by Tim Curran
That’s a horror story, isn’t it?
But it’s true. There was a rumor that the only evidence was a single handprint burned into the wall. Months later, Jim Fastwind and I snuck up there and had ourselves a look. Even then, the stink was still evident—sour, gamey, heavy in the air. But we saw the handprint burned into the log wall nearly an inch by our reckoning. Not the hand of a monster but a very human hand, except the fingers were easily ten or eleven inches in length.
Well, now you’re getting a taste of life on the reservation in those days, aren’t you? It wasn’t all bad, surely, but when the man in black started showing up—and when he did, people died or went mad—things became considerably worse. By then, of course, he was called the Skeleton Man when he was mentioned at all…because that’s how Darlene described him. Like a skeleton in a black suit. So thin he could slide under a door which, she claimed, was how he entered her room that night.
Regardless, the reasonable thinking people of the tribe decided that this boogeyman was nothing but a campfire story, a folktale, what have you. Something that years later might have been referred to as an urban legend. Yet, when things happened now and again there was always some skein of bullshit concerning the Skeleton Man. But the tribal police said it was nonsense and people concurred…at least publicly. Privately, they kept a close eye on their children. For maybe the light of reason will chase away the shadows, but sooner or later that light will go out and the shadows will come skittering back.
One dog-hot August night of the year as I lay in my bed, my father was sitting on a willow stump out in the yard doing his drinking. I heard him talking to someone. I looked out there and there was a man with him. A tall, thin almost emaciated man dressed in black. In the moonlight I could see his face and it was like white cheese. His eyes were like topaz. And his mouth—oh, how I remember that mouth—grinning huge like if it opened much more it would swallow the world.
My father said something and this man in black, the Skeleton Man, said, “We’ll walk together, hand in hand. To a place you’ve never seen and no man may yet know.”
I wanted to cry out to my father not to go with him, not to listen to what he said…but I was terrified. I was so afraid I was shaking. As they started walking side by side I noticed that the Skeleton Man cast no shadow in the moonlight. I opened my mouth to scream. That’s when the man in black put those pink jellyfish eyes on me and I swear to you it felt like a thousand spiders crept up my spine. I could not speak. I could not move. Maybe it was what they call a hysterical paralysis, but maybe it was a little something more. I lapsed into a fever that lasted over a week and I only vaguely remember Dr. Beak hovering over me smelling of disinfectants and five-dollar rye whiskey.
And my father? We never saw him again. But a few years later when a particularly dark tract of woods we kids called Lonesome Thicket got flattened by a rogue tornado, bones were found. A complete set of white shining bones in the very top branches of a thirty-foot oak. I won’t attempt to explain that, but I believe I knew who the bones belonged to.
But now I backtrack. For on the morning of the night I saw my father walk off with the Skeleton Man, something happened. A 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner rolled into Crabeater Creek. The Roadrunner had been cruising the Spirit Lake Reservation most of the morning and people had noticed it, of course it. It would pull up before someone’s house, the big meat-eating 426 Hemi under the hood purring like a big cat with an empty belly, then it would drive off. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason. Every time the tribal police showed to investigate, the car was gone and there was only some crazy story of a long, sleek machine painted flat black that looked like a shark out of a nightmare, something fast and lethal that swam the roads of the rez, its sparkling chrome grill like jaws waiting to open for a sacrifice of flesh and blood.
But the Roadrunner took no sacrifice.
It slowly cruised the high roads and dirt tracks, getting familiar with Crabeater Creek particularly for reasons only known to the man behind the wheel. Who was that man? You may well ask and I may well tell you. But for now, don’t ask me how it is I know these things. Just listen.
The man’s name was Chaney, though he had been known in other places as Royer and Smith and Bowers. He had been known by a lot of names in a lot of places. But that day, at the end of a hot dead August, he was Chaney. Had you seen him walking down the street, tall and proud and juiced to the gills on hard, acid-eating attitude, you would have crossed the street to get out of his way. For it was within him and without, that simmering evil, something physical yet impossibly…nebulous. Something savage and empty and raw-boned. I had a teacher at the mission school who said that iniquity in its purest form has a certain attraction, but there was nothing remotely attractive about Chaney. His eyes were soft and pink and juicy like the bowels of a hog. He was a skeleton wrapped in skin. His face was the color of a new moon, pocked with holes and drawn by scars.
So Chaney was indeed the Skeleton Man. He pulled up in front of a deserted house on Grassy Hill just across the creek and sat behind the wheel of that death-black Roadrunner. He did not move. He did not fidget and he did not blink his eyes, he only stared and hummed a morose tune under his breath. Just waiting, forever waiting. That house on Grassy Hill had once belonged to an Indian agent named Summers and had been sitting empty since Mathew Lake had hung himself from the chandelier three years earlier.
