The Skull of Truth

by Bruce Coville

  Taking a deep breath, he smoothed out the paper and went back to his desk to read it.

  SIX

  Jest in Time

  The letter was written on a piece of lined yellow paper. Several places had been crossed out, including a long section at the end. The ink had run in a couple of spots; Charlie was pretty sure it was because Mrs. Dawkins had been crying as she wrote it.

  It read as follows:

  Dear Charlie,

  I have always thought you were a nice boy. It used to please me when you came to the house to play with Gilbert—even if you did stretch the truth sometimes. So I was sad and surprised to find out what you said to Gilbert in school yesterday.

  Perhaps you didn’t realize how cruel you were being. I’m sure you don’t know that when Gilbert came home he locked himself in his bedroom and cried for over an hour.

  Charlie, during the last three months Gilbert has had chemical treatments that made him so sick he could barely stand up. He lost all his hair, and nearly a quarter of his body weight. What he didn’t lose was his sense of humor about it. It was only yesterday—after he’d gone to school and someone he had thought was his friend, someone he had missed very badly, said cruel things to him—that I finally saw it all get to him.

  I thought about calling your parents but decided against it. But when I saw you here, I had to let you know how I felt. You see, Charlie, Gilbert was supposed to be here tonight, too. He had been looking forward to it for a long time. But when it was time to leave, I couldn’t get him to come. He was too embarrassed—too afraid someone else would laugh at him.

  Everything underneath that had been crossed out. Beneath all the scribbles the letter was signed, Virginia Dawkins.

  “What does it say?” asked the skull.

  “Never mind!”

  He wanted to throw the letter away. But somehow he felt that he had to keep it until he managed to make things right again. Refolding the paper, he tucked it carefully into the back of his sock drawer.

  His heart feeling as if it had turned to lead, Charlie got ready for bed.

  Sleep wouldn’t come. He tossed and turned until past midnight before he began to settle down. Just as he was finally drifting off, the skull said, “Knock knock.”

  Charlie didn’t answer.

  The skull repeated the words, more loudly this time.

  “Who’s there?” snapped Charlie, without opening his eyes.

  “Isaiah.”

  Charlie groaned. “Isaiah who?”

  “I zay a lot of stuff, but you don’t pay attention.—Come on, Charlie. I wanna tell you some jokes.”

  “And I want to go to sleep!”

  “Are you kidding? When you have me, the one and only Skull o’ Truth (TM), to talk to? Say, did you hear the one about the guy who walked into a bar with a duck under his arm?”

  “Be quiet!” hissed Charlie. He turned over and pressed his pillow against his ears.

  Since the skull was speaking directly into his head, this did him no good. “Jeez,” it said in a whiny voice, “you’re no fun at all.”

  “I’m not surprised someone killed you!” Charlie snapped, flinging aside the pillow. “I’d consider it myself, if you weren’t already dead!”

  “You wouldn’t talk like that if you knew how I died.”

  “How did you die?” asked Charlie, curious in spite of himself.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “I’d love to,” he said spitefully.

  “Then come here.”

  “Why?”

  “This will work better if you take me out of the closet.”

  “What will work better?”

  “I’m going to show you what happened to me.”

  Charlie hesitated, then threw aside the covers and went to the closet. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he growled.

  “We’re all slaves to curiosity, bucko. Find someplace where you can be comfortable and put your hands on either side of me.”

  Charlie positioned the skull in the middle of his desk, then sat in front of it and placed his hands as the skull had directed.

  “Not like that!” it said testily.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, don’t leave your hands lying on the desk like a pair of dead pigeons. When I said ‘either side of me,’ I meant holding me. But keep your thumbs out of my eye sockets. I hate it when that happens.”

  Gingerly Charlie placed his hands against the skull. The heel of each palm fit snugly in the ridge that ran beside the eye sockets. The curved dome felt smooth and cool.

  “Ready?” asked the skull.

  “I guess so.”

  “Then heeeeere we go!”

  Charlie felt as if he were being spun about. The skull chuckled hollowly, the sound of its laugh reverberating through Charlie’s head. A cold wind seemed to rush past.

  Suddenly he gasped in astonishment. He was standing on a point of land that rose about twenty feet above a rocky coastline. Gray water smashed against the shore, sending a spray high enough that he could feel it. Thick clouds massed overhead, and a cold wind shrieked around him.

  “Where am I?” he asked nervously.

  “You are still in your room. This is just the setting for the story I want to tell you. Think of me as—oh, sort of as an internal television set.”

  “Television doesn’t usually get me wet,” replied Charlie, as the spray from another wave struck his legs.

  “All right, so I’m a multimedia extravaganza. Call it Skull-o-Vision. Can we get on with the story?”

  “Am I going to be cold and wet during the whole thing?”

  The skull sighed, but the feeling of wetness vanished.

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. Ever. Now, back this way is where I was born and raised.”

  Charlie found himself moving away from the coast. He wasn’t walking; it felt more like he was watching one of those scenes in a film where the camera glides over the landscape. Only somehow he had become the camera. The countryside below had thick forests, and vast bogs that reminded him of Tucker’s Swamp. But it seemed deserted, with only a scattering of huts and cottages.

