Skin Medicine

by Tim Curran

  “You white folks…boy, I’ll never understand you. You bring the whiskey out here, get my people hooked, then you act like it’s not good enough for you.”

  Cabe smiled. “That’s our little joke.”

  Graybrow took a good pull off his bottle. “Since you already know about Clay being in town, I won’t warn you about that. But I hear them miners hired you to sort out all these killings. That true?”

  “Word travels fast, don’t it?” Cabe said. “But, sure, it’s true enough.”

  “Good. Because you’re gonna need my help. I know lots about those killings. If you wanna stop them, then you’re gonna have to stop James Lee Cobb.”

  “Who in Christ is that?”

  “You don’t know?” Graybrow said. “Well, sit back, because I have a story to tell you. And before you ask, yes, it does have to do with coffins and graves and the like. Just not in the way you think…”

  16

  The day turned progressively colder as Cabe and Graybrow rode out to Deliverance. They followed the dirt road up out of Whisper Lake and past the Southview Mine, taking the road where it forked at the blasted oak.

  Cabe found himself studying that oak.

  It was tall and craggy and black, looked something like a huge trapdoor spider climbing from the ditch alongside the road. Cabe could not put a finger on it, but that tree bothered him immensely. He was not one given to omens and portents…but somehow, somehow that tree was a signpost warning him off.

  He found himself studying the landscape as it swept past him-the exposed vermilion rock bursting from the heavy bracken and scrub, the clumps of saltbush and horsebrush giving away to grassy meadow and dense stands of aspen. Streams flanked by drooping dogwood trees and leafless willows.

  He took it all in, making a mental note of the barren cliffs and thick forests, as if he might never see them again.

  But as he rode his sleek-muscled strawberry roan up that narrow, winding road that was carpeted in autumn leaves and pine needles, he knew it was just the wild stories getting to him. Superstitious bullshit that had no place in his line of work. All that business about James Lee Cobb. His life and his culinary habits. Then that bit about him being shipped to Whisper Lake in a casket…except maybe he wasn’t dead. Seemed likely what with that Callister fellow being killed (for no one really bought the suicide theory) and the body vanishing. But there was more to it than that. Because Goode-the old saddletramp Graybrow said had brought the casket in-was pretty firmly convinced that what was in that box was not exactly human. You added that to the fact that Deliverance had gone bad shortly afterwards, had sold its soul to the Devil (as the locals claimed) and, well, even the sanest of men started thinking things.

  Beside him on his calico gelding, Graybrow said, “Ever tell you, Tyler Cabe, about the two fools that rode into the town of devils?”

  “Nope. What happened?”

  “They got killed. Way I heard it, anyway.”

  Cabe licked his lips, felt the cool wind at his mouth. “You scared, Charles? Scared of what we might find?”

  Graybrow said, “Hell no. I’m an injun, we don’t know fear.” He rode in silence a moment, navigated a dip. “Still…I was thinking there might be something I’m supposed to be doing right now, somewhere I have to be. I told the Widow Lucas that I’d stop by and fix that barn of hers. It leaks. Maybe I should be doing that.”

  “When does she need it done?”

  “Oh, about two years past,” Graybrow admitted. “But still I think of it. Wonder at times like these if I should get over there. Think so?”

  “Nope. Not unless you need my help.”

  “Figured on doing it alone.”

  They rode higher and the air was fresher, frigid, so crisp it seemed it might snap. A few snow flurries danced in the air. You could hear the crunching of the horses’ hooves through the leaves and loam, the jingling of equipment and creak of saddles, but nothing else. The aspen forests gave way to juniper and pinyon pine as the road climbed and snaked. Above were slopes blanketed in Douglas-fir and spruce, ancient bristlecone pines dotting the ragged peaks just below the snowline.

  Cabe had ridden through many mountains. Had spent countless days and nights prowling their wastes…but never was he so struck by their absolute silence as he was here. Tree limbs brushed together and wind hissed through the high boughs, but other than that it was silent. Oddly silent. Deathly silent. The sort of heavy, brooding silence one acquainted with burial grounds and crypts.

