Skin Medicine

Cabe nodded slowly, wearily. “A Whitney. That’s Charlie Graybrow’s.”

Outside the door then, Dirker tried the filthy knob and it was locked.

Cabe stood there next to him, a wild and phobic terror threading through him. Whatever was in there…whatever gave off that noxious, eldritch stink…Jesus, it just could not be good, could not be.

Dirker handed his shotgun to Cabe and picked up the Whitney. He placed the barrel against the lock and pulled the trigger. The knob and its housing were blown into the room, leaving a smoking black hole.

Dirker kicked the door open.

And they stepped into hell itself.

As they passed through the doorway, Cabe’s lantern casting bobbing, phantasmal shadows, a black wave of fetid heat actually pushed them back a step or two. And the smell…a nauseous effluvium that was more than just organic decay and dissolution, but a noisome, contaminated stench that made their knees weak and sent their stomachs bubbling into their throats. It reminded Cabe instantly of a field hospital he’d been in during the war. A reconverted barn in Tennessee that stank of putrid battle dressings, amputated limbs, and gangrenous flesh. This was like that, a huge and polluted stink of pain, disease, and vomit.

Steeling themselves, they stepped in farther.

There was no furniture. The flowery cream wallpaper was spattered and stained with whorls and dripping patches of old blood. Even the ceiling was splashed with it…like some insane butcher had been casting buckets of the stuff around. The floor was wet and seething with more of that crawling gray fungus, but here it was matted and webby and seeping with black ichor and bloody mucilage. A gelatinous stew of rot and bones and gnawed limbs, several inches deep. There were bodies and parts of them everywhere, all covered with flies and beetles and creeping worms. A few soiled, peeled and jawless skulls stared up at them.

“Dear Christ in Heaven,” Dirker managed and his voice would barely come.

Because they saw what brooded here, what Cobb had brought back from Missouri.

It might have been a woman once, but now it was a chained ghoul with wet, leprous flesh, flesh that was pitted with gaping holes and hung from the bones beneath like a windblown shroud. That flesh seemed to move and wriggle with pulsing currents, but that was just the action of parasites and vermin nesting within. The skullish head was capped by long, greasy hair latticed with cobwebs and the deathmask face was shriveled and withered, jellied green eyes bleeding tears of slime.

It made a low, bleating sound, holding out hands that were more skeleton that flesh, the skin hanging from them in strips and loops. The fingers were sticks ending in long, curled nails that seemed to coil and convolute in the air. It began to slither in their direction, sending ripples through that pestilential sea of organic profusion. The skin had long ago melted away from the pulsating face, the nose just a hollow and those mottled gums on full display, gums set with gnarled, discolored teeth.

It came forward with a slinking, creeping motion, mewling now like a drowning kitten, a pustulant, writhing worm.

Cabe and Dirker started shooting.

Shells were flying and the air was suddenly filled with smoke and the bitter smell of gunpowder. They fired and fired, reloaded and fired again. And did not stop until that squirming human jellyfish was blown into fragments.

Then they left the room.

They shut the door.

Down the corridor, both trembling, Cabe tossed the lantern against the wall and it shattered, flames licking up over the walls.

Outside, both men fell in the snow, gasping and gagging.

***

It was ten minutes later when they stood before the church.

The bell had stopped ringing now.

They stood near the high wrought-iron gate that surrounded the church, came right up to the steps. The uprights were rusted and tall and lethally sharp. They rose up like spears.

“Well,” Dirker said, “ I guess no one else if left, Tyler. Just you and me.”

Cabe said, “Let’s show these fucks what a pissed-off Yankee and a Johnny Reb lunatic are capable of.”

Dirker laughed. Couldn’t help himself. It just came rolling out of him and soon enough tears were rolling down his face and Cabe was laughing, too, and how damn good it felt to laugh.

“I didn’t even know you could laugh,” Cabe said.

Dirker’s laughing became a coughing and a rasping. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sure I can,” he managed, “it’s just that I’m usually alone and laughing at myself.”

That got them going again and they reeled like drunken men, slapping each other on the backs until it finally died out and was replaced by a somber silence. The silence of the wind and snow and eternity.

“Sounds like I missed the party,” a voice said. “Next time, ye all invite me, hear?”

Elijah Clay came waltzing out of the storm, a pistol in each hand. “And here I thought I was the last one.”

“I never thought I’d be glad to see you, you goddamn hillbilly,” Cabe said.