Skin Medicine

He was running around, handling bones and skulls, waving femurs and tibias about. He set the lantern at the edge of the pit and dove into all those bones like some insane swimmer into a charnel sea. He paddled and sorted, handled and searched. His fingers traced the craniums of skulls, poked into orbits, tapped at yellowed teeth set in pitted jaws. He stroked the rungs of a ribcage, eyed a blackened pelvic wing like maybe it was his own.

“ Get the hell out of there,” Cobb told him and meant it. “Yer losing yer mind, damn ye!”

Gleer climbed out, the bones falling away from him with a sound like tumbling kindling. Cobb grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pitched him to the floor.

“ I ain’t mad, Jimmy! It’s just…hell, it’s just that I know! I know!” He was cackling now, drool running from the corners of his lips. His entire body was shuddering. “These bones…lookit ‘em, will ya? Look close.”

Cobb did.

And then he got it…or some of it. The bones? all the bones in fact? were riddled with tiny cuts and gashes and nicks. Somebody had been hacking and cutting on their owners. And maybe worse…because he found what looked to be teeth marks set into them.

“ Cannibals,” Cobb said in a low voice. “Just like in them Pacific islands I read about when I was a kid. Man-eaters…”

“ That’s right, yes sir, that’s right.” Gleer was still laughing, but tears had welled in his eyes now. “But they didn’t do it on their own, Jimmy Lee, no sir! What they cut out of the ground…whatever it was…it turned ‘em that way, took hold of their savage heathen minds and turned them into monsters…”

Cobb took hold of him and got him out of those caverns. Gleer was stark raving by that point. And maybe it was just Cobb’s imagination, but that high, hot gassy smell seemed almost stronger. Rancid, even.

As if whatever was dead in there, had begun to decay once again after many long years.

***

Cobb got Gleer outside and with the help of the other two, they wrestled him back to the cabin. But he was in a bad way. They had to shackle him to the wall with chains snapped from beaver traps and nailed into the logs themselves. He was talking crazy, shaking and gibbering, hearing things scratching around outside that none of the others could. Talking with people that weren’t there. Going native like his mother’s people and asking for protection from the Great Spirit. So they left him shackled for a week like that, pissing himself, drooling and screeching.

“ Think I’m crazy, don’t you? Think I’ve lost what mind I did have, don’t you?” he rambled on incessantly one afternoon as the wind made the cabin shake. “But I ain’t nohow crazy. Because I know what was up there…I could smell it there and I can smell it here now. Maybe you, Cobb, or you, Barlow…maybe you don’t know what I’m taking about. But Noolan…I don’t know about you. It might have touched you the way it touched them injuns. Ain’t saying it did…but it got to one of us, ‘cause I can smell it! Hear? I can smell it. One of you, yes sir, you know what I’m talking about on account you’re just waiting for the lights to dim so you can feed on the others. I know it! I know it! Oh…ho, ho, my God, my dear Lord Jesus, them injuns, them injuns. Roasting babies and sucking brains from skulls and chewing on the flesh of their young…eating, eating. Offering up their daughters to that, that thing come straight out of hell…”

“ Shut the fuck up!” Barlow snapped finally. “You shut up with that talk or I’ll kill you! I swear to God I’ll kill you!”

Gleer was getting to everyone by that point. Maybe even Cobb. But you couldn’t tell it from that cool smirk on his face. Noolan calmed Barlow down and took him outside for some fresh air being that it was the one thing they had plenty of.

When they were gone, it was just Cobb and Gleer in the cabin. The logs popped and shifted in the hearth. The air was smoky and thick. It stank of body odor and charred logs. What it didn’t stink of these days was food.

“ Ye’ve got to get a hold of yerself, Gleer,” Cobb told him. “Ye carry on like this…well, one of them boys is gonna shoot ye dead.”

Gleer just played with his chains, running the loops through his fingers. He nodded. “I know, I know…but I’m scared, Jimmy Lee. I’m damn scared. I’m thinking…thinking that one of us just ain’t what he appears to be. That something got in him…inside him…and that man, he’s a monster now…”

Cobb considered it a moment and shrugged. “Maybe ye right,” he said. “Maybe you and me, maybe we better had keep an eye on them other two.”

***

Eventually, Gleer came back to his senses.

Barlow managed to shoot a couple wolves. They were rawboned things with hardly any meat on them, but it was something in their bellies. And Noolan made a hearty soup from the blood and fat. It didn’t taste all that wonderful, but it stuck to the bones. With some meat and soup in him at last, Gleer came to his senses.

They cut him loose.

But they kept an eye on him.