A look at young Tom as this amazing story unfolds would reveal a singularly insignificant youth, dreamy of eye and slight of form. Tom burned with that white flame of ambition thwarted by a financial standing about equal to that of a beachcomber, and a scanty country education. But youth has strange ways of overcoming such obstacles, and Tom’s energies, rather than diminishing, seemed to gather momentum and strength from the meagre stuff upon which they were fed. Why or how, cut off as he was from higher learning, Tom chose Anatomy as his field to conquer, no one knows, but chose it he did. He spent every waking hour and every dream yearning for the day when he would be able to buy for himself the text books that would pave his rocky road to Success. A penny here, and, a week later, a penny there—finally Tom was able to purchase a small text on Anatomy. In less than three weeks, he had memorized, with the correct Latin names thrown in for good measure, every word, every definition, every diagram in the text book. This subject was his life, and he wrapped himself so completely in his fierce desires that to shake hands with a man became not merely a gesture of friendship, but a good chance to feel the finger bones manipulate. But, happily, Tom was too intelligent not to know that this knowledge, although he could describe exactly the position, use, and articulation of every bone in the human body, did not make him an anatomist. For his descriptions were merely a repetition of the words in the small book which had become his bible. His burning desires now changed course to those of seeing and examining an actual skeleton, and these thoughts buzzed around in his mind like a swarm of angry bees.
A pensive, solitary figure, Tom sat one night by the huge fireplace in the local Inn, lost in thought and dream. The flames in the fire before him took the shape of grinning, cavorting skeletons. He was so absorbed in his dream-world that the noisy animation and conversation about him pricked his consciousness no harder than a fly on an elephant’s hide. The men were talking, as they had for weeks, about old Cyrus Goodestone, a man always thought of as rich, but who had died without a trace of money to be found anywhere, much to the distress of his creditors.
But when, during one of those violent and sudden early Spring rain storms, the door of the Inn flew open, and a hooded and cloaked stranger strode into the room, even Tom took notice. For the stranger stood before the fire, his back to the company, and neither spoke nor turned when greeted. The storm stopped as suddenly as it had started, and when the moonlight shone once more through the window, the stranger heeled about, gathered his voluminous cloak more closely about him, and left. An eeler, sitting near Tom, spoke up:
“That be a queer chap. I’m a-goin’ to see what he’s about,” and with these words, he too left the Inn.
Less than five minutes later, he returned, white as a flounder’s belly. He made a beeline for the table, and gulped down a glass of rum. Then, gasping, partly from fright and partly from the raw drink of rum, he spoke.
“Udds hiddikins! Old chap just gone out—got no proper face like—only a Death’s head—looked me square in the face in the moonlight, he did, and I c’n tell ye, I waited to see no more!”
At this startling tale, Tom sprang from his lethargy like a man possessed, and clutching the terrified eeler by the coat lapels, he yelled, “You mean—he was a skeleton?” When the answer was a startled “yes,” Tom shouted, “Which way did he go?”
“Why, down towards the graveyard, sure,” said the eeler. But Tom was out the door before the words had barely tickled the lips of the eeler.
No thought that the eeler might have been “seein’ things” entered Tom’s mind and he tore down the road toward the graveyard on Truro’s Hill of Storms. The wild wind, the scudding clouds that made the night a night of shadows, the bony-fingered branches that picked at his face as he ran through the shortcut in the woods—of these things Tom was unaware. For on the Hill of Storms, midst gravestones battered by sea winds and spray, was his heart’s desire!
Tom stood at the top of the hill, bracing himself against the sea wind. His heart thudded against his ribs like the heavy breakers that boomed against the rocks below. His wild eyes swept the graveyard, and then, in the split second when the clouds parted, and the moon shone through, Tom saw, still enveloped in the cloak, the figure from the Inn, gazing sorrowfully down at the new grave marker of Cyrus Goodestone. Then, in a sudden sweep of wind, the cloak billowed up, fell to the ground—and left, gleaming phosphorously in the misty moonlight, the unbelievable figure of a Skeleton!