Skin Medicine

Graybrow stood by his horse, his long gray hair whipping in the wind. He had a Whitney 12-gauge in his arms. “If you figure it’s the right thing to do, white man.”

Cabe didn’t suppose it was at all. Just the feel of the place was enough to make a man jump on his horse and ride until there was no trail left. The air was oppressive, physically heavy as if it were not air, but something slimy and moist. The overpowering, almost vaporous sense of malignancy made Cabe want to wretch. He was afraid to go any farther, to touch anything. Like maybe the contagion would find him, make him part of whatever had ripped the guts…and the soul…out of this place.

He stood on the boardwalk before what might have been a saloon once. A splintered sign creaked on its hinges overhead, but was entirely unreadable, the letters erased by winds and weather. Only a vague shape was still visible. Possibly the head of a horse.

“You telling me this place went to shit only since this Cobb fellow showed up?” Cabe wanted to know. “Looks like it’s been abandoned for years.”

“It has,” Graybrow said.

He told Cabe that the town had originally been called Shawkesville, after its founding father, Shawkes Tewbury, a New England Yankee. Tewbury had discovered the lead in the hills and had built the town, probably to resemble some crumbling seaport town out east. He had owned everything. Upwards of five, six-hundred people had been living in the town and working the mines as recently as 1865, but then the ore had played out and the railroad passed it by…and it had died out.

“Tewbury was the last to leave back in ’70, so I hear. Whole place here, it sat empty until two years back when Mormon squatters moved in, decided to rebuild it. Don’t look like they ever got very far.”

Cabe didn’t think so either. He looked up and down the angular streets. “We’re wasting our time, Charles. Can’t be nobody left living here.”

“That’s what we came to find out, isn’t it?”

Damn Indian logic. It was always so blasted black and white. And just when Cabe figured he had a good reason to get them out of here. He walked up to the door on the old saloon. It was water-damaged, warped in its frame. He had to put his shoulder against it to pop it open. And then it nearly fell off its hinges. Inside, dusty tables and a mildewed bar. Leaves had blown in through the cracks.

Cabe stepped in there, over the mummified body of a rat, very aware of the sound of his boots and spurs on that crooked flooring. There were empty bottles and glasses behind the bar. A few dirty paintings of whores festooned with cobwebs and covered in filth. Cabe just stood there, listening, listening. Though he heard nothing, he sensed everything. The town was not empty. Not in the ordinary sense. There was an overpowering sense of… occupancy. As if the villagers were hiding, playing out some macabre version of blind man’s bluff. Just waiting, waiting to come pouring out from doorways and cellars and shuttered attics, to show the two intruders just what sort of game they were up to.

And this more than anything, chilled Cabe right to the marrow.

He pulled a rolled cigarette from the pocket of his broadcloth coat and lit it with a match. He didn’t honestly want to smoke, but he needed to smell something other than the stink of the town. Because in here, in this vacant bar the stink was electric. A deep, pervasive odor of depravity and degeneration that told him that this town was blighted, polluted right to its core.

He could not put his finger on the source, but it was there. A loathsome, invidious atmosphere of charnel pits and violated graves. Cabe was not given to superstition, but right then…he would not have wanted to be caught in Deliverance after dark. He would sooner have slit his own wrists.

“C’mon,” he said to Graybrow.

Rifles in their hands, they checked out an old assay office, a boarded-up dance hall, the remains of a hotel. It was the same in each and every place. Lots of dust motes drifting in the air, lots of dirt and rotting furniture, but not a lot else. They found buildings where there were trails broken through the dust, but never the people who made them.

They took their horses with them as they walked the streets because the animals were nervous and skittish. There was no doubt they felt it, too, felt it and wanted out in the worst possible way.

Cabe and Graybrow did not look in every house or building. There were certain places they just couldn’t bring themselves to enter. And numerous cul-de-sacs where the roofs overhung to such a degree that they created oceans of shivering shadow so impenetrable, nothing could have forced the two men to investigate. But wherever they went, they could feel that sense of spiritual contamination, that deranged aura of pestilence. In more than one building, they heard footsteps in empty rooms or scratching sounds within the walls. And once, a whispering from a dank, stygian cellar.

But there was never anything to be found when they investigated.