Skin Medicine

1

James Lee Cobb was born into a repressive New England community in rural southeastern Connecticut called Procton. A tight, restrictive world of puritanical dogma and religious fervor worlds away from Utah Territory. Set in a remote forested valley, it was a place where the moonlight was thick and the shadows long, where isolationism and rabid xenophobia led to inbreeding, fanaticism, and dementia.

First and foremost, Procton and its environs were agricultural, farm country, and had been since the English first hewed it from the encroaching forests and wrestled it from the hands of Pequot Indians. The people there were simple, ignorant, and backward even by the standards of the early nineteenth century. They shivered by October fires when the wind clawed coldly at doors and windows and dead tree limbs scratched at rooftops. They clutched their dog-eared bibles and books of prayer, begging for divine protection from lost souls, haunts, revenants, and numerous pagan nightmares.

In everything there was omen and portent.

Folk still read tea leaves and examined the placentas of newborn calves searching for prophecy. Blood sacrifice in the form of sheep were given to ensure the harvest. But these things, of course, were done purely in secret… for the churches frowned upon them.

At night, entrances were sensibly bolted, livestock locked-down in barns, windows carefully shuttered. Horseshoes were nailed over thresholds to turn back demons, salt sprinkled in cribs and at doorways to keep witches at bay. No sane man ventured out into the midnight fields where frosted pumpkins were shrouded by ropes of fog and nebulous shapes danced in dark glades and oceans of groundmist.

Squatting in their moldering 17^th century brick houses, the people of Procton mumbled White Paternoster, hung out clumps of Vervain and St. John’s Wort, and prayed to Christ on the Cross.

For evil was always afoot.

And for once, they were right… James Lee Cobb was about to come into the world.

2

In Procton, it began with the missing children.

In six weeks, five children had gone missing. They disappeared in the fields, on woodland trails, the far pastures… always just out of sight. The evidence was scarce-a dropped wicker of apples here, a few threads of cloth there. High Sheriff Bolton made what he considered a thorough and exhaustive inquiry into the matters, but came up with a nary a thing. Unless you wanted to count witch tales and chimney-corner whispers of dark forces at work. And Bolton, a very practical man in all manners, did not.

For the next three weeks… nothing, then in the first week of October, three infants were snatched from their cradles on the same grim night. Bolton made a flurry of arrests-more to allay wild suspicion and mob mentality than anything else-but in each case, the arrested were released for lack of evidence. Regardless, the tally was up to eight children by then. No longer could suppositions concerning marauding Indians or outlaw brigands suffice… there had to be a more concrete explanation. From the pulpits of Procton’s three churches, ministers were descrying with a passion that what was happening in the village was not mere human evil, but grave evidence of diabolic intervention. Despite the arguments to the contrary by Sheriff Bolton and Magistrate Corey, the clergy fanned the flames of public indignation.

Witchcraft, they said. And demanded action.

So Elizabeth Hagen was arrested, charged with the practice of witchcraft, sorcery, and murder.

Elizabeth Hagen.

She was known as the Widow Hagen and most did not know her Christian name. When someone in or around Procton mentioned “The Widow”, there was surely no doubt as to whom they were speaking of. Widow Hagen then, it was known, had lived in the vicinity at least sixty years, and possibly as many as eighty, depending on which account was listened to. She had outlived no less than four husbands… and, in all those years, had not appeared to age beyond a few years. She was not some spindly, wizened hag… but a stout and robust woman with silver hair and a remarkably unlined face.

This, of course, spawned suspicion… but the people of Procton admitted freely that she “had her uses”. And she did. Despite their puritanical God-fearing ways, those were hard, uncertain times. And the Widow Hagen was expert in folk remedy and herb medicine. She could and had cured the sick, lame, and terminal. And although the village preachers condemned her from their pulpits through the years, more than a few of them had been her customers when they suffered maladies ranging from arthritis to constipation, heart troubles to skin disease. She was considered to be “second-sighted” and could divine your future (and past) through divination: examining entrails and bones, melted wax and dead animals. There was little that she could not do… for a price. And that was rarely coin, but more commonly by barter… livestock, grain, vegetables. That sort of thing. And payment was rarely a problem, for the Widow Hagen, it was said, could visit tragedy and disease down upon you and your kin in the wink of an eye… and had more than once.

Although equally feared and respected, she was not generally considered evil. She could be found digging roots and tubers in the fields, sifting through graveyard dirt and mumbling prayers to the full moon. She had a shack out by the edge of the salt marshes that was reached via a winding trail that cut through a loathsome stand of woods, where? it was said? that high grasses rustled and the tree limbs shook even when there was no wind.

The shack was dim and smoky, lit by hearth and whale oil lamp. It was strewn with hides and bones, feathers and baskets of dried insects. Shelving was crowded with a dusty array of jugs and retorts, flasks and alembics. There were corked bottles of vile liquids, vessels of unknown powder. And jars of brine which contained preserved dead things, things that had never been born, and others which could not have lived in the first place. So the Widow Hagen amused herself with her old and profane books, the skulls of murderers and suicides, Hand of Glory and exotic medicinals. Folk came to her for remedy and prophecy, for a needed blessing over child and harvest field.

She was never part of the community as such, but her power was unmistakable.

Then things changed.

New ministers replaced the old. They were not tolerant of paganism, regardless of its promise. These young upstarts not only attacked Hagen from the pulpit, but threw together town meetings which they vehemently banned any interaction with the old witch. Saying in no uncertain terms, that to have commerce with her was to have commerce with Satan incarnate. The ministers fed on Procton’s puritanism and repressive worldviews, turning them once and for all against what they considered the enemy of Christianity-Widow Hagen and her curious ways.

