Darkness Creeping (22 page)

It was old—it must have been—because it was black and covered with ash. It was missing its jawbone.

“No way!” I said, not sure whether to be disgusted or excited. “It must be for the exhibit on Early Man.”

Mom looked into its empty eyes bravely. “Splendid. Just what we need for Halloween. I’ll go get a candle.”

That night, the skull sat on our porch with a candle inside its empty head, like a human jack-o’-lantern.

Like the other things in our basement, this was something we were going to keep—no matter how much the museum wanted it back. But the museum never came asking for it, and instead of ending up in the basement, it ended up in my room.

I can’t say why I wanted the skull in my room. I was a little bit scared of it, but not as scared as I thought I would be. I liked the way it sat on my shelf and watched me. Also, since I didn’t have many friends, it made me feel less alone.

My dad would look at the skull and shake his head. “Alex,” he would ask, “how did you get to be so strange?” That’s what he said when I first got Octavia, my pet tarantula, and when I decided that I would wear only black to school.

“If you’re going to keep that thing, Alex,” he said, “you ought to clean it.”

So I did. I carefully wiped out the ash and polished the cold, hard bone until it was a smooth granite gray. Then I put it back on my shelf next to Clovis, my Venus flytrap.

Late at night, when I couldn’t fall asleep, I would look at the skull. It seemed to be holding some kind of vigil in the dim moonlight, watching me as I watched it.
Who were you?
I would ask.
Were you a caveman? Were you killed by a mastodon during the hunt? Or are you the missing link?
The skull, to whom

I wanted to give a name but somehow never could, never answered—it just sat there, watching silently.

Several weeks later it disappeared.

I spent an hour searching for it all around the house. Mom wasn’t very helpful. “You’re so disorganized,” she said. “I always told you you’d lose your head if it weren’t attached to your neck.”

The skull wasn’t in the basement, or in any of the bedrooms or closets. I knew there had to be a sensible explanation. Turns out the explanation was so sensible it was disappointing.

You see, my dad is a dentist, and his office is right across the street in a little minimall. When I went out to see if he knew what had happened, I saw my skull sitting there propped up on the dental chair, like a patient who had been X-rayed one too many times.

“Sorry. I should have told you,” said Dad. “I borrowed him to recalibrate my X-ray machine. It’s been giving me trouble.” He showed me a dozen X-rays of the skull, all blurry and out of focus. He took one more shot with his big camera and handed me back my skull.

“This should do it,” he said. “Thanks.”

When he developed the X-ray a few minutes later, the teeth were in absolute clear focus, just like any other dental X-ray . . . so much like any other X-ray that Dad seemed a little bit disturbed. He went over to the skull and picked it up from the pillow it was resting on.

“You say he was prehistoric?” asked Dad.

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, he must be. Why else would he be going to the museum?”

Then Dad flipped the skull over and looked at the upper teeth, all of which were still there. He poked at them with a dental instrument. “Since when did prehistoric man have dental fillings?” he said, raising his eyebrows at me.

That afternoon I went down into the basement and found the box the skull had come in. Inside, I found the original wrapping. The faint brown lettering was not addressed to the museum, as we had thought. It was addressed to me—Alexander Mortimer.

There was a return address, but no name. The return address simply read
475 St. Cloud Lane, Billingsville
.

It was a Saturday, so I decided to ride my bike over to Billingsville, only about ten miles away. I just had to see who had sent me this skull, and why.

Billingsville is a town with lots of old places and lots of new places. I got a map from the gas station, but try as I might, I couldn’t find St. Cloud Lane.

“Ain’t no St. Cloud Lane in Billingsville,” an old-timer told me. “Not that I can remember, and I can remember quite a lot.”

Eventually I gave up and decided to head home before it got dark. I rode through the winding trees of the new developments, wondering where on earth they were going to get all the people to fill these new homes.

That’s when I saw it.

On a pole on a corner where two streets crossed were two signs—St. Andrew and St. Cloud Lane.

I sucked wind for a second, feeling kind of light-headed. Then I rode my bike down the lane. The entire street was filled with huge cement foundations, ready for construction crews.
The homes on St. Cloud Lane had not yet been built!

It was dark by the time I got home, and the cold day had slipped into a frigid night.

“You missed dinner,” said Mom. “Where were you?”

But I didn’t answer her. I went right down into the basement and straight to the package the skull had come in. I looked for the postmark on the package. October 28. But the year was smudged out, and there was no way of telling whether the package was mailed this year, last year . . . or some year that had not yet come.

That night, back in my room, I stared and stared at my “friend” sitting on the shelf. I went up to him and looked deep into those hollow eyes, eyes that seemed so strange, and yet so familiar.

At three in the morning I slipped out of the house and crossed the street. Snow was falling and sticking to the dry ground. There would be several inches by morning. My feet left dark prints in the thin layer of white as I went to Dad’s office. There, I unlocked the door with his keys and disabled the alarm.

The X-ray machine looked like a one-eyed beast in the corner of the examining room. I tried not to look at it. I went to my dad’s office, and I looked around with my flashlight until I found the skull’s X-rays still sitting on his desk. I took the most focused one and put it in my jacket pocket. Then I went to the files, found the folder I was looking for, and pulled it out. It was filled with dental records and X-rays.

I pulled out the skull’s X-rays from my pocket and compared them to the X-rays in the folder.

They say you can identify human remains by dental records. It must be true, because the match was absolutely perfect.

I took a second look at the name on the file, and finally understood why it had been so hard for me to find a name for the skull. It was because the skull already had a name—it was the name that appeared on the file.

Alexander J. Mortimer.

As I reached up and felt my own cheekbones, and the shape of my eye sockets, and the ridges on my own front teeth, I finally realized why that head bone sitting on my shelf had, from the beginning, felt so very, very familiar.

In the morning Dad said we ought to take the skull to the police.

“They have ways of identifying these things,” he said. “Who knows who it might be?”

But I told him that I had already gotten rid of it. “I gave it a proper burial out in the woods,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

He looked at me and shook his head. “How
did
you get to be such a strange kid?” he asked. Since my father was never the type of person to mess with matters involving human skulls, he believed me, and it was never brought up again.

Only I didn’t bury it.

I don’t know who sent me the skull. I don’t know how, but it was sent, and I am charged with its keeping. Dad thinks I’m spending too much time alone lately, and that maybe if we moved I’d make some friends. He’s heard that there are some nice homes in Billingsville—and he intends to buy one. I already know what our address will be.

And so at night, when everyone else is asleep, I take the skull out of its secret hiding place beneath the floorboards of my room and I put it back on my shelf. Then I lie awake, gazing at my silent soul mate resting on that shelf and coldly wait for the day when I find myself on the other side of those dark, dark eyes, looking out.

The narrow, doorless hall seems to stretch on forever.

The bag slung across her shoulder seems full of lead.

And the image of her parents waving good-bye still sticks in her mind.