Several dozen people had seen the Roadrunner that morning and the strange thing was that, though they saw the actual physical incarnation of the car, their minds assured them that what they had seen was not a 1960’s muscle car with a flat and lusterless paintjob, but a black hearse. An old Cadillac hearse straight out of the 1950’s, glossy and dark and somehow ghostly, even in the early hours of that sunny, fine day. The sight of it disturbed them in ways they could not—or did not want to—understand. It made something turn bad inside them, made voices whisper in their heads and their bellies turn over in a slow unpleasant roll. They saw it pass and felt the spit dry up in their mouths, smelled impossible things like black graveyard dirt and rotting flowers. But what bothered them most was that, although the sunlight came down bright and sure, the car cast no shadow that they could see. This was something they would tell themselves later that they had imagined, but when the nightmares of that hearse haunted their bones at three in the morning, they would know better.
Only one man, far as I can tell, talked with Chaney that morning and that was Albert Smith. But Albert was a drunk and nobody paid much mind to anything he said. Albert claimed to have stepped out of an alley in Crabeater Creek and there was Chaney the Skeleton Man. Albert described him as looking like “a loose, slithering weave of shadows.”
Albert was terrified and particularly because there was not another soul around. Just him and the Skeleton Man. He claimed he went down to his knees and begged that his life be spared. But the Skeleton Man was disinterested. He stared down the street with his pink eyes and said, “This village appeals to me. Each time I come here I enjoy it. How ready is it for the reaping, the harvesting. Too many dark places tucked away in too many hearts. Too many secrets under the surface and too many closets filled with bones. I bid you good day, sir. Tomorrow I will be back and you will wait for me.”
So, far as I can tell, Albert was the only one that day that spoke with Chaney the Skeleton Man and lived to tell the story.
Anyway, Chaney was at the house on Grassy Hill. He stepped out of the Roadrunner, lit a filterless cigarette with a finger that burned sulfur-hot like a matchhead and waited. As he told Albert, he liked Crabeater Creek. He had been there before and he liked its lines and curves, the smell and taste of it. Like a seductive and exotic woman, he was anxious to put his hands and mouth on it, to run his tongue over its hot, perfumed flesh.
But that would be later.
For now, Chaney was content just to be there. He pulled a briefcase from the backseat and, whistling like a man on his way to work, he moved through the gate and up the f
lagstone path to the vacant two-story frame house with an apple tree in full bloom out front. He plucked a FOR SALE sign out of the overgrown yard and went up the steps and in.
Inside, there was silence and echoes. A darkness that clung too readily beneath stairs and behind half-shut doors. His face pale and his eyes shining, Chaney looked around, seeing that there was no furniture to be had save a card table and a folding chair.
A car door slammed outside and Lona Whitebird, the local reservation real estate agent, came through the door smiling brightly even though she did not like this man called Chaney. For reasons she did not fully understand, he reminded her of the snake house at the Chicago Zoo. There was that same coiling vitality to him, that vague musky, reptilian odor that seemed to waft off him. But he had the proper paperwork, proving he was an enrolled member of the Spirit Lake Sioux, so she could not deny him even though she was certain he was no Indian. She was, in the back of her crowding little mind, not even sure he was a man.
“Well, Mr. Chaney,” she said. “I see you’ve taken down the sign. I think that means you’ve made a decision.”
“I have,” he said.
“And?”
“This will do nicely.” He nodded his head, but did not smile. “I will make a fine and secret work here.”
Lona did not know what he meant by that and was not sure she wanted to. Chaney was always saying things like that, she discovered in their earlier meeting when he inquired of the house, things loaded with innuendo that you did not dare question. There was a concrete ambiance to him, an appetite she did not like. He reminded her of something stark and cold like a slaughterhouse. When she looked at him she could only think of winds blown through October cemeteries. His eyes did not emote, they were dead things waiting to be filled with something. His face was the color of bone, a pallid canvas of scar-tissue set with draws and hollows that coveted shadow.
Nothing good could come of a man like Chaney, she thought.
And she was right. For he was just a gnawed shell, an empty drum of giggling darkness and scratching midnight. He was no more human than a bag of cobras.
“Well, then,” Lona said. “I guess we have some papers to sign.”
She sat at the card table and opened a folder of documents. Chaney stood behind her and she could feel his shadow that was cold and blank. His own briefcase was open and she could see it held nothing but a hammer and a bag of long nails.
“All set to do some home improvement, I see.”
“Yes,” he breathed. “Oh yes.”
She turned to look at him, smelling his breath which was like thawing meat, and seeing that he was grinning. His teeth were long and overlapping like those of a crocodile. He had something in his hand. A six-inch blade sprung from it.
He handed it to her and although she shook her head, she took it in her hand and immediately began to shake and tremble.
“Use it,” he said. “There’s a good girl. Let us sign the pact.”
Still shaking her head, Lona sank the knife into her own throat. She fell to the floor, bleeding and moaning, trying to crawl for the door. She left a bloody trail behind her and died with her fingers gripping the knob. Whistling, Chaney took up his hammer and put a few nails in his mouth like carpenter. Then he lifted Lona up and nailed her to the wall, crucifying her. A nail in each wrist and one through each ankle. Then another through her throat just because it pleased him to do so.
He stared at her corpse for some time, knowing that a simple act of expiation was what was needed to get the ball rolling.
Wiping blood from his hands, he sat down at the table, humming, listening to the continual dripping of Lona’s corpse.
