Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  So it’s pretty slow going and not feeling like much of a shortcut, and everyone’s kinda quiet until Marissa says, “Why would anyone want to be buried, anyway? The whole idea’s just gross.”

  “So you’d rather be cremated?” Holly asks.

  “Sizzleleeeeean!” Billy says. “Bad choice, though, ’cause you couldn’t come back and bwa-ha-haunt the rest of us!”

  I shake my head. “Isn’t your soul supposed to leave your body after you die? And it’s your soul that haunts, right? So it shouldn’t matter if you get buried or cremated.”

  Marissa shudders. “I don’t want to bwa-ha-haunt anybody! I don’t want to di-i-ie!”

  Holly snorts. “Well, good luck there.”

  “I’m serious. I hate thinking about death. I hate thinking about … all of it! And, as if being gone forever isn’t bad enough, I have to decide if I want to get eaten by maggots or turned into ash.”

  Over his shoulder Casey calls, “So you don’t believe in heaven? God? The glorious ever-after?”

  “Do you?” I ask him, because Casey and I may have discussed a lot of things, but not God or any glorious ever-after.

  “I’d like to,” he says, taking a path between two graves. “It sure would beat getting eaten by maggots or turned into ash.”

  I hurry to catch up to him. “But that happens to you anyway, even if there is a heaven.”

  Holly says, “Some people think your body goes with you to heaven.”

  Billy looks back at her. “Then what are all these bodies doing in the graveyard?”

  So I add, “My grams thinks there’s a purgatory. It’s someplace you go after you die to pay for your sins.”

  Holly nods. “Right. It’s like hell, only your relatives can pray you out of it and into heaven.”

  “Whatever,” Marissa grumbles. “The point is the thought of death freaks me out and you guys are dragging me through a graveyard full of maggot-infested bodies!”

  “They are not maggot-infested,” Holly says.

  “Yes they are,” Marissa snaps. “You just don’t want to think about it, that’s all.”

  “Hey, you can get an airtight coffin, did you know that?” I tell her. “No maggots allowed.”

  Casey leads us around a giant tombstone. “Or you can be embalmed and then no bugs’ll want to touch you!”

  Billy holds up a hand and hops up and down. “Pickle me. Pickle me.”

  “Ewww!” Marissa cries.

  Casey shrugs. “Well, it keeps you from decomposing. At least for a while.”

  “So there you go,” I say to Marissa. “Get embalmed and get an airtight coffin.”

  “But I have claustrophobia!”

  Holly laughs. “Well, then, I guess burial of any kind is out. No mausoleum for you, either.” She points to the Sunset Crypt sort of glowing in the moonlight at the top of the rise ahead of us. “That thing is big!”

  Marissa shivers. “Can we please change the subject? I know I’m dressed as a walking dead thing, but this is really, really creeping me out.” She points toward the right. “And if this is supposedly a shortcut, shouldn’t we be going that way?”

  Casey changes direction a little. “How about a funny dead-guy story?”

  “Sure,” Marissa grumbles. “Anything.”

  “Let me start by saying it’s a true funny dead-guy story. And it takes place in the Wild West. In Oklahoma.”

  “Oklahoma wasn’t the Wild West, was it?” Holly asks. “It’s in the middle of the country.”

  Casey glances back. “Yeah, but at one point it was as far west as they’d gotten, and from what I’ve read it was pretty wild.” We follow him single file between two tall, skinny grave monuments as he goes on with the story. “So there was this guy named Elmer McCurdy who turned to a life of crime at the ripe old age of fifteen when he found out that his mother was really his aunt, and his aunt was really his mother.”

  “Oh, nice,” I grumble, because let’s just say I have deep-seated parental issues involving secrecy and unknown identities.

  Casey goes on with the story. “But as fate would have it, Elmer McCurdy was not cut out to be an outlaw. He tried to be feared and he tried to be fearless, but he was neither. He’d jump a train to rob it, but it would be the wrong train. He’d blow up a safe with nitroglycerin, but he’d use too much and melt everything inside it. He was embarrassingly lame at being a criminal.”

