Skin Medicine

by Tim Curran

  But even this was no easy matter.

  Though heaped with kindling and engulfed with flame, she would not die. She burned for hours…burned, blackened, crisped and curled, but refusing to die. She called out curses upon all present. The wagon wheel finally collapsed under her and the roasted, charred thing she became continued to shriek and wail and scream.

  It was dragged from the coals with billhooks and twined tight with rope and chains. The Magistrates had it placed back in the stockade where it continued to howl and screech and profane all things holy. The cremated cadaver lived for days…until enraged locals dragged it out into the light and hacked it to bits with axes. Then it finally died. The pieces were buried in separate locations and the evil was at an end…or not quite.

  For the demons that possessed the three girls did not vacate; they clung all that much tighter. They would not leave until their spawn was birthed.

  ***

  Three months into their pregnancies…and scarce days since the destruction of the witch…the girls seemed to be ready to deliver…their bellies huge and round, their birth canals dilated. They had become wasted, skeletal things that gave off a pungent stink of carrion.

  And so, they gave birth.

  Clarice Ebers and Sarah Rice were first.

  The labor pains were so intense, each fell unconscious. Copious amounts of blood and black bile drained from Sarah Rice’s vagina and she-a staring, sightless creature whose greasy flesh barely contained the skeleton beneath-ruptured. Or at least, it seemed that way. Dr. Lewyn used every trick he knew, but both child and mother perished in a sea of red. Later, he would-with the family’s consent-investigate matters more fully and discover that Sarah had ruptured because her child had teeth. A full set of teeth oddly sharp and long. And with these teeth, the child-a white, limbless horror with huge, lidless black eyes-had bitten its mother to death from inside, severing arteries in the process.

  Dr. Lewyn decided wisely to keep this from the family…this and the fact that the child had not only bitten its mother, but had cannibalized her. Digesting no small amount of tissue in the process. He also kept secret the fact that Sarah’s child was not dead when he opened her up with a scalpel. That the grotesque little monster was living on inside its dead mother, feeding on her like some hellish prenatal ghoul. That when he pulled it from her cleaved open abdomen…an armless, squirming grub that had more in common with a maggot than a human being…he had to tear it free, for it hung tenaciously to its mother’s tissues by its teeth.

  Lewyn dumped it in a bucket and poured acid on it, upon which, it dissolved like a salted slug.

  Long before her child came into the world, Clarice Ebers lost her mind with the agony, if there was any mind left by that point. She cried out in the voice of Elizabeth Hagen, thrashed and fought and finally passed out. What she birthed into the world was a crawling thing, blistered and scorched. Like something that had been burned alive. Wisps of smoke wafted from its incinerated flesh and it, as it died, scratched a black, inverted cross into the stained bedsheets with one withered finger.

  Clarice died moments later, her insides scalded.

  The child was buried in Heretic’s Field, Clarice and Sarah entombed side by side in a Christian grave.

  Marilynn Hope, however, lasted another month. Her child, when born in the winter of 1824, was healthy and normal in every possible way. A boy. The only irregularity was a birthmark on his back in the form of a tiny, four-fingered hand. But he was considered by townsfolk to be cursed, the progeny of unholy union. So Minister Hope sent his deranged daughter and her son to live with kin in Missouri where they could be sheltered from the world.

  He named his grandson James Lee.

  In Missouri he would take the family name of relations: Cobb.

  3

  Until James Lee’s third year up in the Ozarks in Taney County, Missouri, the same ritual was repeated on a weekly basis. When Uncle Arlen returned from the lumber camps or the lead mine he sometimes found regular work at, he would take Marilynn Hope from the attic loft she was sequestered in and drag her bodily down to Bryant Creek. Along with James Lee’s Auntie Maretta, they would read from the Book of Common Prayer as Marilynn alternately whimpered and growled like an animal.

  Though James Lee grew strong in the simple ways of hill folk, the taint on his mother never lessened. She was a filthy, mad thing dressed in rags with wild, glistening marbles for eyes. Uncle Arlen kept her tied up in the loft where she ate insects and shit herself, whispering to those no one else could see and scratching odd symbols and words into the roughhewn walls with her long yellow nails.