“And that is all I know about the man called Chaney. How I know you’ll soon learn. All I can say is that I learned it the same way you’ll learn answers to your own questions. Now, as I said, I was down with a violent fever for a week. More than a week…then, one hot night, I woke up with the most awful feeling of being watched. Of being stared at. I felt those eyes boring into me and nobody could convince me different. I remember being terrified, being filled with an irrational terror of the unknown only a child can truly know. So, despite the fear, I got up and went to the window. I saw a man standing in the road below. He was staring up at me. To this day I remember him only too well. He was the man in black, the Skeleton Man, and I knew this without question—a tall, narrow man, skeletal and grinning like a skull. He stood in the moonlight and he cast no shadow.
He beckoned to me and I felt rivers of cool-hot sweat course down my face. I shook and trembled. I tried to call out to someone but it was like my lips were sewn shut. What made it worse—if it could have been worse—was that I had been dreaming about him in my delirium. Ever since he walked off with my father and threw that look at me, drove me down into that rank pit of fevers, he had been in my dreams. Infesting them, you might say. The image of him had been growing in my head like a dark seed planted in the soil of my soul. I had not known this, not until afterwards, but it had been there, that face, that expression, that personality slowly eclipsing my own, growing in my head until it filled my skull, casting who I was into a pool of shadow from which it would never escape.
I finally managed to cry out.
But no one came to my rescue because there was no one left, you see. I cried out and down there, in the road, the Skeleton Man faded away. The last thing to go was the face. It was like a bright full moon burned into my retinas and I could see nothing else. Just that face. A face of darkness and light, a phosphorescent complexion that was pitted and sinister, teeth long and narrow and impossibly white. And eyes…oh yes, those eyes…those pink, pink eyes like glistening roe. Long after the face had faded, those eyes remained, shining and discarnate.
Though I was still pretty loopy from the fever, I made myself stand up straight. I made myself breathe in deep. I forced air into my lungs, oxygenating my blood, pushing the shadows out of my brain so I could see clearly, because I knew then that clarity had never been so important. I went to the door and that’s when I heard the first scream. It was quick and shrieking. Then there was another and another and another. All of them were quick. They left me reeling. I counted six of them and I knew they were the screams of my four brothers, my mother, and my sister Darlene.
I made myself go down the stairs.
I felt something behind me. Something following me. Even before I got downstairs I could smell the death: it was hot and meaty. It was a slaughterhouse down there. The floor was slick with fluids and entrails, the air tasted almost salty with fresh blood. I think I slipped on it and fell or maybe I blacked out for a few seconds. But when I opened my eyes I was laying right beneath them: the carcasses of my family. They were hanging upside down, nailed to the rafters above by the feet. Each of them had been opened crotch to throat and what had been inside was slopped over the floor. Their eyes were plucked out, their tongues yanked free, their throats cut, and as a final…depravity, the edges of their mouths had been slit upwards giving them each a bright red clownish grin.
They were dead.
My family had been butchered.
And into their backs a word had been branded. I think you know what word it is if you’ve been through Victoria so I won’t tell you even if I could read it.
Darlene, poor sweet little Darlene. She was on the floor by me, squeezed like her kitten…her guts steaming from her mouth.
Anyway, I could not scream. I had no air in my lungs. All that came out was a whistling expulsion of black air. And it was then that I became aware of a funny smell, a sharp stink like ozone that cut through the stench of death all around me: not subtle but searing and overpowering. Something in the corner by the woodstove shifted, rustled. A shadow rose like a balloon filling itself with air. There was someone there, something there. It was no optical illusion, a form was taking shape, something born of shadows, born of darkness. It filled out and I saw a man. He was dressed in black and his face was pale as moonlight, the complexion craggy
and drawn. The eyes were pink and bright like pockets of pus.
“How fare you, little boy?” he said. “Does thee fare well?”
I wanted to leap at him and tear him into pieces but I knew I never could because he was a ghost. He had no more true solidity than mist. But I was young and hot-blooded so I jumped to my feet and ran at him. Even the pungent stink of open graves and corpse slime that came off him did not stop me. I went at him, swinging and clawing and he was like black smoke. My fists went right through him and he laughed at me until I fell at his feet, panting and sobbing and wailing.
“The little injun that could,” he said in that voice of whispering casket silk. “What spirit, what gumption, what guile.” He laughed again, then held out his hand to me. “Take it boy. Take what is offered.” The hand was like white rubber, shiny like wet neoprene. The fingers were white and slender and almost delicate. There were no nails at the ends of the fingers but thorny yellow claws. Flies were crawling over the back of the hand. “Take it, Little Injun, whilst I have patience. Your sister took it.”
I looked up at him and I knew I was dead. I knew he’d roast my soul in hell and cook my brains on a hot dog fork over the hottest fire in the nether regions, but I did not believe what he said. I had decided that he was the Devil or perhaps Death, or perhaps the very thing that had inspired those stories. Trembling and sobbing, I just looked up at him and hated with everything I had. “YOU LIE!” I told him “YOU ARE NOTHING BUT LIES!”
