Skin Medicine

Beside him on his calico gelding, Graybrow said, “Ever tell you, Tyler Cabe, about the two fools that rode into the town of devils?”

“Nope. What happened?”

“They got killed. Way I heard it, anyway.”

Cabe licked his lips, felt the cool wind at his mouth. “You scared, Charles? Scared of what we might find?”

Graybrow said, “Hell no. I’m an injun, we don’t know fear.” He rode in silence a moment, navigated a dip. “Still…I was thinking there might be something I’m supposed to be doing right now, somewhere I have to be. I told the Widow Lucas that I’d stop by and fix that barn of hers. It leaks. Maybe I should be doing that.”

“When does she need it done?”

“Oh, about two years past,” Graybrow admitted. “But still I think of it. Wonder at times like these if I should get over there. Think so?”

“Nope. Not unless you need my help.”

“Figured on doing it alone.”

They rode higher and the air was fresher, frigid, so crisp it seemed it might snap. A few snow flurries danced in the air. You could hear the crunching of the horses’ hooves through the leaves and loam, the jingling of equipment and creak of saddles, but nothing else. The aspen forests gave way to juniper and pinyon pine as the road climbed and snaked. Above were slopes blanketed in Douglas-fir and spruce, ancient bristlecone pines dotting the ragged peaks just below the snowline.

Cabe had ridden through many mountains. Had spent countless days and nights prowling their wastes…but never was he so struck by their absolute silence as he was here. Tree limbs brushed together and wind hissed through the high boughs, but other than that it was silent. Oddly silent. Deathly silent. The sort of heavy, brooding silence one acquainted with burial grounds and crypts.

And Cabe did not like it one bit.

“Should be just around that bend,” Graybrow said, sounding like something was lodged in his throat.

Cabe felt himself tensing. There was no real, palpable threat here. No men waiting for them with guns. Yet, his muscles had drawn up tight and his heart was beating fast. Something was crawling up his spine and he had a mad desire to have a pistol in each hand.

The road squeezed between high timbered banks where the wind rattled stands of dead pines and then they saw Deliverance. But, as Cabe learned, you didn’t just see the place these days, you felt it. And feel it he did. If something had been crawling up his spine before, it was running up it now. The air was much colder, like a blast of wind from an icehouse. Something in him trembled and curled-up. His balls went hard and his chest was wrapped in iron bands.

“Hell and damnation,” Graybrow muttered.

The village sat before them in a little hollow, forest pressing in from one side and rolling fields to the other. Tall stones like monuments rose from those fields, leaning and gray. All the trees were stripped and dead. Nothing moved, nothing stirred. Only the wind howled and whistled and from its timbre, Cabe was certain there was nothing alive in Deliverance.

The town gave him an immediate, unpleasant sense of claustrophobia. The buildings and houses were pressed together too tightly, rising up over the streets and overhanging each other. Wherever there was an open courtyard or lot, rows of shacks and tent-roofed log structures were inserted. The roads were impossibly narrow and congested. There was not a vertical line to be found anywhere, everything was a crazy sprawl of leaning walls, sloping roofs, angled doorways, and clustered shanties. Even the streets and alleyways were zigzagging and haphazard. Most towns were built to accentuate sunlight and space, Deliverance was built to accentuate shadow and repression. It looked, if anything, like some decaying slum back east.

There was a wooden sign set at the town’s perimeter.

DELIVERANCE, it read in faded block letters.

Someone had etched a pair of simple crosses to either side of the name. They stood out like hex signs. Cabe felt his throat go tight, he could barely pull a breath down into his rasping lungs.

As they rode down and into the sinister heart of the village, it seemed the entire place was decaying, rotting like the carcass of some cursed animal. There were great gaping rents in the walls and the roofs were falling into themselves. Windows were shuttered, planks flapping in the wind. Everything was weathered a uniform gray like graveyard marble. Huge, macabre shadows spilled from warped doorways and collapsing stairwells, laying in the muddy streets in black pools.

Cabe and Graybrow tethered their horses to a hitching post and just stood there, feeling the aura of Deliverance fill them like a seeping poison. Weeds grew up in the streets and sprouted from boardwalks which were contorted and frost-heaved, if not completely rotted right out.

Carefully, then, Cabe slid his Evans. 44-40 repeating rifle from the saddle boot, sucked in a blast of frosty air, and said, “Well, Charles, what you say we have a look around?”