  But once a week…purification.

  James Lee would sit in the dirt, scratching around with a stick, watching with disinterest what they did with the crazy woman. Uncle Arlen and Auntie Maretta would drag her out with a rope looped around her throat. They’d strip her and toss her into the creek, jumping in with her. Taking turns, one would read from the prayer book and the other would dunk Marilynn into the water, holding her under until she quit thrashing. Uncle Arlen said it would drive the demons from her through baptismal in “Christ’s very waters”.

  James Lee had seen it done many, many times, but it had not helped. Though at three years of age he could not understand nor fathom what it was all about, he knew whatever it was they were doing didn’t work. Dunk her, preach to her, dunk her some more, preach some more. He decided it was probably a game…but one only the adults could play. Because whenever he tried to edge closer, wanting badly to splash in the water, too, Uncle Arlen told him to keep away, keep away, hear?

  But after three years of proper baptizing and the Lord’s word, Marilynn was no better. So Uncle Arlen imprisoned her in a shack in the hills above the cabin so they wouldn’t have to listen to “that heathen madness no more”. James Lee wasn’t allowed to go up there. Uncle Arlen and Auntie Maretta took care of the crazy woman’s needs-feeding and watering her like any of the stock on that hardscrabble farm.

  It was a hard life up in the Ozarks, miles and miles from anywhere that might have been considered even remotely civilized. James Lee attended a ramshackle school over in the next hollow yonder, learned to read and write. The other children kept their distance, for they knew he was the son of the woman up in the shack, the woman everyone knew was “teched in the head”. The kids said-but only behind James Lee’s back for even as a schoolboy he had a virulent, raging temper-that the crazy woman ate rats and snakes and toads. That she had two heads, one she gibbered with and one she ate with. But maybe, too, they kept away from James Lee because they could smell something on him, something bad.

  So he clung to the Cobb farm, slopping hogs and cleaning pens and picking rocks and chopping wood. He took great, unsavory relish in watching Uncle Arlen put chickens to the hatchet. Liked how their blood spurted from their necks and how, even when dead, they seemed to live on.

  “ Can folks do that, Uncle?” he asked one day. “Even if they’s all dead?”

  Uncle Arlen made to swat at him as he often did, but held his hand back, fixed him with those fierce, unforgiving eyes. “Boy…that is, folks is dead they’s jus’ dead is all, they cain’t walk about and such and if’n they do…” He stopped himself there, scratched at his beard. “Well, they cain’t boy. They jus’ cain’t.”

  “ But-”

  “ Ain’t no buts, boy! No back to work with ye! Mind me, boy!”

  And the years passed and James Lee got bigger and the children gave him a wider birth except for Rawley Cummings who took it upon himself to tell James Lee that he was no better than the crazy woman in the shack yonder. That, given time, he would drink piss and rut with hogs, too. It was a given. James Lee…though three years younger…jumped the boy like a mountain cat with a thorn digging into its ass. He kicked and punched, bit and clawed. It took four boys to pull him free. Schoolmaster Parnes gave him a good thrashing for that one and Uncle Arlen beat him so hard he closed both his eyes.

  To which Auntie Maretta
said, “Not m’ boy, not m’ sweet little angel Jimmy Lee…don’t ye lay a hand on him! Don’t ye dare lay a hand on him!”

  So Uncle Arlen ceased beating him and took the hickory switch to his wife instead. But that got it out of him. Like other times when he got heavy with his fists, he went up into the hills to do some drinking. When he came back, he was better.

  The Devil was purged.

  ***

  One night, when they thought he was sleeping, James Lee heard them talking by the stove in hushed voices.

  “ Don’t never wan’ that boy finding out, hear?” Uncle Arlen said in his gravelly voice. “Don’t need to know that woman’s his mother.”

  “ Never ever,” Auntie Maretta told him. “Why, Jimmy Lee…he’s m’ boy, m’ big and proud boy. He ain’t like her, cain’t ye see? He’s like m’ own flesh.”

