The Return of Skeleton Man Read online

  Grandmother Moon is helping me. Her light is so bright on the cliff wall that I can see things pretty well. Even the angle of the shadows she casts is just right to show me where I have to put one hand and then the next. I keep making steady progress. I think I am more than halfway to the top. I no longer hear stones striking the wall beneath me. Nor does Skeleton Man let loose another scream of hunger and rage and frustration. And that silence worries me. I begin to wonder if he has a weapon of some kind, like a gun, and if he’s getting it out of the ATV now. If he does, will I feel the bullet strike me before I hear the crack of the shot?

  What I hear next, though, is not a gunshot. It is the roar of a motor. Skeleton Man has started up the ATV. I pause in my climb to listen as the sound moves away. Then I start climbing again. As much as I hope he’s giving up and going away, something inside me says that he isn’t. He knows where my climb is going to take me. He is going to cut back around to find the trail that will lead him there. When I get to the top, will Skeleton Man be there waiting for me?

  17

  The Road

  The last fifty feet of my climb are the worst. The cliff begins to slope out and I have to find a way around the small overhang that is above me, that is between me and where I think the top must be. My hands are getting so numb from grasping the snow-chilled rocks that my fingers feel as if they are made of stone themselves. I hold on with one hand and put the other into my armpit. That’s the warmest place on your body and it helps restore feeling to my fingers, along with an aching pain so sharp that I almost cry out. I’m feeling exhausted, too, almost too tired to keep hanging on. I have to do something now or I’m going to fall.

  Somehow, I don’t really understand how, I manage to find a firm enough hold to reach one arm out and up, over the top of that overhang. My fingers find a tree root and I grab hold. It seems firm enough. I can’t see it, but I think it is a cedar root. Old cedars grow strong on cliff edges. I feel as if that root is speaking to me, telling me to trust it. I have no other choice. I let go with my other hand, push out and up with my feet, and manage to get my other arm over the top as well to grasp that same friendly root. My feet are kicking at nothing but air. There’s a fall of at least a hundred feet below me. I pull, wriggling my body up through snow and twigs and scree. My knees are over the edge now and I’m going hand over hand up that root, which just grows drier and firmer.

  My arms wrap around the tree itself. It is as big around as my father’s waist and I feel for a moment as if the old cedar tree is holding me just as much as I am holding it. Its rough bark is warm and dry against my cheek and I can smell that aroma that only a cedar has, a clean, faintly sweet scent that makes me think of healing. I remember all the times my dad or my mom and I have sprinkled dry cedar needles on glowing coals and bathed ourselves in the smoke that rose up, cleansing ourselves from all the bad influences that have touched our lives, clearing away sickness, clearing the air. My parents did that for me after the first time I escaped from Skeleton Man.

  That thought takes away whatever sense of safety and security I’d been feeling. Where is he? I listen hard, and to my relief I can still hear the faint growl of an ATV. It continues to move away, not yet going upslope and coming closer. But I can’t wait here. There’s no time to rest. I have to keep moving. I stand up and brush the snow and dirt from my knees, slip off my moccasins to clean the grit out of them, and slide them back on again. My toes feel numb and I stomp my feet on the ground to try to bring some feeling back into them. Moving. I have to keep moving.

  There’s a gentle slope ahead of me. It will be easy to climb. But before I go, I place both of my hands on the trunk of the cedar whose root was my lifeline.

  “Thank you, Grandfather,” I say.

  At the top of the slope the ground levels off to a narrow white carpet of snow that extends to my right and my left. It is so level that I know what it must be. I brush away the snow with my foot. It is the surface of a road. I look around and recognize where I am. Although the night and the snow make everything look different, I am on the main road that leads up to the Mountain House, just past the Mountain House Gate.

  That road gives me both hope and a deep sense of foreboding. I can follow it back up to where there are people who can protect me. Or I can head back down toward the gatehouse. But I don’t know if anyone will be there. At night, I think, they just leave it unattended, especially when there’s been a big snowstorm like the one we just had and there’s no likelihood of anyone driving up or down. And if I reach the gatehouse and it is all locked up and no one is there, what good will it do me? Who will protect me from Skeleton Man if he tracks me there? I might even run into him coming up the road as I am going down.

