Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man (2 page)

The first girl calls, “Snow White doesn’t carry a magic wand!” and a second later she comes whipping back around the corner, whispering, “What’s a newt, Daddy?”

“A salamander, honey. Now, don’t you think—”

Snow White dodges the Cowboy, crying, “Eee-haw!”

Mr. DeVries gives me a little shrug and then calls up the stairs, “Margaret! Margaret, you’ve got a visitor!”

Dot comes racing down these skinny little stairs with her face looking like it’s been half dunked in a bucket of
yellow paint. She blinks a bunch, then says, “Hi, Sammy! Come on up!”

Dot’s got a big family. She has two older brothers and two younger sisters, and because they live in this skinny little house, all the girls sleep in one skinny little room and the boys sleep in another.

When you go into the girls’ room, you move from the Land of Blue to the Land of Yellow. There’s a yellow bedspread and a little yellow end table; one whole wall is painted yellow, and there’s even a yellow dresser. And standing there in the middle of all that
yellow
is Dot, painting herself to match the furniture.

I sit down on the edge of her bed and say, “So what are you going to be?”

She gives me a great big yellow smile. “A bee! Wait ’til you see my costume. It’s gonna be great!”

She goes back to smearing yellow paint on her face, and I’m thinking A
bee?
when she says, “How about you?”

I start digging though my bag and say, “The Monster from the Marsh.”

She looks at me in the mirror. “The Monster from the
Marsh?
What’s that?”

All of a sudden I feel pretty stupid. Here she is, taking a bath in yellow paint, trying real hard to look like a five-foot bee, and all I’m planning to do is rat my hair up, spray myself green, and call myself a Marsh Monster. Like there’s such a thing. I look at her in the mirror and kind of shrug. “It’s just something I made up. You’ll see.”

She turns to face me. “Is that what you’re going to be for Heather’s party tomorrow night?”

Now the last thing I want to do is spend my favorite night of the year talking about Heather Acosta and her stupid party. I think Heather’s throwing a party partly so she can do what she did last week: come up to me and say, “In case you hear about the party, it’s true; everyone’s invited—everyone but
you
.” Can you believe it? That’s exactly what she said. Then she wobbled her snobby red head, gave me her best nah-ne-nah look, and walked away. I tell you, having Heather Acosta in your life is like having a slice of onion on your peanut butter sandwich.

Anyhow, Dot’s looking at me, waiting for me to tell her what I’m going to be for Heather’s stupid party, so I kind of shrug and say, “Nah … I’m not going.”

Dot’s eyes pop wide open. “You’re
not?
Why not? Everybody’s going!”

Just then the doorbell rings. Then we hear, “Margaret! More company!”

Dot puts down her paint and jumps up. “That must be Marissa!” She races off saying, “This is so much fun!”

I was glad Marissa had shown up. We’ve been best friends since the third grade, and she doesn’t have to ask what I’m going to be for Halloween. She knows that I’m going to be the Marsh Monster. That or the Ice Monster, if I happen to get white paint instead of green.

Anyway, Marissa comes in and gives me a great big smile. She says, “Sammy!” and puts down these two big shopping bags. “Ready to get ready?”

I nod. “What’cha gonna be?”

She dumps out one of the bags. “A mummy!”

Dot and I look at the rolls of toilet paper tumbling out
of the bag and start cracking up. Dot says, “A
mummy?
”

Marissa pulls a white leotard and tights out of the other bag. “Yeah! And you guys are going to have to help me get dressed. C’mon!”

Just then the door bangs open, and Snow White comes whipping into the room. She slides under one of the beds, then yanks her skirt into the shadows just as the Cowboy charges in. The Cowboy stands in the middle of the room holding the magic wand out like she’s warding off demons. “Where’s Beppie?”

Dot barely nods her head toward the bed, but that’s all the Cowboy needs. She calls “Eee-haw!” and pounces. And as they’re tearing each other up under the bed, I ask Dot, “Shouldn’t you do something about that?”