  “ He ain’t though, woman,” Uncle Arlen pointed out. “Place he comes from…well things jus’ ain’t right there. Ain’t proper.”

  Auntie Maretta chewed on that for a time, decided she didn’t like the taste and spit it right back out. “He’s more mine than he is hers. Don’t ye see? Lord above, sometimes I wish she’d up and expire.”

  “ Woman, now she’s kin.”

  “ Y’all wish it, too, Arlen Cobb.”

  “ In a weaker moment, yessum. But, hell, ain’t happenin’…she’s up in the shack doin’ what she does and livin’ on…how can that be, woman? How can that be? Don’t even freeze to death proper in the winter…now how is that?”

  But Auntie Maretta didn’t know. “Hexed, is all.”

  “ I jus’ worry about that boy…he carries the taint on him and ye know it. What’s in her is in him. Blood’ll tell and it’ll tell every time. Cousin Marilynn ain’t scarcely human, I figure. That whole brood is cursed…Jesus, lookit her old man, kilt himself and what! And him a preacher.”

  “ Easterners,” Auntie Maretta said. “They ain’t right in the head.”

  “ Neither is that boy…he likes blood and killin’ too much. Like his mama, he carries the taint on his soul…”

  James Lee was thirteen when he heard that.

  But it hadn’t been the first time.

  He didn’t know all the story, but he knew enough by then to put some of it together. That crazy woman was his mother and they had come from back east, from some awful place of witches and tainted heredity and things too awful to put into words. At night, he’d lay there and think on it and think on it some more. One way or another, come hell or high water, he was going to learn what it was all about. He figured his first step was to climb up into the hills and get a look at… at his mother. He was banned from going up there, but maybe knowledge was worth a good beating.

  The very next winter he got his chance.

  A bad blizzard had set its teeth into the Ozarks and snow was drifted up near the windows which were locked tight with patterns of frost. Rags had been stuffed in the cracks to keep the wind out, but there was still a chill in the cabin. A chill that set upon you like something hungry if you strayed too far from the fire. James Lee was sitting before it, working out some arithmetic problems by candlelight. His Uncle and Auntie sat at the hardwood table, him with his pipe and her with her knitting.

  Whenever Auntie Maretta caught his eyes, she’d give him a sly, secretive smile that spoke of love and trust and faith. A look that said, yer a good boy and I knows it.

  Whenever Uncle Arlen caught his eyes, he gave him a hard, withering look that simply said, mind yer schoolwork, boy, and quiet yer damn daydreaming.

  So James Lee sat there on the floor, scribbling.

  The cabin was a log affair with a plank floor and smoke-blackened beams crisscrossing above. There was a sheltered loft, but it wasn’t used now that Marilynn was up in the old shack. A cast iron stove sat in the corner, fire in its belly. Two cauldrons filled with boiling water bubbled on its surface. The air smelled of wood smoke, burned fat, and maple syrup. While Auntie Maretta busied herself washing up the dinner dishes-blue speckled plates and tin cups? Uncle Arlen cleared his throat. Cleared it the way he did when he was about to finally speak what was on his mind.

  “ Boy,” he said. “Ye up to an errand? Ye up to bravin’ the snow and night?”

  James Lee slapped his book shut, never so ready. “Yessum, Uncle.”

  “ Aw right, listen here now. Want ye to go out to the smokehouse. Them hams in there is cured and ready. Take one of ‘em and not the big one, mind, wrap it up tight in a po-tater sack, bring it up to Miss Leevy up yonder on the high road.” He packed his clay pipe with rough-cut tobacco. “Now, she been good t’ us and we gonna be good t’ her. She’s up in years. Ye think ye can handle that?”

  “ Yessum.”

  “ Off wit ye then.”

  It was bitter cold out there, the snow whipping and whistling around the cabin, but James Lee knew he could do it, all right. Out past the sap-house, he dug snow away from the smokehouse door and packaged up the ham. Then he marched straight through the drifts and shrieking wind up onto the road and fought his way up to Miss Leevy’s. She took the ham and made James Lee drink some chamomile tea brightened with ‘shine.