  “The Unlucky Outlaw!” Billy cries, and I add, “The Bumbling Bandit!”

  Casey laughs. “Exactly. So of course when there was finally a showdown, he was the one who got killed.”

  We’re following Casey through an area where the trees are extra big, and it’s really dark and very creepy, but I’m actually not scared. For one thing, I’m with four other people, but what’s really helping all of us forget that we’re walking through a spooky old graveyard is the story.

  “That’s it?” Holly asks. “Boom, he’s dead, end of story?”

  “Actually, no,” Casey says. “This is where it starts getting interesting. It turned out that nobody wanted to pay for Elmer McCurdy’s burial.”

  “Or burning?” Billy asks.

  Casey thinks a minute. “I’m not sure they even had cremations in the Wild West. I think everyone got buried.”

  Marissa edges ahead so she can hear better. “Why not just dig a grave and be done with it?”

  “Because it’s a lot of work to dig out six feet of dirt.”

  I kind of half-trip on a tree root, then catch myself. “So what’d they do?”

  “They pumped him full of arsenic—”

  “Arsenic!?” the rest of us cry.

  Casey laughs. “Well, yeah, arsenic will kill you, but he was already dead, right? Arsenic is what they used to embalm him. And the undertaker must’ve thought it would take a while for a relative to claim him because he used a lot of arsenic. Like, hundreds of times more than usual. Then he left him on a marble slab and waited for someone to come get him.”

  “And did they?” Holly asks.

  “Nope. And after a while the undertaker got sick of him hogging up the marble slab, so he stood him in a corner.”

  Billy dodges around a big white cross. “He could stand by himself because he was all stiff from rigor mortis?”

  “Exactly. And pretty soon word got around that for a nickel you could see Outlaw McCurdy in his shoot-out clothes. He stood in that corner for five years.”

  All of us go, “Five years!” and Billy adds, “Beats my time-out record.” Then he laughs, “But barely!”

  We’re walking behind the cemetery’s Garden of Repose now, which is just a little plaza with benches and a small pond that is surrounded by willow trees. Nobody’s in the mood to “repose” though. We’re just following Casey like he’s the graveyard’s very own Pied Piper as he goes on with his outlaw story.

  “Then one day two relatives of Elmer’s showed up saying they wanted to give their uncle a proper burial. So they paid for him and took him away, only they weren’t actually relatives. They were carnival owners.”

  Billy laughs. “They wanted the Unlucky Outlaw as a sideshow?”

  “Exactly. And for the next who-knows-how-many years, Elmer McCurdy traveled from town to town, until eventually they had to coat his body with wax to keep him from falling apart.”

  Marissa is so into this story that she’s grabbing onto tombstones to steady herself as she tries to close in on Casey. “So … he became a waxed-over corpse in a traveling freak show? For how long?”

  “For years and years and years. Decades. He finally wound up as part of a sideshow in an amusement park in California, but at that point people had forgotten where he’d come from—they all thought he was just a wax figure. But then a television studio rented him to use in a TV show, and while they were filming, his arm broke off.”

  Marissa gasps. “It just broke off?”

  “Yup. And in one whiff they knew there was a corpse inside.”

  “So … what did
they do with him?” Holly asks.

  “That Wild West town in Oklahoma decided they wanted him back, and finally buried him.” Casey laughs. “Being a celebrity has its rewards, I guess. Before he was just a bumbling bandit. Now they give tours of his gravesite.”

  “Well, that’s ironic,” Holly says. “First nobody wanted him, and now total strangers go visit him.”

  “That’s another thing about graveyards,” Marissa says. “If you’re not some notorious outlaw or a celebrity or something, who visits you? When the people who knew you are gone, who comes to see you? Nobody! You’re just stuck in the ground until the end of time, alone.”

  “Wow,” I tell her, “that’s a cheerful thought.”

  “We’re in a graveyard! There are dead people all … all under us. What do you expect!”

