Skin Medicine

by Tim Curran

  The wagon was really rolling then, down a bend that cut through the hills and over a creaking wooden bridge that spanned a rushing, icy creek.

  “ Only a few miles now!” Goode cried out, the wagon thundering towards its destination, the horses pounding forward like the devil himself was chasing them…and maybe he was. Goode kept looking over at Hyden apprehensively, then back at the box. “Just hang tight! I can…yeah, I can see the lights below!”

  Hyden took his word for it.

  He did not turn and look.

  He could not turn and look.

  His eyes were wide and staring, that frosty wind buffeting him mercilessly. But he did not feel it. Did not feel his numb fingers on that wooden stock. Did not feel that icy mortuary chill that crept through his bones and locked them tight and hard as iron in a deep freeze. All he knew was the box. It was the center of his universe. It was a dark star and he was a speck of dust caught in its malefic orbit. All he could do was watch those nails twist up and pop free, one after the other.

  And in the box, a flurry of scratching and pawing and thudding.

  Something in Hyden suddenly snapped. A wild, shrieking terror ripped through him and he began to shout: “I’m getting out of here! I’m jumping out of here! This is crazy-“

  But Goode forced him back down and told him to shut up, shut up, goddamn it, it was all in his head, all in his head. But the idea of being alone in that wagon with that box in the back and what it contained…Goode knew he couldn’t do it by himself. Just couldn’t. And Whisper Lake was right before him now. To either side were the derricks and mainframes and hunched shacks of the outlying mining camps.

  Something back there made a loud, snapping sound and Goode didn’t need to turn to see that one of the brass bands had broken open and the other wouldn’t be far behind and then…and then…

  Hyden’s breath was coming in sharp, hurtful gasps. He was shaking so badly he could not hold the shotgun. It clattered uselessly to his feet.

  And then they were in town and whatever was in the box seemed to sense that, for it settled back down into its cold berth and waited things out. Goode and Hyden let out a collective sigh, but did not relax until they found the undertaker’s and got rid of the damnable thing.

  3

  Hiram Callister was who they found.

  Rotund, greasy Hiram Callister, undertaker and cabinetmaker. He prepared the bodies and fashioned the boxes they were tucked carefully into. Cheap pine affairs or sometimes imported black mahogany shipped in by rail for rich miners or railroad men. Hiram preferred to work by lamplight just as his younger brother Caleb-and co-owner of Callister Brothers Mortuary-preferred the light of day. And when Hiram was not handling wood and deadwood, he secreted himself into his chambers above and poured over his collection of pornographic pictures, most of which were sent to him by a friend in New Orleans where such things were readily available to the connoisseur…for a price.

  Hiram had never been very good with women.

  With people in general.

  At least, not living ones. He had been a plump, bookish child and had become a heavy, unsightly man with a bevy of quivering chins that herded about his lower jaw and neckline like pink hogs at a trough. He was fond of cakes and candies. Had an abnormal condition of the sebaceous glands which caused him to sweat profusely. His hands were oddly cold and he was given to stuttering in civilized company. Children often pointed to him on the streets. He could be found by night, chewing taffy and chocolates and French cremes amongst the sheeted forms in the mortuary, dabbing continually at his moist face and brow with a handkerchief. For this was his world, a world of caskets and chemicals, corpses and silver gleaming instruments. A world that was close and dim and smelled of iodine and alcohol and less pleasant things.

  But it was Hiram’s world and he coveted it.

  Let Caleb have the daylight. For Caleb was something that belonged in the daylight-handsome and charming and sure. He spent his days consoling widows and his evenings in gambling dens and brothels telling off-color stories of the dead. People called him friend and lover just as they called Hiram ghoul and deviant, telling nasty stories about him.

  Hiram did not care.

  In the end-man, woman and child-they were always his.

  He fancied the women. Particularly the young ones. Not the upstanding wives and sisters-if there were such things in a seething mining town like Whisper Lake-but the prostitutes. They had been touched and fondled in life, so Hiram figured it was no sin to do the same with them in death. But only the prostitutes. Never anyone else. Regardless of what people whispered about him, he did have standards, professional ethics.

