Skin Medicine

by Tim Curran

  “ 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.

  If Cobb concentrated real hard, he could even make it speak.

  When he was done stuffing his sausages, whistling some old Indian deathsong he’d never once heard in his life, he nibbled on a little finger food he’d boiled from the bones below. One of Gleer’s legs was spitted and roasting over the fire, carefully seasoned. It was getting nice and brown, gobs of fat dropping from it and sizzling in the flames beneath. The meaty, rich smell filled the cabin and went up the flue.

  Cobb knew the meat-smell would bring the others home.

  They wouldn’t have a choice.

  And he would welcome them, surely. He figured two more kills and he’d have more than enough meat to put up until spring, if he practiced a little conservation, that was. Avoided his usual gluttony. But he was no savage. He would invite both Barlow and Noonlan to break bread at his table. He’d give ‘em both a good meal before putting them to the knife.

  It was the Christian thing to do.

  So Cobb nibbled and waited, a curious light flickering in his eyes.

  He remembered the night he’d crept back up to the cave, something in him telling him it was the right thing to do. That what was in there, what was hiding in the cracks and crevices and maybe the bones, too, was the very reason he had come. Not gold. But… it. Whatever in the hell it was. The very thing them injuns had cut from the ground. He could remember it started with that gassy smell. A foul, yellow odor it was, a terrible sweet smell of unburied corpses and miasmic tombs.

  It had touched him.

  Physically touched him.

  In his head? as it held him tightly, nursed him against its breast like an infant? it had told him what to do. How long it had waited for him. How it was he could survive if he could simply overcome certain social taboos, that was.

  But Cobb would not listen, would not.

  He’d been thinking along those lines, but he wasn’t ready just yet.

  And the thing had pressed him into itself, squeezed him so that he thought his bones would come busting out of his mouth. It told him there was no other way. If he wanted power…and he did want that, didn’t he? Then there was only one way to have mastery over men. Same way you had mastery over animals? by eating them. Devouring the flesh and absorbing all that they were and could be.

  This, it said, was the path to invincibility and immortality.

  But Cobb just was not sure, so the thing sweetened it a bit for him. It talked to him like an old friend. It didn’t try to intimidate or terrify him, it just talked in a natural, easy rhythm. And, funny thing, it had a deep Southern accent, a hellbilly accent just like his kin from the Missouri Ozarks.

  Well, at least it seemed that way…but maybe it was just a breathing gray sibilance forming words in his head.

  Now, let me tell ye something, Jimmy Lee. Jus’ mind me and listen, hear? Shet up now, this here’s important. Once upon a time, there was these injuns what lived up here in these hills. Just yer ordinary savages, I reckon. They was some shirttail kin of the Shoshoni called themselves the Macabro. Well, cousin, these Macabros, they started tunnelin’ in the earth like worms into pork…well, sir, weren’t long before they dug somethin’ up, somethin’ mebbe they weren’t a-supposed to find at all. It jumped up, said hello and how you be, and rode down hard on them savages like Christ come to preach. Now this thing here, it crawled into their skins. Ran roughshod all over the tribe like Yankees marching through Georgia. I shit you not. Ye remember them bad things what were supposed to live down in them hollers back home in Missourah? Yessum. This thing, it was like that. Now, it weren’t exactly neighborly, this critter. It got into them injuns deep. Sure as Christ was hammered to the cross, the Macabro belonged to this thing.

  Now, cousin, lemme tell ye how it were fer them.

  These injuns, they took to etin’ human flesh and what not, sacrificin’ their firstborn and all. The shaman would et the little shitters raw and wrigglin’. Yep, their own children, that’s what I said. But adults, too. Jus’ about anyone. And virgins…heh, that sumbitch what out of the ground, he was real sweet on maidens, see. Now, the Macabro were always fighting one tribe or another. When they caught some, they’d make burnt offerings of their enemies, nail ‘em upside down to poles and sometimes put ‘em to the flame and sometimes jus’ left ‘em there to rot to bone.

