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 flagstone 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.