That high wild cackling. “Oh you children are a delight. I haven’t had so much fun in ages. Oh I haven’t spoken with the living in so long.”

I snatched the torch back up again, burning my palm a little.

“You stay back,” I said. “I’m warning you. I’ve seen what her poison can do to a body, even a fella like you. Trust me, it ain’t pretty.”

“You misunderstand, child,” he said. “The living have no fear of me, not at all. It’s the dead I hunger for. And the dead fear no one.”

He lingered just in the place where the torchlight faded, so I could see him a little. A man, or something like one, his face gray and wrinkled, his body skinny, so thin you could count his ribs, you could see every knot in his bones. His skin seemed sick, waterlogged, like if you ran your hand over his arm it would peal off in patches. He hunched down on all fours, his body shimmery and wet, dressed all in rags.

“But you’re the Creepy,” said Tally. “I’ve heard stories about you.”

“If that is the name by which they call me,” he said, “then I suppose the name to be true. Though I had another name once, I did. I still do, sometimes, when I’m asleep. That’s when I have a name, when I’m dreaming, when best I can remember, when I can still believe it to be so.”

He gestured a bone-skinny arm around the cave walls.

“This is my home, where I hide,” he said. “It hurts me when folks look upon me, when their eyes fall upon me. It hurts me for them to see. And the light burns me. I come out only when I am called.”

“And who calls you?” I said.

“The bodies call me,” he said, his nostrils flaring. “The blood calls me. I can smell the blood, I can feel it when it touches the water, I can feel my heart beat with the dead pulse of it.”

He scuttled around on all fours, some long gangly insect creature.

“I am shunned by the living, yes, I am the most lonely of all people, though the living have no fear of me. But the dead welcome me. They call themselves to me. And I minister to them.”

“How can you minister to a dead body?” said Tally.

“As vultures minister to the dead, and flies and worms, as all of nature does. I clean them down to bones. I prepare them for the earth. My hands are the last to touch the body, my eyes are the last to see it. That is my blessing and my curse. No one cares about the bodies save I, and I care the most.”

“The bones everywhere,” I said. “The wind chimes, the skulls. Did you make all those?”

“Aye,” he said. “They’re mine, all of them.”

“But why?” I said.

“Have you seen a burial in the swamp?” he said. “They throw the body down, and it sinks. The mud swallows it whole, that’s what people think. But the bodies bubble up, they do, they float to the surface. Here and there, where no one would think to look. But I find them, I smell them, I can sense the water ripple beneath them. Can’t you feel how lonesome a body is underwater? Can’t you feel how forlorn its bones become? Why not make a beautiful something out of them? Why not give them a voice, make them sing like these wind chimes sing? Why not make them look on and smile, like my skulls do? They’re my art, these dead bodies.”