Skin Medicine (36 page)

“And Deliverance?”

“No God-fearing man or woman went there after that day,” Harmony explained, his face oddly slack. His lower lip trembled. “And those that did, were never heard from again.”

“And what of that…
personage
they had locked away up in the hotel? Was it human? Animal?”

“Neither,” was all Harmony would say. “But in my mind, it was the seed of human evil. There were those in Deliverance that said it was the Devil himself that was chained up there.”

Dirker thought about it all. Thought about it long and hard. “And Cobb…he disappeared from the mortuary. If he was dead, how could that be?”

“I don’t think he was dead,” Harmony said. “But surely not alive. His was the living death, Sheriff. No man will ever know what happened to him after he climbed from his casket. Some things are better not known.”

Dirker was not about to argue with him. He was surely not convinced about any of this. Something had happened, yes, and Cobb was no doubt involved, but the supernatural? Dirker had heard stories and wild tales like any other, but he was not ready to accept such a thing.

“I can see, by the look on your face, Sheriff, that you are skeptical. But what I tell you is the truth as the Lord is my witness. What happened in Deliverance is unspeakable…pagan rites, Devil worship, human sacrifice. It has been said that the first born, all the first born of Deliverance were given to Cobb as burnt offerings. To him and that demented thing up in the hotel.” Harmony looked close to tears now. “If God in His infinite wisdom would only smite that serpent’s nest from the land.”

Dirker said, “Well, maybe God’s gonna need some help this time.”

22

Cabe pulled off his cigarette, sent the smoke out through his nostrils. “So, I reckon from what you’ve been saying that you talked to your Indian friends?”

Charles Graybrow nodded. “Yes, I have.”

“And…?”

“Worse than I thought.”

They were sitting in Cabe’s motel room, on the bed, sorting out those things that a week before would have been unthinkable by any sane man. Now, however, there was no choice but to look the devil, as it were, in the face and give him his due.

“First off, you have to know about a Snake medicine man called Spirit Moon,” Graybrow said, his fingers coiling uneasily in his lap, unused to being without a ready bottle. “Now Spirit Moon…oh boy, he’s big mumbo-jumbo heap plenty bad injun witch doctor—”

“Would you quit the dumb injun bit already?” Cabe said impatiently. “It’s funny at times. But now ain’t one of those times.”

Graybrow nodded, smiled. “Sure, sure, understood. Okay, now Spirit Moon, you know something about him?”

“I’ve heard a few things.”

“What you heard is true. That’s one injun with the power, I tell you,” Graybrow said with complete certainty. “I won’t go on about things he’s done, the sick he’s cured and the bad ones he cursed…we’ll let it go by saying Spirit Moon is the genuine article. He refused to go to the reservation with the others, claimed that the Snake Nation would bow before no man, white or otherwise. So him and his followers hid out up in Skull Valley on Goshute land. And old Spirit Moon, he knew things that have long been forgotten, things others might want to know…”

“Like who?” Cabe asked.

“Like James Lee Cobb.”

Ah, that name again. Cabe was beginning to get this picture of that crazy bastard in his mind and he had horns and a tail. Even the sound of that name was starting to leave him cold.

“So Cobb went to Spirit Moon?”

“That’s how the story goes. Cobb and his gang of bad men went to pay Spirit Moon a call.” Graybrow broke off, wanting to get it right as he’d heard it. “Now, understand that Spirit Moon didn’t make Cobb wicked, he already was. They say he was born of darkness. That he lived a life of depravity and the like. That up in the mountains…up there, well, he didn’t eat his friends because he just wanted to, but because something crawled into him. The sort of thing the Ojibwa up north might call a Wendigo. A cannibal devil, a soul-eater…”

Graybrow told him then the story he had heard from an old Goshute named He-Who-Runs-Swift.

Cobb and his boys rode right into Spirit Moon’s camp, a thing many others would have been afraid to do. At first, Cobb was friendly. He made up some bullshit story about needed sanctuary for a time being that the whites were hunting him and his men. It was a lie, but essentially true in that just about all his boys were wanted for something, somewhere.