Dot shrugs. “They’ll work it out. They always do.”

After a few more squeaks and squawks and pughh, pughhs, the Cowboy emerges with a gun in her hand and a smile on her face. She looks at Dot and says, “There’s a newt under your bed,” then disappears.

Dot looks at me. “What’s a newt?”

Snow White comes out with a pout. “A salamander.” She throws the magic wand on the ground, says, “I hate being a newt,” and stomps out of the room.

Marissa and I shake our heads, then go back to getting ready. Marissa gets into her tights and leotard, and we wrap her up like a caterpillar in a cocoon, laughing and telling her what a great idea it is to be a mummy—if she trips and falls or bumps into something it won’t even hurt because, really, she’s got about half a foot of padding all the way around her.

When we’re all done, she walks over to Dot’s bed like the Abominable Snowman and stands there for a minute before she says, “I can’t sit down!”

Dot and I start laughing all over again, but there’s not much we can do about it. She has to just stand there while Dot and I hurry up and get ready.

So I’m hanging upside down, ratting and spraying my hair like crazy when Marissa says through the slit for her mouth, “Hey! I almost forgot! I brought you something.” She goes over to her bag and pulls out this huge olive green sweater that’s made out of long twisty strands that look like thick hair.

My eyes bug out. “Wow! Where did you
get
that?”

She smiles through all that toilet paper. “Yolanda’s closet, of course.”

“Your
mother
bought that?” I ask, thinking there’s no way Mrs. McKenze would be caught dead in a sweater that was obviously meant to be worn by a Marsh Monster.

Marissa says, “Yup, and I figure since I’ve never seen her wear it, she’s not going to miss it.” She hands it to me. “It’s kinda heavy.”

She wasn’t kidding about that. I pop it on over my turtleneck, and all of a sudden I feel like I’m at the dentist, wrapped up in a lead apron, waiting for x-rays.

I move around a bit, swaying from side to side, getting used to this hairy sweater brushing against my thighs. Then I let out a few
Rrrrs
and
Arghs
, and pretty soon I’m
feeling
like the Marsh Monster. I go back to putting on warts and spraying hair, and when I’m all done I spread out my arms and say, “Hey! What’cha think?”

Marissa says, “That’s great!” but Dot takes one look at me, pops on her antenna headband, and says, “Your shoes don’t go.”

I look down at my high-tops and then back at Dot. “They don’t?”

She laughs. “They’re white!”

Well, they weren’t exactly white. They were too old to be white. But she was right. They sure weren’t green.

Marissa shrugs and says, “So spray ’em.”

I have to think about this a minute. Painting my hair and face and
hands
green, that’s one thing. But my high-tops? I pick up the paint and read the label. It says
WASH OFF WITH WARM SUDSY WATER
, so I figure okay, what the heck, I’ll spray my high-tops green.

Dot says, “I’m dying of thirst. Anyone else want a root beer?”

Marissa says she does, but I just shake my head and get to work painting my shoes. So Dot runs off, and a minute later she and Marissa are sipping root beers, watching me work. And when my shoes are finally all green and dry enough to wear, I lace them up and say, “Is that better?”

Dot says, “Much!” and Marissa nods. “That’s the best Marsh Monster ever.”

Dot gives herself one last look in the mirror, adjusting the wings that are strapped on like a backpack. “So where are we going to go?”

Marissa puts down her root beer. “Why don’t we start here and go out toward Broadway?”

Dot says, “I thought maybe we’d go the other way. You
know, up the hill? They probably have great decorations and candy and stuff up there.”

Marissa and I laugh because we tried that once. We went all around Marissa’s neighborhood and came home with practically nothing. Big houses are rotten for trick-or-treating. You have to run like crazy to get from one house to the next, half the houses have their lights off, and if they
do
have their porch light on, half the time the people don’t even know it’s Halloween. They answer the door and just kind of stare at you, and you can see them thinking, Are these kids dressed up for a reason? Is it Halloween? No, it
can’t
be.… Then off they go to dig up some marshmallows or nuts that they’ve got buried in a cupboard somewhere, and the minute you turn around,
click
, they’ve doused the porch light.

