The Return of Skeleton Man

by Joseph Bruchac

  There is one part of the old Mohawk story of Skeleton Man that I usually leave out, even though it was always in the version my father told me. It’s the part that is freaking me out right now. It’s the part where, after the monster seems safely gone and everyone has been rescued, that rabbit comes back and whispers something in the little girl’s ear. You may already have guessed what it is.

  “The monster is not really dead. Skeleton Man will come back again.”

  By the time I catch up to my parents, who had gotten only a little ahead of me, I’ve regained my composure. I even manage to paint a smile on my face before I get to them, but I’m no longer feeling happy as we walk along the hall to the main dining room. And I can still feel eyes watching my back.

  6

  Dark Corridors

  Gormenghast. That is the title of a trilogy of old fantasy novels I heard about when they were made into a TV miniseries a few years ago. It’s about this ancient castle that is so large it stretches for miles, with dark corridors and hidden rooms and strange characters. There’s all kinds of murder and intrigue in the story.

  “This looks like Gormenghast” was my first thought when we drove around the corner in our car and I saw where we were staying. Admittedly, it wasn’t miles long, but it was huge and it looked even bigger, being way up on top of this mountain.

  “Heeeere’s Johnny,” my father said, leering at my mother as we walked down the corridor toward the registration desk.

  “Stop that,” my mother said, trying not to laugh.

  “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” my father replied in a mock creepy voice.

  My mom punched him in the arm.

  “Ouch,” he said, pretending to be hurt.

  “Next time it’s the baseball bat,” Mom answered.

  I love it when my parents do that kind of thing. My dad likes to quote lines from scary movies and pretend to be the monster in them. Right then he was imitating Jack Nicholson in that movie The Shining, where this guy and his wife and little son go all alone to an old resort hotel way up in the mountains because he is the winter caretaker, but he gets driven crazy by the ghosts there and tries to kill his family.

  For a while, after Skeleton Man, my parents stopped playing that game. I think someone had advised them to soft-pedal stuff like that around me because it might upset their poor traumatized daughter in her delicate condition. Actually, it was more upsetting to me to have them walking around on eggshells, trying not to say the wrong thing or do anything that might set me off. It made me feel fragile, like a piece of antique china locked up in a cupboard.

  I finally realized I had to do something. I knocked on the door of their room one night. I just knew they were up and talking about me. Sure enough, when they told me to come on in, I could hear that little hesitation in their voices that made me certain they’d been talking about poor Molly.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed, then leaned over and put my head on my father’s shoulder.

  “Daddy,” I said, “tell me a story.”

  “I don’t know,” my father said. My mom bit her lip.

  I sat up and looked first at him and then at Mom.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m still Molly. Remember me? I need to hear a story. And make it a scary one, okay?”

  I guess the tone of my voice must have been a little stronger than I intended because both my parents raised their eyebrows. Then my mother laughed.

  “She’s baa-aack,” my father said. And then he told me a story that was so scary I asked my parents if I could sleep with them that night. All three of us fell asleep with a smile on our face.

  The thing about scary stories, you see, is that they’re reassuring. At least they are for me. Like I said before, life really is dangerous. There truly are things for people to be afraid of—if not giant cannibals in the forest, then other people who can be just as dangerous. The stories have always helped me deal with my fears. Remember, the scariest monster is the one you don’t see. After that big mechanical shark in Jaws finally comes to the surface and starts chomping on the boat, it is nowhere near as terrifying as it was at the start of the movie, when you just heard that music and then saw a swirl of blood and one or two leftover body parts sinking to the bottom. So the stories help me see my fears and then deal with them. Once Dad started telling stories again, we really did get back to normal.

  Coming to this conference with my parents is yet another way of their letting me know they think I’m ready to deal with the outside world—or at least the microcosm that is Mohonk. This huge resort hotel has more than seven hundred employees. Some of them live in New Paltz and the other little communities around Mohonk, but a lot of them stay right here on the premises in the dormitory for workers.

  I can understand why. The main road that leads up to the Mohonk Mountain House is winding and long. I can’t imagine what it was like building it. In some spots the road is narrow and right next to the edge of the cliffs, which have long drop-offs. It must take a lot of maintenance to keep the road open in winter or to repair it when there are rock slides. I saw some big machines—a bulldozer, a front-end loader, and a dump truck—parked in a pull-off area where the road started winding around after we passed the gatehouse.

  “How’d you like to drive that baby?” my dad said to me, pointing at the bulldozer with his chin as we slowly passed it.

  “I’d love it,” I said.

  I wasn’t kidding. Dad operated machinery like that during the summers when he was working his way through college. He’s never lost his love for those things and keeps little yellow model construction vehicles of all kinds on a shelf by his desk. He’s remained friends with some of the men he worked with back then and visits them now and then on their jobs. I must have inherited that “knock things down, build things up” gene, as my mom calls it, from my father.

