Skin Medicine (23 page)

Problem was, Cobb didn’t really know where it was.

See, a voice in his head told him that up in the high Sierras he would find his destiny. The voice was not vague as usual, but quite absolute and determined that Cobb should listen to it.

So he did.

And this is how the elements of his life—a vile stew at best—finally came full circle.

6

Six weeks then.

Six weeks Cobb had been trapped up in the high country, just waiting and waiting. Gleer, Barlow, and Noolan waited with him…though Barlow had suggested a heroic outbreak through the snows that had sealed off the pass and locked them tight at the foot of the summit. Nobody took him up on it.

At least not yet.

They weren’t desperate enough.

But it was coming, God yes, you could see it just as Cobb was seeing it now as he looked into those weathered, rutted faces burned by subzero winds and discolored by frostbite. You could see it there along with the bitterness and unease and animosity that was fermenting in them. For the past week it had been raging inside each of them, a potent and toxic brew bubbling up from the seething pit of each man. A brew that was sheer poison, seeping and simmering and smoking. It was fast becoming a palpable thing in the confines of the cedar-post cabin and its stink was raw and savage.

None of them had spoken in three days now.

They were reaching the point where their choices were being made for them. By nature. By God. By whatever cruel force had imprisoned them up in the mountains with no hope of deliverance. It was fed by hatred of Cobb, of course. For, although none of them had voiced it yet, they all blamed him for their predicament. He was the one that had insisted they stay into the winter, hunting that mine, and by the time January had sealed them up tight…there was nothing to do but wait.

Wait and go mad.

Yeah, they went through a stiff semblance of culture, but culture, like ethics and morals, died a long, hard death in those godless wastelands. Gleer still worked his traplines. Barlow went out hunting each morning with his Hawkens rifle. Cobb and Noolan still cut brush for the fire. But there was no food coming in and a warm fire and plenty of water didn’t fill their bellies.

They were slat-thin to a man, like skeletons covered in membranous flesh. Eyes jutting. Cheeks hollowed into cadaverous valleys. Teeth chattering and bony fingers wrestling in narrow laps. They had already eaten the horses. Even boiled the hooves for soup. Barlow had been nibbling on his belt and Gleer was chewing on a deerhide knife sheath.

So, if there was madness here, it was born of hunger.

Of solitude.

Of hopelessness.

No game was coming in and even the few rabbits Gleer had brought in last week were not enough to stave off the hunger pangs for more than a few hours. They needed meat. Real meat. Their bellies cried out for it, their teeth gnashed for it. Their tongues licked fissured lips, dreaming of venison steaks and beef shanks. Blood. Meat.

Of all of them, only Cobb took it in stride.

Something in him was enjoying the plight of the others. Was enjoying how they’d slowly become living skeletons, ghoulish figures that would’ve looked perfectly natural…or unnatural…wandering from the gates of a cemetery worrying at their own shrouds. As starvation progressed, social amenities failed one after the other. Their thoughts were of meat. Their dreams were of meat. In that high, wind-blasted netherworld of snow-capped peaks, shrieking winds, and whipping blizzards, there was only one way to
get
meat.

One last, unthinkable way.

Cobb was waiting for it. He already saw it in the dead pools of their eyes. The way they looked at each other and at him. Survival had canceled out any bond they’d once shared. To a man they knew one thing in their fevered, deranged minds…only one of them could come out of this in the spring.

And the hunger was upon them. The taboo lust for flesh of one’s own kind. And in the close, confined atmosphere of the cabin, you could smell it…a heavy, sour, vile odor tainting the very air.

And maybe it was starvation that was bringing it on, forcing them into damnable regions of thought, and maybe it was something else.

Maybe it was what they found in the cave.

Or what found them.

***

It was Barlow who located it.

He had been out hunting with Noolan. They both stumbled back to the cabin, winded and worn, with something like fear in their eyes. They stood in the doorway babbling, framed by a field of white and blowing death, rifles in fur-mittened hands, snowshoes on their feet.

“
What?” Cobb had put to them. “What in the name of Christ is it? What did ye find?”

And maybe part of him was thinking,
hoping,
they’d found the mine…but he didn’t really believe it. For what he saw in their eyes plainly told him it was not good. If a regiment of injun ghosts had descended upon them, they could not have looked more grave.

“
You better come,” Noolan said. “You just better come.”

So, wrapped in buffalo coats and bearskin hats, swaddled up like babies in all their gear, they fought through the drifts and winds that tried to knock them off the narrow trails along the jagged cliffs. The world was white and whipping and immense. The sky seemed to reach down and become mountain and it was hard to say where one began and the other ended.

Noolan led them to a little cave mouth set into the base of a limestone bluff with craggy walls and a jutting overhang which looked as though it might fall and crush them at any moment.

Cobb could see the snowshoe prints leading away. Looked like they’d been in one hell of a hurry to get some distance between themselves and the cave mouth.

“
All right, goddammit,” Cobb said, his breath frosting in clouds. “What is it? Goddamn mother lode or the Devil his ownself?”

“
You better just go in,” Barlow said, secretive as a schoolboy.

Cobb went in first, with Gleer at his heels. Both of them were grunting and puffing as they wedged their way in flat on their bellies. The shaft was barely big enough for a man to snake his way through. With the heavy furs and leggings, it took some time to corkscrew themselves into the central chamber. Like forcing a wadded-up rag through the neck of a wine bottle.

Inside it was black as original sin.

Cobb called out to Gleer and his voiced echoed eerily into unknown heights. Gleer had the oil lantern. He struck a match off the cave wall and touched it to the wick, adjusting the flame. The cavern was big enough to shelter two freight wagons side by side. It continued on up a gentle, pebble-littered slope into another darkened chamber. Cobb looked around, seeing lots of granite and gravel, great masses of bedrock that had fallen from the roof in years long past. He saw nothing else noteworthy.