  When the two men with the casket showed up, Hiram had the body of a young whore stretched out before him like a cedar plank. She’d slit her wrists. Hiram was touching her, sweating and breathing heavily…then those two banged on the door. One was some old grizzled desert rat, the other a kid with freckles on his cheeks. But both had wide, unblinking eyes and hands that shook. They looked like they’d seen their own ghosts threading at them in the darkness.

  Hiram had never seen two men so… afraid.

  They brought in the box, set it on an empty table and got out just as fast as fast could be, practically fighting to be the first out the door. But some people, Hiram knew, were apprehensive around the dead. No matter.

  He had been wired about the casket.

  It contained the body of James Lee Cobb. Cobb had been something of a hired gun and outlaw, a notoriously sadistic, evil man and the world was better without him. His only kin was a Mormon squatter over in near-by Deliverance-one of the Mormon villages. A half-brother name of Eustice Harmony who was willing to plant him…long as Cobb’s injun friends footed the bill. And they had.

  As Hiram looked over the box, he saw that many of the nails fastening it shut were missing. One of the brass hasps had broken free. Rough handling. But the sort of thing Cobb deserved.

  Hiram left the box where it sat.

  He had more pressing matters than dead outlaws.

  4

  Long after midnight, a sense of dread settled into him.

  He could not explain it. Did not try to.

  After he’d finished with the painted lady, had locked her down in a cheap cedar box paid for by her madam, Hiram started on the Byrd brothers, Thomas and Heck. He pulled back the sheets and studied their graying faces. A shame. Both had been business owners-Thomas owned a livery stable and Heck a meat market. And now, of course, they were only so much meat themselves. It was no secret they’d both been romancing the same woman…Heck’s wife…and it was only a matter of time before such wanton fornicating would lead them here.

  Hiram knew only a few details.

  They’d gotten into a drunken brawl at the Cider House Saloon and Heck had pulled his old Army Colt and shot Thomas and Thomas, before his blood had run out, had slid a skinning knife into his brother’s throat. They had died in a communal pool of their own blood, locked in a fighting embrace. They had been brought in that way. It had taken both Hiram and his brother to pull their stiffened limbs from one another. Heck’s wife Clarissa was paying for the funeral, wanted them in nice boxes and wanted them presentable so they could be photographed side-by-side, cheek-to-jowl for kin back in Missouri. She could afford it-as the only living relative, she owned a livery stable and meat market now.

  With gray, watery eyes like wet tin, Hiram got down to work.

  His fingers were nimble and busy, forever searching and prodding, slitting and plucking. He stitched and sewed, gummed and pasted. Knives flashed and saws bit, wax pooled into hollows and catgut sealed cadaveric mysteries intact. He embalmed the brothers with a solution of arsenic and covered them with sheets until the caskets arrived.

  Pumping water into the basin, Hiram pulled off his rubber gloves and washed his hands thoroughly.

  The wind picked-up outside and a tree limb scratched at the roof. For a reason Hiram could not understand, a chill swept up his spine
. That sense of dread again. It had been gnawing at him for hours now…but why? He found himself thinking of the two men that had brought the casket.

  They’d been scared white.

  But why? Why? Fatigue, maybe. They’d been on the trail for two days from Toole County to Whisper Lake. And cold, inhospitable days they had been. Such deprivation and exposure could do strange things to men. Hiram cleaned up his instruments, decided against working on Cobb tonight. The oil stove in the corner was chugging away, yet he felt cold. Worse, his skin actually seemed to be crawling in turgid waves. He wanted out of the mortuary in a bad way and was not sure why.

  He paused, a droplet of sweat coursing down the hill of his cheek.

  There was something, something.

  He could not hear anything, but…he turned around, staring at the casket. He stood there, watching it, his brain filled with cryptic thoughts. It was ridiculous…but he had the unnerving sensation that he was being watched, studied, stared at.

  Children peeking in?

