Ask the Bones Page 8

  From that day on, the master’s wife purred when she saw her children or servants, but she gave her husband no peace. She let her fingernails grow into claws and raked them across his face whenever he came near. Finally he put her in an institution, hoping that doctors might find a cure.

  But as the months dragged by, the master despaired of her ever improving. He became gaunt and gray.

  Everything around him reminded him of his wife, so he left his Georgia plantation and took his children to South Carolina.

  All went well for a number of years. But one evening when he was standing on the second floor balcony, he heard his donkeys braying. He looked down at the barn and was startled to see the same shadowy figure he had seen in Georgia. Was that Luke digging a hole by the stable? The master raced downstairs and across the lawn, but by then the man had melted into the dark woods.

  The master’s old anger returned. He was so furious, he didn’t even think to reach down into that hole. If he had, he would have unearthed a scrap of handkerchief, stained with blood. He ran back to the house for his dogs and his gun. He didn’t want Luke or anyone else skulking around his property.

  The moment he stepped into the front hall, he felt a smashing blow to his side. He steadied himself, leaning against the door frame, and saw his son on all fours, kicking at him like a donkey. The master lunged at the young man, pinned back his arms, and carried him off to his room.

  The son screamed for hours. Finally his voice became so hoarse that he started braying. Day after day he lay in wait for his father—around corners, behind trees—ready to drop down on his hands and kick him with both feet.

  The master spent months dodging his son and hoping that he would improve. But the braying and kicking only grew worse.

  He lay awake at night, distraught. When he arose in the morning, his eyes looked dark and haunted.

  He knew the doctors hadn’t helped his wife. But he finally sent his son away for treatment. What else could he do?

  Now only he and his daughter were left. He was sure he would go mad if he lost her. So he took her to Tennessee, traveling in the middle of the night, crossing fields and following back roads, hoping that the shadowy figure would not find them again.

  But it did.

  One evening the master saw someone climbing down from the live oak tree at the bottom of the drive. He didn’t know that Luke had just tucked a scrap of the bloody handkerchief into a nest high in the tree. But he did know that something terrible happened every time that person appeared. So he raced to his daughter’s room to make sure she was safe. But she wasn’t there.

  He ran from room to room, calling her name, but he couldn’t find her. He ordered his servants to saddle his horse so he could ride forth to save his missing daughter.

  He opened the closet door to get his coat, and gasped. There she was, perched on a shelf, giggling. And when she finally stopped, she was cawing like a crow and flapping her arms, trying to fly. Each day thereafter, she spent hours sitting on a branch of the live oak tree.

  The master didn’t need to send her away, because she was harmless. But he sobbed as he watched her flapping by.

  He now knew that he couldn’t escape the shadowy figure. Luke always found him, wherever he moved. Even the wind began to mock him with the voice of the dead girl.

  The master prowled around his property, night and day, watching and waiting. He missed meals, forgot to change his clothes, and let his hair grow wild.

  When the branches of trees rubbed together in the wind, he heard Jo’s death cry. When clouds raced across the moon, he saw shadowy figures everywhere. But no matter how carefully he aimed, his bullets never struck anything. And no one else saw what he saw or heard what he heard. He began to believe that nothing around him was real.

  Then a letter arrived from the institution in Georgia. The master guessed what it said even before he slit open the envelope. His wife had died, and she had been buried in the family cemetery there.

  He started off that very afternoon to visit her grave. He rode for days, and finally, one moonlit night, he reached the lonely road that led to the cemetery. He heard footsteps behind him and saw the glowing eyes of wolves in the surrounding forest, but he was sure his mind was playing tricks again.

  When he found his wife’s grave, he knelt beside it, his head bowed. He thought he felt a sympathetic hand on his shoulder, and he remembered his wife’s gentle touch, before she went mad. By the time he looked up, he saw just what he expected—no one.

  But if he had run his fingers across the back of his jacket, he would have found a scrap of bloody handkerchief clinging there.

