Skin Medicine (37 page)

And that, it seemed, was a good parting remark.

They rode.

***

It was at the fork in the road, at that old lightening-blasted dead oak, that they found more riders waiting for them. Mormons. Eustice Harmony was there. As were four surviving Danites—Crombley, Fitch, Sellers, and Archambeau. All of whom were anxious to destroy what lived in Deliverance once and for all.

So, then, twenty men rode on that town.

Twenty men who were willing to give their lives to stop the killing and what lived in Deliverance was more than happy to take them.

One by one.

***

By the time they passed through those high banks of withered, dead pines outside of Deliverance, the storm had filled its lungs with ice and had become a full-blown blizzard. Visibility was down to less than thirty feet. But no one suggested turning back. What had to be done would not be easy in any weather.

As they came around the bend, everyone brought up their guns.

They saw what they thought were two men waiting for them on either side of the road. But they were not men, but scarecrows impaled on sticks. As the posse got closer, they saw they were actually corpses and ones long dead by the look of them. Their clothes were shredded rags that flapped in the wind. Hollowed, skullish faces with empty eye sockets appraised the riders as they passed.

Although Cabe had seen countless dead men, he found he could not look upon those frostbitten faces. He was afraid they might smile at him, speak to him in voices of cold dirt.

Well, he found himself thinking, you volunteered for this fucking mess. Got nobody to blame but your ownself. If things get ugly—and they will—y’all just keep that in mind, Tyler Cabe.

“Ye can feel it, cain’t ye?” Clay said.

And Cabe could only nod, wordlessly.

For he could feel it. Feel some ancient, unspeakable terror erupting in his belly, licking at his insides with a cold tongue. Something in him knew the smell of this place, the malefic feel of it, and not from yesterday but from days long gone. It could smell those that haunted Deliverance and it frantically warned him away, filling him with an immense, unreasonable fear that made him physically ill. It settled into every cell and fiber in a black, wasting totality.

And then, as they rode in guarded silence, the town began to appear. It swam up out of the blizzard like a decaying ghost ship out of ocean fog: the masts and prows, decks and rigging. Yes, the ruined buildings and sharp-peaked roofs, false-front stores and boarded high houses all described by churning tempests of snow that shrieked through the streets.

Deliverance was laid-open before them like a sprung sarcophagus, daring, just daring them to look upon the secrets its moldering depths concealed.

Cabe saw it, really
saw
it, and felt like a little boy lost in a graveyard full of whispering voices and ghastly screams. And he heard these things, too, but only in his head. For that was the sound of the town—a humming, dead neutrality composed of agony and tormented screeching reduced to a single low and morbid thrum.

It made his mouth go dry and his heart pound like a hammer at a forge. His skin was tight and cold, his internals pulling into themselves. Adrenalin rushed through him, making his hands tremble on the reigns and his eyes go wide and unblinking. For everywhere around them, shadows seemed to dip and scamper in the blowing wall of snow.

In the street then, in the very black heart of the town, they dismounted and tethered there horses to a hitch rail.

Harmony stood there in a flapping black coat, a shotgun in his arms and the Book of Mormon in his hip pocket. “What you will see here will look like people,” he said to the posse, the wind turning his voice into a weird, wailing sound. “But they are not people. Not anymore. Not any more than a cadaver in a grave is a person. They may try to talk to you, to get you off alone. But don’t let them, by God. Don’t let them…”

Maybe not everyone in the posse knew what was in Deliverance. But maybe they’d heard stories, chimney-corner whispers, the sort of crazy tales kids tell late at night and around fires…things, of course, they’d dismissed at the time. But now? They did not dismiss them. They remembered them, locked those tales down deep within themselves where they would not be able to feel the teeth. And maybe that was why they did not question what Harmony said. They just accepted.

“It’ll be dark in about three hours,” Dirker said to them, his face pale and wind-pinched, but very determined, “and we want this wrapped up by then. So we’re gonna break into groups and…”

But Cabe was not listening. Not really.

He was watching those shuttered windows and high, sloping roofs, the narrow spaces cut between buildings. The tenebrous shadows that oozed from them. He was watching and noticing how everything seemed to lean out over the men in the street, wishing to crush them or get them close enough to pull them into dark places where business could be handled in private, away from the light. And what he was feeling was the blood of the town—a toxic, miasmic venom seeping into himself.

“Let’s do it,” Dirker said.

And they started off.

***

As Dirker led Harmony and the Danites through that howling white death, the church bell began to gong. It echoed out through the storm with a hollow, booming sound.

“The bell,” Harmony said, “Dear God…”

Dirker was telling himself that it meant nothing really. That maybe the wind had snagged it, but he knew better. Hands were pulling that rope and he could only imagine why.

The snow was flying thick and fine like powdered glass, dusting the buildings with a sound like blown sand. It whipped and swirled and drifted, lashing at the men in the streets, doing everything it could to drive them back, back. But they refused to be driven. They came on with shotguns in their fists and a ragged, squinting resolve in their eyes.

Suddenly, Fitch stopped dead, his rifle brought to bear. “What…what was that?” he said and the fear was thick in his voice like ice clogging a well-rope. “Over there.”

Dirker looked quick, frigid wind blasting him in the face. He saw a suggestion of a form swallowed by the storm. Could have been something. Maybe.

“It had green eyes,” Fitch said weakly. “Glowing green eyes…”

But Dirker would hear none of it.

They pushed on past sagging houses and a livery barn with a three-foot drift of snow pushed up against the door like a wave. Next to it was a larger, two-story log building. It had been some kind of community house or saloon at one time.

Dirker tried the door.

It was open.

He kicked it in all the way and the five of them came through with their guns held high and ready to spit rounds. But what they saw stopped them dead. It literally froze them in their tracks.

