Skull Moon

by Tim Curran

  "Anyway, Ghost Hand had been dead maybe four, five months when I came up here. Damn. It was night and filthy black and the wind was howling and I could hear things moving in the darkness around me. And I swear to God I could hear footsteps crunching through the dry grass and voices whispering. I got up by Ghost Hand's grave and, Christ, I swear I saw him standing there all done up in his funeral finery-robes and beads and bones and his hair squirming around like snakes and his eyes were yellow like a rattlesnake's by firelight and…shit, I was just a kid all worked up and all. I screamed and ran all the way home."

  Longtree thought about it. He wasn't about to tell Bowes he'd been imagining things. The very quality of his voice was very convincing. It made Longtree's hackles rise. So he said: "Some of them shaman…they're pretty spooky."

  "You have no idea," Bowes said and his voice was filled with dread.

  36

  "If we're caught here," Bowes said, "we're dead men."

  Longtree nodded, saying nothing. They were in the foothills of the Tobbacco Roots, in Blackfeet territory. They brought with them shovels, pickaxes, and enough extra ammunition to turn back the Sioux Nation.

  They were taking no chances.

  "You come here much?" Longtree asked.

  "Just the once," the deputy admitted, "when I was a boy. On that dare…scared the life out of me. And I don't care for it much now."

  The Blackfeet cemetery was located in between two forested ridges, in a little, moon-washed valley of dead, clawing trees. This was sacred ground. This was where the Blackfeet buried their dead and had for countless centuries before white men walked this land. Longtree and Bowes were astride their horses in a copse of dark pines, waiting.

  "You sure you want to do this?" Bowes asked one final time.

  "Yes."

  "Are you going to tell me what we're looking for?"

  "In due time. Let's go."

  Bowes nodded. "It won't matter if we're caught digging or not, just being here and being white is enough reason to be killed."

  Longtree pulled his hat down over his brow. "Let's get it over with."

  The moon brooded high in the hazy sky, illuminating everything, casting crazy, knife-edged shadows everywhere. A cool wind whistled out of the north, skirting the jagged peaks of the mountains.

  They picketed their horses at the foot of a rock outcropping. If they had to get out fast, the horses would be hidden from view. Course, if they had to get out fast, it was unlikely they'd get out of this country at all.

  Collecting their rifles, ammo belts, and digging tools, they started into the graveyard. Longtree wasn't sure what it was, but he had an awful feeling in the pit of his belly…a crawling apprehension. He had gone white and cold inside and something had pulled up tight in his belly. He could not adequately put a name to what he felt, only knew that, yes, it was a mixture of fear and anxiety and irrational terror. And that it was very old. An ancient, primal network of horror.

  They didn't belong here.

  No living thing belonged here.

  Longtree thought: Imagination, that's all it is.

  But he didn't believe it for a second. No more than he'd believed it when he was caught in that sandstorm in Oklahoma Territory.

  Bowes was pressed up close to him and when Longtree stopped, he bumped into him. "Quite a place, eh?" Bowes said, his voice thick like tar. "Anytime you've had enough, you let me know."

  Longtree assured him that he would.

  Despite the fact that the temperature was hovering just above freezing, there was a stink on the wind, like salts and spices and dry things locked in moldering cabinets. Longtree tried to swallow and couldn't…he didn't have any spit.

  Certain they were alone, Bowes lit the lantern. It cast wild, leaping shadows over the graves and mounds. The wind began to pick up, sounding at times like cold, cackling laughter. Vines of mist tangled at their legs.

  "Think you can find the grave?" Longtree asked softly.

  "I can find the site," Bowes told him. "I know where Crazytail's people are buried…once you see it, you won't forget it. He's part of some society, some weird group. Something funny about it all, if you ask me. I came here on that dare just after sunset that time. And I saw, I saw-"

  In the bleak, shivering distance, a wolf began to howl. It was a low, drawn-out mournful baying.

  Longtree's skin went cold. The back of his neck went rigid with gooseflesh. "Just a wolf," he said dryly.