  Suddenly he felt a tremendous urge to get down on all fours. And when his eyes began to glow, he threw back his head and bayed at the moon.

  The Bridal Gown

  • A Tale from Germany •

  No one in the family ever went near the attic. They hoped the eerie sounds up there were made by branches scraping against the house. But they took no chances. And that was wise, for up in the attic an evil demoness awaited them.

  She had been flying past the house, years before, when the mother of the family had packed her wedding gown into a wooden trunk. The demoness loved silken gowns, and when she glimpsed the wedding dress through the attic window, she wanted to try it on.

  If the mother had remembered to utter the name of God when she packed her gown, there would have been no trouble, but she forgot. And in a wink, the demoness entered the trunk. The mother could not see her and closed the lid.

  The demoness found herself trapped, and she grew angrier hour by hour. After she had been imprisoned for years, her fury was colossal. She vowed that she would take possession of the very next person who tried on the gown.

  The daughter of the family had been warned to stay out of the attic. She’d also been warned never, ever, to open the wooden trunk. But she didn’t know why. In truth, the gown was being saved for her own wedding. And her mother believed that bad luck would haunt her daughter for the rest of her life if she saw the gown before her wedding day.

  For years, the girl wondered what was in the forbidden trunk. One day when the demoness was unusually quiet, the girl slipped up the stairs and opened the attic door. There before her was the trunk, right beside the window. She knelt on the dusty floor and quietly unhooked the latches. Then she raised the lid just a crack.

  Inside, she saw her mother’s silk wedding gown. She pushed the lid back and ran her fingers over the soft material, marveling at the tiny stitches. It was so beautiful that it almost took her breath away.

  The girl couldn’t understand why her mother kept it hidden, nor could she resist taking it out of the trunk and trying it on. But she had barely pulled it over her head when suddenly she felt as if she were spinning into the depths of a dark whirlwind.

  She was already feeling sick when she looked at the gown and saw it turning to worms—creeping, crawling, slimy worms. Worms were crawling all over her body, across her shoulders, up her neck, and into her hair. She screamed.

  Her mother rushed up to the attic and began crying as hysterically as her daughter. But she managed to pull off the wormy gown, run down the stairs, and cast it into the fire. The mother was still crying when she returned to the attic, but her daughter seemed strangely calm, even cold. And as the mother watched, an evil grin spread across her daughter’s face, for the angry demoness had taken possession of the girl’s body.

  The frightened mother suspected that her daughter was possessed and ran out of the house to find a rabbi who could expel evil spirits.

  When she and the rabbi returned, they found the girl pulling food from the cupboards, tossing it on the floor, and stamping on it. And all the while she bared her teeth in an evil grin.

  The rabbi realized that the demoness was hunting for jam, the favorite food of demons. So he took some down from a high shelf and told the girl she could have it if she returned to the attic with them. The girl followed, licking her lips.

&nb
sp; When she was standing in front of the trunk once more, he told her, “Close the lid most of the way, then push your little finger inside.” The girl refused, for the demoness was controlling her. But when the rabbi threatened to withhold the jam, she obeyed.

  At that moment, the rabbi fervently pronounced the secret name of God, and the demoness was forced out of the girl’s body by way of her little finger. The girl screamed and pulled her hand away. The rabbi slammed the lid of the trunk shut, imprisoning the demoness once more.

  The girl backed away, trembling, still terrified of the demoness. While her mother consoled her, the rabbi rushed to put a huge lock on the trunk. Then he hauled the trunk onto a wagon and drove it into a dark forest where he buried it as deeply as he could, covering it with dirt and heavy stones.

  Even now, some say that eerie sounds rise through the earth in that dark place. Some say those sounds are no longer as muffled as they were when the trunk was first buried.

  But who knows how long it takes for a wooden trunk to rot and a demoness to claw her way free?

  The Greedy Man and the Goat

  • A Tale from Russia •

  The old man’s wife died the very day his goat disappeared. He wept. How could he pay for a decent funeral if he had no goat’s milk to sell?

