Dead Scared

NO, NOT A bone man, it couldn’t be a bone man. Bone men were a silly, rural custom, in a place she’d left behind, hundreds of miles from here. This was nothing more than a child’s toy. A six-inch-high skeleton with a wind-up mechanism like clockwork. Just a simple, common toy, the sort that was popular around Halloween. Wind the key and let the toy go. It would walk across a hard surface until the mechanism ran out or it hit an obstacle.

Hardly knowing whether she was still frightened or not, Evi picked it up. A small piece of Blu-tack was stuck to one half of the key. It looked as though the toy had been wound up tight, then stuck to the inside of the wardrobe with the Blu-tack. When the mechanical force of the key trying to turn had become too great, the toy had broken free of its sticky blue handcuffs.

There had been a child here today, it was the only explanation. The cleaner, who had come on the wrong day, had brought a child. Maybe a child too sick for school and with no one else to take care of him. He’d played in the house, left a toy upstairs, put the fir cones along the path, left a heap of them on the kitchen table.

Evi looked through the rest of the upstairs rooms, found nothing, and let the lift take her back down. She left the skeleton toy on the hall table and made her way into the kitchen, knowing that even she didn’t believe her sick-child theory and wondering what on earth she was going to do about it.

If she’d switched on the light straight away, she almost certainly wouldn’t have seen the black-clad figure perched on one of the lower branches of the cedar tree, staring in through the kitchen’s uncurtained windows. Even with the kitchen in darkness, she might not have noticed the crouching form, so still it was almost melting into the shadows. She might never have known it was there, had it not been for the mask.

The mask was black too but with fluorescent paint picking out the contours of the human skull. There was just enough light for Evi to be absolutely sure that a bone man was less than two yards from her kitchen window, watching her.