The Return of Skeleton Man Read online

  That story is the one about Skeleton Man. He was a greedy, lazy uncle who sat around the fire in his longhouse all day waiting for his family to bring him food. One day, when no one was around and all the food in the pot was gone, he thought he saw something to eat that had fallen into the coals. He reached for it and burned his finger so badly that he stuck it in his mouth to cool the singed flesh. “Oooh, I have found something tasty,” he said, meaning his own cooked finger.

  So he ate it. Then, seeing how easy it was, he stuck his other fingers in the coals, cooked the flesh on them, and ate them one by one. But he was still hungry. So he ended up cooking his whole self until all that was left of him was a skeleton. Gross, I know, but I used to adore that story and ask my father to tell it again and again.

  Then Skeleton Man, who was still hungry, lured other members of his family into the dark longhouse so he could kill them and cook them and eat them. They just went in, one by one, not realizing their relative’s hunger and greed had turned him into a monster. Finally, only one little girl was left. She refused to come into the longhouse because she knew something was wrong with the one who had been her uncle. So Skeleton Man came out and began to chase her.

  Tschick-a-tschick-tschick-a-tschick, that was the noise his dry bones made, rubbing together, as he pursued her. He might have caught her, but she was helped by a rabbit she had rescued from the river earlier. It led her through the darkness. It helped her keep one step ahead of the cannibal skeleton.

  Finally, the rabbit showed her how to trick Skeleton Man into following her out onto a log that had fallen across the swift river like a bridge. When he was in the middle, she pushed the end of the log into the water. Skeleton Man fell in and was washed away.

  Then she went back to the longhouse where all her relatives, including her mother and father, had been eaten. All that was left of them were bones. But the rabbit told her what to do.

  “Put their bones together,” the rabbit said. “Go outside the longhouse and push over that big dead tree. Just before it hits the longhouse call out these words.” Then he told her the magic words.

  That girl did just as the rabbit said. Just before the tree hit the longhouse she shouted out what the rabbit had told her.

  As soon as she did that, all of her relatives were restored with the flesh back on their bones. They jumped out the door, happy and alive.

  I was once like the girl in that old story. And not just because I’m a Mohawk, as she was. My parents had vanished without a trace about a year ago. And there was a monster in my story, too. Some people say he was just a man, an evil old man who pretended to be my long-lost uncle after my parents had disappeared, even though he turned out to be the one who kidnapped them and held them prisoner. He meant to do something terrible to all three of us and I am sure he would have if I hadn’t escaped. I was even helped by a rabbit, who appeared in my dreams to guide me.

  My so-called uncle fooled everyone except me. Social services even sent me to live with him in a spooky old house where he locked me in my room every night. Maybe you remember seeing it on the news, how I escaped from that house and found the place where he was holding my parents captive, how he chased me through the dark until he fell through the old bridge over the gorge. That’s where the TV news stories mostly ended. Except for the ominous little mention at the end of each telecast that “the kidnapper’s body has not yet been found.” It never was.

  My father talked about the circle more than usual in the months after it all happened. Not right away, of course. Right after I saved them, we were all so excited and happy and relieved that there was no time to be upset or think too much about it. It wasn’t until after we were safe that all three of us started to feel depressed and sad and Dad started talking so much about the circle and I started having bad dreams.

  Mrs. Rudder, my school counselor, met with us. Of course, she suggested antidepressants for me. My mother suggested something else to Mrs. Rudder, which made my father laugh. It ended up with the three of us going into family counseling. We could talk about our fears together and not feel foolish.

  Together, my dad says, we can overcome anything. Even bad memories like those that were coming back to haunt me after it all supposedly ended when Skeleton Man fell into the gorge.

  Gradually, the bad dreams became fewer and then it seemed as if they were gone. I no longer woke up in the middle of the night screaming. It had been months since that happened. But here, at this safe, secure place, where they even have a gatehouse halfway down the mountain where everyone in a car has to stop and be logged in before they can go any farther, the dreams have returned. This last dream has been the worst of all.

  “It’s over,” Mom says. “It was just a dream. He’s not coming back.”

  “I know,” I reply, keeping my voice calm.

  But I hear another familiar voice saying something else to me. I’m not hearing it with my ears but deep inside my mind.

  It’s not over, that voice says. Some dreams are more than just dreams.

  And I nod my head, knowing it to be true.

  Some dreams, that rabbit voice continues, are like this one I just sent you. They are messages and warnings.

  And even though it sends a shiver down my spine, I understand what this message, this warning, means.

  Skeleton Man will return.

  4

  My So-Called Uncle

  Molly,” my mom says, “get dressed, honey. Your father will be here soon and he’ll want to use the bathroom.”

  That’s one disadvantage of the suite we’re in. Three people and only one bathroom. Being a man, my dad doesn’t have to spend much time in there at all. Since he doesn’t even have to shave—a lack of male facial hair is just one more advantage of an aboriginal heritage, he jokes—he spends even less time in there than the average man. But there are things that Mom and I each need to do, involving mirrors and brushes and sprays and all that. I’m the kind of girl who wishes it all just came in a bottle you could simply point at yourself and phhsssshh! put it all on with one spray. Instant full facial. But lately I am feeling better about the results. So I am now ready to take the time, even though I let out a heavy sigh.