  And Cabe did not like it one bit.

  “Should be just around that bend,” Graybrow said, sounding like something was lodged in his throat.

  Cabe felt himself tensing. There was no real, palpable threat here. No men waiting for them with guns. Yet, his muscles had drawn up tight and his heart was beating fast. Something was crawling up his spine and he had a mad desire to have a pistol in each hand.

  The road squeezed between high timbered banks where the wind rattled stands of dead pines and then they saw Deliverance. But, as Cabe learned, you didn’t just see the place these days, you felt it. And feel it he did. If something had been crawling up his spine before, it was running up it now. The air was much colder, like a blast of wind from an icehouse. Something in him trembled and curled-up. His balls went hard and his chest was wrapped in iron bands.

  “Hell and damnation,” Graybrow muttered.

  The village sat before them in a little hollow, forest pressing in from one side and rolling fields to the other. Tall stones like monuments rose from those fields, leaning and gray. All the trees were stripped and dead. Nothing moved, nothing stirred. Only the wind howled and whistled and from its timbre, Cabe was certain there was nothing alive in Deliverance.

  The town gave him an immediate, unpleasant sense of claustrophobia. The buildings and houses were pressed together too tightly, rising up over the streets and overhanging each other. Wherever there was an open courtyard or lot, rows of shacks and tent-roofed log structures were inserted. The roads were impossibly narrow and congested. There was not a vertical line to be found anywhere, everything was a crazy sprawl of leaning walls, sloping roofs, angled doorways, and clustered shanties. Even the streets and alleyways were zigzagging and haphazard. Most towns were built to accentuate sunlight and space, Deliverance was built to accentuate shadow and repression. It looked, if anything, like some decaying slum back east.

  There was a wooden sign set at the town’s perimeter.

  DELIVERANCE, it read in faded block letters.

  Someone had etched a pair of simple crosses to either side of the name. They stood out like hex signs. Cabe felt his throat go tight, he could barely pull a breath down into his rasping lungs.

  As they rode down and into the sinister heart of the village, it seemed the entire place was decaying, rotting like the carcass of some cursed animal. There were great gaping rents in the walls and the roofs were falling into themselves. Windows were shuttered, planks flapping in the wind. Everything was weathered a uniform gray like graveyard marble. Huge, macabre shadows spilled from warped doorways and collapsing stairwells, laying in the muddy streets in black pools.

  Cabe and Graybrow tethered their horses to a hitching post and just stood there, feeling the aura of Deliverance fill them like a seeping poison. Weeds grew up in the streets and sprouted from boardwalks which were contorted and frost-heaved, if not completely rotted right out.

  Carefully, then, Cabe slid his Evans. 44-40 repeating rifle from the saddle boot, sucked in a blast of frosty air, and said, “Well, Charles, what you say we have a look around?”

  Graybrow stood by his horse, his long gray hair whipping in the wind. He had a Whitney 12-gauge in his arms. “If you figure it’s the right thing to do, white man.”

  Cabe didn’t suppose it was at all. Just the feel of the place was enough to make a man jump on his horse and ride until there was no trail left. The air was oppressive, physically heavy as if it were not air, but something slimy and moist. The overpowering, a
lmost vaporous sense of malignancy made Cabe want to wretch. He was afraid to go any farther, to touch anything. Like maybe the contagion would find him, make him part of whatever had ripped the guts…and the soul…out of this place.

  He stood on the boardwalk before what might have been a saloon once. A splintered sign creaked on its hinges overhead, but was entirely unreadable, the letters erased by winds and weather. Only a vague shape was still visible. Possibly the head of a horse.

  “You telling me this place went to shit only since this Cobb fellow showed up?” Cabe wanted to know. “Looks like it’s been abandoned for years.”

  “It has,” Graybrow said.