Yet…
yet,
there was something here. Something unusual. He could feel it same way a man can feel his own skin or the balls dangling between his legs. There was something here. Something important. Something secret.

Gleer held out the lantern at arm’s length, wild lurching shadows darting about them. Rising and falling, swimming and diving and leaping. He licked his lips. Licked them again. It was warmer inside and ice began to melt on his beard, water dripping onto his shaggy coat.

“
What the hell did they find in here?” he wanted to know. “Ain’t shit but dirt and rocks. Ain’t shit else.”

But there was and they both knew it,
felt
it, but did not dare let their lips frame it into words. Instead, they stood side by side, waiting and wondering and maybe even worrying. Way a man will when he knows something is circling his campfire. Something big. Something awful. Something with teeth and attitude.

Cobb did not feel afraid.

He told himself in many a situation that as far as fear went, he inspired it, he did not experience it. And maybe that was true and maybe it was bullshit, but, at that moment, he was not afraid. For a voice in his head was telling him that yes, yes, this is what he had come to find. Somewhere in this cave and it passages was sheer revelation.

“
Ain’t nothing here,” Gleer said, his voice dry. “So let’s just—”

“
There’s something here, all right.” Cobb looked over at Gleer, motes of dust drifting around him like moths. “Cain’t ye smell it?”

“
Yeah…yeah, I guess I can.”

Cobb was likening it to decay. Sweet, gassy decay like a bin filled with rotten potatoes or a flyblown corpse washed-up on a riverbed. A moist, rank smell which simply did not belong in this dry, hollow place where even the air was grainy and tasted of dust.

A muscle was jumping in Gleer’s throat. “Don’t like it none. Let’s make to getting the hell out.”

“
Follow me,” was all Cobb said.

He followed the stink like a tasty aroma, led it pull him into the kitchen of this place where the goods were simmering and steaming. He moved up the slope, stepping carefully around razorbacked outcroppings and over flat tumbled stones. Together they moved up into the passage which was tight and twisting, the ceiling brushing their fur caps. And in the next chamber, they found—

They found bones.

Maybe some animal bones, but mostly human.

A great central pit had been carved out of the floor, hacked out as if with picks and shovels to a depth of maybe ten or fifteen feet and it was filled with bones. An ossuary. A charnel pit of ulnas and femurs, vertebrae and ribcages. And skulls…Jesus, what seemed to be hundreds of skulls. Adults and children. And the only thing all those bones had in common was that they were charred…as if they had been
roasted.
Blackened skulls stared up at them, alluding to ghoulish secrets they would not tell.

A scapula shifted and it caused a minor rain of arm and leg bones. A skull tumbled from its perch and grinned at them, its lower jaw missing.

“
Moved,” Gleer said, his face lined with tension. “Something in there…Mary, Mother of God,
something in there moved…”

He had his Colt pistols out and he wanted very badly to empty them into something, anything. Because he was a man who handled the unknown with knife and gun, hatchet and bow. And what was eating into him then could not be found nor defined quite so easily.

“
Dead,” Cobb told him. “All long dead. Just settling is all. If they was just rocks and one fell, ye wouldn’t come out of yer skin, would ye?”

Gleer calmed, shook his head. “Suppose not.”

“
Well, them bones cain’t hurt ye no more than rocks can.”

But what he wanted to say was that he had a weird, unearthly feeling that whatever was in the cave, whatever was hiding and whispering around them, just might have
caused
those bones to shift. Just like it might cause more trouble. And maybe, hell, maybe it would make them bones stand right up and walk about.

Cobb and Gleer moved around the chamber and came to another just off the first.

And it was the same. Bones. More and more bones. Whoever had owned them had been long dead. There were what looked to be ancient, rusted ringbolts pounded into the high, flat table rock above. From them…ancient lengths of hemp rope hanging like dead snakes. From a few of them were brown, mummified hands. As if, people had been hung there and left, allowed to putrefy and drop, only their hands left to mark the grim occasion.

Cobb touched one of the ropes…it began to flake away in his fingers.

“
This place,” Gleer said, his eyes fixed with an almost religious ecstasy, “it’s goddamn old. I mean
really
old, Jimmy-boy. Lookit at all, will you? This place…ha, ha…I think it was chopped right out of the mountain. People…injuns…worked it like we would a mine shaft.”

Cobb studied the rough-hewn walls. You could see they’d been chiseled, hacked from solid rock. None of it, save the original cavern was natural. The tool work on the walls was all-too apparent.

Gleer was making a funny sound in his throat that was somewhere between gagging and laughter. He played the light around some more. There were pictures on those walls. Primitive paintings, etchings. Mostly run-of-the-mill stuff like bear and mountain lion and bison. Things Cobb had seen splashed or carved into many cave walls and rock faces in the Southwest. Even up north in the Montana and Dakota Territories. Herds of animals. Stick figures hunting them. Dancing. Sitting around fires. Just your basic depictions of tribal life.

But Gleer, whose mama was half-Chickasaw, seemed fascinated by them. He studied them, making those gulping/giggling sounds in his throat, whispering things beneath his breath.

“
See? See?” he said. “See how down low here, down here you got your oldest images. Most of these are faded, worn by time…shit, hundreds and hundreds of years old if not more. Maybe thousands.” He was breathing hard now, licking his lips. He followed the paintings and cuttings up the wall with the lantern. “You get up here, Jimmy Lee, you get up here and, sure, you can make ‘em out better. These ain’t as old, eh? But still old, old, very old.”