They whirled as a skeleton in a mud-stained suit and a seventeen-year-old Irish girl with blood-matted hair climbed from the pit. Skulduggery held a wooden staff and Valkyrie threw him a headpiece carved from stone. He fixed it to the staff, then held it up for the zombies to see.

The shuffling stopped. The moaning stopped. They stared, transfixed.

“Hear me,” Skulduggery said loudly. “You are the Doherty clan, the last of the great families. You have been cursed to an un-death, cursed to never know peace because of the sins of one man, centuries ago. That man, your ancestor, has now been punished. I have seen to it myself. The curse is lifted. This staff belonged to the one who cursed you. It is yours to destroy.”

Skulduggery stepped back, held the staff over the pit they had just emerged from, and let it go. A moment passed where nothing happened and then, as one, the zombies lurched forward. Skulduggery and Hayley went one way and Valkyrie and Tane went the other, parting so that they wouldn’t be caught in the surging mass of bodies that started to topple into the hole. Like lemmings they went, albeit uglier and smellier, without even a murmur as the darkness swallowed them. When the last of them disappeared into the pit, the pit itself closed over, and so was neither a hole nor a pit any longer.

“Told you we wouldn’t need the amulet,” Tane said, wiping the dust from his combats.

“How did you do it?” Hayley asked Skulduggery as he checked his pocket watch. “What’s down there? What happened?”

“Assorted things,” Skulduggery said as he led the way to the door.

“We’ve got to kind of hurry a little bit,” Valkyrie said, walking after him.

“But how did you lift the curse?” Hayley asked. “How did you punish their ancestor?”

Skulduggery was already out the door, but Valkyrie hesitated just as she was about to leave, and turned. “He lied. We didn’t lift the curse. We didn’t punish anyone. We stole the staff to get the zombies to go away. And if we’re not out of this graveyard by the stroke of midnight, in exactly seventy seconds, we will inherit the curse. Providing the Hound doesn’t kill us first.”

The Hound. So it was dog, not bog, and certainly not log. Tane remembered it now. The Hound was the spectral guardian of the curse on the Doherty family, and it was meant to be very, very mean. Feeling pretty chuffed with himself that he had managed to remember that much, Tane spoke up.

“So how big is it, this Hound? Big as a German Shepherd?”

Skulduggery stepped back inside the mausoleum, and nodded to just over Tane’s shoulder, said, “Oh, it’s about as big as that one,” and Tane looked back.