  “How come you can make me see all this?”

  “Being dead does have a few compensations. Ah, look! That’s where I was bom! And there’s dear old Mom.”

  They were hovering over a small stone hut. In front of it stood a woman dressed in garments made of fur. She was tall and coarse-looking. As Charlie watched, a boy of six or seven came bouncing through the door. He tugged at the woman’s leggings. When she turned to him he lifted his leg and broke wind. Then he began to giggle.

  “Me,” said the skull proudly. “I was always looking for a laugh, even back then.”

  “Doesn’t look like you got one,” replied Charlie. Indeed, the tall woman had started to yell at the boy, who was now looking at the ground with teary eyes and quivering lip. Suddenly she lifted her hand and gave him a heavy clout.

  “Mom didn’t appreciate my sense of humor. That’s one of the reasons I left so early.”

  “How old were you when you went?” asked Charlie, who had entertained visions of running away from home more than once in the last couple of days himself. “And where did you go?”

  “I was fourteen. And I went on a quest for Truth.”

  When Charlie snorted, the skull replied, “Don’t laugh. I was young and idealistic. Besides, I almost found her.”

  “Almost?” asked Charlie. And then, “Her?”

  “Well, I think I got pretty close. I met this crazy old woman who claimed she knew where Truth lived. She told me if I apprenticed myself to her for a year and a day she would give me the directions. I had been there just one week short of a year when I blew it.”

  The scene shifted again, to a thatch-roofed hut in a forest clearing. In front of the hut crackled a greenish fire. Suspended above the fire was a large black cauldron filled with a thick concoction that bubbled and popped like the mud in th
e hot springs Charlie’s family had seen in one of the national parks two summers earlier. To Charlie’s surprise he could smell the stuff. It was disgusting—heavy, sweet, and rotting all at once.

  A young man, probably in his late teens, stumbled into the clearing. He was fairly handsome, with a thick head of red hair. He carried an armload of wood, which he fed to the fire.

  The cauldron began to bubble more intensely, causing its contents to slop over the sides. Whenever some of the stuff hit the flames, they shot up in brightly colored shafts.

  An old woman hobbled out of the cottage, leaning on a stick. She wore a tattered gray dress. Her gray hair, long and matted, hung nearly to her waist. A large black cat lounged disdainfully across her shoulders.

  Approaching the young man, the woman grabbed his chin with her gnarled hand. Turning his head so that he was looking directly into her face, she asked in a voice that sounded like a rusty hinge, “Do you think I’m ugly?”

  The young man looked around desperately, as if hoping someone else might answer the question.

  “Do you think I’m ugly?” repeated the old woman, tightening her grip.

  “Well, you aren’t the queen of the May,” said the young man, trying to smile.

  He winced as her clawlike fingers clenched his jaw still tighter. “Do . . . you . . . think . . . I’m . . . ugly?”

  The young man’s eyes rolled to the side.

  “Look at me!”

  He turned his eyes full on her and whispered, “No, you’re not ugly. In fact, you’re really quite attractive!”

  “Liar!” shrieked the old woman, her voice filled with despair. “Liar!” The cat leaped from her shoulder, hissing and spitting, and ran into the darkness.

  To Charlie’s horror, the woman dragged the young man to the cauldron. As he screamed and struggled, she thrust his head into the bubbling brew. “You longed for Truth!” she cried as lightning crackled in the sky above them. “Longed for it, but weren’t brave enough to give it. Now be cursed with it!”

  The boy’s body jerked and twisted as he struggled to free himself. After a moment the old woman pulled his head from the cauldron. Charlie flinched, expecting to see the boy’s face horribly scalded by the brew. Surprisingly, his skin was smooth and clear, seemingly unscathed. But his red hair had changed to purest white.

  “From this day forth you shall speak nothing except the truth,” cried the old woman. “Little good may it do you!”

  “And little good it did do me,” said the skull, as Charlie watched the young man flee the clearing. “Cursed to speak only the truth, I couldn’t go anywhere without offending someone. Oh, I’d make friends and get along for a while. But sooner or later someone would ask a question they didn’t really want an answer to, and that would be the end of it.”

  “What kind of question?”

  “Oh, you know: Did I like their cooking? Did I think their joke was funny? Did I agree that their daughter was beautiful? I would tell the truth, as the curse compelled me to, and end up being about as welcome as a booger in the butter. Finally I learned to cover some of the truth with jokes. As time went on, I got better and better at it.

  “Eventually I found the perfect job for someone with my . . . problem.”

  As the skull said this, Charlie found himself rushing toward a gloomy-looking castle. It stood atop a rocky spit of land that thrust out into a cold-looking sea. Scarlet flags and pennons snapped from its towers, bright scars against the dark sky that loured behind it.

  Before he could really study the place, they were inside, staring down at the throne room as if they had been somehow attached to the ceiling. The white-haired youth they had watched flee the witch’s hut, now a young man, was dressed in jester’s motley and crawling around on his hands and knees. On his back he carried a small boy. Shrieking with laughter, the child kicked his heels into the jester’s side, shouting, “Faster! Faster!”

