Skin Medicine

by Tim Curran

  “ Drop that gun on the floor,” Barlow said.

  Cobb sighed, shrugged, went for the gun with his right hand. And actually cleared leather before two bullets ripped through his belly. But all that did was make him laugh as his blood dripped to the floor. He dipped one finger into the hole in his buckskin shirt like a quill into an inkwell. He pulled it back out, licked the tip. His face was narrow and pallid, real tight like a skull wearing skin, his eyes lit like glowworms.

  But he had his Colt out and, barking a short laugh, put a slug right between Barlow’s eyes, dropping him dead in the doorway.

  “ Now,” he said to Noolan. “Why don’t ye join me for supper? What’s say?”

  The pistol dropped from Noolan’s fingers and he started to whimper. Whatever was in Cobb’s eyes had him tight. He stumbled over to the table, his own eyes wide and unblinking and filled with tears. He sat down and watched dumbly as Cobb pulled the leg off the spit and began to carve it up.

  Then he began to eat.

  His fork jabbing and his teeth chewing and his throat swallowing, his mind gone to a formless putty. He ate and ate while Cobb watched him, all the while holding Gleer’s head by the hair. And the real bad thing was that Gleer was speaking, that white furrowed face was speaking. The eyes were rolling in his head and that black tongue was licking his lips. Cobb asked him questions and he answered in a dry, whistling voice, telling Gleer exactly what it was like down in that black pit of death and how Noolan’s kin were all down there burning with him.

  Sometime later, Gleer’s head screaming and the cabin filled with chanting injun voices, Cobb slit Noolan’s throat and dressed him out.

  ***

  In the Spring, Cobb came down from the mountains on foot, his parfleche still packed with dried human jerky. His travels after that were unknown for the most part. What is known is that he assembled a crew of blooded killers with similar leanings and tastes as his own. That they accompanied him back to Missouri where there was something he needed to collect. And sometime later he made for the Shoshoni peoples. Knowing he had something in common with them now.

  And somewhere along the way, he heard about a Snake medicine man called Spirit Moon.

  Part Four:

  The Good, the Damned, and the Deranged

  1

  Whisper Lake by daylight.

  It was afternoon by the time Tyler Cabe rolled out of bed and even later by the time he stepped out onto the streets, his brain still reeling with the sight of the murdered prostitute. He stood before the St. James Hostelry, breathing in the air which, although not cold as the night before, was kissed by a chill blowing down from the mountains.

  He hadn’t even been in Whisper Lake a full twenty-four hours yet. It was hard to believe. He thought of the crazy hillbilly Orville DuChien. Jackson Dirker. The crazy tales that bartender-Carny-at the Oasis had told him about the local animal attacks. The Texas Ranger, Henry Freeman. Sir Tom English. Virgil Clay laying dead in a pool of his own blood. The jail and Charles Graybrow. And, yes, Mizzy Modine.

  It all came together in his brain and made his head ache.

  He lit a cigarette and wondered what would come next.

  Licking his lips then, he made his way down the muddy, rutted street, taking in the town an inch at a time. It was his first real look at it. Whisper Lake was like other mining camps he had ridden through: a congested, dirty mess of humanity.

  High above town, clinging to the rises and mist-cloaked slopes were the looming steel headframes and drum hoists of the mines themselves, the outcroppings of assorted buildings and sheds that rose up around them. There was a constant thundering and booming and clanking from up there, as the earth was gutted of silver. Ore wagons made the run continually from the chutes to the looming refineries down by the lake itself…you could see the gray, toxic smoke that belched from the stacks and fell back to earth, dusting everything in filth.

  It looked oddly as if the town itself had once been part of the mine systems above and had slowly slid down the muddy inclines to its present position.

  It was laid out with no plan or pattern, just a haphazard collection of log buildings and false-corniced stores, tents and shanties, brush huts and wooden shacks cut through by a maze of intersecting dirt roads that dipped into little hollows and climbed up low hills. There were a few brick buildings and an elaborate system of board sidewalks. Just a crazy-quilt of hotels and boarding houses, assay offices and saloons, brothels and churches, liveries and lumber yards with a Union Pacific railroad spur winding around the northern end.