A couple kerosene lamps were blazing away. Seven or eight people were in there, pushed up to the dusty bar or sprawled in chairs at dirty, cobwebbed tables.

“Afternoon, gents,” a fellow behind the bar said. He was a heavy, rotund man with a Quaker-style beard lacking mustache. There were glasses set up on the bar top before him. Using a rag, he was cleaning them out. “Pull up a chair.”

Dirker and Harmony looked at each other while the Danites formed a defensive ring, just ready to draw on anything that so much as breathed. Behind them, wind rattled the door, fingers of snow snaking across the floor.

Besides the bartender, there were three men at the bar, a few others at the tables. There was nothing exceptional about any of them. A little boy with flat, empty eyes was in the corner tossing what looked like a ball into the air and catching it. Except it was no ball, but a skull. A human skull.

“Wanna play?” he said, giggling.

Dirker ignored him. “Where’s Cobb?” he said. “James Lee Cobb.”

The others just looked at each other and started to laugh, as if the sheriff was asking where Jesus was, on account he wanted to buy him a beer. When the laughter died away, Dirker saw a little girl come from the back room. She was no more than seven or eight…and completely naked. She hopped up on the bar in a very childlike, carefree manner. Sat there, her legs swinging. She looked upon Dirker and there was no innocence in those eyes, just a leering, hungry depravity. But what was truly strange was the elaborate tattooing of her belly and chest. Dirker couldn’t be sure what he was looking at in the dim light, but it looked like…intertwined serpents and weird figures, configurations and distorted magical symbols.

As he looked on them, the illustrations seemed to move.

He looked away.

A man at one of the tables with a Confederate hat and an officer’s coat patched with spreading blotches of mildew, said, “Where’s your manners, barkeep? Offer these here fellas a drink…”

“Course,” the bartender said.

His other hand came up from behind the bar…except it was elongated, the fingers spidery and narrow. Where the nails should have been there were long black claws curved like potato hooks. Smiling, the bartender used one of the claws to slit his wrist. Then, most casually, he began filling a glass with his blood.

“Blasphemy,” Harmony finally said, breaking that bleak silence. “A cancer on the face of God…”

That got them laughing again.

About that time, the sound of gunfire rose up from somewhere in the town and Dirker knew the others had made contact, too. That the party was finally underway.

The man in the Confederate hat began to grin and a spidery tangle of shadows spread over his face. When he spoke his voice was low and grating.
“Now, you boys don’t really think you’re getting out of here alive, do you?”
he said, his teeth suddenly long and sharp.

And there was a weird electricity in the air, an odd sharp stink of something like ozone and fresh blood. There was subtle motion and a wet, sliding sound.

“Honey,” the man said to the little girl, “these men like your pictures, show ‘em how the lines meet…”

And as Dirker watched, those weird and diabolic tattoos began to move. Maybe it was the flesh beneath, but suddenly everything was in motion. There was a rending, popping sound as muscles stretched and ligaments relocated to accommodate new and feral anatomies. The girl’s chest thrust out in a cage of bones, her limbs going long and rawboned. Thousands of fine gray hairs began to erupt from her skin until you could no longer see the skin. It looked, if anything, like millions of metal filings drawn to some central magnet. Her jaw pushed out into a snout, her nose flattened and her ears did likewise, pressing against that narrow skull of whipping locks and going high and sharp. Her eyes became green and slitted, her brow heavy, the skull beneath grotesquely exaggerated.

She was suddenly more wolf than girl.

Her lips pulled back in a snarl, her teeth sharp as icepicks.

Dirker heard himself mutter, “Shit.”

All he could think of was a childhood story of how Circe the witch had changed Odysseus’s men into beasts.

And around him…they were all changing.

Flesh became smoke that was blown by secret, cabalistic winds and rivers moved by mystical currents. The girl suddenly leaped into the air, five, six feet until it seemed she would brush the rafters overhead, and then she came right down on Sellers. And this before he could even jerk a trigger or think of doing so. He and the girl-thing went down in a thrashing, writhing heap. Her mouth was wrapped around his face, those teeth sunk right to the bone. You could hear his screams echoing down the shaft of her throat.

But nobody had time to look at that.

For as the girl made her move, so did the others.

The man in the Confederate hat rose up in a flurry of teeth and claws and growling and was almost on Harmony when his shotgun went off, pitching the man backwards. Suddenly, everyone was shooting. Shooting at shapes and forms and monstrosities from some primal nightmare.

Dirker brought his Greener up and blasted the bartender. The impact blew his shoulder to a bloody mist and threw him against dusty glasses and discarded bottles. There was a crashing and shattering and he came right back up again, his face gone lupine and his teeth bared to bisect human flesh.

Dirker gave him another round that knocked him away and then that little boy was hopping in his direction. Dirker gave him the butt of the Greener in the face, driving him to the floor, broke it open and ejected shells, fed two more in, snapped it close. The bartender was up on the bar by then, his shirt split wide open from the pulsing, bestial muscularity beneath.

As he leapt, Dirker gave him both barrels.

The buckshot blew his snarling head into a spray of bone and blood. He flipped back over the bar and stayed down this time. As Dirker whirled around, the boy hit him hard and put him down, those jaws opening like the mouth of a tiger and coming in for the kill. The Greener still in his hands, he jammed the barrel lengthwise into that mouth, claws tearing great ruts through his coat and shirt and into his chest below. With a scream, he pushed the beast away from him, flipping it off him.

The man in the Confederate hat had Harmony.

His huge, clawed hands were pressed to either side of the Mormon’s head…and he was lifted an easy two feet off the floor, rivers of blood running from his ears and eyes as his skull was crushed. Then the teeth darted forward and his face was literally stripped from the bone beneath.