Skin Medicine (24 page)

Cobb still was not impressed. Just injun-art. What of it?

But Gleer wouldn’t let it go.

He explained in some detail what it all meant, what the rock was saying to them, how it reached out across the centuries telling them a tale of life long gone from these hills. Hunting. Fishing. Battling enemies. Birth. Death. Religious ceremony. Marriages. Funerals. If you could read it and it wasn’t too hard, Gleer said, it was just like a book.

“
Looks like a village there,” Cobb said, indicating a cluster of lodges. “Wonder what the hell happened to it?”

“
Probably down there in that valley, what’s left of it,” Gleer said. “Covered in snow.” He followed the art across the wall. “See? See this?”

Cobb saw it. Was so impressed he stuck a cigar in his mouth and smoked it, knowing there was more here than just silly injun-art.

“
They…they were working this mountain, maybe these caves, tunneling…”

Cobb could see it fine. Stick figures at work. Using what might have been primitive shovels and picks, staffs and baskets to haul out rock. Looked like drawings of ants working their hive. Figures everywhere.

Gleer was getting real excited now. “Right here…Jimmy, right goddamn here, something happened,” he said, stabbing the wall with a dirty index finger.

“
What?”

Gleer told him it was big, bad medicine, whatever it was. All the symbols and hex signs attested to that. To Cobb it looked as if down in their tunnels they had dug into another chamber. The chamber was represented by a jagged gouge…and out of it, something like smoke misting out.

“
A catastrophe,” Gleer said. “See? All them figures are laying about now. All dead.”

“
Gas probably. Hit a pocket of poison gas.”

“
No…no, I think it’s worse than that.” He was panting now, rubbing grime and settled dust from the walls, close to something, but he wasn’t sure what. “There…not gas…something else…something they dug out of the ground, something real bad…”

Cobb was studying it pretty close himself now.

Another representation of that jagged chasm, more smoke or mist seeping up and out. Only the mist was now shown to have gathered above the dead and the living like some storm cloud. A storm cloud made of skulls and devil-faces. The drawings went on and that cloud appeared to have come up out of the cave and settled over the village.

“
It got to ‘em,” Gleer said, his eyes wide and the lantern trembling in his fist now. He looked afraid. His face was tight and set with wrinkles and taut cords. “It got to ‘em, Jimmy? Don’t you get it? Don’t you?”

The paintings abruptly ended there and there were no more.

Cobb didn’t really get it. Something was crawling in his belly like worms and it made him feel giddy. The birthmark on his back was throbbing. Something was happening to him, but he didn’t see. Not really. Not just yet. The Indians had been mining or something. They had cut deep into the mountain and uncovered a hidden chamber, dug into it…and something, something had come out. Something that killed a lot of ‘em. Something real bad came out of the ground.

Gleer was half out of his mind now.

He was running around, handling bones and skulls, waving femurs and tibias about. He set the lantern at the edge of the pit and dove into all those bones like some insane swimmer into a charnel sea. He paddled and sorted, handled and searched. His fingers traced the craniums of skulls, poked into orbits, tapped at yellowed teeth set in pitted jaws. He stroked the rungs of a ribcage, eyed a blackened pelvic wing like maybe it was his own.

“
Get the hell out of there,” Cobb told him and meant it. “Yer losing yer mind, damn ye!”

Gleer climbed out, the bones falling away from him with a sound like tumbling kindling. Cobb grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pitched him to the floor.

“
I ain’t mad, Jimmy! It’s just…hell, it’s just that I know!
I know!”
He was cackling now, drool running from the corners of his lips. His entire body was shuddering. “These bones…lookit ‘em, will ya? Look close.”

Cobb did.

And then he got it…or some of it. The bones

all the bones in fact

were riddled with tiny cuts and gashes and nicks. Somebody had been hacking and cutting on their owners. And maybe worse…because he found what looked to be teeth marks set into them.

“
Cannibals,” Cobb said in a low voice. “Just like in them Pacific islands I read about when I was a kid. Man-eaters…”

“
That’s right, yes sir, that’s right.” Gleer was still laughing, but tears had welled in his eyes now. “But they didn’t do it on their own, Jimmy Lee, no sir! What they cut out of the ground…whatever it was…it
turned
‘em that way, took hold of their savage heathen minds and turned them into monsters…”

Cobb took hold of him and got him out of those caverns. Gleer was stark raving by that point. And maybe it was just Cobb’s imagination, but that high, hot gassy smell seemed almost stronger. Rancid, even.

As if whatever was dead in there, had begun to decay once again after many long years.

***

Cobb got Gleer outside and with the help of the other two, they wrestled him back to the cabin. But he was in a bad way. They had to shackle him to the wall with chains snapped from beaver traps and nailed into the logs themselves. He was talking crazy, shaking and gibbering, hearing things scratching around outside that none of the others could. Talking with people that weren’t there. Going native like his mother’s people and asking for protection from the Great Spirit. So they left him shackled for a week like that, pissing himself, drooling and screeching.

“
Think I’m crazy, don’t you? Think I’ve lost what mind I did have, don’t you?” he rambled on incessantly one afternoon as the wind made the cabin shake. “But I ain’t nohow crazy. Because I know what was up there…I could smell it there and I can smell it here now. Maybe you, Cobb, or you, Barlow…maybe you don’t know what I’m taking about. But Noolan…I don’t know about you. It might have
touched
you the way it touched them injuns. Ain’t saying it did…but it got to one of us, ‘cause I can smell it! Hear?
I can smell it.
One of you, yes sir, you know what I’m talking about on account you’re just waiting for the lights to dim so you can feed on the others. I know it! I know it! Oh…ho, ho, my God, my dear Lord Jesus, them injuns, them injuns. Roasting babies and sucking brains from skulls and chewing on the flesh of their young…eating, eating. Offering up their daughters to that, that
thing
come straight out of hell…”

“
Shut the fuck up!” Barlow snapped finally. “You shut up with that talk or I’ll kill you!
I swear to God I’ll kill you!”