  Everything from privy to meat market was darkened with soot from the mines and refineries.

  The roads were filled with horses and wagons, prospectors and business-owners, immigrants pushing carts and dirty children chasing balls with sticks. Cabe saw ladies with parasols clustered in whispering groups and whores in their petticoats emptying chamber pots into the streets. The ground rumbled from the industry of the mines above and voices chattered and people shouted and bodies threaded in every which direction. Unlike other frontier towns, you saw very few people lounging about. Everything was business and money and there was no time for loafing.

  Cabe, his boots plastered with mud up to the shafts, stepped up onto the boardwalk, then stepped back down again as a trio of elderly ladies passed. He touched the brim of his hat to them. A freight wagon and team roared past him, nearly running down a group of black-faced miners, and splashed dirty water over his pants. A group of men fought to push a buckboard that was buried to the axle in a muddy hole. The batwings of a saloon flew open and a drunken man stumbled out, leaned over the hitching rail and vomited out coils of foam. Dark-clad foreigners gesticulated and mumbled in a dozen different dialects. Indians in blanket robes stood around, watching the ruin of their land.

  Cabe kept walking, weaving through groups of miners and laborers, trying to find a place where he could get away from all the noise and activity. But everywhere he turned, every alleyway and street, was crowded with more people and more wagons and more industry.

  Dear Christ, he thought, maybe Dirker was right…there’s just too many people here, I’ll never find the Strangler in this piss-pot.

  But he wasn’t about to give up.

  He would crawl into every crack and alcove of this seething, pulsing hive if he had to.

  But he was going to run the Sin City Strangler to ground.

  2

  Jackson Dirker, looking decidedly pale, said, “I’ve seen atrocities, Doc, I’ve seen true horrors…but this, something like this, I can’t begin to even understand it.”

  Dr. Benjamin West, a Whisper Lake surgeon and the Beaver County coroner, just nodded. He was a tall, reed-thin man in a charcoal suit with a gold watch chain that flashed in the sunlight like a winking eye. He clutched his derby hat to his chest and ran long, delicate fingers through his sparse white hair. A cord jumped in his throat.

  “ Although I’m a man of science,” he finally said. “I would think the Devil rode through here in a black mood.”

  Dirker did not disagree with that.

  They were standing outside the general store that had served as not only the market, but saloon and gambling house in the placer camp of Sunrise. They stood outside the double doors, looking and looking, and seeing and wishing they were blind. Because what they saw in Sunrise was permanently burned into their vision like a sudden, hurting arc of light.

  Dirker was studying what was on the door.

  A man with an eagle tattooed on his back had been skinned completely, his hide nailed there in one piece. No less than three heads hung over the entrance like ghastly lanterns. Copper wire had been jabbed into their ears and looped to nails above. The faces were splattered with dried blood, blanched eyes staring dumbly. The head on the left looked like it was about to say something.

  Doc West waved a few flies from it. Though the wind had a bite to it, the sunshine was heating things up. Bringing the bugs and the ever-present reek of bacterial decay. “I�
�m guessing that these heads,” he said, “were not cut off as with a hatchet or knife, but actually ripped from their bodies.”

  Dirker had already figured that.

  At the stump of the necks there was a great deal of tissue and vertebrae hanging out like party confetti. No clean slice was evident. Someone…or something…had the strength to actually pull a man’s head from his body. Dirker didn’t like to jump to fantastic conclusions like that, but what else was he to think? The evidence spoke volumes.

  Sighing, as used to the carnage now as he would ever get, he looked over the shacks and weathered buildings that had made up Sunrise in its heyday before the veins of gold had played out. It looked like a cemetery to him…the gray, windowless structures very much like tombstones in some lonesome, windy graveyard. The mountains brooding above looked down silently like mourners.