  “Have mercy on your poor horse, my prince,” gasped the jester as he scrambled across the floor. “I’m going as fast as I—well, actually I can go a little faster.”

  Kicking up his heels, he made three rapid circles in front of the thrones while the child on his back shrieked with delight.

  “Alas, my poor fool,” laughed the king. “I fear you shall never have rest till the prince is grown.”

  “I love you, horse!” cried the boy. Then he threw his arms around the fool’s neck and kissed him. “You were a court jester?” asked Charlie.

  “Given my personality, it was a natural choice. Besides, the only people who can get away with telling the absolute truth are fools and poets. It’s part of the job. And even then you have to be careful about it. I managed to pull it off here for nearly ten years—told the king all sorts of things he didn’t really want to hear, but did it with a joke and a song, so he could either ignore them, or pretend it was just me being foolish.”

  The skull sighed. “Those were good years, overall. I cut some wild capers in those days, Charlie. Danced and frolicked and said the most outrageous things. But it couldn’t last. The scene I’m showing you now is from my last night in the court. I might have made it longer, if there hadn’t been something rotten in Denmark.”

  “I’m in Denmark?” asked Charlie in astonishment.

  “No, you’re in your room, just like I told you. But the things I’m showing you happened in Denmark, nearly a thousand years ago.”

  “What’s the king’s name?”

  “Hamlet.”

  “Are you kidding? The ‘To be or not to be’ guy?”

  “No, that would be the little git sitting on my back and turning my ribs black and blue. Hamlet Two, so to speak. Poor little guy; he was pretty happy back then. That was before everything started to turn sour. Broke his heart when he lost me. His father never did tell him the truth about that. He let the boy think I died in an accident.”

  “I take it you didn’t.”

  “Not unless it was an accident when they threw me in the dungeon, beat me, and left me to starve.”

  Though the skull didn’t show him the scene, in the back of his head Charlie heard the echo of an ancient scream, and then a muffled sobbing.

  “I see,” he said with a shudder.

  “I doubt it,” replied the skull. “At least, not entirely. But probably close enough for the spell to accept it as truth.”

  “What did you do to get thrown in the dungeon?”

  “Queen Gertrude didn’t like me.”

  “Because you told the truth?”

  “Well, to be specific, I told the truth about her, which wasn’t pretty. Anyway, that’s how I died. Told one too many pieces of truth. It’s dangerous stuff, as you know.”

  “So how did you end up in Mr. Elives’ shop?”

  A whirl of color exploded around them. “A little special effect to denote the passing of time,” said the skull pleasantly. “Okay, we’ve jumped ahead by twenty-some years.”

  “I can’t see a thing. Where are we?”

  “Underground.”

  “What are we doing underground?”

  “These are grave circumstances, Charlie,” said the skull. Then it made a spooky laugh.

  “Wait a minute . . . You don’t mean—”

  Charlie broke off as he was struck by an overwhelming sense of confinement and dampness. He felt as if he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move.

  A single thought burned in his brain. I’ve been buried, alive!

  He started to scream.

  SEVEN

  Grave Circumstances

  “Oh, calm down,” said the skull. “You’ve only been down here about ten seconds. I was moldering underground for twenty-three years. And I’m not even throwing in the really ooky stuff, like the worms. You wanna talk special effects? Wowza! Anyway, you might as well face the truth: Once you’re dead they bury you—at least, they do if they don’t want you smelling the place up.”

  “So this is what happens after you die?” asked Charlie in horror.

&
nbsp; “Let’s just say it’s what happened to me, personally, after I died. But you have to remember I had been cursed by that old witch in the forest, so I was not what you would call a typical case. I don’t have the slightest idea what happens to other people when they take the big dirt nap. But I was definitely stuck here. Oh, I did the ghost bit for a while; sort of egged on old Hamlet One when he crossed the line himself, which may or may not have been a good idea. But my spirit could never get very far from the grave; tied too closely to my bones, I guess. Mostly I slept. Had really lousy dreams, too.”

  As the skull spoke a sudden shaft of light startled Charlie. From the sound that accompanied it, he realized it was caused by a spade thrusting through the soil above them. The spade pulled away, taking a clump of dirt with it. Charlie found himself looking up at smooth earthen walls, through which thrust crooked roots and the raw ends of worm-cleaned bones.

  “Ah,” said the skull. “It’s morning in Denmark.”

  “How come someone’s digging up your grave?”

  “He’s not digging up mine; he’s digging a new one. It just happens to be in the same spot.”

  “That’s disgusting!”

  “Different times, different customs. Now stop chattering and pay attention.”

  The spade thrust down again. As it did, Charlie heard someone talking above them. Again and again the spade returned, until finally it lifted the skull from its resting place and tossed it toward the pile of dirt beside the grave.

  As Charlie saw the world whirl above him he understood that he was actually seeing all this through the skull’s eyes—or eye sockets, as the case might be. Suddenly its lower jaw fell off and went spinning in the other direction.