  But even if I do go up, toward the Mountain House, it won’t be easy. I think it is at least a mile. I can’t run fast on a road slippery with snow. Skeleton Man may be able to catch up to me before I can reach safety.

  I have to decide. As I stand there trying to decide what to do, I can feel myself getting colder. The blanket is still tied around my shoulders, but it is not enough to keep me from developing hypothermia if I stand still. Running—not headlong but at a careful, steady jog—will warm me up and, perhaps, get me to the place I have to reach in time. I turn and start running up the road.

  18

  The Blade

  The snow is not as deep as it was when it first fell. The road surface must not have dropped down to freezing, so the drifts have begun to melt from the bottom. In places where it was swept by the wind, the road is actually clear of snow, but in others there is still as much as six inches with icy patches in between. So I have to run with care. I don’t want to fall and hurt myself, maybe twist an ankle. I have to keep going.

  The running is warming me up. My breathing has settled into an even, steady rhythm. But I’m far from relaxed, because I keep listening for a sound from behind me, the sound of the engine of an ATV. Every now and then I catch it as I turn a bend. It is still thin and distant, like the whining buzz of a hornet, but I think it has been growing louder and closer. My feet thump on the road surface, then slosh through snow that is wet and heavy and pulls at my moccasins. I slip and almost fall, but I manage to catch myself with my hands and keep running.

  The back of my left hand is hurting, though. I glance at my knuckles. The moonlight is bright enough to see a dark flow welling out from a cut. I don’t know when that happened. Maybe it was when I was climbing and my hands were too numb to feel it, too cold to bleed freely. My near tumble has just opened it enough for the blood to start dripping out. There’s a deep pocket in my buckskin dress and I reach into it with my other hand to pull out a Kleenex that I’d wadded in there. I wrap it over my bleeding knuckle. It’s not that it is cut deeply enough for me to lose enough blood to weaken me. A knuckle cut doesn’t bleed all that much. It is that I don’t want to leave a blood trail behind me. Even though the logical part of my mind knows that the man who posed as my uncle and took me captive is just an evil human being, another part of my mind knows with equal certainty that he is more than that. He is a monster, the kind of monster that can smell blood.

  I wish that I was the one on the ATV and that he was the one on foot. It’s not right. In the old stories the monsters don’t use machines. It isn’t fair. Yes, I know it is crazy for me to think of this when I’m running for my life. But exhaustion and fear can bring thoughts into your head that don’t make logical sense, like feeling there has to be some better way for me to escape other than on foot.

  Then, as I see a familiar cutoff in the road and a pile of earth and stone ahead of me at the cliff’s edge, I realize that my thoughts are logical after all. I jog off the road to the bulldozer I had spotted the other day. On the radiator grille is a word that my dad spelled out for me when I was four years old and visiting a job site with him for the first time: INTERNATIONAL. That word brings a smile to my face. I know this big yellow machine. My dad taught me all about it.

  There’s not m
uch snow on the bulldozer, which had clearly not quite finished its work on the road before the snowstorm hit. It is still sitting here, ready to go. I step up onto the push arm and then the track to get into the cab. It isn’t a really big bulldozer, but it is big enough for me to feel protected by it as I step over the steering levers and sit down on the black padded seat. It is completely dry inside. I run my hands over the controls of the big machine, reminding myself what is what. The blade control lever is to the side of the right armrest, the decelerator—no, the brake pedal—is under my right foot. I put my hands on the two steering levers, which are between my legs. Here’s the decelerator pedal—under my left foot. Now…the engine speed control lever is by my left elbow. Yes. And the transmission shift? Okay, here it is, a foot farther to the left, over the gearbox.

  I make sure everything is set, then reach my right hand down to the starter switch.

  Baabaaabaabaa-barooooom. The engine catches and then grumbles into life. I feel as much as hear the steady, smooth rumble of the big diesel as it warms up.

