Skin Medicine

Dirker found a smile and put it on, but it faded soon enough. He stared up into space, breathing real hard. “Pea Ridge…I can see it, Tyler, it’s right before me…the woods…the hills…oh, Tyler, you remember how cold it was…so very cold and snow…in Arkansas yet…in Arkansas yet…you boys, you boys, pull back now, dear God pull back the rebs the rebs is overrunning us…no, no, no…I’m dreaming, Tyler…”

Cabe was holding his hand tight. “I’m gonna get you on a horse and get you back to town. That’s what I’m gonna do…”

He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Clay’s.

“He’s gone, boy,” Clay said softly. “He’s gone.”

His face wet with tears, Cabe lowered Dirker to the floor. He stroked his cheek and sniffed, tried to get a hold of himself. He saw his shotgun and picked it up. “Where,” he said, “where did that fucking prick Cobb go?”

Clay, trying to patch his wounds, said, “Through that door yonder…give ‘em hell, boy…”

Cabe, just pumped hard with iron and hate, went through the door like an artillery shell. If Cobb had been waiting there, he would’ve slit him right in half like a sword through cheese.

But he wasn’t there.

Cabe was in a very narrow passage that went straight up to the belfry. A set of cramped, spiral stairs climbed up its throat like a spiral worm. There was blood on them. And blood smeared on the railing.

Cabe thought: He was hit then, that cocksucker was hit…

Sucking in a sharp breath, Cabe went up those steps as quiet as quiet could be, the shotgun in his hands. He crept and inched like a stalking cat. At the very top there was a hatchway.

Steeling himself then, Cabe crouched and threw himself up through it.

He rolled across the plank floor.

Eddies of wind-driven snow lashed at the bell. The bell-room was about ten feet square, open on all four sides with a waist high ledge. The floor was drifted with snow, old leaves…and drops of blood.

James Lee Cobb, his face sculpted into that of a human wolf stepped around the bell. The left side of his face was more skull than flesh and that skull was of some ravenous beast.

“I ate all the souls in Deliverance,” he said, “and now I’m gonna eat yours…”

A hatchet flipped end over end past Cabe’s face and went flying out into the white, whipping streets below.

Cabe let the demon have first one barrel of his Greener right in the belly and then Cobb jumped at him, jumped with an amazing speed and balance for a gut-shot man. In mid-air, Cabe gave him the other barrel which threw him back against the bell. The bell began to swing and gong with a resounding, thundering peal. Cobb left a bloody smear on it and pulled himself up by the ledge, his back to the blizzard.

His torso was blasted clean open in a burning, smoking valley. Flames were licking at his poncho from contact burns and the stink was of cremated flesh and burning hair.

But what froze Cabe up was that Cobb had no internal organs. His body cavity was filled with a chittering and crawling life. Locusts. Thousands upon thousands of locusts. And then Cobb began to laugh with a high, weird cackling that rose up and joined the gonging bell in a hammering wall of noise.

Cabe let out a cry as the locusts fled from Cobb’s torso and filled the air in a buzzing, busy swarm, descending on him like he were a field to be stripped. They heaped over him, biting and scratching and droning and Cabe was half out of his mind, clawing madly at the green, piping carpet of insects. They chewed and nipped, got under his clothes, tried to press into his ears and mouth, nostrils.

They would strip him to bone.

Cabe, knowing it was now or never, threw himself at Cobb with everything he had. He struck the grinning, cackling bastard, struck him real hard. So hard Cobb lost his balance. He fell back over the ledge of the belfry with a manic, pained barking sound. His arms bicycled in the freezing, snowy air…and then he fell, spinning end over end into the blizzard.

He let out an enraged, piercing shriek.

The insects curled-up brown like dead leaves and fell from Cabe. He leaned against the ledge, looking down as the snow let up for a moment and he could see Cobb below.

He was impaled on the fence.

Three blood-slicked uprights were jutting from his chest a good fifteen inches if not more and he was stuck sure as a bug on a pin. He contorted and fought, his arms whipping and his mouth howling. But that just forced him farther down on the uprights.

Iron, Cabe found himself thinking, iron.

The uprights were iron and he had read that the Devil feared iron for it signified earth. That’s why people hung iron horseshoes over their doorways. Iron was a basic element of earth and an enemy of demons and the discarnate.

Cabe felt the entire church shaking beneath him as Cobb screamed in what seemed a dozen different voices…men, women, children.

Cabe half-climbed, half-fell down the stairs. He dragged himself through the door and Clay was still there, still waiting. Together they made it out of the church.

Cobb was no longer moving.