A Skeleton in the Family Read online

  We reminisced about other Halloween pranks for the rest of the drive and even laid some possible plans for the upcoming holiday. At the very least, we could put Sid in the front yard and pretend he was one of those animated skeletons I’d seen in the stores.

  Once we got closer to the Oktoberfest, traffic slowed and Sid obediently scooted down in the seat so he wasn’t visible. But when I parked, he balked about being left behind.

  “Sid, I am not taking you with me. If it were dark, maybe, but it’s broad daylight. You’re going to stay here until I get back.”

  “What if you get into trouble? At least take my skull in a bag so the rest of me can come running if you need me.”

  “The rest of you wouldn’t be able to see where it was going! Besides which, if a headless skeleton ran through that crowd, people would probably panic. At the very least, they’d spill their beer and take pictures with their phones. Either promise to stay behind, or I’m turning this van right around and taking you home.”

  “I’m developing claustrophobia thanks to you,” he muttered, but he collapsed himself onto the floor of the van and let me cover him with a blanket.

  I double-checked to make sure the door was locked behind me, not wanting to scare any sneak thieves to death, then headed for the festivities. After paying the two bucks admission, I headed for the midway, resisting the tantalizing aroma of bratwurst.

  None of the rides looked particularly familiar. Of course, I assumed that everything had been repaired, repainted, and brought up to current safety codes any number of times in thirty years. I found a haunted house, but the one from my memory had a house-of-wax theme, with grotesque scenes of melting faces and buxom girls in fringed vests running from shambling mad scientist types. This one was a zombie beach party, with grotesque scenes of rotting faces and buxom girls in bikinis running from shambling undead types. Apparently, buxom, running girls and shambling villains were key to haunted-house decor.

  It could have been the same ride with an extreme makeover, but I couldn’t be sure, and one important thing was missing: a gibbet, with a skeleton inside. There had been some sort of mechanism to wriggle the cage and make the skeleton rattle. Ironically, I’d barely noticed the skeleton—the skeleton hadn’t scared me—but I’d been fascinated by the gory paintings in that way that kids can’t help staring even when they know it’s going to give them nightmares. In my case, however, the nightmares had come while I was awake.

  I couldn’t really remember all the details of what had happened that night—I’d only been six—but over the years, I’ve filled in the gaps with my family’s memories.

  It had been early spring when we’d come to the carnival and was already dark when we arrived. My parents had promptly herded Deborah and me past the haunted house and thrill rides to get to the kiddie stuff. That had been fine with me, but ten-year-old Deborah quickly grew bored with the little boats, little motorcycles, little racing cars, and other miniature modes of transportation going around in circles. She wanted to go on big-kid rides like the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Scrambler.

  After consultation, Mom had agreed to go ride with Deborah while Phil escorted me to the little helicopters and the little stagecoaches. I’d been so proud to be riding without a parent or my big sister for the first time.

  Then the power went out.

  I learned later that it wasn’t the city power but the carnival’s own generator that had been the problem, but at the time, all I knew was that the ride stopped, and it was suddenly dark as far as I could see. Immediately people started screaming. Kids screamed for their parents, parents screamed for their kids, people trapped on unmoving rides screamed to be rescued, and carnies screamed for people to stop screaming.

  Deborah and my mother were stuck several feet off the ground on the Octopus, but Mom kept Deborah from getting overly anxious, and in fact got all the people on the ride to sing along to “Octopus’s Garden.”

  Meanwhile, Phil was trying to get to me, but so were the parents of all the other kids riding on the little stagecoaches. He shouted for me, but again, so were all the parents, and I didn’t hear him.

  I wasn’t really scared at first. Once I was sure the ride had come to a complete stop, I carefully unbuckled my seatbelt, climbed out of the stagecoach, and made my way to the exit, but I couldn’t find Phil. He’d forced his way onto the ride by that point and was looking through each of the stagecoaches to find me.

  The commotion started to bother, though not really scare, me, and I decided I wanted to go home. I started retracing my family’s earlier path back toward the exit, getting jostled like crazy as people panicked. Some folks claimed to smell smoke, and others said they’d seen people falling from the Ferris wheel. Neither turned out to be true, but it added to the confusion.

  Somehow I found myself in front of the haunted house, and if those paintings had been creepy before, now they were downright terrifying. A few of the carnies had pulled out flashlights and were trying to herd people to safety, but the flickering lights made it look as if the mad scientists were moving, reaching for me.

  I began to cry, too scared to move.

  A big hand landed on my shoulder and a stranger put his face right up to mine. His breath smelled bad. “Hey, little girl. Calm down, it’s okay.”

  I was nearly as frightened of the man as I was of the monsters. When I tried to jerk away, his grip tightened, and I whimpered.

  “Come along with me, I’ll take care of you.” He started pulling me toward the one place I didn’t want to go—the entrance to the haunted house.

  Now I started screaming, but with so many other screams, nobody even noticed.

