A skeleton cannot sneak. Every joint in it clicks, the knees loudest, a dry double tick like someone cracking walnuts under a blanket, and on a frosty night the sound carries a hundred paces. The creature appears not to know. It walks upright and a little ahead of its own balance, like a man late for a cart, and it has never once arrived anywhere quietly.
The lane below Cherzhava in late October shows how an encounter goes. The first hint is the dogs. They stop barking, go under the porches and stay there. A few minutes later the ticking starts up near the old limekiln, steady as a clock with a loose pendulum. Lamps go out along the lane, because a lit window draws the thing to the glass, where it stands with its jaw hanging and does nothing for an hour. Gates are latched but never locked. A locked gate holds it in the road until sunrise, rattling the bars and ruining everyone's sleep. A latched one it lifts, crosses the yard in a straight line, and leaves by the far fence. On the way through, it takes a boot. One from each doorstep, always the left, never a pair, never the right. Lubomir Hask, who keeps the pump yard, sets out a single worn-out left boot every night in October and says the thing has never once complained about the fit.
At first light it stops wherever it happens to be and comes apart, the skull rolling a little way downhill, the rest settling into a heap of pale sticks like kindling someone has bleached. This is when the knuckle-pickers work. The trade exists nowhere else. Two of them walk the lane at sunrise with a sack and a flour sieve, shaking small bones out of the frost and the ruts. Finger bones fetch the most. A dicemaker in Tvarnice buys them by the cupful and swears they roll honest. A picker who misses the small ones leaves a skeleton that rises the next dusk without fingers, and it clicks wrong, a stuttering sound the dogs seem to dislike more than the proper one.
The boots are never found. Fences, ditches, the limekiln and the churchyard wall have all been searched, and in all the autumns anyone remembers not one left boot has turned up. Nobody in Cherzhava can say what a creature with feet of its own wants with that many left boots, or where it keeps them.
- Classification
- Animate undead, articulated bone
- Habitat
- Village lanes, limekilns, churchyard walls
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 5 ft 8 in standing, about 40 lb
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Rural borderland villages
- Binomial
- Os crepitans
- Diet
- None; collects left boots
- Temperament
- Oblivious, dogged, unhurried