Skeleton Man

Although all the other children are happy about the upcoming weekend, Molly is not. After everyone leaves, Molly notices that the workmen who are remodeling the library have left their toolboxes open. She manages to snag a few tools that might come in handy over the weekend. At the house, her great-uncle has put out pizza and a soft drink for her dinner, but she once again refuses to eat. Molly goes to her room and tries to read a book. Eventually, she hears her great-uncle come up the stairs and lock the door. Molly waits at the window until she sees her great-uncle go out to his toolshed, which he does every night.

Quickly, Molly goes to her backpack and pulls out the power drill that she borrowed from the school. She uses it to remove the hinges on the door, then removes the door from its frame. She heads downstairs with her backpack and goes to her great-uncle’s study, where she finds a photo of her mother with her arms tied up and her mouth covered by duct tape.

Molly grabs the stack of photos and stuffs them into her backpack. Next, she grabs the computer disks lying on the desktop. (Her great-uncle has been hacking into bank accounts.) Molly shoulders her pack and goes out toward the toolshed. When she tosses a rock through the upstairs window of the house, her great-uncle comes out of the toolshed, sees the broken window, and hurries back to the house.

Meanwhile, Molly enters the toolshed and discovers a secret door, which she forces open with a crowbar from her pack. In the next room, she finds a trap door that opens to a grate covering the cave below. Her parents are in the cave. Molly manages to cut through the grate’s lock with the bolt cutters that she took from the school. Her father pleads with her to run away, but first she pushes all the tools down into the cave. She tells her father that she is going to the waterfall they both know.

Her great-uncle is waiting for her outside the shed and nearly grabs her. As she runs away with her great-uncle chasing her, a rabbit darts in front of the old man and causes him to stumble. However, her great-uncle manages to get in front of her, blocking her path.

Molly throws her backpack at her great-uncle and manages to escape by running up the slope through the bushes and brambles. A rabbit suddenly appears, and Molly follows it to a steep trail that leads to a gorge. She crawls under a wire fence then reaches a broken-down suspension bridge over the gorge. Although the bridge scares her, she scrambles across it as her great-uncle looms closer. When her great-uncle is about halfway across the bridge, Molly dislodges the plywood connecting the bridge to its far edge. The Skeleton Man desperately reaches for the edge of the gorge, grabbing Molly’s ankle. She kicks at his hand as she holds onto a metal bar at the side of the gorge. Finally, he lets go and falls into the waterfall. Molly, who has also been pulled over the edge, finds a toe hold and manages to climb up over the lip of the crevasse. At that moment, her father appears on the trail. He declares that Molly has saved them all and calls her a “Warrior Girl.”

No one ever finds the great-uncle’s body, nor are they able to determine his real identity, even though Molly provides the police with hard evidence of his crimes. The school psychologist tries to explain his behavior as a chemical imbalance. Molly’s father, on the other hand, argues that only the old stories about the Skeleton Man give the best explanation of what happened. He says that the false great-uncle was not human, and that the only way to defeat an evil nonhuman creature is to be brave.