Page 22 of Stay Buried

She knew she shouldn’t, but she had to.

She was determined to see that old knackerman once and for all. To see if he really existed or if it was just her father taking the treats away, or one of the men in town. Sad Willy, maybe, who got so drunk on bourbon at Loon’s Call each night that it was a game the children played to see who could find him first each morning, sleeping under a tree, on a bench, or down by the old millpond.

Mini had been planning to see the knackerman forever, but always lost her nerve. But tonight was the night, she’d promised herself. No more chickening out.

But still, the closer it got to dark, the more nervous she became.

“Is he good or is he evil?” she asked, her throat feeling tight as she got the words out.

Mama frowned, thought a minute. “He’s the knackerman, that’s all.” She brought the corn cakes over and arranged them carefully on the plate with the candy and coins. “Now, be a good girl and go out back and pick the last of the black-eyed Susans. We can decorate the plate with them. He likes pretty things.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mini said, dancing out the door.

HOURS LATER, THEHunter’s Moon was watching over Boone’s Ferry, its faint orange glow looking for creatures who should be sleeping in their burrows. Mini was shivering in the bushes, wishing she’d worn a coat. She’d thrown Finn’s heavy red sweater over her T-shirt and old jeans, but she was still cold. She was curled up inside the tall clump of lilac bushes that grew along the edge of the yard. The flowers were long gone, and most of the leaves were dead too, only the tangle of scratchy branches remaining. She had the perfect view of her little blue house with the white front door and matching shutters, and the freshly swept and washed front steps where a single candle burned. The candle stood beside the plate piled high with gifts for the knackerman. It was the same, she knew, at the front of every house in town.

The candle was half burned down. Mini didn’t know what time it was. She didn’t own a watch. And the bell at the factory that they all used to mark time during the daylight hours (it rang at eight a.m., noon, and five p.m., when the men could shut down the machines, sweep the floors, and come home) did not ring at night or on weekends. The night was for the owls, the coyotes, and, on four full moons a year, the knackerman.

She was starting to wonder if he would come at all. She held still as a rock and waited, keeping her mind busy so as not to fall asleep, reciting the times tables she’d been learning in school:two times eightis sixteen, three times eight is twenty-four.Mini loved math, found that numbers calmed her. Numbers made sense. They followed a pattern, unlike people.

She heard him before she saw him. Felt the thunder of hoofbeats on the ground, making her own heart race like it was trying to keep time with the horse. He moved down the street, turned into the driveway—a man in a long patchwork coat, riding a pale white horse with saddlebags. Mini held her breath as he dismounted, his back to her, his head and face obscured by the hood of his coat. She could hear the horse breathing.

The knackerman walked up to the front steps, leaned down, picked up the plate. He looked impossibly tall. His shoulders broad. And he wore heavy black boots that clopped much like the horse’s hooves.

Who are you really?she wondered.

Turn around so I can see your face, she willed.

And, as if he heard her, as if her thoughts had sound or wings that carried them over to him, he turned.

Her breath caught in her throat. She might have made a sound then, a small, strangled sound. The sound of a frightened rabbit, maybe. That small. That quiet.

But he heard.

He heard and looked right at her.

His face was glowing white bone, the stripped-down skull of a horse with two black hollows for eyes, large yellow-white teeth grinning hideously.

And she realized then that it hadn’t been the horse she’d heard breathing earlier. It washim. His breathing was loud and hard, like a roaring fire, like a train.

He looked right at her and she knew she’d been seen. Mini the odd, Mini the tiny, Mini the invisible girl who shaped her body into the smallest spaces, a girl who was hardly there at all.

He let out a whinnying roar, threw the plate piled with gifts to theground. The plate smashed, the corn cakes and peppermint candies scattered, the bottle of rum exploded on the ground, soaking Finn’s drawing.

Then he stepped toward her, the ground shaking with his footsteps. Mini rose, thinking she would turn and run. She was fast. Could outrun anyone.

He walked to his horse, but did not mount. He opened a saddlebag, pulled something out, and carried it back to her house. He walked up the three front steps, reached out a gloved hand, and used a brush to paint a red mark on her front door.

She knew the mark.

She knew what it meant.

“No!” she cried, straining to keep from waking anyone. “Please!”

But it was too late.

He mounted the horse and was gone, not back out to the street to visit the rest of the houses in the village, but into the woods, away from town, the white glow of the horse lost in the shadows of the forest in seconds.

She looked at the mark on the door in horror, the broken plate and all their offerings strewn across the front steps, and Mini realized that it was all true. She never should have been here.