  He told Cabe that the town had originally been called Shawkesville, after its founding father, Shawkes Tewbury, a New England Yankee. Tewbury had discovered the lead in the hills and had built the town, probably to resemble some crumbling seaport town out east. He had owned everything. Upwards of five, six-hundred people had been living in the town and working the mines as recently as 1865, but then the ore had played out and the railroad passed it by…and it had died out.

  “Tewbury was the last to leave back in ’70, so I hear. Whole place here, it sat empty until two years back when Mormon squatters moved in, decided to rebuild it. Don’t look like they ever got very far.”

  Cabe didn’t think so either. He looked up and down the angular streets. “We’re wasting our time, Charles. Can’t be nobody left living here.”

  “That’s what we came to find out, isn’t it?”

  Damn Indian logic. It was always so blasted black and white. And just when Cabe figured he had a good reason to get them out of here. He walked up to the door on the old saloon. It was water-damaged, warped in its frame. He had to put his shoulder against it to pop it open. And then it nearly fell off its hinges. Inside, dusty tables and a mildewed bar. Leaves had blown in through the cracks.

  Cabe stepped in there, over the mummified body of a rat, very aware of the sound of his boots and spurs on that crooked flooring. There were empty bottles and glasses behind the bar. A few dirty paintings of whores festooned with cobwebs and covered in filth. Cabe just stood there, listening, listening. Though he heard nothing, he sensed everything. The town was not empty. Not in the ordinary sense. There was an overpowering sense of… occupancy. As if the villagers were hiding, playing out some macabre version of blind man’s bluff. Just waiting, waiting to come pouring out from doorways and cellars and shuttered attics, to show the two intruders just what sort of game they were up to.

  And this more than anything, chilled Cabe right to the marrow.

  He pulled a rolled cigarette from the pocket of his broadcloth coat and lit it with a match. He didn’t honestly want to smoke, but he needed to smell something other than the stink of the town. Because in here, in this vacant bar the stink was electric. A deep, pervasive odor of depravity and degeneration that told him that this town was blighted, polluted right to its core.

  He could not put his finger on the source, but it was there. A loathsome, invidious atmosphere of charnel pits and violated graves. Cabe was not given to superstition, but right then…he would not have wanted to be caught in Deliverance after dark. He would sooner have slit his own wrists.

  “C’mon,” he said to Graybrow.

  Rifles in their hands, they checked out an old assay office, a boarded-up dance hall, the remains of a hotel. It was the same in each and every place. Lots of dust motes drifting in the air, lots of dirt and rotting furniture, but not a lot else. They found buildings where there were trails broken through the dust, but never the people who made them.

  They took their horses with them as they walked the streets because the animals were nervous and skittish. There was no doubt they felt it, too, felt it and wanted out in the worst possible way.

  Cabe and Graybrow did not look in every house or building. There were certain places they just couldn’t bring themselves to enter. And numerous cul-de-sacs where the roofs overhung to such a degree that they created oceans of shivering shadow so impenetrable, nothing could have forced the two men to investigate. But wherever they went, they could feel that sense of spiritual contamination, that deranged aura of pestilence. In more than one building, they heard footsteps in empty rooms or scratching sounds within the walls. And once, a whispering from a dank, stygian cellar.

  But there was never anything to be found when they investigated.

  Other than that, the only sounds were the wind moaning and their own boots stepping over groaning timbers. But that did not satisfy Cabe that he was imagining any of it. Because, someone or something was there. Behind them, in front of them, maybe on the rooftops or down in the cellars. More than once he had caught movement out of the corner of his eye. And there was no mistaking one thing: they were being watched. Eyes were peering at them from shadowy tangles, leering from behind shuttered windows and staring from dark, damp places.

  At the edge of town, they found a few log houses that showed signs of recent occupancy. Beds were made and tables set, firewood stocked and barns hayed. There was dust over everything, but it made Cabe think that whoever had lived in those places had left in one hell of a hurry. In that part of the country times were always harsh and you didn’t abandon your belongings and wares without a real damn good reason.

  In one of the houses they found a single yellowed bone.