Year by year, then, less and less sought out the Widow’s wisdom and expertise. No more charms and talismans, love potions and cure-alls. Her shack became a shunned place and she became ostracized to the point where she could not even buy her goods in the village.

A month before the first child disappeared, a group of men tried to burn down her shack. When that failed-the wood refused to catch fire-she was publicly stoned in the market square. Raising her hands to the sky, the bloodied and broken Widow Hagen said loud enough for all to hear: “A curse then, breathern… on ye and yer ways!”

Then the children began to disappear.

Village livestock were plagued with nameless afflictions.

Weird storms raked the countryside.

Crops withered in the fields… practically overnight.

And no less than four village women gave birth to stillborn infants.

So when the children turned up missing on top of everything else, there could only be one possible miscreant: Elizabeth Hagen.

Witch.

She was duly arrested by High Sheriff Bolton and a posse of deputized men and placed in the Procton stockade: a windowless, insect-infested sweatbox with dirty straw on the floor where the accused lived in his or her own waste and was fed perhaps every second day. The crude walls were scratched with supplications to God above.

And the investigation, as it were, began.

Sheriff Bolton was in complete agreement with Magistrate Corey and the learned members of the village General Assembly-it was all superstitious rubbish.

Then, Widow Hagen’s shack was searched.

Upon entering, the posse smelled a vulgar, nauseous stench as of spoiled meat. And no man who went in there that windy, misting October afternoon would soon forget what was uncovered. There were soiled canvas sacks of human bones-children’s bones, still stained with blood and plastered with stringy bits of sinew. The skulls were soon uncovered buried beneath the dirt floor. As were the maggoty and headless bodies of the infants. All of which bore the marks of ritual hacking and slashing. And at the hearth in a greasy black pot, some pustulant and ghastly stew made of human remains.

But in the root cellar below was found the most gruesome and unspeakable of horrors, something swimming in a cask of human blood and entrails. Sheriff Bolton later described it as “something like a fetus… a hissing, mewling mass of flesh… a blubbery human fungus with more limbs than it had any right to possess”. It was shot and brought into town wrapped in a tarp. The village physician, Dr. Lewyn, a man of some scientific background and possessed of a microscope and other modern equipment, dissected it. Bolton’s observations were proven correct, for Lewyn’s inspection revealed the creature to be human in form only. It’s anatomy was terribly rudimentary, reversed from that of a normal human child and was entirely boneless, unless one wished to count the “rubbery, fungous structure within”. The cadaver gave off a hideous, fishy odor and was immediately burned, the ashes buried in unconsecrated ground.

It was said the Widow Hagen screamed from her cell when that particular blasphemy was given to the flames.

The preceding evidence was more than sufficient for Magistrate Corey to form a Court of Oyer and Terminer, much like others that had governed over many another witch trial. Elizabeth Hagen was first examined by Dr. Lewyn. Though a man possessed of scientific reasoning, it did not take him long to give the court the very thing it wanted… physical evidence that the Widow Hagen was indeed a witch. For three inches below her left armpit was found an extra nipple… the so-called “Witches Teat”, the seal of a pact with the Devil. Through this nipple, a witch supposedly fed her familiars.

No one was more shocked than Lewyn.

He told the court that supernumerary nipples weren’t unknown in medical annals, but his argument was flaccid at best. Even he didn’t seem to believe it. And nothing he could say could allay what came next-Elizabeth Hagen was tortured to elicit a confession or, as it was popularly known, “put to the question”. During the next week she underwent the ordeal of the ducking stool and the strappado, the heretic’s fork and the witch’s cradle. She was burned with hot coals, cut, beaten, hung by her feet and thumbs. The needed confession came within a few days… a might too quick for the court’s henchmen.

But come, it did.

She admitted freely to the practice of witchcraft, of hexing the village, of conjuring storms and blights. It was enough. The morning of the trial she was dragged from her cell, wrists bound and tied to the rear of a farm wagon. She was pulled by oxen through the streets in this way, her jailer lashing her with a whip the entire way through those muddy streets to the courthouse. The locals lined up to pelt her with rotten fruit and stones. On her belly then, she was dragged up the steps and before Magistrate Corey and his associates, Magistrates Bowen and Hay.

She was bloody and broken, sack dress hanging in strips, her back raw from the whip, her face slashed open from “the blooding”, her scalp missing patches of hair from “the knotting”. A metal cage known as a Scold’s Bridle encircled her head. The jailer removed it, tearing the bit from her mouth that pressed her tongue flat.

She begged for water and was given none.

She begged for food and was ignored.

She begged for mercy and the assembled crowd laughed.

Then the questioning began. The court had already assembled a lengthy list of evidence, not all of which was found in the Widow’s shack. People, certain now that she had been emasculated by the law, came forward with tales of horror and wonder. A young woman named Claire Dogan admitted that Widow Hagen had tried to seduce her into the “cult of witchery”, promising her riches and power. Dogan claimed that she had witnessed Hagen mixing up “flying ointment” which was applied to a length of oak, upon which, Hagen flew through the air, dipping over treetops and harassing livestock in the fields, laughing all the while.