  We were right under the gibbet when the skeleton started rattling. Which made no sense. The power was still off.

  “What the hell?” the man said.

  A creaky voice said, “Leave the kid alone!”

  “Who said that?” He looked around wildly.

  I tried to wriggle free again, but he clamped down on the back of my neck, pulling my hair in the process.

  “Let her go!” came a voice from above, and both my captor and I looked up.

  The skeleton was looking down at us, and while we watched, he reached above his skull to unhook himself from the chain that was keeping him suspended. The gibbet wasn’t particularly authentic, so there was plenty of space between the bars for him to get out, and he dropped to the ground in front of us. “Let her go,” the skeleton said.

  The man’s grip loosened, and I smelled pee. He stumbled away and ran, knocking through people in the crowd as he went.

  If I’d been older or younger, I’d have wet my panties, too, but there was something about being six that kept me from being afraid. Besides, compared to the smelly man and the gruesome pictures, the skeleton looked downright friendly.

  He knelt down in front of me. “Are you okay?”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Okay. Where do you live?”

  I gave him my address.

  “Is that far?”

  I rolled my eyes. “You have to drive.”

  “I don’t think I know how to drive, and I don’t have a car.”

  “We have a station wagon. You can take me to the parking lot and Phil will drive us home.”

  “Who’s Phil?”

  “My father.”

  “Why do you call him Phil?”

  “Because that’s what Mom calls him. Sometimes Mom drives, too, but mostly Phil.”

  “Do you know where your car is?”

  “I may need you to help me look. It’s blue, with a white top.”

  “Okay.” He offered his hand, and I took it without hesitation and started leading him toward the exit.

  I don’t know why nobody noticed that there was a skeleton walking around with a little girl—either they were too busy going berserk or assumed it was somebody
in costume from the haunted house or just didn’t believe their eyes. At any rate, nobody stopped us on the way to the parking lot.

  It was an absolute zoo in that lot, with people driving like idiots in their efforts to escape the carnival. I probably would have been hit a dozen times if I’d been out there alone, just because it was so dark and I was so small, but the skeleton lifted me up for a piggyback ride.

  Again, nobody seemed to notice us, but of course nobody would expect a monster to be giving a child a piggyback ride. From the vantage point of those bony shoulders, I managed to spot our station wagon, and we made our way over there. The doors were locked, but my new friend plopped me onto the hood before climbing up himself.

  “My parents will be here soon,” I said with complete assurance.

  “I’ll wait with you.”

  “Okay. Then you can come home with us.”

  But the skeleton was looking at his hand as if he’d never seen it.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I think I’m having a really strange dream. I’d ask you to pinch me, but I don’t seem to have anything to pinch.”

  “You can’t pinch a skeleton.”

  “I guess not.” He looked at his hand, then his feet, and then reached up to feel his skull.

  At about that point, I decided it was time to attend to the social niceties. “My name is Georgia Thackery. What’s yours?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know your own name?”

  “Maybe skeletons don’t have names.”

  “I think your name is Sid.”

  “Why Sid?”

  “You look like a Sid.”

  “Okay. Sid sounds good to me.”

  I asked Sid about living in the carnival and who that smelly man was, but he didn’t have any answers for me. I later found out that he only became completely aware at the moment he saw that guy grab me. He had some very vague impressions of seeing things happening around him before that, but said it was as if he’d been watching the world through a wall of water.

  Then he asked me about myself, but I don’t remember what I said. Now that I was safe, I was getting sleepy, and before too much longer, I dozed off. The next thing I knew, I was being hugged awake by my mother.

  The carnival’s lights were back on and she and Deborah had been rescued from the Octopus only to find my father frantically searching for me. They got the carnies involved, and Mom had come out to get a jacket for Deborah because it was getting chilly. She’d found me sound asleep on the hood of the car.

  Sid was nowhere to be seen.

  Mom grabbed me up and ran back to the carnival, yelling at the top of her lungs that she’d found me. Phil heard her and started running, too, and an orgy of hugging and crying commenced. Even Deborah, not the most demonstrative of people even as a child, socked me in the arm and said, “About time you showed up.”

  The carnies were mightily relieved, and the owner gave Deborah and me stuffed Scooby-Doos that we kept for years, even after we realized they were knockoffs. My parents let us accept the toys but turned down the offers of a wall clock and matching watches that were prizes from the dart game.

  Nobody thought to ask me how I’d ended up at the car. They just assumed I’d found my way there alone. Between the hugging and my being half asleep, I didn’t think to explain. I did see Sid back in his gibbet when we walked by the haunted house, and I waved, but he didn’t wave back.

  It wasn’t until the next morning that anybody asked for details about the previous night—characteristically, it was Deborah who demanded an explanation. I think it was because she was jealous of the attention I was continuing to get. Mom and Phil had made my favorite breakfast: cheese and eggs with extra-crispy bacon. Plus Deborah’s Scooby-Doo wasn’t as nice as mine, and she didn’t even like Scooby-Doo that much.

