Skin Medicine

“There is a draw, a strange seduction to sin, to evil, Sheriff. It is the Devil’s primary tool: people will give themselves to Him in order to experience wicked gluttony.” Through the open door, Harmony watched men loading bodies in a wagon for burial. “Before long, women were spending time in that hotel. There was an unhealthy influence that Cobb and the others possessed. The young were drawn. By the time we realized that they were being taken over, body and soul, it was far too late. Our breathern had given themselves to the Evil One. Cobb had become their messiah. Those of us as yet uncorrupted, came here to Redemption to start again.”

“And Deliverance?”

“No God-fearing man or woman went there after that day,” Harmony explained, his face oddly slack. His lower lip trembled. “And those that did, were never heard from again.”

“And what of that… personage they had locked away up in the hotel? Was it human? Animal?”

“Neither,” was all Harmony would say. “But in my mind, it was the seed of human evil. There were those in Deliverance that said it was the Devil himself that was chained up there.”

Dirker thought about it all. Thought about it long and hard. “And Cobb…he disappeared from the mortuary. If he was dead, how could that be?”

“I don’t think he was dead,” Harmony said. “But surely not alive. His was the living death, Sheriff. No man will ever know what happened to him after he climbed from his casket. Some things are better not known.”

Dirker was not about to argue with him. He was surely not convinced about any of this. Something had happened, yes, and Cobb was no doubt involved, but the supernatural? Dirker had heard stories and wild tales like any other, but he was not ready to accept such a thing.

“I can see, by the look on your face, Sheriff, that you are skeptical. But what I tell you is the truth as the Lord is my witness. What happened in Deliverance is unspeakable…pagan rites, Devil worship, human sacrifice. It has been said that the first born, all the first born of Deliverance were given to Cobb as burnt offerings. To him and that demented thing up in the hotel.” Harmony looked close to tears now. “If God in His infinite wisdom would only smite that serpent’s nest from the land.”

Dirker said, “Well, maybe God’s gonna need some help this time.”

22

Cabe pulled off his cigarette, sent the smoke out through his nostrils. “So, I reckon from what you’ve been saying that you talked to your Indian friends?”

Charles Graybrow nodded. “Yes, I have.”

“And…?”

“Worse than I thought.”

They were sitting in Cabe’s motel room, on the bed, sorting out those things that a week before would have been unthinkable by any sane man. Now, however, there was no choice but to look the devil, as it were, in the face and give him his due.

“First off, you have to know about a Snake medicine man called Spirit Moon,” Graybrow said, his fingers coiling uneasily in his lap, unused to being without a ready bottle. “Now Spirit Moon…oh boy, he’s big mumbo-jumbo heap plenty bad injun witch doctor-”

“Would you quit the dumb injun bit already?” Cabe said impatiently. “It’s funny at times. But now ain’t one of those times.”

Graybrow nodded, smiled. “Sure, sure, understood. Okay, now Spirit Moon, you know something about him?”

“I’ve heard a few things.”

“What you heard is true. That’s one injun with the power, I tell you,” Graybrow said with complete certainty. “I won’t go on about things he’s done, the sick he’s cured and the bad ones he cursed…we’ll let it go by saying Spirit Moon is the genuine article. He refused to go to the reservation with the others, claimed that the Snake Nation would bow before no man, white or otherwise. So him and his followers hid out up in Skull Valley on Goshute land. And old Spirit Moon, he knew things that have long been forgotten, things others might want to know…”

“Like who?” Cabe asked.

“Like James Lee Cobb.”

Ah, that name again. Cabe was beginning to get this picture of that crazy bastard in his mind and he had horns and a tail. Even the sound of that name was starting to leave him cold.

“So Cobb went to Spirit Moon?”

“That’s how the story goes. Cobb and his gang of bad men went to pay Spirit Moon a call.” Graybrow broke off, wanting to get it right as he’d heard it. “Now, understand that Spirit Moon didn’t make Cobb wicked, he already was. They say he was born of darkness. That he lived a life of depravity and the like. That up in the mountains…up there, well, he didn’t eat his friends because he just wanted to, but because something crawled into him. The sort of thing the Ojibwa up north might call a Wendigo. A cannibal devil, a soul-eater…”

Graybrow told him then the story he had heard from an old Goshute named He-Who-Runs-Swift.