  A miner named Jim Tomlinson had ridden down from the high country to provision at the store and found the massacre. He was so overwrought by the time he made it to Whisper Lake, Doc West had to shoot some morphine into him to get anything sensible out of him. An hour later, Dirker, West, and two deputies-Henry Wilcox and Pete Slade-made it up to Sunrise.

  Henry Wilcox-a man who’d seen his fair share of blood and guts-took one look at what was in the store and promptly ran outside to vomit. The other three were inclined to do the same, but held their own.

  Massacre was what Tomlinson had called it and massacre is what it was. Period. There was no way to tell just yet how many had been killed. Corpses and parts thereof where littered about like bison carcasses at a buffalo camp. The bar was heaped with dismembered limbs…legs, arms, hands, feet. Some hands still gripped pistols and some legs still wore their boots. There was blood everywhere, oceans of it dried in sticky pools on the floor and splashed on the walls and spattered up onto the ceiling. Tables had been overturned, chairs shattered to firewood. Sacks of salt and flour had ripped open, their contents powdered over everything like a down of snow. Poker chips and playing cards scattered in every which direction.

  Slaughter, plain and simple.

  The store had sold everything from picks and shovels to Rochester lamps and sluice boxes. One of the picks had been put to good use-it had been used to impale a man to the wall, his feet a good six inches off the floor. Dirker couldn’t even begin to imagine the strength it would take to do something like that.

  And if all of that was bad enough down here, upstairs…Jesus, even worse.

  Like a slaughterhouse. The corridor was actually painted red like a child’s fingerpainting, filled with bodies and limbs and viscera. Dirker didn’t do much exploring up there-the sight and smell of all that spilled blood and raw human meat was simply too much for any man-but what he had seen was enough to haunt his dreams forever. Whoever or whatever had been at work up there, had taken their time. Unlike downstairs which was, save a few grisly examples, like a free-for-all just this side of Hell, in the upstairs corridor, the fiends had been in no hurry whatsoever.

  Five bodies had been ritually pulled apart-limbs and heads cut from torsos-and then reassembled on the walls where they had been nailed in place. Dirker suppose that was evidence of a sick, grim sense of humor. When he first saw it, he thought he was looking at bloody manikins, but the truth found him soon enough. He hadn’t bothered with the other rooms up there. No doubt they hid more horrors, but he simply wasn’t up to it.

  Downstairs with Doc West, Dirker watched the medical man examine the bodies. He probed punctures and gashes with instruments, measured wounds and abrasions. Dirker was thinking about the others. About the miners that had disappeared up in the hills these past months. And the ones that had been mauled by animals…at least what he had thought were animals.

  Now, well, he knew better.

  But if it wasn’t animals, then what? Lunatics with dogs?

  There were bullet holes everywhere-in the walls, the ceiling. Slugs had ripped through barrels of salt pork and jerky, had shattered the liquor bottles behind the bar. Shotgun blasts had blown holes in tabletops and pellets were peppered in the plank flooring.

  Doc West sighed. Examined an obvious bite mark in a woman’s buttocks. “Some sort of animal did this…but the spacing of the teeth, I just don’t know. Like the others before.” He stood up slowly, a immense weight bearing down on him. “These people were killed in a number of ways. Some were shot. Others stabbed. Still others had their throats torn out or were eviscerated. But, ultimately, they were all partially eaten. Killed for sport and for food. And as a bonus, most of them were scalped.”

  That was a new wrinkle, Dirker knew. The other bodies they had found in weeks previous had not been scalped.

  Dirker cleared his throat. “So we’ve got ourselves a pack of animals that carry weapons and scalp folks like Indians?”

  “ That would be correct, yes.”

  Dirker licked his lips with a tongue dry as sandpaper. “The scalping…we’d better keep that to ourselves. People hear that and they’ll be running Indians again.”

  Doc West nodded. “We had better keep most of this to ourselves.”

  Dirker walked back outside, to get that abattoir stink out of his face. Outside the wind blew and howled amongst the leaning, ramshackle structures. In his mind, it was the wail of ghosts demanding justice. He thought of the bounty he had put out. The one on the animals he had hoped were responsible. So far, hunters brought in three pathetic black bear, two slat-thin wolves, and a badger of all things.