  No, it was too late and the shades were drawn. Carefully, slowly, he went to the windows, peered around the shades. The dirt street outside was empty. He could see the town stretching out in the distance? clustered roofs climbing the hills and dipping into hollows. He could hear the wind skirting the lonesome spaces. Hear a wagon somewhere in the distance. The sound of voices over towards saloon-row. The ever-present rumble of mine machinery.

  But no one looking in, watching him.

  The shadows seemed to be growing longer in the mortuary, spilling out from crevices and cracks and crannies, tangling like mating snakes across the floor. The lanterns still burned bright, yet everything seemed oddly murky.

  Eyes watching me.

  Imagination?

  Hiram had no use for superstition. He would have no truck with it. Yet, something in him was alive and electric and concerned, afraid maybe. He walked across the room to the casket. Licking his lips, he ran his hands over the roughhewn cedar, fingering nail holes and splintered knots.

  Eyes staring at me.

  That body in there…James Lee Cobb…Hiram began to wonder about it as something inexplicable began to take hold of him, but so gently he was not even aware of it. All he could think about was the body in the box, body in the box. Cobb had died up in Skull Valley, they said. His injun friends had bought him a casket, paid for him to be shipped back to Whisper Lake.

  Now why would injuns do that for a white man?

  Hiram wiped sweat from his brow. He knew there was a reason, but he couldn’t seem to remember what it was. Cobb had come home to the only kin he had. Sure. Had a half-brother over in Deliverance, the Mormon settlement just west of Whisper Lake. That’s why Cobb was sent. The half-brother was going to pick up the box day after next, he said.

  Hiram’s hands were trembling now.

  He mopped more sweat from his brow, thought: What the hell is wrong with me?

  He couldn’t seem to think straight. His brain was filled with wild, leaping thoughts that could not be strung to together into anything reasonable. There was a tenseness behind his eyes. Perspiration was beading his face, pooling under his eyes, streaming down his jowls. A few droplets struck the surface of the box. Plop, plop.

  For one irrational moment, Hiram thought it was blood.

  Yes, like a sacrifice. A blood sacrifice offered up to some malefic pagan god. Blood. Burnt offerings. A tribute of blood and flesh and burned entrails. Atonement. Expiation. Some gods demanded these things, they-

  Hiram began to whimper, tears mixing with sweat.

  Eyes that won’t shut, won’t die, won’t stop staring.

  He stumbled over to the tool bench, found a small crowbar.

  Standing over the casket, he looked upwards, seeing only the stained tiles of the ceiling, but maybe hoping for some divine intervention from God. From the Lord Jesus Christ even though Hiram did not believe in him or anything else. Regardless, something had hold of Hiram now and his thoughts were a jumble and his brain a buzzing hive of wasps. His eyes were wide and unblinking, tears bled away, taking his sanity with them. His lips moved, but no sounds came out.

  Blood offering.

  Watching me.

  Frantically, he began pulling the nails from the box, ripping them from the cheap plank coffin. One after the other until he was panting and wheezing and his heart was pounding and his temples throbbing. He broke the remaining brass band and it clattered to the floor along with the crowbar.

  The eyes are watching me.

  He tore the lid from the box and let it drop away. Then he was looking inside the box and seeing he did not know what. A body in a black burial suit, yes, but wrong, all wrong. Too many shadows crawling and slinking and shifting and maybe not shadows but the body itself.

  Hiram’s heart thudded dully, his breath was locked in his lungs.

  Something in him shattered like white ice and he saw the eye. A single green eye, wide open and staring. Like a silver coin, it shined and glimmered, reflecting a burning light that got inside Hiram’s head.

  Then there was a scalpel in his hand and he held his left wrist out.

  Blood offering. Expiation.

  He slit his wrist, dark arterial blood streaming into the box in loops and spirals. Something in there moved and rustled.

  “ God help me…” Hiram’s voice echoed from another room.

  And a single rawboned, fleshless hand snaked from that pit of conspiring shadows and took him by throat.

  It was like the hand of God.