  I’ve gone along with him on some of those jaunts. It is usually a real hands-on visit, because Dad always has to climb up into the cab of whatever new behemoth they’ve got and try the controls. I don’t know how many times I’ve sat on his lap, my own yellow hardhat on my head, with my hands on his as he drove a front-end loader or dozer, or operated a crane. Since I’ve gotten older, I’ve even been allowed to work the controls myself at times. Nowadays there are women on some sites operating those big machines.

  On the drive up here I didn’t notice anyone using the bulldozer or loader. They probably wouldn’t have been left unguarded like that if they hadn’t been on this side of the gatehouse, secure. The gatehouse marks the start of the private Mohonk road. It’s the only official way in. This main road ends at a loop, with the Mountain House at the far end of it. There’s a smaller, secondary road called Mossy Brook Road that swings off that loop, but it is so little it makes the narrow main road look like a superhighway.

  Everyone who comes up to the Mountain House has to check in at the Mohonk Mountain House gate just like we did our first day. You have to be an employee with ID, or your name has to be on the guest list, or you have to pay a fee to come up for the day or to get lunch or dinner. You have to either park your car in a big lot near the gatehouse and take the shuttle bus up or drive your car the remaining two miles to where the valets park it for you.

  That is one reason why my dad’s convention is being held here, because it is so organized and safe and secure. It is what they call a “controlled environment.”

  But lots of events do take place here. Dad’s conference isn’t the only thing going on. At Mohonk this weekend they are also celebrating the Day of the Dead, which is a Mexican festival, along with Halloween. Halloween, as every kid knows, is on October 31. Its name comes, as a lot of kids don’t know, from the eve of All Hallows, a time to celebrate all the Christian saints. (Forgive me, but you are now dealing with Molly the information junkie, who you should never ever dare to take on in a game of Trivial Pursuit.)

  The Day of the Dead is actually the two days right after Halloween, November 1 and 2. It is an o
ld indigenous celebration. The Aztecs celebrated it around the end of what we call the month of July. It was presided over by Mictecacihuatl, the “Lady of the Dead,” who was a powerful, benevolent being who loved little children and even acted as their protector, a sort of messenger from the ancestors, who were always watching over their descendants. But the priests who arrived with the Spanish conquistadors didn’t appreciate that the local people followed the old ways. They wanted them to honor just the Christian saints. They tried to wipe out the holiday, but the Indians wouldn’t give it up. So the Spanish moved it to the beginning of November to coincide with El Día de Todos Santos, the Day of All Saints or All Saints’ Day, as well as All Souls’ Day.

  The Day of the Dead is huge in Mexico, where life and death are seen in a different way than they are in most of the United States. People go to cemeteries to honor their dead relatives. There are fireworks and people dress up in devil masks and costumes to look like skeletons. They even give kids candy shaped like little skulls. Because there are so many Mexican Americans in the United States, it has been popular in the American Southwest, too. It’s a new idea having a Day of the Dead here at the hotel, almost two thousand miles from Mexico. The poster I read about it says that it is Mohonk Mountain House’s way of “continuing to celebrate the multicultural tapestry that is the United States today.” Whatever.

  Some people would say that my parents were either cruel or crazy to take a kid who’d experienced the kind of trauma I did to a place where they were celebrating not just Halloween but also the Day of the Dead. Not just one event focusing on ghosts and death but two. Practically child abuse. But I think it’s great. My parents always told me that you have to face your fears. If you turn away from them, they can just sneak up and grab you from behind. The fact that my parents would actually take me to something like this after all we went through with Skeleton Man really shows how much they believe I have gotten back to normal.

  Normal, though, doesn’t necessarily mean safe.

  Like right now.

  They are showing a movie tonight here at the hotel, right after the music is done. I’ve been feeling antsy all day, actually ever since dinner last night. I guess I need to get out of the room. It’s a full hour till the concert starts, so I’ve decided to poke around the hotel. Dad has an evening meeting and won’t be able to go to the concert, although he’ll join us in time for the film.

  Mom has told me she’ll meet me at the concert. Rather than head straight there, I decided to go upstairs and explore the wing I haven’t seen yet. So here I am walking this long dark corridor alone.

  There’s this sound that your feet make on a wooden floor when no one else is walking on it but you, like the floor is talking to you in a different language. You don’t know how to speak that language, but you can comprehend it the same way you understand the growling of a big animal that’s out there just beyond the light of your fire.

  Kuhh-reeeaak. Kuhh-reeeaak.

  Walking slower just makes it worse. This hallway seems to go on forever. I try walking faster. I’m humming “A Little Bit of Luck” under my breath to the beat of my footsteps, but not the whole song, because I don’t know it. Just this one refrain, which shows how nervous I am making myself.

  With a little bit,

  with a little bit,

  with a little bit of luck

  I won’t get caught.

  Caught by what? This is dumb. I stop humming. Immediately I start to notice that the sound of my footsteps is getting louder. Each footfall seems to be echoing. Am I hearing someone else’s feet hitting just half a step after mine? I stop and listen, but I don’t hear anything. I pretend to take a step, then whirl around to look behind me. There’s nothing there but the empty hall and the old black-and-white photos hanging along the walls. Not even a shadow. Every door is closed. Nothing to be afraid of.