  It would have been mildly humorous, if it weren’t so terrible.

  Henry Wilcox was leaning against the shack across the road. The door was open and there was another body sprawled in there. This one had taken a load of double-ought at point-blank range. Probably the only truly normal death in Sunrise.

  Wilcox and Dirker avoided looking at each other.

  Dirker, his belly filled with something like wet sand, followed the muddy, overgrown road up amongst the empty buildings. The killers had impaled a series of heads on waist-high stakes to mark the path. Considerate of them. They had found three other bodies in one of the shacks-an old assay office. They had been hung by the feet and disemboweled. Dirker tried to suck in fresh air, but all he could smell was decomposed, maggoty death.

  There was a gray false-fronted building at the very end with boarded-over windows. Dirker hadn’t checked that one yet. He supposed he had to, like it or not.

  He had to kick the door free of its hinges to get in.

  And right away he smelled it-a wet and rancid stink. Feeble sunlight filtered in through gaping rents in the walls where boards had peeled loose. Motes of dust danced in the beams. The building had been something of a hotel once, but the furnishings had long ago been stripped away. Even the staircase leading above had been purloined, probably for firewood. It was dirty in there, shadowy and dank like a crypt. There was a bloody handprint on the faded wallpaper, a single bootprint pressed into the settled dust.

  Dirker, sucking in a lungful of stale air, walked over to a door that was open maybe an inch. He could hear the wind whistling through holes in the roof, making the building groan and creak and tremble. There were another noises, too…the buzzing of insects. Meatflies, no doubt.

  Dirker grasped the door, yanked it open.

  A man stood there before him.

  Stood stock still for a split second, then fell straight forward like a post and almost knocked Dirker on his ass. Dirker let out a little strangled cry, but the man was dead. A bubble of hysterical laughter slid up the sheriff’s throat, but he would not set it free.

  Just another corpse, that’s all. The insides hollowed out, the face covered in flies. In the room behind him, there was dried blood everywhere. Bloody bootprints led to a window where planks had been knocked free.

  Dirker left the corpse there and made for the door.

  He heard the sound of hooves hammering up the road.

  He knew it was Pete Slade riding back in, but for moment, one moment he thought that maybe it w
as-

  Outside, Slade was speaking with Wilcox. Dirker made his way over to them.

  “ Anything?” he said.

  Slade just shook his head, stroking his mustache. “I followed the tracks up pretty high. I’m figuring seven horses, but no sign of animal with ‘em, dogs or otherwise. About three miles from here, the riders cut into a stream. I followed it for a mile or so…but I saw nothing that made me think they ever cut up the bank.” He pulled a cigar butt from the pocket of his leather vest, stuck it in his mouth. He did not light it, just chewed on it. “That stream winds through the mountains for miles and miles. Maybe if we had some dogs, we could cast for scent.”

  Dirker swallowed. “That’s fine. I don’t want you to go up against…these people on your own. Our time will come, just not yet.”

  Slade said, “I think these boys…I think they know what they’re doing. They been tracked before, I’m guessing, and their smart.”

  Dirker told him and Wilcox to bury the heads on the poles, what bodies they could find. Then he went back to the general store. He didn’t bother trying to drag the bodies out. When Doc West was done, he spilled kerosene around and lit the place on fire.

  A cleansing then, of a sort.

  3

  Although Dirker very much wanted only a sanitized version of events of what had occurred up at Sunrise to circulate through Whisper Lake, the miner who had discovered the slaughter beat him to it. By the time Dirker and the others made it back to town, the story was out. It was out and people were crawling up the sheriff’s ass like mites.

  Over at the Callister Brother’s Mortuary, Caleb Callister and three other men-James Horner, Philip Caslow, and Luke Windows-were gathered in the upstairs rooms, speaking in soft, careful tones. The rooms had once been used by Hiram Callister, but were now a sort of meeting place for Caleb and his friends.