  It was sitting in the center of the floor, a human femur. Both he and Graybrow examined it and came to the same conclusion: the marks punched into it were from teeth.

  “What do you make of all this?” Cabe finally asked.

  But Graybrow just shook his head, saying, “I think it’s much worse than what folks are saying. Whatever happened here…maybe I don’t want to know.”

  Cabe just looked him dead in the eye. “You scared?”

  “Damn yes, I am.”

  And Cabe was, too. He had never experienced such a total sense of terror before. And what made it all the worse, all that much harder to handle was that he did not even know what he was afraid of. Only that if it found him, if it reached out and touched him, he feared he’d lose his sanity.

  They found a livery in which a dozen horses were stabled. They were very much alive and had plenty of feed and water. There were saddles and rigs, bits and reigns. Even shoes and nails stacked on a bench.

  “Somebody’s here, all right,” Cabe said.

  They checked out the old jail and then the only church in town. Its spire was high and leaning, the cross missing. If there was one place the Mormons would have set to right, it would have been the church. It stood at the end of a weedy road, surrounded by a rusty wrought-iron fence with spiked corner posts that rose up five, six feet. It was frightful and uninviting, looked like it might fall right over at any moment. The windows had been planked-over and a weird, gassy smell emanated from it.

  Cabe climbed the rickety steps and tried the iron door-puller.

  “Locked,” he said, sounding relieved.

  Graybrow stood just outside the fence with the horses. “You see what’s carved into that door?”

  Cabe did.

  He was not an educated man, but he could read. And had read widely in his lonely occupation to pass the time. What he saw carved in the face of the door were signs and symbols generally associated with witchcraft and black magic-pentagrams and pentacles, stylized inverted crosses.

  Regardless, he had seen enough.

  They both mounted and rode through those streets one last time, each with their weapons in hand. The shadows were elongating and they heard sounds, murmuring voices, distant movement…as if whatever lived in Deliverance was real anxious for the sun to go down.

  When they got outside town, Cabe and Graybrow rode like hell was opening behind them and that wasn’t too far from the truth.

  17

  It was well after dark when Cabe finally tracked Dirker down to a sordid rooming house called Ma Heller’s Place just this side of Horizontal Hill, the red-light district. He had been all
over town looking for the sheriff ever since returning from Deliverance and this is where he found him, staring up at the house astride his gray mare.

  Cabe brought him into a tent-roofed saloon called the Mother Lode and laid it out for him over warm beer.

  “Empty?” Dirker said.

  Cabe just shrugged. “It is and it isn’t. There’s something there, but I’m not just sure what.”

  Dirker just gave him those ice-blue eyes full blast. “Maybe you better explain yourself.”

  So Cabe did. He took his time, telling the sheriff everything he had learned about Deliverance and James Lee Cobb and how he figured the degeneration of the place was definitely connected with the man. At least, it seemed likely. Because something was wrong there, the place had gone from a God-fearing Mormon enclave to a vile pest-hole and there had to be a reason.

  Dirker didn’t laugh at him or dismiss it outright. He gave it all pause while he sipped his beer. “I’ll grant you that something strange has happened there…but witchcraft? Satanism? Christ, Cabe, I just can’t swallow that sort of business.”

  “Don’t blame you, Dirker. Not in the least. I wouldn’t have swallowed it myself unless it was rammed down my throat,” Cabe said. “I think…I think what ought to be done here is a posse organized and taken in there. Hell, maybe the army. But something ought to be done.”

  “Then why don’t you do it? I told Forbes that you were the man for the job.”

  Cabe just stared at him. “I guess…I guess I appreciate that. But this whole thing is bigger than me. Even all that money he promised me, it ain’t enough to get me up to Deliverance by myself. That place has to be torn apart and rooted out.”

  But Dirker wasn’t so sure. “When the time comes, I think that’ll be my decision.”

  Cabe just sighed. “Goddammit, Sheriff…listen now, this ain’t a matter of who’s in charge. It’s a matter of something being real fucking wrong up at that place and something having to be done about it.”