Anyhow, we agreed that we’d start off in Dot’s neighborhood and work our way over toward the mall. And it might have been just a regular Halloween night for the Bee, the Mummy, and the Monster from the Marsh, if I hadn’t gotten the bright idea to take Dot somewhere she’d never been before. A place you wouldn’t dare go except on Halloween. A place even adults don’t like to talk about.

A place all the kids in town call … the Bush House.

The Bush House isn’t scary because it has a big pointy roof and broken shutters. You see that kind of stuff all the time. And it’s not scary because it’s haunted—it’s not. No, the Bush House is scary because of the
bushes
. They’re dry and gnarly, and they’ve gotten so big that they’ve kind of swallowed up the house.

The bushes start clear out by the street and go up about ten feet in the air. Then they kind of arch over the sidewalk and connect with the ones that are growing in the yard. You can be walking down the sidewalk in the middle of the day with the sun beaming away up in the sky, and if you’re crazy enough to walk through that tunnel of bushes instead of crossing over to the other side of the street, well, the sun disappears. And there you are in the dark with your heart thumping and your knees bumping because you just know that the Bush Man’s going to jump out and kill you.

No one had ever actually seen the Bush Man. No one that I believed, anyway. Grams had told me that the stories about him were exaggerated—that he was probably just a lonesome man lost in his own world, but I never quite believed her, either. No, there’s something very strange about a man who locks himself up in a house like that, and the best thing to do is stay away from him and his bushes.

The Marsh Monster didn’t happen to agree. And it’s the Marsh Monster who dragged the Bee and the Mummy down Orange Street, through the tunnel, and onto the Bush House walkway. And it’s the Marsh Monster who said, “C’mon! It’ll be fun!”

So there we were, fighting through the bushes with our flashlights bouncing around all over the place, whispering and shhing our way toward the Bush House, when out of nowhere this
skeleton
appears and comes charging straight at us. All of a sudden I wasn’t the Monster from the Marsh anymore. I was Sammy Keyes, and my heart was looking for a way out of my body.

Marissa screamed, but it must have scared the buzz right out of the Bee, because one minute Dot’s up and the next minute she’s on her little stinger in the middle of the walkway. And she’s crawling backward, trying to get away from the skeleton, when she steps on one of her wings and can’t move.

Then we hear, “Out of the way, out of the
way!
” and that’s when I realize that the skeleton’s not a skeleton at all, but a trick-or-treater in one of those glow-in-the-dark skeleton suits. And he’s sure had a busy night, because his green-and-white striped pillowcase is just
loaded
with candy. He swings it right over Dot’s head and kind of dances around her, then disappears down the walkway.

For a minute, the three of us stare at where he used to be. Then I help Dot up and say, “And Grams thinks
I’m
too old to go out trick-or-treating.”

Dot lets out a nervous little laugh, but you can tell—she
wants
out
of there. I look over at Marissa, and, sure enough, she’s doing the McKenze dance. She’s got her toes pointed at each other, and she’s squirming around with her knees together, biting on a fingernail, looking scared to death. She whispers, “I have to go.”

I grab her by the arm. “Hey, don’t be spooked—it was only a trick-or-treater. C’mon … the door’s right there. We’ll just knock and run, okay?”

“No, Sammy, I have to go!”

“Look, Marissa, we’re never going to live it down if people find out we made it halfway up the walkway and—”

“Sammy … I have to
go!
”

I stare at her. “To the
bathroom?
”

She nods. “I shouldn’t have had that root beer.”

I look around and say, “Just go in the bushes.”

Her eyes practically pop through toilet paper. “In the
bushes?
No way! Besides, I
can’t
. I’m all wrapped up and I’ve got on tights and a leotard. I’m going to have to take off everything to go!”