  Bowes licked his lips. "I surely hope so."

  Longtree fed a cigarette into his mouth, lit it. Bowes joined him. They were in a bad place here and they needed very much to steel their nerves. Somehow. Longtree was used to trouble, he fed off it like a leech off blood. He was not scared of it, it was part of who and what he was. But this…Jesus, this place, the atmosphere was simply noxious, simply rotten and pestiferous. Longtree felt for sure they were not alone, that cold and malefic eyes scanned them from the mists. He couldn't seem to shake it. A hush had fallen over the surrounding hills and woods. Shadows rose up and paraded around them.

  Longtree felt like he was carved from wood.

  "You feel it don't you?" Bowes said.

  "Yes."

  The images of that burial ground at night were locked hard in Longtree's mind where, he supposed, they'd linger now forever, showing up in nightmares and at four in the morning when he jerked awake with the sweats. The moon gleamed sickly off the graves and cairns of stones, casting huge, nebulous shadows. Crooked, black trees rose up from the frozen, cracked ground, their skeletal limbs like dead fingers scratching at the sky. There were great towers of rock and broken slabs fringed with frost and carved with grotesque images of animals and nameless gods. They raged underfoot and climbed into the dismal sky. And everywhere, a strange mephitic odor of mold and rot.

  "Can't say I like this place much," Longtree said.

  Bowes looked at him with a cold glare in his eyes and looked away.

  There were bones everywhere, animal bones. The skeletal trees were decorated with them. Some were fresh, bleached white with bits of meat clinging to them, others gray and cracked with age. All were covered with frost. They were from large animals. Longtree saw a few horse skulls, half-buried in the uneven ground.

  "Why the bones?" he asked.

  "It's a custom with these people to kill the deceased's favorite horse upon burial of its master," Bowes pointed out. "Sort of a sacrifice, I guess. That and the Skull Society, maybe."

  "Up there," Longtree said, gesturing to a low bluff crowded with dark shapes.

  "That's the place," Bowes said.

  The graves of Crazytail's clan were set on a long, low bluff of misshapen, craggy trees. Wooden frames-some new, some old, others impossibly ancient and crumbling-were set about, covered in tanned buffalo hides scrawled with drawings and weird letters. Other frames carried the stretched and sunbleached hides of wolves. There were wooden staffs driven into the hard earth, decorated up with feathers, paint, and beads. On them were the skulls of wolves and men. Dozens and dozens of them. They were all yellowed, cracked, ancient.

  Bowes set the lantern down atop a cairn of stones. It was a recent piling. These stones didn't have the weathered, arid look of the others and they weren't covered in blankets of furry, winter-dead moss and fungus.

  "My guess is Red Elk's under here," Bowes said.

  Longtree, the tails of his coat flapping in the wind, said, "Let's take a look."

  It took them about thirty minutes to remove the stones, most were frozen in place and only a good blow from a shovel would loosen them. Longtree then took the pickax and broke through the frozen ground. None of it was easy. The frost line went down a good ten inches and the earth splintered with each blow like flint.

  "That's good," Bowes said. He took the shovel and carefully dug through the soft, sandy earth. "The Blackfeet don't bury their kin very deep. Shouldn't have to dig down," he grunted, "more than a few…feet."

  When they caught sight of a flap of cloth,
Bowes used his hands to clear away the soil. Red Elk had been wrapped in a blanket. Bowes, with what seemed genuine respect for the dead, gently pulled the blanket open. Beneath, there wasn't a body, but something that looked like a buffalo skin shroud, stitched up and painted with images of the sun and moon.

  "We'll have to cut this open to take a look at him, " Bowes said, like it was the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

  Longtree kneeled next to the body, pulling his knife from its sheath. "Just one quick look," he said. He cut the buffalo sinew stitching as far down as where he figured Red Elk's waist would be. With one look at Bowes, he pulled back the skin shroud.

  "Are you going to tell me what we're looking for now?" Bowes asked.

  "You'll know it when you see it."