A farmer named William Constant claimed that, in order to gain control of his neighbor’s holdings, he contracted Widow Hagen to “witch” the man. He said he watched her tie the series of knots in rope known as the “witch’s ladder”… and soon after, his neighbor was taken ill, dying shortly thereafter. Another farmer, Charles Goode, said that he-“while bewitched by the old hag”-had asked her to kill his shrewish wife. Hagen had taken a bone covered with decaying meat, sprinkled it with unknown powders, said words over it “which withered my soul upon hearing them”. The bone was buried beneath his wife’s window and as the meat rotted from it, so did the flesh melt from his wife’s skeleton. She died soon after of an unknown wasting disease.

A group of village children admitted that the Widow had taught them how to avenge their enemies: another group of children who had teased and tormented them. She showed them how to gather hairs from the other children and press them into dolls made of mud and sticks. The words to say over them. And whatever they then did with the dolls happened to the children in question. When one doll was thrown in the river, one of the offending children drowned. When a doll was thrown into a fire, its namesake’s cabin burned to the ground. The court recognized this as sympathetic magic. The children also said that when Mr. Garrity chased them bodily from his apple orchards, they said “strange words” taught to them by Widow Hagen and Garrity’s prize milking cow keeled over dead on the spot.

And more than one farmer came forward to say that there was always trouble during midsummer. That it was the time of the Wild Hunt-the legendary flight of the witches. That Elizabeth Hagen and her fellow witches would take to the air with a coven of demons and evil dead and by morning the unwary had been carried off and livestock went unaccounted for. That on nights of the Wild Hunt, wise men stayed indoors for it could be heard coming-a barking and hissing, screaming and churning.

So the evidence, as such, was not lacking.

High Sheriff Bolton told his wife in secret that if the Widow were to be “put to flame”, the entire village should burn with her. For there were precious few that had not encouraged her wild talents, had not called upon her in times of need. If she had gotten out of control, then who was to blame for empowering her? When there was trouble, her council was always the first sought. And that she had cured more ills and delivered more babies than any thirty doctors, there was no doubt.

But, even Bolton, after what he had seen at Hagen’s shack, had no sympathy for her.

On the first day of the trial, the horrors were heard.

Magistrate Bowen: Elizabeth Hagen… do you admit, then to being a witch?

Hagen: I admit, yer lordship, into being that which is called as such.

Magistrate Bowen: You admit to bewitching this community then?

Hagen: I admit I have my ways. I admit I use them against those what have done me wrong, yer lordship. I was stoned, was I not? My cabin was near-burned, was it not? I have been driven away by those who I have helped numerous times. And now… look upon me! Beaten and bloodied… have I not a right to avenge meself?

Magistrate Bowen: Yours is a crime against, God, lady. Yours is a crime punishable by death. Do you admit then to the worship of Satan?

Hagen: Satan? Satan? A Christian devil, yer lordship. I have no truck with him.

Magistrate Bowen: Then who have you struck your filthy bargain with?

Hagen (laughing uncontrollably): Bargain? Bargain, do ye say? Why with him, is it not? With him that crawls and him that slithers. Him that lords over the dark wood and the empty glen, him that commands from a throne of human bone.

Magistrate Bowen: How do you call this devil, this despoiler?

Hagen: Call him? Him that is She and She that is Him? Him That Cannot Bear Name? The Black Goat of the Dark Wood? She with a thousand squirming, screaming young? Him that calls yer name from the dead and lonely places? Aye! He and She that are It cannot be named! Cannot be held nor bound by such.

Magistrate Bowen: Say the name, witch, in the name of Christ Jesus!

Hagen (laughing): Jesus do ye say? A Christian charlatan! My doings, right and proper, are with Her, with Him, with It, the ancient Writher in Blackness!

Magistrate Bowen: Then you admit to entering into a pact with this nameless other?

Hagen: I do, if it please your honor. This I then do.

Magistrate Bowen: Do you admit, also, of that abomination in your root cellar? That you were growing it? Bringing it to term, as it were, a horror that would torment the community?

Hagen: You ruined me simple fun! What a lark that thing would have been, sucking out the bones of the good and proper!

Magistrate Bowen: I command you, lady, to name this devil who you have had commerce with. That which gave you power over man and nature.

Hagen: Ah, ye wish I hang meself, do ye? Ye wish I speak of commerce with them from the hollow places? Them that hop and jump and crawl?

Magistrate Bowen: You already have, lady, you already have. Tell us, then, of the children. Confess in the name of Jesus Christ.

Hagen: I will confess not in the name of a false god, yer lordship. The children? The children? Aye, I took their lives and laughed as I did so! I drank their blood and stewed their meat, didn’t I? Just as I loosed him what stole them babes, him that devoured their soft heads and picked his teeth with their tiny bones… it is only the beginning, the beginning! Do ye hear? Do ye hear me, you fat stuffed piggies of Procton? Only the beginning…

Magistrate Bowen: Your days of evil are at an end.

Hagen: Are they, yer lordship? Are they indeed? I think not! Stoned, I was. Tortured, I was. Eye for an eye, they say, and eye for an eye I shall have in His name! At an end? What I have called up, brought to me side, will be known for ages! The legacy will not end, this I swear by me mother’s soul which burns in the dark, cold place. Even now, yes, even now I have sewed the seeds. Even now there are three who bring hell into this world…

And so it came to pass.

While Elizabeth Hagen languished in her prison cell, the most peculiar thing happened: three village maidens became pregnant. And each were the daughters of town ministers-Hope from the Congregational Church, Rice from Christ Church, and Ebers from the Presbyterian Church. The girls declared themselves virgins and examinations by Dr. Lewyn proved their hymens to be intact. Virgin births, then. The village was joyous… yet horrified, considering who and what was currently being held in the stockade.

