Skull Moon

These were the ways of the Skull Society and they were secret, taken to the grave.

The people of Wolf Creek knew little of the Gang of Ten, but they speculated endlessly as was their way. Sometimes, even the most gruesome speculation paled beside reality.

Abe Runyon, the first victim of Skullhead, was a veteran Indian-hater. Or so he thought until he took a fancy to a Blackfoot girl barely in her teens. She spurned his advances and Runyon decided that was unthinkable. He abducted her and kept her in his little cabin outside town where he repeatedly raped her until, overcome with guilt, he staved in her head with a hammer. He buried her beneath the floorboards of his cabin where she still lays, a skeleton dressed in a rotting elkskin dress, dreaming away eternity in a rage of moss.

Cal Sevens, the second victim, had been a quiet man. A loner in every sense of the word. But at night in his room above the smithy shop, he would dream of a prostitute he had known in Kansas City and masturbate fiercely…and then, overcome with guilt, would read from the Bible.

Charlie Mears, the third, was a highwayman who specialized in robbing and murdering miners in the hills. He was perpetually drunk and had been since the night he'd tipped over an oil lamp and his house had burned to the ground, taking his wife and infant son with it.

And Pete Olak, the fourth victim, was thought to have been a good father and provider for his little family. But it was he who pulled the noose over Red Elk's head and tightened it, smiling as he did so. The fifth, sixth, and seventh victims-George Reiko, Nathan Segaris, and Curly DelVecchio respectively-had been the ones who had cooked up the lynching of Red Elk and had done so under Mike Ryan's supervision. They dragged Red Elk through the streets, kicking and cussing him all the way. As a final gesture of hatred and disrespect, they had urinated on him. And Dewey Mayhew, who had pretty much stood by and watched the hanging, his bowels tight and his bones rattling beneath his skin, lived a cursed and haunted life. Like that nameless miner, he had been told the exact date of his death by Ghost Hand, Herbert Crazytail's father. And told it would be violent, painful, and unpleasant. It was. Mike Ryan, the most recent victim of Skullhead, was a very rich and powerful man. Equally respected and feared. But for all his bravado and barrel-chested machismo, Ryan had a taste for young men and, whenever possible, satisfied his urges with a male prostitute in Laramie.

The last surviving member of the Gang of Ten was Sheriff Bill Lauters. He had a fine farm and wonderful family, but he, too, was haunted. Ever since Red Elk's lynching he had been drinking heavily. Sometimes it was the only way he could get the boy's face out of his mind-that distended visage livid as a bruise, those bulging sightless eyes, crooked neck, and lolling blackened tongue. Sometimes Lauters would dream that Red Elk came to him, a dead thing, bone shaft jutting from his broken neck. He would carry a noose in his hands. His own. Lauters would wake in a cold sweat and immediately hit the bottle. Sometimes, he prayed for death.

These were the secrets of the town, a sampling at best. There were worse things, but they would never be known. For as Deputy Bowes had commented, Wolf Creek was a seething cauldron ready to boil over.

This, then, was the scene before the slaughter.

7

Longtree found the body about half a mile from Ryan's ranch. It was covered in a light dusting of snow, the world's oldest shroud. He would've missed it save that it was sprawled over the trail, twisted and flayed, a cast-off from an abattoir. It was still warm.

Lighting the oil lantern he always carried for times like this, Longtree investigated.

The face had been torn free as had the throat. The body had no arms and one leg was missing It had been eviscerated, plucked, bitten, clawed, and chewed. Longtree, nausea like a plug of grease in his stomach, searched the surrounding area and found the arms, some bloody meat that might have been a regurgitated face, much frozen blood, but no leg. A snack carted away for the trail, he decided.

In the snow and the wind, his horse whinnying with displeasure, Longtree made a fairly through examination of the crime area. He found nothing here he hadn't seen at the others: carnage, simple and brutal. Nothing more.

Yet, he knew there was always more to be gleaned than what struck the eye. This was the work of the Skullhead, the marshal full well knew, an act of revenge perpetrated with an animal's hunger and a man's sadistic imagination. This man, whoever he might have been, had to be one of the Gang of Ten. Unless the Skullhead had allowed a serious slip in methodology, it could be no one else. The mysterious ninth member. But who?

He searched the corpse for signs of identification and found none.