Skin Medicine

Outside, the storm was howling like a blood-maddened beast, throwing itself at the ramshackle buildings and making them creak and groan and sway on their rotting foundations.

There was a high, unpleasant stink that had little to do with woodrot or animal droppings. It was a sharp, violent smell that got inside Graybrow’s head and made him think of slaughterhouses and mass graves, insane asylums and death wards…places filled with death, with pain and horror and madness.

He started up the steps, feeling now how fully alone he was.

But you are not a white, he kept telling himself. You are not a white who feels safe in crowds or needs the presence of many. You are an Indian, a Ute, and solitary, lonely places do not frighten you.

And that was great in theory, but it wasn’t working so good in practice today.

For the stink was getting worse and there seemed to be something crackling in the air like some negative charge of potential energy, some static electricity that was building and building. The farther he went up the stairs, the more he felt it. It was all around him, heavy and dark and threatening. He could feel it from the top of his head right down to his balls and it was a foul, reaching hostility like hands poised to strangle him.

Upstairs.

More leaves, more dirt. But you could see now that there had been traffic up here. The hardwood floor of the corridor was thick with collected dust, but a trail had been beaten through it.

Graybrow thought: Okay, old man, okay, just do it.

So he did.

He began going from room to room and finding little more than additional cobwebs and some old crates and moldered furnishings. The covering of dust was disturbed in some of them as if maybe Cobb’s men had tossed their bedrolls onto the floor to sleep.

In the corridor, the garish wallpaper was spotted with fungus. It was faded and disintegrating and peppered with wormholes. In the gloom, Graybrow was beginning to see evidence of claw-marks ripped into the paneling and old, browned blood smears.

That smell was still thick around him, but there was another smell, too. A repellent fetor of putrescent meat and spilled blood. The stink was vaporous and gagging, enough to make him-

Suddenly, without a sound, a shape stepped from a darkened doorway. So very quick and so very silent that Graybrow could barely even register surprise before the Whitney 12-gauge was yanked from his hands and tossed down the hallway.

Feeble light choked with dust motes and a powdery rain of snow illuminated the shape. Graybrow saw it, felt his heart give a jolt of pain. He knew what he was looking at was James Lee Cobb. He knew that, but it took him some time to acclimate himself to the horror.

As it was, he felt faint.

Cobb was tall and cadaverously-thin, a mummy from a sideshow. A sombrero with a short, curled brim was pushed back on his head. The crown was scarved in the skins of desert snakes and set with feathers and the talons of raptors and the teeth of wolves. He wore a poncho of pale hide that was stitched together in a crazy quilt from human pelts. Around his corded throat there were a half-dozen necklaces of human fingers, ears, and teeth. At his waist were a brace of ivory-handled pistols and hatchets. There was a sash from shoulder to gunbelt and it was sewn together from… faces. Faces tanned to death masks with the scalps intact.

And it was all dreadful enough…but Cobb’s own face, it was the very worse thing.

The right side was pale and the skin was tight and seamed, barely covering the skull beneath. A single unblinking green eye with a huge, dilated pupil like a translucent moon stared out at Graybrow. But the left side of his face…just gone. Red tendons and pink muscle were stretched obscenely across an exaggerated skull like starving dogs had eaten the good stuff away. There was no eye there, just a black scarified cavity.

Graybrow managed to start breathing again before he passed dead out. “Suppose…suppose I’m in for it now, eh?” he said.

Cobb nodded that fright mask. Lips pulled back from sharp, yellow teeth. “I reckon ye are, friend,” he said in a hissing voice. “I reckon ye are.”

“Don’t suppose I could-”

“Doubt it,” Cobb said. “But since ye came this far, there’s something I’d like ye to see.”

But Graybrow just shook his head. “Don’t think I want to.”

And when Cobb made to grab him, he brought out his hunting knife and buried it right into the devil’s belly. Not that it did him shit-good. Cobb took hold of him with a strength that was amazing. Those clawed hands-the left one was skeletal and skinless-took him by the shoulders and smashed him against the wall until Graybrow went loose as a rag.

The fight had been pounded out of him.