But you could not fool Sprit Moon.

He had the gift to look into minds, to see truths, things that had not yet even come about. He instructed his people to be kind to Cobb and the others, for even at that point he knew what Cobb was, hoped only that he would ride off given time. But it was not to be so. For what lived in Cobb, the seed planted there at birth and nurtured by what Spirit Moon called “the Old One of the Mountain”, was not in complete control just then. But it had found fertile ground and was blossoming by the day.

Before long, Cobb admitted that he knew of Spirit Moon, knew of his great knowledge and that he had come to learn from him. By that point, everyone in the tribe was afraid of Cobb. Afraid of what was inside him and the hideous smell emanating from him, the voices heard speaking in his tent by night…even when he was alone. Spirit Moon told Cobb he would indeed teach him, but only him. That he must send his men away. Cobb agreed. Spirit Moon had no intention of teaching him; he planned on killing him. There was no other way. For Cobb was evil and he had to be purified and death was the only way. But Spirit Moon knew he had to be careful…for if it was done wrongly, what lived in Cobb would rise up and kill the entire tribe.

“Well, Tyler Cabe,” Graybrow went on, “before Spirit Moon could do what had to be done, a woman disappeared from camp. Her remains were discovered shortly thereafter. Cobb had nearly devoured her…”

“Jesus. They caught him in the act?”

Graybrow shrugged. “Perhaps. I do not know. Only that when he was questioned about the crime by Spirit Moon and the elders, he freely admitted that, yes, he had
eaten
her. He boasted of it. Of the many people he had eaten. That his strength was absorbed directly from the flesh of those he feasted upon.

“Well, it took no less than five or six strong warriors to hold him down so he could be shackled,” Graybrow said. “So maybe there was some truth to what he said. And next…”

What happened to Cobb next, was not pleasant.

The Snake called it “the Living Death”. It was a sacred, dark ritual reserved only for those who could not die in the normal way and were possessed of something discarnate and malevolent. Spirit Moon decided that it was the only way. For what was in Cobb had to be starved to death. Only this would force it into cold dormancy. So Cobb was cursed with the Living Death. Hung by the wrists, Cobb was bound by the medicine man’s sorcery. He was treated with herbs and roots, secret chemicals and wasting prayers. The skin was literally eaten from one side of his body by ants. He was hung in a medicine lodge, dangled from the roof and smoked over a fire of holy balms for three days while Spirit Moon and the other holy men chanted a ceremony of entombment over him. When it was over, Cobb was neither dead nor alive, but somewhere in-between.

“What happened then?” Cabe wanted to know.

“He was nailed shut in a coffin. He was to be buried alive like that. For what was in him had to be slowly starved to death. It was the only way.”

Spirit Moon learned that Cobb had a half-brother in Deliverance, so the casket was sent to him via Whisper Lake. But Spirit Moon had underestimated the strength of what was inside Cobb. It should not have woken until it was in the grave, but instead it woke up on the trip to Whisper Lake. And when Hiram Callister opened the box…

“Cobb returned to the land of the living,” Graybrow explained. “Returned in probably a foul mood. A week later, maybe, he and his confederates rode on the Snake camp. They killed everyone, including Spirit Moon…Cobb was too strong to fight by then.”

But Cobb’s gang did more than kill the Indians.

They ritually slaughtered them. Women were raped and skinned, men drawn and quartered, children roasted over fires and eaten. Spirit Moon was encouraged to eat the flesh of his own young…when he refused, he was cooked himself. Cobb and the others ate him and absorbed all that he was.

“They became beasts, Tyler Cabe,” Graybrow said, looking very concerned now. “They had tasted that which was taboo. It brought out the beasts within each man. And Cobb, now in possession of Spirit Moon’s secrets or those the man’s soul could not covet into the afterworld, was far worse than before. He was in possession of what the Snake call the ‘Skin Medicine’.”

Cabe’s mouth was dry by this point. “What…what the hell is that?”