And in her cell, Elizabeth Hagen chanted and sang songs and spoke in unearthly voices throughout the night.

A week into the trial, for more and more witnesses kept coming forward, the three girls-Clarice Ebers, Marilynn Hope, and Sarah Rice-all in their sixteenth years, began to exhibit the physical characteristics of women in their fourth months. Their bellies were oddly swollen and this, seemingly overnight. Dr. Lewyn admitted it was impossible, that even one such case stretched the fabric of credibility… but that three surely canceled out the possibility of coincidence.

And it grew worse.

On the same night, all three girls underwent violent seizures. They fell into violent fits in which they attacked anyone nearby, screaming and cursing and destroying anything at hand. They scratched madly at their skins, as if trying to free themselves of something that burrowed within. Sarah Rice actually peeled a great deal of flesh from her arms and thighs. All three had to be restrained so as not to harm themselves or others… and to keep them from running off in the woods, to someone, they claimed, that beckoned to them and filled their heads with “horrible noises”.

Of course, it just got worse day by day.

They would not eat, claiming they could only consume blood and raw meat. They profaned their mothers, fathers, and anyone within earshot. Objects moved about their rooms, things were ripped from walls, timbers groaned and splintered, furniture toppled over. The girls spoke in tongues, in the voices of the dead. They told of hidden secrets that they could not possibly know of. Black, reeking fluids were discharged from all orifices. Profane melodies were heard emanating from their swollen bellies. Polluted, noxious smells seeped from them. And more than one person fled in terror when they heard voices whispering from the girls’ vaginas.

There was no doubt: the girls were possessed of demons.

Demons, no doubt, loosed by the hag herself, Widow Hagen.

Exorcisms were attempted by the ministers and all were glaring, horrendous failures. Minister John Rice of Christ Church battled with Marilynn Hope for hours upon hours, trying to wrest her soul from the malignancy that had consumed it. He read scripture over her and demanded she… or whatever lived in her… submit to the will of Jesus Christ. But the girl would only laugh and bark and writhe, speaking in various tongues and languages. She demanded meat and blood be brought her. She demanded the flesh of children. Minister Rice underwent physical attacks from objects flying about the room and from “a malefic force as of a cold wind that threw me about.”

The demon in Marilynn spoke in the voice of Minister Rice’s long-dead first wife, telling him in graphic detail how she was being sodomized in Hell. How his father and mother were there, fornicators and child-eaters, and to prove this she spoke in their voices… very often at the same time.

After some twelve hours of psychic, physical, and spiritual attacks, Minster Rice was led away… a beaten, broken man, his soul laid raw like a festering wound. Ebers tried next, for Marilynn’s father had not the strength to look upon his own daughter in such an obscene condition. Things went well at first and it seemed that whatever dwelled in the Hope girl was relenting. Marilynn began to cry and pour out her wracked soul over the macabre torments she had undergone. When Ebers bent forward to listen to her whispered confession… she licked his ear, said something only he could hear. Something which sucked the color from his face. Something which made him run from that room in that cursed house until he reached his own and was able to press a pistol against his temple. And end it.

It was hopeless.

The three girls were locked in the grip of a seemingly omnipotent evil that owned them body and soul. Whatever it was, it was malicious, perverse, and toxic to any who dared toy with it.

The trial of Elizabeth Hagen ended and she remained locked in the stockade. The Magistrates were unable to decide on her fate. If she were executed would the evil in Procton only get stronger? Or would it be purged? These were dangerous matters and ones, they decided, not to be considered lightly.

But public opinion ran high and strongly, so there was little choice in the matter. Elizabeth Hagen was dragged from her cell, lashed to a wagon wheel and rolled through the streets before a jeering, hateful crowd. In a clearing known to locals as Heretic’s Field for it served as a makeshift graveyard for “suicides, heathens, and those kin folks were ashamed of”, Elizabeth Hagen was burned. The wheel she was lashed upon was tied to the trunk of a blasted, dead oak and set afire.

But even this was no easy matter.

Though heaped with kindling and engulfed with flame, she would not die. She burned for hours… burned, blackened, crisped and curled, but refusing to die. She called out curses upon all present. The wagon wheel finally collapsed under her and the roasted, charred thing she became continued to shriek and wail and scream.

It was dragged from the coals with billhooks and twined tight with rope and chains. The Magistrates had it placed back in the stockade where it continued to howl and screech and profane all things holy. The cremated cadaver lived for days… until enraged locals dragged it out into the light and hacked it to bits with axes. Then it finally died. The pieces were buried in separate locations and the evil was at an end… or not quite.

For the demons that possessed the three girls did not vacate; they clung all that much tighter. They would not leave until their spawn was birthed.

Three months into their pregnancies… and scarce days since the destruction of the witch… the girls seemed to be ready to deliver… their bellies huge and round, their birth canals dilated. They had become wasted, skeletal things that gave off a pungent stink of carrion.

And so, they gave birth.

Clarice Ebers and Sarah Rice were first.

The labor pains were so intense, each fell unconscious. Copious amounts of blood and black bile drained from Sarah Rice’s vagina and she-a staring, sightless creature whose greasy flesh barely contained the skeleton beneath-ruptured. Or at least, it seemed that way. Dr. Lewyn used every trick he knew, but both child and mother perished in a sea of red. Later, he would-with the family’s consent-investigate matters more fully and discover that Sarah had ruptured because her child had teeth. A full set of teeth oddly sharp and long. And with these teeth, the child-a white, limbless horror with huge, lidless black eyes-had bitten its mother to death from inside, severing arteries in the process.