  The instrument panel is lit now and I flick on the headlights, then work the blade control lever. There’s a slight jolt as the lift cylinders pull back and the blade lifts free. I manipulate the lever to shake loose the dirt and snow. It’s a good two feet off the ground, high enough so that it won’t catch anything, but I can still see over it.

  I push forward on the right steering lever, pull back on the left, and the bulldozer makes a tight pivot. Its headlights illuminate the snow-covered road that leads toward the Mountain House. Those lights also reflect off the bone-white finish of the ATV that has just pulled up to block my way. In the stark gleam of the headlights I can see the tall, thin figure astride that ATV, his head a glistening skull, his eyes red as blood.

  19

  Cat and Mouse

  Aaaaaarrryyyyaaaaahhhh!”

  Skeleton Man stares into the bright glare of the bulldozer’s headlights. He has raised himself up from the seat and is standing on the ATV. He is just about to get off. He’ll be on me in half a dozen strides of his long legs. The sound of the diesel motor of the bulldozer is so loud that I didn’t hear his approach. I’m frozen at the controls.

  But I stay frozen for only a heartbeat. I haven’t climbed and run this far to get caught like a foolish little mouse backed into a corner by a cat. Not when this mouse has several tons of steel under her, steel controlled by an engine with as much power as a herd of horses. I shift into reverse, and the bulldozer rolls backward as I work the steering levers to keep my enemy in the beam of the headlights. I hear the familiar beep-beep-beep-beep warning sound that echoes through every construction site whenever some big piece of machinery starts backing up. I love that sound, and right now it makes me feel as if it is the voice of this huge yellow beast I’m riding.

  “Come on, baby,” I say to the bulldozer as I steer her backward in a half circle. “Let’s show him what you’ve got.”

  I can tell that I’ve surprised Skeleton Man. He probably hadn’t expected a kid to be able to run a dozer. Instead of getting off the ATV, he settles back into the seat, grips the handlebars, and revs the engine so hard that when he pops the clutch it roars forward into a wheelie. But as soon as he gets close enough, I stop, shift, and roll forward even faster than I went back. Skeleton Man has to turn sharply and speed up to avoid getting hit by the blade of the dozer.

  “Yes!” I say.

  I’m not frightened now. There is so much adrenaline pumping through me that I feel as if I could make my big yellow metal horse take flight. I pull the left steering lever back and push forward on the right. The bulldozer spins in a tight circle so that I keep Skeleton Man in the beam of the headlights. Every time the lights catch him, he raises a bony hand to block his eyes from their glare and I can’t see his full face. But what I do see makes me swallow hard. He doesn’t seem at all human anymore—he’s just a glaring, red-eyed skull.

  It’s like a dance now. Each time he tries to get close I back up, turn, roar forward, turn again to evade his approach. I’m not certain what he thinks he’ll be able to do. He must know that he can’t get off his much smaller machine to try to attack me on foot. There’s no way he’s going to scale the treads of a moving bulldozer. I turn, go forward, back up, spin, drive forward again.

  Our game of cat and mouse continues. Though it is more like lion versus elephant, I think. Then it comes to me. His plan isn’t really to get close enough to catch me. He’s trying to get me to make a mistake, stall out, or even run out of fuel. Then he can leap up into the cab and grab me like an owl sinking its claws into a baby bird. I’m safe only as long as I don’t do something wrong. As soon as I think that, my wet moccasin slips off the pedal. I lurch forward out of control for a second before I manage to get my foot back in place again, my heart pounding at the thought of him catching me.

  Suddenly I know—I’m seeing it wrong. I’m not the mouse. I’m the cat. I shouldn’t be evading him. I should be on the attack. As quickly as I realize this, I act. I lower the blade, shift, push the throttle to its highest point, and pop my feet off the pedals. My yellow behemoth doesn’t just roll forward, it seems to almost jump through the air. And it takes Skeleton Man totally by surprise. He tries to turn his ATV, but he’s too late. The blade catches the side of his four-wheeler. As I raise the blade, it lifts him and his ATV up into the air.