  Billy leapfrogs over a headstone. “Good thing we showed up then, huh? Doing our civic duty for all the lonely bones.”

  “They’re not just lonely!” Marissa cries. “They’re forgotten.”

  She’s getting herself all worked up again, so I put a hand on her shoulder and say, “Hey, it’s okay, don’t freak out.”

  “I really, really hate death,” she whimpers.

  I grin at her. “So why’d you drag me in here?”

  “What?”

  Our little argument gets cut short because just then Casey stops dead in his tracks.

  “Whoa,” Billy says, pulling up right beside him.

  So the rest of us stop, too, and that’s when I see something running across graves in the new section.

  “Is that a person?” Holly whispers.

  Billy’s voice comes out all hoarse when he says, “That’s no person. That’s a beast.”

  In the clouded moonlight it looks like a beast, too. It has weird wings that are half-flapping at its side and, even though it’s moving fast, it’s sort of hunched over and hobbling, like one leg is longer than the other.

  Then Marissa chokes out, “Oh my God!” because the Beast has turned and there’s no doubt about it—it’s coming our way.

  “Hide!” Casey says. So we all take cover behind different tombstones.

  “I don’t want to die,” Marissa whimpers.

  “Shh!” I tell her. “You’re not gonna die.”

  “And I really, really, really don’t want to die in a graveyard! It would be so wrong to die in a graveyard.”

  “Shhh!”

  “I mean it!” she whispers. “It’s like showing up early for your own death!”

  I peek around the tombstone and that’s when I see that the Beast is being chased by a man.

  A big man.

  One who’s wearing a ball cap and carrying a shovel.

  So everyone peeks around their tombstone, watching the Beast as it runs out of the new section toward the old.

  “That thing is coming to get us,” Billy says.

  “Shh!” I tell him, but it’s too late—Marissa’s totally freaking out. “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod!” she pants like she’s about to die.

  We watch the Beast get closer.

  And closer.

  My heart is beating like crazy and my whole body feels tense and twitchy. Like it’s a fuse sparking and sputtering toward a bomb. And since the Beast is coming straight for us, we finally quit looking and cower behind our tombstones and hold our breath.

  The footsteps get louder.

  Then there’s heavy breathing.

  And all at once there it is.

  Right above us.

  The Beast.

  Out of reflex I sort of jump and I go, “Aaagh!” And I guess Casey thought I was trying to scare the Beast off because he does the same thing, only on purpose.

  And then Holly does it, too.

  Since our eyes are already bugged out and we look like death in our makeup and tatters, the Beast must have thought we’d just risen from the graves we were on, because he backpedals like mad to get away from us.

  And then he stumbles over Billy.

  “Aaaah!” he cries, and when Billy lunges at him, he stumbles again, and this time the woven sack he’s carrying flies out of his hand and drops in Billy’s lap.

  That’s when I finally realize that the Beast is not a beast at all. It’s a guy wearing a zarape—you know, one of those Mexican poncho-type things?

  So, ding-dong!

  Trick-or-treat!

  I feel like such an idiot. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

  But El Zarape doesn’t seem to get that we’re trick-or-treaters, and when he realizes that there are five of us ugly, warty creatures hanging out on graves and hears the guy who’s been chasing him call, “I know you’re in there, punk!” he does what any sensible trick-or-treater who’s been chased through a graveyard into a pack of zombies would do.

  He abandons his candy sack and takes off running.

  Now, it’s pretty obvious that it would be bad news if Shovel Man found us. I mean, what kind of man chases a trick-or-treater through a graveyard with a shovel?

  So we hide behind our tombstones holding our breath, and when Shovel Man doesn’t show up after a few minutes, we finally get brave and peek.

  “There he is,” Casey whispers, and we can see him skirting the edge of the old section, searching for El Zarape as he moves farther and farther away.

  “It looks like he’s afraid to come into this part,” I whisper back.

  “Smart guy,” Marissa says, and her teeth are chattering so bad she can barely talk. “Can we please get out of here?”