  Red Elk had been buried in his finest. He wore a shirt of soft antelope skin and leggings of the same. Both were decorated up with dyed porcupine quills, feathers, beads, and little bells. The women who'd prepared him for burial, as was the custom, had painted up his face with intricate streaks of white clay and earthen yellows and blacks. A war club ornamented with eagle feathers was sewn up in the shroud with him, as were his tobacco pouch and medicine bundle, both of the softest unborn buffalo calfskin.

  Longtree examined him minutely with aid of the lantern. His neck was twisted at an odd angle from the hanging and his skin had shriveled to a blotched brown that clung to the skull beneath. Beyond that, the cold and soil had stopped any real decay.

  "Well?" Bowes asked impatiently.

  Longtree covered Red Elk back up and wrapped the blanket over him. "Nothing. I'm relieved. Very, very, relieved."

  "What did you expect to find?"

  Longtree ignored the question and filled in the grave. Bowes helped him pile the rocks back in place. In a few days, after the frost settled back in, no one would know the grave had been tampered with.

  "Look at this," Bowes said.

  Longtree looked where he indicated. Another grave, an ancient one by the look of it, had been opened. Rocks were scattered aside. All that remained of the grave was a four-foot deep trench. But it was gigantic. Far too large for a man. You could've buried a horse in there. Maybe a couple of them.

  "That grave was opened," Longtree said. He pawed in the trench with his shovel. "Empty. Now why do you suppose the body was carted away?"

  Bowes shook his head.

  Longtree took the lantern to another grave a few yards away. This one was particularly ornamented with skull poles and painted up hides on frames and slabs of rock covered with drawings and writings that were obscured by the years. There were no less than half a dozen human skulls here and twice that many of wolves. Some of the poles had fallen, the skulls shattering like brittle yellow porcelain. It looked to be very ancient.

  "Who do you suppose is down there?" Longtree asked. "Ghost Hand?"

  "No, he's farther up on the next hill."

  "I'd say whoever it was must have been important."

  Bowes licked his lips. "They're all important up here. All big, bad medicine men," he told Longtree. "But this one…shit, he's been in the ground a hundred years or more. Maybe twice that."

  Longtree was thinking the very same thing. He wasn't sure why, but he was certain there was an answer up here somewhere. And this grave…it was so ornamented, so well-tended…it spoke to him.

  Longtree removed a stretched yellowed skin atop the cairn and it came apart in his fingers like candied glass. He began to loosen the stones with powerful swings of the pickax.

  "I'm finished," Bowes said, throwing up his hands. "I wanna know what the hell this is all about."

  Longtree kept working. "When we find it-if we find it-you'll know."

  "Goddammit, Marshal, I'm risking my neck out here! Tell me what's going on or I'm riding out!" Bowes shook all over. Then, calmer, "Digging up Red Elk's one thing, but this one…Christ, he's been dead for centuries. What can he have to do with anything?"

  "I hope nothing," Longtree panted.

  Bowes spat. "Damn you, Longtree." He came over and started working.

  It took them longer to take apart this cairn. Countless generations of rains, freezes, and baking summers had welded the rocks together as if they'd been mortared in place.

  When they were done, both men had long since shed their coats, sweat steaming on their faces. A slab of rock was beneath the cairn, this one painted with things that were neither animals nor men. They had to use the shovel handles like levers to slide it free. And then they had to chop through the frost line and the hard packed earth beneath.

  The wind had picked up considerably, howling out of the north. Wolf hides and moldering ceremonial blankets rustled and snapped on sagging willow frames. That wolf started up in the distance, baying its ancient dirge. The pale moon looked down, piercing the grotesque, dancing shadows.

  Longtree found the first tattered remains of something like a skin-tarp and the two of them cleared away dirt and rubble. The tarp came apart in their fingers, rotted and half-frozen.

  "Christ," Bowes said, turning away, "that stink."

  Longtree smelled it, too: A heavy, thick smell of decay and grave mold. An odor nothing dead for untold years had the right to possess. It was a black smell, a suffocating evil odor of slaughterhouses and disturbed graves.