  On his way back, he cut through the woods.

  He knew where he was going.

  He knew what he had to see.

  Sheets of snow fell from the pines overhead and the air was kissed with ice. His breath frosted from his lips and the night created crazy, jumping shadows that ringed him tight. But the ‘shine had lit a fire in his belly and he felt the equal of anything. He carried an oil lamp with him, lighting it only when he made out the dim hulk of the shack.

  The forbidden shack.

  Sucking cold air into his lungs and filling his guts with iron, he made his way over there. He stood outside in the snow, thinking how it wasn’t too late to turn back, wasn’t too late at all. But then his hand was out of its mitten and his fingers were throwing the bolt, just throwing it aside fancy as you please.

  First thing he heard was a rattling, dragging sound…as of chains.

  Then something like a harsh breathing…but so very harsh it was like fireplace bellows sucking up ash.

  It stayed his hand, but not for long. Good and goddammit, James Lee Cobb, a voice echoed in his skull, this is what ye wanted, weren’t it? To know? To see? To look the worse possible thing right in the face and not dare look away? Weren’t it? Well, weren’t it?

  It was.

  Those chains…or whatever they were…rattled again and there was a rustling sound. James Lee pulled the door open, but slowly, slowly, figuring his mind needed time to adjust. Like slipping into a chill spring lake, you had to do it by degrees. The door swung open and a hot, reeking blast of fetid air hit him full in the face. It stank like wormy meat simmering on a stove lid. His knees went to rubber and something in him-maybe courage-just shriveled right up.

  In the flickering lantern light he saw.

  He saw his mother quite plainly.

  She was chained to the floor, pulling herself away from the light like some gigantic worm. Her flesh had gone marble-white and was damp and glistening like the flesh of a mushroom. Great sores and ulcers were set into her and some had eaten right to the bone beneath. It was hard to say if she was wearing rags or that was just her skin hanging in loops and ragged folds. Her hair was steel-gray and stringy, those eyes just fathomless holes torn into the vellum of her face.

  But what struck James Lee the hardest was not the eyes or the stink or even the feces and filthy straw and tiny animal bones scattered about…it was that she seemed to have tentacles. Just like one of them sea monsters in a picture book that ate ships raw. Long, yellow things all curled and coiled like clocksprings.

  But then…he realized they were her fingernails.

  And they had to be well over two feet in length…hard, bony growths that came out of her fingertips and laid over her like corkscrewed snakes.

  James Lee made a sound…he wasn’t sure what…and she opened those flaking lips,
revealing gray decayed teeth that sprouted from pitted gums like grayed fence posts. She made a grunting, squealing sound like a hog. And then she reached out to him, seemed to know him, and those fingernails clattered together like castanets.

  That’s when he slammed the door shut.

  That’s when he threw the bolt.

  And that’s when he ran down through the snow and brambles, ducking past dead oaks and vaulting fallen logs. He ran all the way to the cabin and stumbled and fell into the door. Then Uncle Arlen threw it open, yanking him inside, into that mouth of warmth and security, demanding to know what it was, what it was.

  But James Lee could not tell.

  ***

  The Ozarks back then had a fine story-telling tradition. Sometimes a man’s worth was judged on how hard he worked and how good of a yarn he could spin. So James Lee was no stranger to tales of ghosts and haunts, child-eating ogres that lived in the depths of the forests or blood-sucking devil clans that peopled secret hollows. For everything scarcely understood or completely misunderstood, there was a story to explain it. It was a region where folktale and myth were an inseparable part of everyday life. There were faith healers and power doctors, water witches and yarb grannies…you name it, it showed sooner or later.

  And one thing the Ozarks never had a shortage of were witches.

  Some good, some evil, some real and some storied, regardless, they were there. Ask just about anyone in any locality of the hills and they could tell you where to find one…or point you to someone who could.

  The kids at school told of an old man named Heller the Witch-Man who lived up in some misty hollow that few dared venture to. He could cast out devils and call them up, cure disease and make hair grow.