  When I told her about Sid, she accused me of making it up. An argument broke out, and when the volume reached the lower end of the Richter scale, my parents intervened.

  I told them my story, and they just smiled indulgently, figuring that my skeleton was nothing more than a skinny carny. When they called Fenton’s to let them know that one of their employees had gone above and beyond the call of duty, Fenton denied having anybody named Sid working for him. Since my parents couldn’t offer a better description than my insistence that Sid was incredibly pale and really, really skinny, they let it drop.

  Two weeks later, Sid showed up at our back door.

  24

  I was so caught up in remembering my previous trip to the carnival that I didn’t notice the man speaking to me until he repeated himself.

  “It’s really not that scary,” he said again.

  “What?” I responded brilliantly.

  “I’m just saying that the ride isn’t that bad. Or were you admiring the artwork?”

  Standing beside me was a man with reddish brown hair, deep blue eyes, and just the hint of a cleft in his chin. He was wearing jeans and a purple polo shirt with Fenton’s Family Festival embroidered on it. He looked a few years older than I was, and was much less taken aback.

  “I was wondering how often you changed the theme on a haunted house,” I said. “It looks like some of the zombies on this one snuck in from The Walking Dead.”

  “We try to stay current,” he said. “This particular ride has had incarnations ranging from atomic horrors to witch’s dungeon to werewolf’s lair. I think there was a wax-museum thing when I was younger.”

  “Interesting.” So it probably was the same ride I remembered, and this guy had been with the carnival for a long time, which might be helpful.

  “It was a vampire’s castle most recently, but then vampires got sexy, so we switched to zombies. Nobody has tried to make movie zombies sexy yet.”

  “Thank goodness for that. How about skeletons? Have they ever made an appearance?”

  “Usually in more of a supporting role. There are none inside, if that’s what you’re afraid of. Just zombies, rats, and some mild dismemberment.”

  “I’m not scared of going in,” I said indignantly.

  He was grinning at me mockingly, or perhaps mocking me with a grin. In either case, I was pretty sure I’d lost control of the conversation.

  “Let me start over,” I said. “My name is Dr. Georgia Thackery, and I’m from McQuaid University.” Okay, I was hardly there in an official capacity, but it sounded impressive. “I’m trying to establish the provenance of a human skeleton that was recently donated to our collection.”

  “Huh. I’ve been on the show since I was born, and I would have bet that there was no townie story I hadn’t heard before, but you have indeed come up with a new one.”

  “Here’s the situation,” I said, starting my lie. “A man in Pennycross recently passed away, and in cleaning his house, his family found a human skeleton. They said he used it to decorate for Halloween, and they’d assumed it was fake, but one of the man’s grandchildren realized that it was real. Since nobody in the family wanted an actual skeleton around, they donated it to the university.”

  “How does that get you here?”

  “When the skeleton was examined, they found identifying marks on him . . . on it. The kind of markings that would have been on a skeleton in a museum or university collection, but they aren’t from McQuaid.”

  “So? Finders keepers, right? Just put your own marks on it and nobody will know the difference.”

  Had the scenario I was describing actually taken place, that’s probably what would have happened, especially after what Yo had told me about skeleton prices, but for the sake of my fiction, I pretended we had more integrity. “The chancellor is a real stickler for establishing rightful ownership. She insists that we find out where the skeleton came from and if it was obtained legally.”

  “Still wondering where we come in.”


  “The man who had it told his kids he bought it from a haunted house operator at a carnival. This carnival.”

  “We sell many things, but we do draw the line at human remains.”

  “This would have been about thirty years ago.”

  “Who would care after thirty years?”

  “The chancellor is a Roman historian. To her, thirty years is recent.”

  “Wow.” He scratched his head, showing a small tattoo of a carousel horse on his forearm. “Okay, that makes it about what, nineteen eighty-three?”

  “Plus or minus a couple of years.” I knew the exact date, of course, but that would be too much detail to explain away.

  “I would have been eleven or twelve, so if anybody was selling skeletons, I wouldn’t have known. We better talk to the boss.”

  “Is he around?”

  “She’s always around. Come with me.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “I’m Brownie Mannix, by the way.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said. He led me across the midway, cutting between the merry-go-round and the giant slide. A trailer marked OFFICE was parked behind the rides, where the wires were exposed and the engines cranking. Brownie knocked on the door before opening it, then waved me inside.

  An older couple—man and woman—were sitting at matching desks. The man was counting money while the woman worked at a laptop computer.

  “Hey, boss,” Brownie said to the woman. “I got a new one. This towner—”

  “Brownie!” the woman snapped. “You know better than that.”

  “Excuse me, this patron wants to know about a skeleton.”

  The woman gave me the kind of searching look that made me glad I’d worn clean underwear and brushed my teeth that morning. “I’m Dana Fenton, and this is my show. What’s this about a skeleton?”