Dr. Lewyn decided wisely to keep this from the family… this and the fact that the child had not only bitten its mother, but had cannibalized her. Digesting no small amount of tissue in the process. He also kept secret the fact that Sarah’s child was not dead when he opened her up with a scalpel. That the grotesque little monster was living on inside its dead mother, feeding on her like some hellish prenatal ghoul. That when he pulled it from her cleaved open abdomen… an armless, squirming grub that had more in common with a maggot than a human being… he had to tear it free, for it hung tenaciously to its mother’s tissues by its teeth.

Lewyn dumped it in a bucket and poured acid on it, upon which, it dissolved like a salted slug.

Long before her child came into the world, Clarice Ebers lost her mind with the agony, if there was any mind left by that point. She cried out in the voice of Elizabeth Hagen, thrashed and fought and finally passed out. What she birthed into the world was a crawling thing, blistered and scorched. Like something that had been burned alive. Wisps of smoke wafted from its incinerated flesh and it, as it died, scratched a black, inverted cross into the stained bedsheets with one withered finger.

Clarice died moments later, her insides scalded.

The child was buried in Heretic’s Field, Clarice and Sarah entombed side by side in a Christian grave.

Marilynn Hope, however, lasted another month. Her child, when born in the winter of 1824, was healthy and normal in every possible way. A boy. The only irregularity was a birthmark on his back in the form of a tiny, four-fingered hand. But he was considered by townsfolk to be cursed, the progeny of unholy union. So Minister Hope sent his deranged daughter and her son to live with kin in Missouri where they could be sheltered from the world.

He named his grandson James Lee.

In Missouri he would take the family name of relations: Cobb.

3

Until James Lee’s third year up in the Ozarks in Taney County, Missouri, the same ritual was repeated on a weekly basis. When Uncle Arlen returned from the lumber camps or the lead mine he sometimes found regular work at, he would take Marilynn Hope from the attic loft she was sequestered in and drag her bodily down to Bryant Creek. Along with James Lee’s Auntie Maretta, they would read from the Book of Common Prayer as Marilynn alternately whimpered and growled like an animal.

Though James Lee grew strong in the simple ways of hill folk, the taint on his mother never lessened. She was a filthy, mad thing dressed in rags with wild, glistening marbles for eyes. Uncle Arlen kept her tied up in the loft where she ate insects and shit herself, whispering to those no one else could see and scratching odd symbols and words into the roughhewn walls with her long yellow nails.

But once a week… purification.

James Lee would sit in the dirt, scratching around with a stick, watching with disinterest what they did with the crazy woman. Uncle Arlen and Auntie Maretta would drag her out with a rope looped around her throat. They’d strip her and toss her into the creek, jumping in with her. Taking turns, one would read from the prayer book and the other would dunk Marilynn into the water, holding her under until she quit thrashing. Uncle Arlen said it would drive the demons from her through baptismal in “Christ’s very waters”.

James Lee had seen it done many, many times, but it had not helped. Though at three years of age he could not understand nor fathom what it was all about, he knew whatever it was they were doing didn’t work. Dunk her, preach to her, dunk her some more, preach some more. He decided it was probably a game… but one only the adults could play. Because whenever he tried to edge closer, wanting badly to splash in the water, too, Uncle Arlen told him to keep away, keep away, hear?

But after three years of proper baptizing and the Lord’s word, Marilynn was no better. So Uncle Arlen imprisoned her in a shack in the hills above the cabin so they wouldn’t have to listen to “that heathen madness no more”. James Lee wasn’t allowed to go up there. Uncle Arlen and Auntie Maretta took care of the crazy woman’s needs-feeding and watering her like any of the stock on that hardscrabble farm.

It was a hard life up in the Ozarks, miles and miles from anywhere that might have been considered even remotely civilized. James Lee attended a ramshackle school over in the next hollow yonder, learned to read and write. The other children kept their distance, for they knew he was the son of the woman up in the shack, the woman everyone knew was “teched in the head”. The kids said-but only behind James Lee’s back for even as a schoolboy he had a virulent, raging temper-that the crazy woman ate rats and snakes and toads. That she had two heads, one she gibbered with and one she ate with. But maybe, too, they kept away from James Lee because they could smell something on him, something bad.

So he clung to the Cobb farm, slopping hogs and cleaning pens and picking rocks and chopping wood. He took great, unsavory relish in watching Uncle Arlen put chickens to the hatchet. Liked how their blood spurted from their necks and how, even when dead, they seemed to live on.

“Can folks do that, Uncle?” he asked one day. “Even if they’s all dead?”

Uncle Arlen made to swat at him as he often did, but held his hand back, fixed him with those fierce, unforgiving eyes. “Boy… that is, folks is dead they’s jus’ dead is all, they cain’t walk about and such and if’n they do…” He stopped himself there, scratched at his beard. “Well, they cain’t boy. They jus’ cain’t.”

“But—”

“Ain’t no buts, boy! No back to work with ye! Mind me, boy!”

And the years passed and James Lee got bigger and the children gave him a wider birth except for Rawley Cummings who took it upon himself to tell James Lee that he was no better than the crazy woman in the shack yonder. That, given time, he would drink piss and rut with hogs, too. It was a given. James Lee… though three years younger… jumped the boy like a mountain cat with a thorn digging into its ass. He kicked and punched, bit and clawed. It took four boys to pull him free. Schoolmaster Parnes gave him a good thrashing for that one and Uncle Arlen beat him so hard he closed both his eyes.

