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.”