I wanted to run, but he wouldn’t let me. He made me watch what he did then. “Death, so sayeth the Lord of Graveyards!” He pointed a finger at the baby and it no longer moved. Its eyes were wide and glazed, drool running from its pink blossom of a mouth. Then it began to go green, it bloated up like it was filling with gas and then it made a sound like violent farting and maggots poured from it in squirming rivers.
“Do you favor the hand of Death, Little Injun?”
But I could not speak. It was only the will of the Skeleton Man that kept me standing, kept my eyes open.
“Tut,” he said. “I see that you do not.” Then he dug the nails of his left thumb and forefinger into one of the holes in his white face and pulled out a wriggling red worm. A resurrection worm of the sort that would fall from the sky much later on. It came out with a sound like a thread pulled through a button hole. He dropped it onto the dead baby and it swam into the foaming white sea of maggots. “Born again, so sayeth the Maker and Unmaker, breathe my plump little chavy, smile out at us from the charnel!”
The baby moved. It reached out its gas-distended fingers at me, making a crying, hungry sound as graveworms fountained from its mouth. “Hold it, Little Injun. Pick it up and love it. Press the sweet baby against your cheek. Breathe warmth into the little grub. But beware, I say, of its sharp little milk teeth.”
But I could not touch it and he did not make me. It wasn’t mercy; it was amusement. He pointed his finger at the baby and it seized up. “Back to the earth, sayeth my voice!” The baby not only seized up, but blackened and fell into itself with a crackling sound like melted plastic or dry cellophane. Then it burst open, cracking apart like an egg and there was nothing but maggots inside, shining and white, then a blackness of oily carrion beetles.
“As I did unto your family, I have done unto that squalling brat,” the Skeleton Man said to me with a whispering, windy voice. “And as I have done unto them so I have done unto the village of the Crabeater and certainly to Shayla Hawk who I made beg for death before I gutted her like a fish.”
I screamed and ran out of there, tripping down the stairs and crawling through the grass and that’s when I saw the town was burning. The fire was racing up the road and house after house went up in flames. I ran with the heat at my back and made it outside Crabeater Creek, winded and seared and blackened with smoke, but I made it. I watched the town burn flat.
They said a propane leak had started it all. Bullshit, of course. But nobody dug any deeper into it and that was that. I ended up in the mission school and some years later I became a tribal cop after I got out of the Army. Some twenty years after the inferno that took Crabeater Creek, I was out on patrol. In Crow Hill one afternoon, I saw the car: that black car, the Roadrunner.
I told myself it wasn’t so as you would tell yourself it wasn’t so.
But I knew it was the one, that same flat black monster with tinted windows that had crawled from the sixties. I slowed and saw there was a man leaning up against it. He waved. He was dressed in black. That white face. Those awful eyes. It was Chaney. It was the Skeleton Man. Again, I told myself it wasn’t so as I pulled the patrol car up behind that Road Runner. But something had already gone bad inside me, something went cold and my guts pulled down deep.
I had a mad desire to stomp on the accelerator and drive off, run while I still could but instead I pulled to a stop and grabbed the riot gun, clicked the safety off.
I stepped out, my belly filled with poison now. “Who the hell are you, Slick?”
The man in black just grinned and his teeth were long and narrow like those of something that fed on dead things. He was tall and thin. All over his white hands were names, dozens and dozens of names written in tiny, flowing letters.
“I said, what’s your name?”
“Chaney,” he said. “Chaney. Just like last time, Little Injun. How fare you, my heathen savage?”
There was an accent to his voice but I couldn’t place it. He had an accent in Crabeater Creek that night, too. It sounded European, I thought. Regardless, in Crow Hill that day the voice was raspy and raw like he had been gargling with powdered glass. His face was skullish, set with lots of hollows and draws, the lips thin as a paper cut, the flesh nothing but poorly mended scar tissue like he had used lye as a facial scrub sometime in the past. But it was the eyes lording over all this that found and held me… they were flesh-pink, bubblegum pink, and glossy, completely without whites. The eyes of an unborn reptile.
“Long has it been since we met, Little Injun.”
“Shut your mouth,” I said. “Tell me who you are and where you are from.”
He laughed. “I think you know who I am and perhaps what I am. But I enjoy games. So let us play, you and I. Now, you know I’m not from these parts. I just come and go like a… well, like a bad storm or a disease wind. I do my thing, as it were, I sow and reap, and then I just push on. My name is Chaney. At least today it is. I plan on causing trouble tonight and having a bit of a lark. How’s that set with you, Little Injun? About the time this village wakes from its nightmare and comes to its senses, I’ll be on my way. Another dark story for another dark and rainy night, hmm?”
I had no spit in my mouth. My throat had constricted down to a pinhole and I was having trouble breathing. When I got my voice out, it was broken and airless: “Okay, Mr. Chaney, okay. I’ve had about enough of your shit for one day. You wanna blow smoke up somebody’s ass, it won’t be mine. Now, why don’t you turn around and put your hands flat on the hood of the car there. Assume the position, because I figure you know it.”
The Skeleton Man started laughing… at least laughter came out of his mouth. It never touched the rest of his face, though. That was still hard and cruel and hideous. The laughter was high and scraping and almost hysterical. “Now, you know you can’t put the cuffs on me, Little Injun. You damn well know you can’t any more than you can draw down the moon and put it in your back pocket or knit yourself a set of breeches from the fog that comes in off the river. Shall we be sensible? Shall we sit like old friends and talk of Crabeater Creek?”
The sweat was rolling down my face. There was a smell coming off Chaney and it reminded me of things long buried that had been exhumed. “Who the hell are you?”
Chaney the Skeleton Man lit a cigarette, only no flame ever touched it… it just flared up. Smoke rolled from his nostrils. “I’m Chaney. Already told you that. Oh, tomorrow I might be Smith or Blake or Lupez or Snarnov, but right now I’m Chaney. Fair enough, Little Injun?”
I could feel the shotgun in my hands, feel my finger putting pressure on the trigger. “What’re you doing here?”
“You already know why I’m here. I’m Chaney and I’ve come to do some business, that’s all. Next week, next month it’ll be a different town and a different name.”
Chaney stepped forward and I put the shotgun on him, had every intention of killing him. I had dreamed of doing it for many years. Only I couldn’t seem to pull the trigger. And Chaney knew that. He grinned, his pink eyes filled with motion like ripples in a fleshy pond.
“Now, Little Injun. Look what I have here. Look what is in mine hand.”
It was a book. One of those huge antique books, a folio like the Gutenberg Bible. A massive leather-bound tome thicker than a Manhattan phonebook. It was well-worn, the iron hasp rusting. I knew what it was: The Book of Hell. This is where the names of the dead were written, the names of the souls the Skeleton Man reaped. He cracked it open and held it out to me. The pages fluttered in the breeze. About two-thirds of the way through the book they stopped and my eyes locked on a single page. There were the names. The names of all the families that had been exterminated in Crabeater Creek written in a spidery precise hand using a faded brown ink that looked like old blood. I saw the names of Jim Fastwind and his family. Shayla Hawk. Skip Darling, his wife, and children. Lona Whitebird. They were all there, as were the names of my mother and father, my brothers and my kid sister. My name was there, too. In fact, it had been underlined three times.