To which Auntie Maretta said, “Not m’ boy, not m’ sweet little angel Jimmy Lee… don’t ye lay a hand on him! Don’t ye dare lay a hand on him!”

So Uncle Arlen ceased beating him and took the hickory switch to his wife instead. But that got it out of him. Like other times when he got heavy with his fists, he went up into the hills to do some drinking. When he came back, he was better.

The Devil was purged.

One night, when they thought he was sleeping, James Lee heard them talking by the stove in hushed voices.

“Don’t never wan’ that boy finding out, hear?” Uncle Arlen said in his gravelly voice. “Don’t need to know that woman’s his mother.”

“Never ever,” Auntie Maretta told him. “Why, Jimmy Lee… he’s m’ boy, m’ big and proud boy. He ain’t like her, cain’t ye see? He’s like m’ own flesh.”

“He ain’t though, woman,” Uncle Arlen pointed out. “Place he comes from… well things jus’ ain’t right there. Ain’t proper.”

Auntie Maretta chewed on that for a time, decided she didn’t like the taste and spit it right back out. “He’s more mine than he is hers. Don’t ye see? Lord above, sometimes I wish she’d up and expire.”

“Woman, now she’s kin.”

“Y’all wish it, too, Arlen Cobb.”

“In a weaker moment, yessum. But, hell, ain’t happenin’… she’s up in the shack doin’ what she does and livin’ on… how can that be, woman? How can that be? Don’t even freeze to death proper in the winter… now how is that?”

But Auntie Maretta didn’t know. “Hexed, is all.”

“I jus’ worry about that boy… he carries the taint on him and ye know it. What’s in her is in him. Blood’ll tell and it’ll tell every time. Cousin Marilynn ain’t scarcely human, I figure. That whole brood is cursed… Jesus, lookit her old man, kilt himself and what! And him a preacher.”

“Easterners,” Auntie Maretta said. “They ain’t right in the head.”

“Neither is that boy… he likes blood and killin’ too much. Like his mama, he carries the taint on his soul…”

James Lee was thirteen when he heard that.

But it hadn’t been the first time.

He didn’t know all the story, but he knew enough by then to put some of it together. That crazy woman was his mother and they had come from back east, from some awful place of witches and tainted heredity and things too awful to put into words. At night, he’d lay there and think on it and think on it some more. One way or another, come hell or high water, he was going to learn what it was all about. He figured his first step was to climb up into the hills and get a look at… at his mother. He was banned from going up there, but maybe knowledge was worth a good beating.

The very next winter he got his chance.

A bad blizzard had set its teeth into the Ozarks and snow was drifted up near the windows which were locked tight with patterns of frost. Rags had been stuffed in the cracks to keep the wind out, but there was still a chill in the cabin. A chill that set upon you like something hungry if you strayed too far from the fire. James Lee was sitting before it, working out some arithmetic problems by candlelight. His Uncle and Auntie sat at the hardwood table, him with his pipe and her with her knitting.

Whenever Auntie Maretta caught his eyes, she’d give him a sly, secretive smile that spoke of love and trust and faith. A look that said, yer a good boy and I knows it.

Whenever Uncle Arlen caught his eyes, he gave him a hard, withering look that simply said, mind yer schoolwork, boy, and quiet yer damn daydreaming.

So James Lee sat there on the floor, scribbling.

The cabin was a log affair with a plank floor and smoke-blackened beams crisscrossing above. There was a sheltered loft, but it wasn’t used now that Marilynn was up in the old shack. A cast iron stove sat in the corner, fire in its belly. Two cauldrons filled with boiling water bubbled on its surface. The air smelled of wood smoke, burned fat, and maple syrup. While Auntie Maretta busied herself washing up the dinner dishes-blue speckled plates and tin cups? Uncle Arlen cleared his throat. Cleared it the way he did when he was about to finally speak what was on his mind.

“Boy,” he said. “Ye up to an errand? Ye up to bravin’ the snow and night?”

James Lee slapped his book shut, never so ready. “Yessum, Uncle.”

“Aw right, listen here now. Want ye to go out to the smokehouse. Them hams in there is cured and ready. Take one of ’em and not the big one, mind, wrap it up tight in a po-tater sack, bring it up to Miss Leevy up yonder on the high road.” He packed his clay pipe with rough-cut tobacco. “Now, she been good t’ us and we gonna be good t’ her. She’s up in years. Ye think ye can handle that?”

“Yessum.”

“Off wit ye then.”

It was bitter cold out there, the snow whipping and whistling around the cabin, but James Lee knew he could do it, all right. Out past the sap-house, he dug snow away from the smokehouse door and packaged up the ham. Then he marched straight through the drifts and shrieking wind up onto the road and fought his way up to Miss Leevy’s. She took the ham and made James Lee drink some chamomile tea brightened with ‘shine.

On his way back, he cut through the woods.

He knew where he was going.

He knew what he had to see.

Sheets of snow fell from the pines overhead and the air was kissed with ice. His breath frosted from his lips and the night created crazy, jumping shadows that ringed him tight. But the ‘shine had lit a fire in his belly and he felt the equal of anything. He carried an oil lamp with him, lighting it only when he made out the dim hulk of the shack.

The forbidden shack.

Sucking cold air into his lungs and filling his guts with iron, he made his way over there. He stood outside in the snow, thinking how it wasn’t too late to turn back, wasn’t too late at all. But then his hand was out of its mitten and his fingers were throwing the bolt, just throwing it aside fancy as you please.