  Mom’s laying out clothes for my dad to wear to dinner. She likes doing these “girly, wifely things” when we’re all together like this because she doesn’t usually get to do them every day. She has a master’s degree in social work and has done everything from being a drug counselor in a prison to working with unwed mothers. Currently she is the head counselor at a youth camp for juvenile offenders. She is a tough cookie. Of the three of us, Mom seems to have been the least fazed by what we all went through. Then again, she has been faithfully going to a self-defense class for women two nights a week. No way does she plan to ever get kidnapped again without putting up a fight.

  I study myself in the mirror. I’ve got this little crease between my brows that shows up when I’m worried. It’s like an anxiety barometer and it’s there now. But at least the only face I see in the mirror is my own. In one of the dreams I’ve started having again, I look into the mirror and see not just my own face but the cold face of Skeleton Man staring over my shoulder.

  The one question people kept asking was why did that strange old man do it. There are theories. The most common one has to do with money. He kidnapped my parents because of my father’s job with the bank. He was trying to get my father to tell him information that he could use to get a lot of money. It all had to do with wire transfers and offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. My mom and I were being used as leverage to get my father to do what he wanted. But my father kept stalling him because he knew in his gut what I also believe to be true. As soon as he got what he wanted, my so-called uncle would have killed all three of us.

  The investigators found all the stuff they needed to prove that money transfer theory. They found the computers, the phony identification papers, even uniforms he had used to pose as a policeman, a phone company employee, and a security g
uard.

  And they also found evidence that tied him to the disappearance over several previous years of other bank executives in other cities, along with their familes. None of those people were ever seen again. Each of those disappearances had been connected with the loss of large sums of money from their bank. Millions. But the theory, until our family escaped, had always been that those bank people had stolen the money themselves. Before us, there had never been any loose ends. Not even a dead body. I don’t like to think about what might have happened to the bodies of those poor innocent people.

  Despite all they discovered, the investigators never found anything that told them my so-called uncle’s true identity. I don’t like to think about that, either. It’s bad enough that my dreams and the rabbit had told me that he wasn’t a person at all.

  “He is Skeleton Man,” the rabbit said. “He is a hungry monster just pretending to be human.”

  A monster. The other theory the state police investigators came up with was that whoever he was, he didn’t really do it for the money. He did it for the thrill of controlling people’s lives—until it was time for their deaths. He enjoyed playing with us the way a cat toys with a mouse. Monsters—whether they are serial killers or creatures in our old stories—don’t see the rest of us as human. They just see us as playthings. Maybe they don’t even think of themselves as evil. But I do. I know there’s real evil in the world.

  But I also know there is good.

  “If it wasn’t for good,” my mother says, “we human beings would have been wiped out a long time ago. Either the monsters would have gotten us or we would have killed each other off with greed and jealousy and anger. So we have to believe in good. We have to look for the good in ourselves.”

  Sometimes, like that rabbit who turned up in my dreams speaking in a voice like my dad’s, there’s good outside us, too. There’s this old Indian idea about spirit guides. There are forces in the universe that can help us if we prove worthy. They may take the shape of an animal or a bird and appear to us to aid us. That was what the rabbit did for me, just like the rabbit in the old story who helped the girl escape from Skeleton Man.

  The thought of that rabbit makes me smile—just as I’m putting on my lipstick. As a result I get some on my teeth. Before I wipe it off with a tissue, I notice how much that red lipstick on my teeth looks like blood. My smile disappears. There’s a knot in my stomach again.

  I finish wiping off the lipstick and turn toward the bathroom door, where my father has appeared, waiting “patiently” and looking at his wristwatch.

  “Hey,” he says to my mother, “it’s a new record. Molly girl managed to finish before I reached retirement age.”

  It’s one of his corny jokes, but it’s so normal that it makes me feel good again and giggle. I pretend to be angry and I elbow him in the side.

  “Watch it there, warrior girl,” he says with a groan. “The ribs you broke last time still haven’t healed.”

  I love my family. We’re together and having fun. There is nothing wrong. Life is good. So why am I so worried? And why does my father also have that little furrow between his brow?

  5

  By the Lake

  Dad has gotten ready even faster than usual, which has left us time for a leisurely stroll along the lake before dinner. Both Mom and I are wearing comfortable shoes, and the paths are all well cared for and easy to walk along. It’s so warm today that we don’t need heavy coats. The few remaining late-autumn flowers, mums and pansies, are beautiful.

  So why does everything around me seem as if it is transparent? Why do I feel as if I am walking on thin ice that might break any minute? Why do I feel as if I am being watched?

  Stop it, I tell myself. I’m being an idiot. Is dwelling on the past all I can do?

  I need to look at the beauty around me and feel good about being here. I look at an old tree—and notice how one branch is shaped almost like a huge hand about to grab me. I look at the big stones along the trail—and see how one of them has a jagged edge that is almost like a row of hungry teeth.