  He trudged through the snow to his greedy neighbor’s house. Perhaps he could borrow some money. But as he walked along, he saw hoofprints that seemed familiar, leading directly to his neighbor’s yard. And when he knocked on the door, he smelled savory goat stew cooking over the fire.

  The old man was trembling by the time his neighbor appeared. “Where’s my goat?” he cried.

  “What goat?” the neighbor asked. And he quickly rubbed the back of his hand across his chin, wiping off a glob of gravy.

  “My only goat,” the poor man shouted. “The goat who was going to help me pay for my wife’s funeral.”

  “Who knows what happened to your goat?” growled his neighbor. “It’s not in the field with mine. And don’t bother me for money. I have none to spare.”

  He slammed the door so quickly that he didn’t hear the old man’s anguished curse: “May the fate of my goat befall you.”

  The poor man returned home, moaning. “At least I can dig a proper grave for my wife.” He picked up his tools and went to the graveyard. The ground was frozen, but he chopped it with his ax and scooped it up with his shovel, removing icy chunks of dirt. His fingers and toes ached from the cold, but he dug deeper and deeper into the earth.

  Just as the sun was about to set, he noticed something round at the bottom of the hole. He pulled a pot out of the dirt and pried off the lid. And what did he find inside? Gold coins.

  The old man was overjoyed. Now he could give his wife the finest funeral his village had ever seen, with a gleaming coffin and an elaborate church service.

  After the funeral was over, he invited everyone to his hut for dinner, even his greedy neighbor, for the old man had begun to wonder if he had judged him too harshly.

  When the neighbor saw all the fine food and drink, the crusty bread and tempting sweets, he piled his plate high. But even as he gorged himself, he was not happy. He could not imagine where the poor man had found the money to pay for such a feast.

  The neighbor continued eating until everyone else had left. Then he turned on the old man and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Where did you steal the money?” he bellowed.

  “Nowhere!” cried the old man. “That would be a sin.” He raced to his cupboard. “I found this pot of gold when I dug my wife’s grave.”

  The greedy man’s face flushed with anger. He could hardly stand the poor man’s good fortune. He wanted that pot of gold for himself. He thought about it every day and dreamed about it every night. Finally he thought of a way to get it.

  “Wife,” he said, “I’m going to kill our biggest goat and skin it, horns, beard, and all. Then I want you to sew the goat skin around me.”

  The greedy man’s wife was sure he had gone mad, so she dared not argue with him. When he brought the goatskin into the house, she ran to find her needle and thread. Stitch by stitch she sewed the skin around her husband. And when she finished, it covered every inch of his body.

  The greedy man waited until everyone in the village was asleep. Then he trotted directly to the old man’s hut. He put his cloven hooves up on the windowsill, and he butted the glass with his horns. “Give me the gold,” he demanded, speaking through the lips of the goat.

  The old man shuddered. He thought a demon was peering through his window, an angry demon who had discovered its gold was missing from the graveyard. The old man leaped out of bed. “Take it,” he cried, throwing it out the door.

  The goat picked up the pot of gold with his teeth and hurried home. He butted the door open and galloped inside to find his wife.

  “Help me out of this goatskin,” he shouted. “It’s getting tighter. It’s pinching me.”

  His wife grabbed a knife and started cutting the stitches, but no matter how carefully she cut, blood flowed.

  “Owwwww!” he screamed. “Stop hurting me.”

  She grabbed her sewing scissors and cut the stitches even more carefully than before. But still the blood spurted forth, spattering her dress and dripping on the floor.

  “Tug it off!” he wept. “I can’t stand being cooped up in this smelly hide.” But even when she pulled and twisted and tore at the goatskin, it stuck to his body like glue.

  In desperation, the greedy man galloped to the poor man’s hut and flung the pot of gold on his doorstep, but still the goatskin stuck tight. Worse yet, his cries sounded more and more like those of a goat.