Gleer was getting to everyone by that point. Maybe even Cobb. But you couldn’t tell it from that cool smirk on his face. Noolan calmed Barlow down and took him outside for some fresh air being that it was the one thing they had plenty of.

When they were gone, it was just Cobb and Gleer in the cabin. The logs popped and shifted in the hearth. The air was smoky and thick. It stank of body odor and charred logs. What it didn’t stink of these days was food.

“
Ye’ve got to get a hold of yerself, Gleer,” Cobb told him. “Ye carry on like this…well, one of them boys is gonna shoot ye dead.”

Gleer just played with his chains, running the loops through his fingers. He nodded. “I know, I know…but I’m scared, Jimmy Lee. I’m damn scared. I’m thinking…thinking that one of us just ain’t what he appears to be. That something got in him…inside him…and that man, he’s a monster now…”

Cobb considered it a moment and shrugged. “Maybe ye right,” he said. “Maybe you and me, maybe we better had keep an eye on them other two.”

***

Eventually, Gleer came back to his senses.

Barlow managed to shoot a couple wolves. They were rawboned things with hardly any meat on them, but it was something in their bellies. And Noolan made a hearty soup from the blood and fat. It didn’t taste all that wonderful, but it stuck to the bones. With some meat and soup in him at last, Gleer came to his senses.

They cut him loose.

But they kept an eye on him.

In fact, everyone kept an eye on each other. It was like everyone was afraid to be alone with anyone else. All four of them went about their daily routines with knives and pistols hanging from their belts. And when one came upon another out in the woods or poking through the ice that covered the stream…well, it was only sensible to give advance warning. For up there in that awful place, only the guilty sneaked around or moved silently.

Things got bad in the week following Gleer’s release.

The wind shook and rattled the cabin continually. It picked up sheets of snow and flung them all and everywhere. Visibility outside was down to eight, ten feet at any given time. The air was unnaturally cold. Sometimes the wind carried funny sounds with it, sounds like weeping or screaming. The voices of children chanting in some distant place. There were odd noises in the dead of night…noises like something walking up on the roof or scratching at the shuttered windows. A pounding at the outside walls. Weird distorted tracks found in the snow outside. Tracks that started suddenly and ended just as abruptly…like something had leaped down from the cold stars above and then leaped back up there again.

Noolan and Barlow could be heard whispering prayers at night.

Gleer just hid beneath his elk hides silently.

And Cobb, he just grinned, head always cocked like he was listening for something.

Because he had secrets from the others.

They didn’t know about him slipping off that night they’d found the cave. About him crawling in there in the frigid, dark hours. Walking amongst the bones with a lantern in hand. They didn’t know how it was for him when the gassy, fetid odor rose up from the trembling marrow of the mountain and fell over him like a shivering, stinking blanket. Or how it held him and made communion with something already hiding deep within him. Something planted there like an obscene seed in the blighted soil of his soul by his father. How it reached out and found this sleeping other and became one with it.

Because Gleer was right—there
was
a monster among them.

And it was getting hungry.

***

It had been three weeks since they found the cave now.

Two weeks since the last of the soup and wolf meat was eaten. Their bellies had been stark empty since and something in each and every man was decaying at an unpleasant rate.

Except for Cobb.

What was in him had already rotted to carrion.

***

Cobb was alone in the cabin…or nearly.

Noolan and Barlow had run off hours ago. Run off when they’d returned early from their hunt and found Cobb dressing out Gleer’s corpse, happily sorting through meat and muscle, selecting the finest cuts for steaks and the poorer ones for stews.

“
Hungry, gents?” he’d said, gore dripping from his mouth because, well, dammit, it was hard to do that sort of work without a little taste here or there. “Pull yerselves up a seat and see what old Jimmy Lee can do when the proper victuals is available.”

Barlow and Noolan just stood there, rifles in hand, mouths sprung like spittoons, staring and staring. One of them—Cobb couldn’t be sure which—let out a wailing scream and together they’d run off into the snows. Damn fools left the door open, too. Born in a goddamned barn, the both of ‘em.

That had been three, four hours before.

But Cobb knew they’d be back. Unless they decided to winter it out up in the cave; but they wouldn’t like that very much. It was one thing to be up there with light and heat…but when the lantern died out and the blackness swam up like some ravenous shark from a primeval, godless sea like it had for him, well that was an entirely different kettle of fish, mind you.

Cobb had long-since finished slaughtering Gleer.

When Cobb had pulled his Arkansas toothpick and walked up to him, speaking in the voices of long-dead injuns, Gleer had just gone to jelly. Slicker than shit, Cobb had slit his throat ear to ear and Gleer just accepted it. Now, there wasn’t nothing but a pile of bloody bones to mark his passing. His skin was drying on a rack before the fire, smartly salted for leather. His organs were gently layered in a black pot of brine, seasoning up for a fine stew that would last Cobb for weeks and weeks. The meat had been carved from his buttocks, belly, and breast and packed in snow so it would keep fresh and sweet. His blood had been drained off into buckets for soup and broth. Even his fat was saved. His ligaments and sinew were drying for catgut. And right that moment as Cobb listened to the wind speaking and cackling in the chimney pipe, he was grinding up muscle and organ to be stuffed into bowel casings for sausage.

Gleer’s head was sitting across from him.

The eyes were blanched and the tongue protruded blackly from those seamed lips. His bearskin cap was still on his head. A few greasy strands of hair had fallen over the sallow, blood-spattered face.