
“Do you know, Zak?” Deevee urged. “Time is short.”
Zak took a long breath and felt his lungs fill up at last. That helped his head clear. “Uh, sure. The crypt. Evazan is hiding in the Crypt of the Ancients. Now what…”