Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls Read Free

claustrophobia!”
    Holly laughs. “Well, then, I guess burial of any kind is out. No mausoleum for you, either.” She points to the Sunset Crypt sort of glowing in the moonlight at the top of the rise ahead of us. “That thing is big!”
    Marissa shivers. “Can we
please
change the subject? I know I’m dressed as a walking dead thing, but this is really,
really
creeping me out.” She points toward the right. “And if this is supposedly a shortcut, shouldn’t we be going that way?”
    Casey changes direction a little. “How about a
funny
dead-guy story?”
    “Sure,” Marissa grumbles. “Anything.”
    “Let me start by saying it’s a
true
funny dead-guy story. And it takes place in the Wild West. In Oklahoma.”
    “Oklahoma wasn’t the Wild West, was it?” Holly asks. “It’s in the middle of the country.”
    Casey glances back. “Yeah, but at one point it was as far west as they’d gotten, and from what I’ve read it was pretty wild.” We follow him single file between two tall, skinny grave monuments as he goes on with the story. “So there was this guy named Elmer McCurdy who turned to a life of crime at the ripe old age of fifteen when he found out that his mother was really his aunt, and his aunt was really his mother.”
    “Oh, nice,” I grumble, because let’s just say I have deep-seated parental issues involving secrecy and unknown identities.
    Casey goes on with the story. “But as fate would have it, Elmer McCurdy was not cut out to be an outlaw. He tried to be feared and he tried to be fearless, but he was neither. He’d jump a train to rob it, but it would be the wrong train. He’d blow up a safe with nitroglycerin, but he’d use too much and melt everything inside it. He was embarrassingly lame at being a criminal.”
    “The Unlucky Outlaw!” Billy cries, and I add, “The Bumbling Bandit!”
    Casey laughs. “Exactly. So of course when there was finally a showdown, he was the one who got killed.”
    We’re following Casey through an area where the trees are extra big, and it’s really dark and very creepy, but I’m actually not scared. For one thing, I’m with four other people, but what’s really helping all of us forget that we’re walking through a spooky old graveyard is the story.
    “That’s it?” Holly asks. “Boom, he’s dead, end of story?”
    “Actually, no,” Casey says. “This is where it starts getting interesting. It turned out that nobody wanted to pay for Elmer McCurdy’s burial.”
    “Or burning?” Billy asks.
    Casey thinks a minute. “I’m not sure they even had cremations in the Wild West. I think everyone got buried.”
    Marissa edges ahead so she can hear better. “Why not just dig a grave and be done with it?”
    “Because it’s a lot of work to dig out six feet of dirt.”
    I kind of half-trip on a tree root, then catch myself. “So what’d they do?”
    “They pumped him full of arsenic—”
    “Arsenic!?” the rest of us cry.
    Casey laughs. “Well, yeah, arsenic will kill you, but he was already dead, right? Arsenic is what they used to embalm him. And the undertaker must’ve thought it would take a while for a relative to claim him because he used a
lot
of arsenic. Like, hundreds of times more than usual. Then he left him on a marble slab and waited for someone to come get him.”
    “And did they?” Holly asks.
    “Nope. And after a while the undertaker got sick of him hogging up the marble slab, so he stood him in a corner.”
    Billy dodges around a big white cross. “He could stand by himself because he was all stiff from rigor mortis?”
    “Exactly. And pretty soon word got around that for a nickel you could see Outlaw McCurdy in his shoot-out clothes. He stood in that corner for five years.”
    All of us go, “Five years!” and Billy adds, “Beats my time-out record.” Then he laughs, “But barely!”
    We’re walking behind the cemetery’s Garden of Repose now, which is just a little plaza with benches and a small