First thing he heard was a rattling, dragging sound… as of chains.

Then something like a harsh breathing… but so very harsh it was like fireplace bellows sucking up ash.

It stayed his hand, but not for long. Good and goddammit, James Lee Cobb, a voice echoed in his skull, this is what ye wanted, weren’t it? To know? To see? To look the worse possible thing right in the face and not dare look away? Weren’t it? Well, weren’t it?

It was.

Those chains… or whatever they were… rattled again and there was a rustling sound. James Lee pulled the door open, but slowly, slowly, figuring his mind needed time to adjust. Like slipping into a chill spring lake, you had to do it by degrees. The door swung open and a hot, reeking blast of fetid air hit him full in the face. It stank like wormy meat simmering on a stove lid. His knees went to rubber and something in him-maybe courage-just shriveled right up.

In the flickering lantern light he saw.

He saw his mother quite plainly.

She was chained to the floor, pulling herself away from the light like some gigantic worm. Her flesh had gone marble-white and was damp and glistening like the flesh of a mushroom. Great sores and ulcers were set into her and some had eaten right to the bone beneath. It was hard to say if she was wearing rags or that was just her skin hanging in loops and ragged folds. Her hair was steel-gray and stringy, those eyes just fathomless holes torn into the vellum of her face.

But what struck James Lee the hardest was not the eyes or the stink or even the feces and filthy straw and tiny animal bones scattered about… it was that she seemed to have tentacles. Just like one of them sea monsters in a picture book that ate ships raw. Long, yellow things all curled and coiled like clocksprings.

But then… he realized they were her fingernails.

And they had to be well over two feet in length… hard, bony growths that came out of her fingertips and laid over her like corkscrewed snakes.

James Lee made a sound… he wasn’t sure what… and she opened those flaking lips, revealing gray decayed teeth that sprouted from pitted gums like grayed fence posts. She made a grunting, squealing sound like a hog. And then she reached out to him, seemed to know him, and those fingernails clattered together like castanets.

That’s when he slammed the door shut.

That’s when he threw the bolt.

And that’s when he ran down through the snow and brambles, ducking past dead oaks and vaulting fallen logs. He ran all the way to the cabin and stumbled and fell into the door. Then Uncle Arlen threw it open, yanking him inside, into that mouth of warmth and security, demanding to know what it was, what it was.

But James Lee could not tell.

The Ozarks back then had a fine story-telling tradition. Sometimes a man’s worth was judged on how hard he worked and how good of a yarn he could spin. So James Lee was no stranger to tales of ghosts and haunts, child-eating ogres that lived in the depths of the forests or blood-sucking devil clans that peopled secret hollows. For everything scarcely understood or completely misunderstood, there was a story to explain it. It was a region where folktale and myth were an inseparable part of everyday life. There were faith healers and power doctors, water witches and yarb grannies… you name it, it showed sooner or later.

And one thing the Ozarks never had a shortage of were witches.

Some good, some evil, some real and some storied, regardless, they were there. Ask just about anyone in any locality of the hills and they could tell you where to find one… or point you to someone who could.

The kids at school told of an old man named Heller the Witch-Man who lived up in some misty hollow that few dared venture to. He could cast out devils and call them up, cure disease and make hair grow.

James Lee figured it was just another story… then one day he was down in town. Uncle Arlen was picking up some feed. James Lee was standing out on the boardwalk, kicking pebbles into the street. Suddenly… he got the damnedest feeling. He felt dizzy and the birthmark on his back started to burn something awful.

He turned and some grizzled old man was standing there, staring at him.

He looked like some hillbilly from the high ridges, dirty and smelling in an old hide coat. He had a single gold tooth in his lower jaw and it sparkled in the sunlight.

“Boy… ye got the mark on ye,” he said. “Ye got it on ye and ye cain’t rid yerself of it…”

Then Uncle Arlen came out and dragged James Lee bodily away. And even after he threw him in the wagon and they made their way out of town, James Lee could feel those eyes on him, feel that mark on his back burning like a coal.

Uncle Arlen shouted and raged and warned James Lee about talking to strangers, because one day you meet the wrong one and soon enough, he sneaks up to the farm and slits all our throats.

James Lee just said: “It’s him, ain’t it? The Witch-Man.”

“Ain’t no such thing, damn ye! Ain’t no such thing!”

But James Lee couldn’t stop. “They say… they say how he can do things. Things no one else can. Maybe, maybe if we brought the… the crazy woman to him, he could cure her—”

James Lee caught the back of Uncle Arlen’s fist in the mouth for that. And when he got home, he got a better taste of it. When Uncle Arlen was done, James Lee was folded up on the ground bleeding.

“Ye never, ever, never mention that one ‘round me again, hear?” Uncle Arlen told him. “That heathen devil witch-man is nothin’ but pain and trouble! He cain’t cure nothin’ and no one, all he’ll bring ye is seven yards of hell!”

After that, James Lee didn’t mention Heller the Witch-Man again.

Even Auntie Maretta looked on him differently. She wasn’t exactly cold, but gone was the warmth and love he’d once known. Sometimes he got the feeling she was scared of him. And one night he heard Uncle Arlen say:

“What’d I tell ye, woman? Like calls to like.”

