Skin Medicine

There was a gray false-fronted building at the very end with boarded-over windows. Dirker hadn’t checked that one yet. He supposed he had to, like it or not.

He had to kick the door free of its hinges to get in.

And right away he smelled it-a wet and rancid stink. Feeble sunlight filtered in through gaping rents in the walls where boards had peeled loose. Motes of dust danced in the beams. The building had been something of a hotel once, but the furnishings had long ago been stripped away. Even the staircase leading above had been purloined, probably for firewood. It was dirty in there, shadowy and dank like a crypt. There was a bloody handprint on the faded wallpaper, a single bootprint pressed into the settled dust.

Dirker, sucking in a lungful of stale air, walked over to a door that was open maybe an inch. He could hear the wind whistling through holes in the roof, making the building groan and creak and tremble. There were another noises, too…the buzzing of insects. Meatflies, no doubt.

Dirker grasped the door, yanked it open.

A man stood there before him.

Stood stock still for a split second, then fell straight forward like a post and almost knocked Dirker on his ass. Dirker let out a little strangled cry, but the man was dead. A bubble of hysterical laughter slid up the sheriff’s throat, but he would not set it free.

Just another corpse, that’s all. The insides hollowed out, the face covered in flies. In the room behind him, there was dried blood everywhere. Bloody bootprints led to a window where planks had been knocked free.

Dirker left the corpse there and made for the door.

He heard the sound of hooves hammering up the road.

He knew it was Pete Slade riding back in, but for moment, one moment he thought that maybe it was-

Outside, Slade was speaking with Wilcox. Dirker made his way over to them.

“ Anything?” he said.

Slade just shook his head, stroking his mustache. “I followed the tracks up pretty high. I’m figuring seven horses, but no sign of animal with ‘em, dogs or otherwise. About three miles from here, the riders cut into a stream. I followed it for a mile or so…but I saw nothing that made me think they ever cut up the bank.” He pulled a cigar butt from the pocket of his leather vest, stuck it in his mouth. He did not light it, just chewed on it. “That stream winds through the mountains for miles and miles. Maybe if we had some dogs, we could cast for scent.”

Dirker swallowed. “That’s fine. I don’t want you to go up against…these people on your own. Our time will come, just not yet.”

Slade said, “I think these boys…I think they know what they’re doing. They been tracked before, I’m guessing, and their smart.”

Dirker told him and Wilcox to bury the heads on the poles, what bodies they could find. Then he went back to the general store. He didn’t bother trying to drag the bodies out. When Doc West was done, he spilled kerosene around and lit the place on fire.

A cleansing then, of a sort.

3

Although Dirker very much wanted only a sanitized version of events of what had occurred up at Sunrise to circulate through Whisper Lake, the miner who had discovered the slaughter beat him to it. By the time Dirker and the others made it back to town, the story was out. It was out and people were crawling up the sheriff’s ass like mites.

Over at the Callister Brother’s Mortuary, Caleb Callister and three other men-James Horner, Philip Caslow, and Luke Windows-were gathered in the upstairs rooms, speaking in soft, careful tones. The rooms had once been used by Hiram Callister, but were now a sort of meeting place for Caleb and his friends.

“ It’s worse than anything thus far,” Caleb said to them. “An out and out slaughter and I think we all know who’s responsible.”

“ Scalped, too, you say?” Caslow asked.

“ Yes.”

Horner looked angry. “I’m not surprised. Them goddamn Mormons think this is their place, that the whole of Utah Territory belongs to them. They’ll do anything to push real Christians out.”

Windows lit a cigarette. He was a blacksmith and his hands were huge, callused. “See? What they got in mind is for us to blame injuns. That’s what they want. But we ain’t rising to that bait. We got us a pack of them Danites, them Destroying Angels hiding over in Redemption or maybe Deliverance.”

“ Exactly,” Caslow said. “It’s only a matter of deciding which snake pit we root out first.”

“ Redemption,” Caleb said to them.

He knew if he suggested Deliverance, he’d get no takers. No man in his right mind wanted to ride up to Deliverance, not with what was said about that place. Maybe all of it wasn’t true, but if some of it was, then it was enough. Besides, even the Mormons shunned the place.

“ Tonight then,” he said. “Tonight we sack that heathen nest and burn it to the ground.”

No one disagreed with that.

4