  "This ain't right," Bowes said in a weak voice.

  The grave, once completely unearthed was huge. Gigantic.

  The body was stitched up in a hide shroud, too, but blackened with age, covered in spots with mildew and damp gray fungi. And it was not buffalo skin. It had a smoother texture. Was very fine. Longtree suspected human skin, but didn't mention the fact. Whatever it was, given the size, it had taken a lot of pelts.

  Longtree slit it open, not being too careful. His fingers trembled. The baying of that wolf took on a high, shrill pitch. Swallowing, Longtree pulled back the shroud. Bowes held the lantern.

  "Jesus in Heaven," he muttered.

  Longtree backed away, his skin cold and tight with gooseflesh. A nameless dark madness teased at his brain.

  Whoever it had been…he wasn't human. He was a giant.

  The head was huge and distorted, ridged with jutting bone and covered in a tight flaking gray skin that had burst open in spots like badly worn canvas. There were darker patches of mildew stitched into it. The heavy jaw was pushed outward like a flattened snout, the blackened gums set with irregular crooked teeth, sharp as spikes, fragmented and splintered. There were no eyes, just black yawning sockets, one of which was threaded with moss. Tufts of silver hair jutted from the obscene skull in irregular patches, blowing in the wind like strands of cornsilk.

  Longtree just stared. There were no words to be said. A flat, clawing emptiness raged in his brain and he knew then what it was like to go insane, how sometimes madness was the lesser of two evils.

  "It can't be, it can't be," Bowes kept saying over and over in a silly, defeated voice.

  But it was.

  Longtree kept looking. The cadaver had been interred in this unhallowed ground in a shroud of skin that had rotted to rags now, through which protruding bone and withered flesh could be seen. One skeletal hand was thrown over the chest, the fingers covered in parchment skin and ending in hooked claws. There were only four fingers on that hand and they were easily twelve or fourteen inches from knuckle to nail tip. Big enough to palm a man's head. The giant also had a tail wrapped around it, a bony thing that looked oddly like vertebrae.

  One of the fingers moved.

  "Jesus," Bowes whispered, "bury it! For the love of God, bury it!"

  Longtree turned away from the horror in the grave. This is what he'd been looking for, what he knew they must find, but in finding it, the revelation was simply too much. He listened to the wind howling, the wolf baying, could feel the sickly light of the moon on his skin.

  It wasn't human, whatever it was. Not in the least. Just a mummy of some ghoulish, perverse tribe, some nameless monster far larger than a man and twice as wi
cked.

  Skullhead.

  Yes, of course. It's body was skeletal and chitenous, the head like a huge misshapen skull. It all fit.

  Bowes' eyes suddenly went wide and he stumbled back and fell. He was pointing and muttering gibberish, drool coursing down his chin.

  "What-" Longtree began, but by then he knew.

  A huge and hideous shadow fell over him with the icy kiss of tombs. He heard something like old, dehydrated kindling snapping and popping. The wind carried a musty stink of old bones and wormy shrouds.

  He turned and saw what he knew he would. A warm wetness spread in his belly; his head was full of noise. His lips opened and he could draw no breath.

  The thing was standing up in the grave, a decayed scarecrow with a grinning, crumbling skull for a head. Its mummified skins flapped in the wind. The jaws parted with a groaning click, a hissing, reptilian noise issuing from the collapsed throat. It stood seven feet if it stood an inch. That tail-like the spinal column of an animal, all spines and bony ribs-whipped around it and thudded against the ground.

  Longtree couldn't move; he was paralyzed.

  Bowes fumbled for his gun and drew it, his hands trembling so badly he couldn't hold it still. The first shot ripped apart the stagnant night with a thundering explosion, the bullet whistling past its target.

  The dead thing shambled over to Longtree, a discordant, bellowing howl rising from its throat and echoing through the burial ground. One atrophied claw snatched at Longtree's hair, yanking back his head, as the bobbing skullish face went in for the kill, the shriveled lips drawing back a good inch from hooked, yellow teeth and festered gums.