“A system of black magic, I suppose. Very ancient and forbidden. Instead of a formula written in a book or scratched on a rock, it is tattooed into the flesh. The Skin Medicine allows the beast that lives in all of us to come to the surface, to make itself known in blood and flesh…”

“And that’s what’s killing people? These Skin Mediciners, these beasts?”

Graybrow nodded.

Back home in Yell County there had been another name for men who changed into beasts. Werewolf. Cabe recalled a story he had heard as a youngster about a village of them that were supposed to live high in the Ozarks. Just a story…or was it?

There was a knock on the door and it swung open.

Jackson Dirker was standing there, looking gallant and handsome in his fur-trimmed overcoat and round buffalo hat. His eyes blazed like blue fire. “Charles,” he said, “I need to have a word with Mr. Cabe.”

The Indian nodded. “Sure, sure. There’s things white men can’t discuss before injuns. I was just here to see if I could be of service. You know, shining shoes or emptying chamber pots.”

If he found himself amusing, it wasn’t working on Dirker. He left the room and Dirker closed the door.

And Cabe was thinking:
He looks pissed-off. Looks like he wants to kick the shit outta me. Maybe he knows, maybe—

Dirker sat next to him.

Close like that, he could see that Dirker wasn’t really angry. Something was broiling in him, but it had nothing to do with the man he’d come to see.

“Cabe,” he said, staring down at the floor now.
“Tyler.
May I call you that?”

“Of course.”

Dirker patted him on the leg. “We’ve surely had our differences, haven’t we? You’ve spent years hating me and I don’t blame you, for I think I’ve spent years hating myself over that business at Pea Ridge. But it is over. The war is long gone and we are one people again. I like to think since you’ve come here, things have changed between us. If we are not friends, then surely we are allies now. Would that be a correct assumption?”

Cabe swallowed. “It would be.”

“Once we fought on opposite sides and I honestly don’t know any longer who was in the right…sometimes, sometimes I can’t remember what it was I was fighting
for.”
Dirker smiled, then looked embarrassed. “The time has come when we must fight side-by-side. So I’ve come to you with an open heart to ask you, to beg you even, to ride with me on Deliverance…”

“You want me at your side?” Cabe said, overwhelmed by emotions he couldn’t even begin to guess on.

“Yes. I would trust you at my side more than any man now living. I would like to deputize you, have you lead a posse with me on that hellish place. Am I out of order asking this of you?”

Cabe cleared his throat. “No, you are not.” He felt something warm spreading in his chest. He stood and looked out the window at the streets below. He turned back to Dirker. “I would be honored to ride at your side.”

And then they shook hands and everything for them, finally, ultimately came full circle.

23

Two hours later, the posse assembled outside of the Sheriff’s Office.

The freezing rain had become snow now that drifted through the frigid air like ash blown from some huge funeral pyre. And that seemed pretty fitting given where the men were going and what they were going to do.

There were some fifteen men there when Cabe rode in on his strawberry roan. Most of them were miners that Cabe did not know. But Pete Slade and Henry Wilcox were there, the office left to another deputy. Sir Tom Ian, the English-born pistol fighter was there. As was Charles Graybrow and Raymond Proud, the big Indian carpenter. The one that really surprised Cabe was Elijah Clay astride a chestnut mare.

“Afternoon, Mr. Cabe,” he said, quite cordially. “The sheriff here has let me join this huntin’ party. He says I have to behave m’self. As far as ye killin’ Virgil, well, I knowed he weren’t nothin’ but trash. So I don’t hold no grudge no more.”

Cabe relaxed a little at hearing that. He pulled his Stetson with the rattlesnake band off the saddle horn and place it on his head. “I’m ready, then,” he said.

“Okay,” Dirker said. “You know where we’re going and what we’re going to do. So let’s get it done. And we don’t come back until Cobb is put down.”

“Yessum, Sheriff,” Clay said. “I’ll tell ye boys one thing and I’ll tell ye just the once. If’n I get that peckerwood devil in m’ sights, I’ll shoot that trash just deader’n Jesus on the cross. Yes, sir.”