  5

  Early the next morning, Caleb Callister found his brother’s body.

  It had been stuffed in the casket, white and bloodless and shrunken. Caleb did not cry out or go into theatrics. He summoned the coroner quite calmly for he was a man used to death in all its unpleasant forms.

  The coroner came and gave his verdict of suicide.

  An odd suicide at that. Hiram, for reasons unknown, had slit first his left wrist, then his right. Then he had climbed into the box. The scalpel was still locked in his fist. The box had contained the body of James Lee Cobb. But as to where that body had gotten to, no one could guess.

  Suicide, then.

  The only thing that concerned the coroner were the bruises at the throat, the crushed windpipe. But he was willing to overlook this on account he had no viable explanation and Caleb was not interested in pursuing it.

  Let the dead rest, Caleb told him.

  Forever Amen.

  Part Two: Gone to Hell

  1

  Seven Months Later…

  The black sky unbuttoned itself like a corset, spilling cold, freezing rain by buckets that found the wind, joined with it, becoming a raging, angry thing that pounded the landscape, lashing and whipping and driving anything with blood in its veins to cover. Dusty, sun-cracked soil became mud. Mud became swamp. Swamp became rivers and creeks that overflowed their banks and sank the world.

  Two hours after sunset, the water began to freeze and the rain became snow and the San Francisco Mountains were sculpted in ice. Through the maelstrom came a lone rider trotting through muck and snow and freezing rain.

  His name was Tyler Cabe and he was a bounty hunter.

  A yellow slicker wrapped around him like a wet, flapping skin, Cabe rode into Whisper Lake. He couldn’t see much of the town through the snow that became pelting rain and then snow again, but was simply glad to be anywhere. Anywhere he could find warmth and hot food.

  He brought his strawberry roan to a gallop and stabled it at the first livery he found. Stowed his saddlebags and guns. Then he crossed the muddy, sucking streets and fell through the door of a tent-roofed saloon called the Oasis. Inside, the floor was covered in sawdust. There was a bar and tables with pine benches pulled up to them. A woodstove in the corner belched greasy fumes that mixed with tobacco smoke, cheap cologne, and body odor. A dozen worn, beaten-looking men slouched over beers and whiskey. A lone gambler played solitaire in the corner.

  Whisper Lak
e was a company town, Cabe knew. These men and everything around them would either belong to the company or exist through its permission.

  Cabe shook the rain off his flat-brimmed Stetson with the rattlesnake skin band, pulled off his slicker and hung them both from a hook near the woodstove. Dressed in striped pants, high-shafted boots, and a black frock coat, he found himself a stool at the bar, studying the oil painting above the bar which showed some fleshy jezebel displaying her charms. He saw himself in the mirror-the scars across his bony face, the sharp green eyes peering from narrow draws.

  “ Thirsty, friend?”

  Cabe looked over at the bartender, a heavy-set man with a neck thick as an old cottonwood stump. His nose was flattened, eyes peering out from puffy pads of flesh. He had the look of a barefisted fighter about him.

  “ Yeah,” Cabe said. “Damn if I ain’t.”

  “ Beer? Whiskey? Got some rye if it’s to your taste.”

  Cabe shook his head. “No, nothing like that. Need something that’ll warm me up. I’m not sure if that’s a dick between my legs or an icicle.”

  The bartender laughed. “Frank Carny,” he said.

  Cabe introduced himself. “You fight?” he asked.

  “ Once,” Carny said. “Years back.”

  “ Do any good?”

  “ Held my own. Can’t see outta my left eye no more, too many hits. A wise man does something other with his head than use it for a punching bag.”

  Cabe nodded at that, made good sense.

  One of the miners at the bar laughed. “Where you from?”

  “ Been riding all day,” Cabe said. “From Nevada. Was starting to think I just wouldn’t make it.”

  “ Helluva day for a ride,” the miner said. He turned to the bartender. “Make him something special, Frank.”

  Carny grinned. “Ever had a Brigham Young?”

  Cabe just looked at him. “A what?”