  Quit thinking about dumb things, I command myself. Unfortunately, when you focus on not thinking about something, that is all you can think about. For example, try not to think about a blue elephant.

  “Molly, where are you going?”

  I hear my dad’s voice at the same moment I feel his hand on my elbow, pulling me back onto the path. I’m so distracted that I’ve almost walked off the trail right over one of the low cliffs and into the lake. It was just absentmindedness, but I find myself remembering another one of our old Mohawk stories. It’s about a monster who lurks underwater and lures unsuspecting people to come closer and closer—like sleepwalkers—until it can grab them and pull them under.

  That’s a scary tale to most people, but I find it strangely reassuring. It gives me an idea. If I can concentrate on what it would be like if there were a Mohonk Lake monster it may not leave enough room in my mind to worry about…something else.

  The Monster of Mohonk, I think. A horrible, terrible old lake creature. I build a picture in my mind of something like a cross between Barney the dinosaur and the snaky Loch Ness monster. In my imagination, it is always hungry, but no one seems to know it is there, even though picnic baskets and pet poodles left by the lake have a habit of disappearing.

  When their parents are not around, children come down to the lake, drawn by the monster’s hypnotic mind-call. They climb onto his fuzzy purple back. You can almost hear a merry-go-round playing in the background. He carries them out into the center of the lake while he grins back at them with a big, happy, toothless Saturday-morning-kids’-show smile. However (cue the ominous theme music), when they are far enough out he opens his mouth even wider. Now the horrified tots can see that behind his big goofy grin, set farther back in his mouth, are row after row of huge razor-sharp teeth, bigger than those of the shark in Jaws.

  Ka-chomp, ka-chomp, ka-chomp!

  “You’re smiling,” my mother says, looking at me. “I knew you’d feel more relaxed once we got outside.”

  It’s true—I’m beginning to feel like my old, imaginative self. The image of that deadly, hungry but goofy lake creature is doing it for me. It fits right in with what my father always said when he told me our old Mohawk stories about monsters: “Molly girl, those monsters were big and dangerous and hungry…and stupid. You can use a monster’s own weakness against it.”

  I imagine a girl—a girl who looks like me but a lot younger—who has hidden inside the big old hotel while all the other kids have gone out to play. From behind the curtains of her window she has seen the lake monster scarf down lunch baskets and lure in foolish children. No one believes her when she tells them what she has seen. So she knows it is up to her. Her big brother has brought a bag of illegal fireworks with him on their vacation. She connects them all together with a long fuse, then she goes down to the deceptively peaceful lake with all those firecrackers in a picnic basket. She notices bubbles rising to the surface about fifty feet out and she nods to herself.

  Quickly she lights the long fuse, puts down the basket, and calls out in a loud voice, “Oops, I have forgotten something and now I have to run back to my room. But all of this delicious food will be safe here beside the lake, where nothing big and purple and hungry and stupid can get it.”

  Then she turns and runs as fast as she can.

  She has taken only a few steps before she hears the slosh of water and a loud gulp. She turns back to look and sees nothing but ripples and a few bubbles moving away from shore.

  Wha-boomp! There is a big underwater explosion. A little geyser shoots up from the center of the lake, followed by pieces of purple monster flesh.

  I keep refining that story in my mind as we reach the steps that lead up into the main building. Maybe after the monster is destroyed that little girl does something magical. Maybe she sings a song or throws some sweetgrass into the water, then all of the kids that were eaten by the monster come bobbing up to
the surface, alive and well, although coated with monster slime—along with a hundred happy, yappy poodles. They swim back to the shore, where their bewildered, overjoyed parents—and dog owners—are waiting for them.

  I turn at the top of the steps to look at the lake and the cliff that rises above it. Then I look back at the huge old building itself, at its dark old wood and stone. I could wander the long, echoey hallways of this place for days and never see it all. There aren’t just big meeting rooms and places where concerts and shows take place; there are also creaky stairways, balconies, and closed doors that probably lead down into basement rooms where no one goes. Mohonk Mountain House is spooky. In fact, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t haunted by at least a ghost or three. But the thought of ghosts doesn’t scare me. Like the imaginary lake monster whose story I’ve been creating, spectral beings are a better alternative than the reality of what my parents and I actually survived. That was a real horror story—too real.

  Just like that, with one careless thought, my whole reassuring scary fantasy vanishes as quickly and completely as a soap bubble broken by the breeze. The knot in my stomach grabs hold once more. Everything around me that had just seemed old and safely quaint has suddenly become ominous. I really am as afraid as a little kid left alone in a haunted house. There are lots of other people around me, people here for my dad’s conference, and others who’ve come to eat in the famous dining room or take part in the other programs that are always going on here—like the Adirondack musicians named Quickstep who’ll be playing in the Lake Room tomorrow night.

  But now I am feeling totally alone in this crowd. I don’t want to look at any faces for fear that one of those strangers might look familiar, that I might see the cold, calculating eyes of Skeleton Man staring at me. In fact, I feel right now as if someone is watching me from behind, from just above me. But I don’t allow myself to turn and look up toward the landing. I push through the crowd, trying not to sob, trying to catch my breath.