  Now wait, son, keep yer Henry in yer pants…yep, there’s more. See, these Macabro…they started digging up their dead and the dead of anyone they could find, yessum. Started worshipping bones and skulls. Made altars of ‘em and doin’ things with the dead uns ye just don’t want to think about. They was jus’ real soft in the heads, this bunch.

  Now these shaman, priests? whichever ye want to call them baby-rapin’ devils? they was quite a bunch. They called all the shots. Sumbitches didn’t cotton to bathin’ no how. A filthy lot what jumped and hopped about in their cloaks of baby-skins, snakes just a-twisting in their long filthy hair. They sang them profane songs and wore skull masks and chattered their teeth what were filed to points to rend and tear, ye see. These shaman, they controlled everything. Their bodies were tattooed with snakes and symbols and witch-sign, what they called the Skin-Medicine. Some sort of conjurin’ and magical formula written right on their skins. It was said that with this Skin-Medicine, them heathen devils could control the spirits of the dead and change themselves into man-eating beasts jus’ any old time the need struck ‘em. Now on nights of the full moon, the Macabro priests would light big fires and them injuns would dance naked in the snow while the priests read from their own skins. Injuns what had been captured from other tribes would be slaughtered, their flesh eaten, and the snow would just stain red with their blood. And if the Macabro could get some of those injun’s young-uns, well, a regular party they’d have chompin’ up that fine, fat squib.

  Well, cousin, ye get the picture.

  These injuns was mad, yessum, but they had it half-right about etin’ other peoples to absorb all they had. Now the Macabro, they was all wiped out by the Ute two-hundred year ago, but what ye found in the cave, yes sir, that was their legacy. See, the Ute herded them Macabros what weren’t killed outright and all the dead uns up into that cave, burnt ‘em up alive, seeded their bones in them pits. Yessum, the cave. It was fitting, I reckon, in that the cave is where a lot of that pagan sacrificin’ went on.

  And now, Jimmy-boy, ye understand? Do ye? Do ye?

  Cobb didn’t remember much after that.

  Just that he wasn’t quite the same. Sometimes he was himself and sometimes part of the thing that had impregnated his mother and sometimes part of that rabid hillbilly out of the cave. Sometimes they were all just one mind. Th
e next day and all the days after, Cobb just waited and plotted the getting of skin and meat and bone.

  And that’s how it all came about.

  Cobb, a chunk of finger meat packed in his cheek, went over and turned Gleer’s leg on the spit. He poked it with a fork and the juice ran free and clear, telling him it was done. His belly was rumbling at the nauseating stench.

  Just then, he heard movement outside the cabin.

  He grinned, his eyes flashing with hellfire. It was Barlow and Noolan being real quiet and stealthy, sneaking about like red savages. They were doing a good job of it, too, but Cobb heard them. The sound of their boots breaking the crust of snow. The roar of the blood in their veins, the throb of their hearts. And mostly, yes mostly, he could smell their fear and to him it was like freshly uncorked brandy.

  Cobb went about setting the table.

  His back to the door, they came bursting in, the both of them. They held pistols on him and they were both shaking from the cold, their faces pinched and mottled and edged with fear.

  “ You’re crazy, Cobb, you sick sonofabitch,” Barlow said. “Now real careful like, I want you to take that pistol out of your belt…with your left hand. Real slow now, let it drop to the floor…”

  But Cobb just giggled. “Ye stop with that talk, friend. I’m just a-setting the table here. I want the both of you to sit with me and have a fine meal. Ye know ye want to, so why fight it? We’ll have us some eats and discuss this like men.”

  Barlow and Noolan just stood there, not sure what to do. Cobb was insane, sure, but why was he so damn calm? What was that funny light reflected in his eyes? There was something very wrong about all this and it wasn’t just the cannibalism either.

  “ We better just shoot him,” Noolan said.

  “ That wouldn’t be very neighborly, cousin,” Cobb said.

  “ See? See? He’s crazy! Watch him now, watch him real careful, because James Lee Cobb he’s right fast with that Colt,” Noolan was saying. “He can pull it so fast you-”