  But I’ve been so intent on catching my enemy off guard that I haven’t noticed where I am. I’m heading right toward the edge of the cliff! I ram the pedals to brake just as one side of the bulldozer blade hits the edge of a huge slab of rock.

  Ker-whomp!

  The sound of the blade hitting that huge stone is like an explosion. It’s helped me stop, but it jolted me so hard that I’ve been thrown forward against the steering levers. The breath has been knocked out of me and I feel as if my ribs are cracked. But I can’t think of that now. I slam my feet back down on the decelerator and the brake to keep from crawling forward again just as a terrible scream fills the air.

  “Aaaaaarrryyyyaaaaahhhh!”

  Skeleton Man and his ATV were flipped forward off the blade of the bulldozer when we struck that stone. In the beam of the headlight I see him there at the cliff’s edge, the machine on top of him as he windmills his long arms, screaming as he tries to get free.

  “Aaaaaarrryyyyaaaaahhhh!”

  Then the earth collapses beneath him. He and the four-wheeler fall over the edge. That huge stone I struck, which is twice the size of the bulldozer, also begins to slide. Half of the mountain slope and a big chunk of the road edge in front of me goes with it.

  For a second the whole world is filled with the rumble and roar of a landslide. The bulldozer shakes beneath me and I wonder if the road is going to collapse under us. But then, as suddenly as it began, it is over. As the last echoes die away, all is quiet aside from the rattle of a few stray rocks falling.

  I take a deep breath. Then, holding my side, I climb off the yellow bulldozer. I leave it in neutral with its motor running, just in case. But when I get to the edge of the crumbled cliff, I can feel in my heart there’s nothing to fear now. Grandmother Moon is shining her light even brighter than before on the white stones of the talus slope. She shows me that Skeleton Man is gone. He is down there somewhere, buried forever under thousands of tons of rock.

  20

  By the Fire

  A hand grasps my shoulder.

  “More hot cocoa, Molly?” my mom asks. Dad is leaning over her to hold out a plate of cookies. It’s teatime at Mohonk and we’re sitting in the Lake Lounge by the fire, the same room where the lights went out two nights ago and Skeleton Man took me away. We’ve had to stay here an extra two days because of the investigation, but we’ve managed to make most of it feel like a vacation. It hasn’t been hard to enjoy ourselves now that the sense of foreboding that hung over us like a sword on a thin thread is gone.

  “Thanks,” I say. I reach out one bandaged hand for the cocoa and grab three coo
kies with the other. My parents both laugh.

  “Well,” I say, “I’m hungry.” That makes them laugh harder and I laugh with them, even though laughing makes my bruised ribs hurt.

  As we sit and look at the fire, it seems as if all the scary and awful things that just happened occurred ages ago. My fears that my parents had been hurt turned out to be groundless. That night when Skeleton Man killed all the power on the mountain, I was the only person he attacked. I’m sure he had further plans, but we’ll never know what they were.

  They haven’t been able to find any trace of his body, though they did find some pieces of the shattered ATV at the bottom of the slope. The stones that slid down are too big for anyone to move and the state troopers say that we might as well think of it as the grave of the unidentified man who kidnapped me. From what I told them and from the way he operated, they agreed it might very well have been the same person who kidnapped my mom and dad and posed as my uncle a year ago. But with no hard evidence other than what I said I saw, that remains only a theory as far as they are concerned.

  But what about that cave and all his stuff, you ask? They listened to my description of that place and they’ve searched for it. But the snow had all melted away by the time they started looking and they couldn’t even find the tracks of the ATV. So far they haven’t been able to find the cave either. I’m not sure how hard they’ve tried. Apparently everyone who knows anything about this area says there is no such cave that anyone else has ever found. I was probably in shock and remembered it wrong—or at least that’s what they theorize. I even told them about the cedar tree whose roots helped me climb those last few feet over the cliff, but they claim there are no cedar trees growing along that stretch of road at all, and never have been.