  So we get up and start moving along the border of the old section, staying far enough back so we can duck behind gravestones again if we have to hide. I keep looking over my shoulder for signs of Shovel Man or El Zarape, and finally I ask, “What do you think El Zarape did?”

  Everyone turns and looks at me.“El Zarape?”

  “You know, the guy in costume? The one who lost his candy bag?”

  Billy holds the woven bag up. “If I see him, I’ll give it back.”

  Casey snorts. “Sure you will.”

  “Dude, I’m serious. I’m no sugar-lootin’ ghoul. I’m a good ghoul!”

  Casey chuckles, and then he starts singing,

  “He’s a good ghoul, loves his mama …”

  And Billy chimes in louder with,

  “Yeah, I’m free! Free fallin’!”

  “Are you guys crazy?” Marissa says. “Do you want that guy with the shovel to hear you?”

  “He won’t hear us,” Billy says. “He’s long gone.”

  “What song was that?” I ask, because it was pretty obvious they weren’t just making it up.

  Holly turns to me. “ ‘Free Fallin’,’ Tom Petty.”

  Casey nods. “Also covered by both John Mayer and The Almost.”

  Marissa and I give each other a never-heard-of-it shrug, but very quietly Holly says, “My mom used to sing it.”

  So now Marissa and I look at each other like, Oh, maaaaan, because to make a long, sad story short, Holly’s real mom is dead and Holly has no idea if she’s buried, or cremated, or what happened to her because Holly and her mom were homeless and her mom was a junkie, and when Holly was, like, ten, she found her mother dead from an overdose. And since Holly was just a kid with no relatives and no money, she wound up in foster care.

  Anyway, the point is, I know it really bothers Holly that she doesn’t know what happened to her mom’s body, and all of a sudden I’m feeling awful for Holly. I mean, maybe nobody visits these graves we’re walking by anymore, but at least at one point someone cared enough to bury them and put up a grave marker, right?

  Thankfully Holly seems to be thinking nice thoughts about her mother because she gives a little smile and says, “But when my mom sang it, it wasn’t ‘ghouls’ in the lyrics. It was ‘girl.’ ”

  Now I’m hoping Billy won’t say anything that’s meant to be funny but winds up being hurtful because I don’t know how much he knows about Holly and her mom and their awful past. But before he can say anyth
ing at all, Marissa changes the subject: “How are we going to get out of here, anyway?”

  Casey points across the new section. “I’m thinking we’ll make a break for it and climb the fence.”

  Marissa looks at him, horrified. “You’re serious?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Now, I knew it wasn’t the “make a break for it” part that was the problem. And I knew climbing the wall section of the fence wasn’t the problem, either. It was the wrought-iron posts on top of the wall section that were the problem.

  Specifically the pointy spears at the tippy top of each post.

  See, Marissa has a history of getting stuck on fences that don’t have spears, so I didn’t even want to picture what might happen on one that did.

  “Trust me,” I tell Casey. “You do not want Marissa to climb the fence.”

  “Is there another gate?” Holly asks. “You know, like the one we came through?”

  “There’s a bigger one on Battles Road,” I tell her, “but it’s newer and you probably can’t squeeze through it. And it’s got those spears on top, too.”

  “So then what was the plan?” Holly asks Billy. “I figured you knew an actual shortcut.”

  Billy shrugs. “My plan was to commune with my brethren,” he says with a goofy grin.

  Just then Marissa does a double take over her shoulder and points to the new section. “Is that a car?”

  We stop and look, and sure enough, there’s an old sedan driving through the graveyard.

  Now, another difference between the old section and the new is that the new part has skinny little asphalt roads. There’s the main one that hearses use when they come through the big gate on College Street. It winds past the cemetery office, then goes out to another drive-through gate on Battles Road. But off that main road are skinnier asphalt paths that weave in and out and all around the new section.

  Maybe for drive-by visits to the dearly departed?

  Don’t ask me.

  Anyway, we watch as the car moves along. It seems to be in a hurry and its headlights are shining straight at the Battles Road gate.