  He raced home bleating, with a pack of dogs nipping at his heels. “Even dogs think I’m an animal,” he moaned.

  He tried to tell his wife, but she could no longer understand him. He shook with terror from head to tail.

  The goatskin had grown onto his body. He would have horns and hooves and scraggly goat hair for the rest of his life.

  “Serves you right, you greedy old man,” said his wife. She put a rope around his neck and led him to the goat pen behind the barn.

  When she went out to feed the goats the next morning, she could not tell one goat from another.

  “What will I do?” she wondered, “when the butcher comes?”

  The Evil Eye

  • A Tale from the United States •

  Long ago there were two sailors who couldn’t stand each other. And there they were, mates on the very same sailing ship. One was a feisty old man named Bell, better known as Ding Dong. And the other was a pesky fellow called Liverpool Jorge.

  Jorge was not a superstitious man, but Ding Dong was. And that’s why Ding Dong suspected the worst when he noticed that one of Jorge’s eyes was blue and the other was brown. Jorge didn’t tell him that one was made of glass.

  Whenever Ding Dong was around, Jorge flaunted his tattoos, because he knew how much they upset the superstitious old sailor.

  Ding Dong didn’t mind the pictures of sea monsters encircling Jorge’s legs, or the great dragon on his chest, or the whales on his arms. But he feared the pictures of a sinking ship on Jorge’s back, the cats on his shoulders, and the crowing hens on his wrists. He thought they all foretold disaster, especially the cats, because, he said, “they carry gales in their tails.”

  So what did Ding Dong do? He crossed his fingers and spat into his hat to protect himself. He could hardly stand to look at those tattoos. And what did Jorge do? He just grinned and added more. Whenever the ship docked, Jorge rushed ashore to look for tattoo artists. They decorated him with snakes and lightning bolts and more hens and more cats.

  Jorge showed them all to Ding Dong. And Ding Dong got so upset he started whittling in his spare time, just to have little pieces of wood he could snap in two, in hope of a lucky break.

  But Ding Dong doubted that anything could protect him from Jorge’s cat and hen tattoos. “They’ll sink us yet,” he muttered. “Ma
rk my words.” And he began watching for a chance to shove Jorge overboard.

  Jorge had almost run out of space for new tattoos. He had just one little circle of unmarked skin left, about the size of a silver dollar. And that circle was in the crook of his arm.

  Jorge wanted his last tattoo to make Ding Dong’s hair stand on end. So he searched in port after port until he found an artist who could tattoo a fearsome evil eye. And when Jorge lowered or raised his forearm, that eye seemed to open and close.

  But Jorge wasn’t happy. He wept because he could never get another tattoo. But the tattoo artist said, “Don’t worry, there are lots more ways to get decorated.” And he sent Jorge downstairs to the glassblower’s shop to buy himself a fancy glass eye.

  Jorge had never seen the kinds of eyes this glassblower made. He was a real artist. The eyes came in all colors—red, yellow, purple, green, and blue. And not one had a regular iris in its center. One had a silver star, another had a sickle moon, and yet another had a coiled snake, white with red fangs. That’s the one Jorge liked best—the coiled snake in the middle of an eye of navy blue. He handed his money to the glassblower, put in his fancy new eye, and hurried back to the ship.

  Ding Dong was standing on the deck, coiling a rope, so Jorge crept up from behind and put his arm in front of Ding Dong’s face. Then Jorge flexed his elbow, making the tattooed eye open and close.

  Ding Dong spun around and found himself staring right into Jorge’s new glass eye. For a moment Ding Dong froze, his eyes wide and his mouth agape. Then he raced below to grab a lucky horseshoe from his sea chest to nail to the ship’s mast.

  Ding Dong was sure that Jorge was trying to bewitch him. So late that night when Jorge was sleeping, Ding Dong tried to scoop that glass eye right out of Jorge’s head. And when Jorge woke up bellowing, Ding Dong threatened to hit him with a belaying pin. “There isn’t room on this ship for the two of us,” he shouted.