  But I start running anyway. Sometimes seeing nothing is just as ominous as seeing something. I don’t know if that sounds crazy, but right now it makes sense to me. I find a stairway and I thud down it, and all of a sudden I’m not alone at all. Just half a flight below me I see people walking along, talking and acting normal. One or two of them are turning to look up at the wild-eyed teenager descending the stairs like a deer stampeding down a slope away from a mountain lion.

  “Take it easy, honey,” I hear a woman say. She’s got hold of my arm—not so hard that it hurts, but firm enough to have stopped my headlong progress. It takes me a second to realize that she’s just saved me from running into her and sending both of us rolling down the stairs. She must be a maid, because she is wearing one of the hotel’s uniforms. The towels she dropped when she grabbed me are at her feet. She is also holding a big red potted chrysanthemum in her other arm. Its heady smell is all around us.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I just…” Just what? I don’t know.

  “S’all right, honey,” the woman says. She has some kind of accent, maybe Central American. She looks up at me as she says this, because she is not at all tall, no more than five feet, but she looks compact and strong. Her face is even a little browner than my dad’s and I find myself wondering how much Indian blood she has. Her ID tag tells me her name is Corazón.

  “You all right?” she says. Her voice is soft, confidential.

  I nod.

  She lets go of my arm to set the chrysanthemum down on the landing. Then she picks up the towels, places them on a little seat built into the stairwell behind her, and straightens out my sweater, which has gotten twisted around. Her touch is as reassuring as my mom’s.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Corazón smiles. She looks at my face closely and then nods in recognition. “Indio,” she says. It’s not a question.

  “I’m Mohawk.”

  Corazón smiles at me again, one of those smiles that just lights up a face. She puts her right hand on her heart.

  “Mayan,” she says.

  I’m not sure when we sat down, but we’re sitting together now, as if we were old friends. I hope I’m not getting her into trouble because she’s supposed to be working, but I’m really glad that she’s here with me. I look over at the towels she was carrying.

  “S’all right,” Corazón says again. “My shift is just over. I take these down, drop them off, go home. It is my time now.”

  I’m feeling a lot saner now. Sane enough to be embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what made me do that.”

  Corazón leans over toward me and looks into my eyes. Her own eyes are dark, just like mine. Her face is also just as smooth and unlined as mine, but I’m sure she is older than me. Not as old as my mom, but she has to be at least twenty.

  “This place,” she says. She doesn’t say it as if she is afraid or unhappy about being here. It’s more like she is just making an observation. “Sometimes when I walk up there, I think I am not alone. You maybe felt like somebody was looking at you?”

  “That’s it,” I say. “That’s exactly it.”

  “Los muertos,” Corazón says. “The dead are watching.”

  7

  Down the Hallway

  Corazón is waving at me from the doorway, not with her whole hand but with her fingers in a fluttery gesture that makes me think of a butterfly. She’s smiling as she waves and then she touches her heart. I smile back and tap my own chest with the fingers of my right hand. I feel such a connection to her.

  Part of it is her being Indian, like me. Just from our short talk, too, I can tell that she understands things I can’t talk to a lot of people about. Things that some people would call being foolish or superstitious. Things like being guided by your dreams.

  “My great-great-grandfather,” she had told me in a soft, sure voice that had only a little bit of a Spanish accent. “His name was Chan K’in. That means ‘Little Sun’ or ‘Little Prophet.’ He was over 130 years old when he passed away a few years ago. We little ones would sit at his feet around the fire at night and he would tell stories. Then every morn
ing he would ask us what we had dreamed about. He would listen closely to our dreams and help us understand the messages those dreams brought to us. He taught me how to interpret dream messages.”

  So I told her about the rabbit and about Skeleton Man. Just the short version. But it still took twenty minutes.

  When I finished my story, Corazón shivered as if she had just felt a cold breeze. Then she reached out one hand and tapped it lightly on the wood bench where we were sitting. I understood that gesture. You knock on wood when you think something bad may be about to happen. It’s a way of summoning good to come and protect you. She was silent for a while before she spoke again.

  “I think my great-great-grandfather might have said your rabbit was speaking with an ancestor’s voice. He was watching over you in the same way that our Lady of the Dead always watches out for our children. Do you know about the one the Azteca call Mictecacihuatl?”

  “A little,” I replied. That brought a smile to Corazón’s face.

  “I think you have mucho fortuna,” she said. “Much fortune.”

  “I think so too,” I replied.

  I looked at my watch. I had that feeling you get when a story has just ended and you find yourself back in the “real” world again, and you wonder how much time has passed. This time it was more than I’d realized.

  “Oh my gosh,” I said. “It’s almost time for the concert. I have to meet my mom.”

  Corazón picked up her towels, put them under one arm, and stood. “Come,” she said, holding out her hand to me. “I know the quickest way to get there.”

  “What a lovely young woman,” Mom says as Corazón disappears around the corner. “It was very nice of her to help you find your way here after you got turned around. This is a big place and those long hallways can be confusing.”