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| - Be good, parents used to say, or the bogeyman will come and take you away. The story has a hundred different incarnations. Maybe it was an animal in the first telling, a wolf or great cat. Children everywhere grew up hearing about wicked spirits or little men who would kidnap them given half a chance. In some places, it was the gypsies who filled the role of the potential abductor. The stories about a bogeyman usually involve the thought of transgression. “Don’t go across the railroad tracks at midnight, or it’ll get you”. Of course, human abductors and predators aren’t held at bay by a person’s obedience to the rules. The True Fae are, somewhat, but the rules vary so much. But sometimes there’s a story of a supernatural bogeyman who’ll get you through no fault of your own, because someone else set him on you. Like the story of Skin and Bones. The story doesn’t go into detail about who or what Skin and Bones is. His name is his description. He’s the Tall Stranger, the Man with the Sack. There’s no explanation of where he came from, or why he does what he does — these morsels of information are often left blank just to entice the listeners’ imagination. Nobody knows what happens to the people he takes away. They’re just never heard from again, and that’s where the story ends. But those who do their research find out the story is old. A grandmother remembers her grandmother telling her the story when she was a child. There are similar tales to be found in the various ethnic neighborhoods of the city. The backdrop of an archaic photo shows the words SKIN AND BONES written backwards across a piece of glass in the distance. His origins are unclear. He’s decidedly one of the Fae, equal parts medieval bogeyman and modern urban legend. Nobody seems to know more than that, though. He might be one of the lords of distant Arcadia, but if so, he’s been doing humble work for decades rather than manifesting in all his glory. He might have origins in the Hedge, somewhere between here and there. He’s definitely not a changeling, even if he might have started out that way. Skin and Bones is a creature defined by his purpose. He comes when he’s called, and he abides by the unwritten contract of “give me a name and I’ll make that person disappear”. He doesn’t always come right away. Sometimes he waits until you’re drifting off to sleep before he steps out of your mirror and stands over your bed. Sometimes you see your reflection swim away, replaced by his face. Sooner or later, though, if you’ve made the kind of call he can’t ignore, he comes through. And you’d better have a name for him. It’s a rare thing to meet Skin and Bones outside of a summoning or abduction. He doesn’t come to the mortal world for any other reason. Some changelings have said they’ve seen him out in the otherworld of the Hedge, always at a distance, carrying his bulging gunnysack on his back. The stories get a little wilder from there. He’s allegedly been sighted in a Hedgeside cemetery, presumably to bury his targets. Others see him on a wide Faerie road, no doubt bearing a burden home to Arcadia. But stories like that don’t seem to come up much until after someone’s had an upclose-and-personal run-in with the Tall Stranger, and then they crop up like mushrooms. Everyone’s got an opinion. When Skin and Bones comes to take a target away, he is the very picture of patience. He won’t chase someone over open ground: he’ll pace after her slowly, waiting for an opportunity to close the distance by using his ability to travel between mirrors. If he’s after someone who has been named to him, all he has to do is touch her to put her in his gunnysack, so he doesn’t bother much with any other kind of grappling or striking. He will wrestle an opponent to defend himself if need be, and he is surprisingly strong for his nearemaciated frame — but mostly he doesn’t see the point of fighting against people who aren’t his actual target. He’ll simply retreat through the nearest mirror, attempt to lose pursuers in the Hedge, and try again later. It’s nothing personal. It’s never personal.
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