Although he didn’t mention the strange old man, James Lee never stopped thinking about him or what lived in the shack up yonder. Days became weeks that wrapped themselves around months and years. And it was from an old moonshiner named Crazy Martin that James Lee got the answers he wanted. Crazy Martin knew the old man, lived way up in a hollow known as Hell’s Half-Acre and with good reason.

So one summer afternoon, James Lee made the pilgrimage.

It took him hours to navigate the mud roads and pig trails that snaked through the deep forest. But finally, in a hollow where no birds sang and no insects buzzed and the vegetation had a gray, dead look about it, he located the Witch-Man’s shack.

Heller was sitting before a fire. “Come sit yeself down, boy,” he said, without once looking in James Lee’s direction. “I knewed ye’d come, sooner or later, I knewed ye had to. So sit down. Folks say I bite people, but don’t ye believe it none.”

James Lee sat before the fire, refusing to meet the old man’s eyes.

Heller had a fiddle on his lap and he played a slow, melancholy tune while his mouth rambled on and on about his crops and how they were taking and it would be a good year, save fire and frost.

“Ye said I was marked,” James Lee managed after he realized the old man was no flesh-eating booger like they said. He was just an old man who lived in a weird hollow who worried over his crops.

“I recall, boy, I recall.” He set the fiddle on his lap. “Yer pa… no sir, yer uncle, I think, yes… yer uncle didn’t cotton ye talking to me, did he?”

James Lee was astounded. Here, all these years later, the old man remembered a chance encounter like it was yesterday. And he seemed to know things without being told them. Maybe he wasn’t just some old dirt-farmer after all.

“I think… I think he’s afraid of ye,” James Lee said honestly. “I think lots of folks are.”

“Yessum, they is. They certainly is.” The old man thought about it. “Yer uncle… I figure he’s a wise sort. For commerce with me can come at a terrible price. Boy like you… he cain’t afford what I got. Less’n, he don’t value his soul. Ye value yer soul, boy?”

“Yes… yes, I do.”

“Good boy. Now state yer business, will ye? I cain’t pull everything outta yer head.”

So James Lee told him. About his mother, the mysteries surrounding their coming to Missouri. He went on and on, telling him the same things and asking him the same questions for these were things he’d never spoken aloud to anyone before, but had always itched to.

“First off, boy, yer mama… she’s beyond m’ help. M’ power does not extend far enough to fight what holds her. She was cursed, boy, cursed by… yes, by that evil old bitch. Yessum, I see her in my head, that hag. She packs a heap of power, boy… even dead, her medicine is strong.”

“I was hoping…”

“No, boy. But what has yer mama… yes, it’s weakened some. If’n ye wait… surely, there will be peace for yer mama.” The old man leaned forward, his eyes burning. “But hear me, boy, ye carry the mark… yer life’ll be a dark matter. Ain’t no sunshine comin’ yer way… jus’ darkness.”

James Lee couldn’t fathom any of that business. Heller waxed on about the “Devil’s Mark” and how those who wore it were cursed. But finally, the shadows growing long, Heller let him leave, telling him to follow the trail straight up and out of the hollow. Not to stop, not even to pee. To keep walking, looking straight ahead. That if he saw someone on the trail, to not look upon them, not to listen to what they said. And if he heard voices from the woods… to just ignore them, no matter what they said or what they promised.

“This holler, boy… it’s full of them what don’t rest easy.”

James Lee ran out of there and up into the sunshine and greenery again. When he got back to the cabin, no one would speak to him as if he carried a stain upon him. A stink of crazy old men and witches. The next day, he packed what he had and left the hills, figuring he was seventeen and a man. That it was time to make his way in the world.

West was where he was going.

And on the way he fell in with the wrong type. He seemed to naturally gravitate to them. And as the weeks and months past, whatever had been waiting in him all these years began to sprout, to take root and bloom. But it was no flower, but a mordant and eating cancer that devoured him an inch at a time.

By the time he fought in the Mexican-American War, James Lee had already killed six men… with his hands, his pistols, knife and hatchet.

4

The dry winds were born of blast furnaces and ovens. They scoured the desolate countryside, howling through dry ravines and whistling along the peaks of rocky precipices. Dense stands of chaparral and wiry brush trembled. Sand blew and snakes hid amongst the crags. Buzzards circled in the yellow hazy sky above. Flies lit on the faces of the living and the dead and the wind tasted of salt, heat, and misery.

All in all, Northern Mexico was a parched, godless country just this side of hell.

James Lee Cobb, a Missouri Volunteer, watched as two buckskin-clad irregulars dragged another Mexican corpse from the dirty scrub.

“That’s six now, boss,” one of them named Jones said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the Spanish face of a corpse that had taken a load of grapeshot in the belly. He was just one big, wide opening between sternum and crotch now… you could’ve passed a medicine ball through him without brushing meat. “Six of them stinking, mother-raping sonsofbitches.”

“Every time I see a dead greaser,” Cobb said, “I think this land is one inch closer to civilization.”

Jones nodded, kicking at a spider in the dirt. “Yep, I would agree with that, James. I surely would.” He spit at the corpses again. “You know? Some of this country down here… it ain’t too bad. If it weren’t were for the Mesicans dirtying it up, might be fit for a white man. You think?”

Cobb narrowed his eyes, watching for trouble, always watching for trouble. “Could be. Hotter than the Devil’s own asshole, but maybe.”

“Worth thinking on.”

Cobb listened to the wind talk and it spoke in the voices of demons, telling him there would be a lot more killing, a lot more ugly dying before this little party was wound up. Licking his leathery lips, this made Cobb smile.

Whatever Cobb had been as a boy, he was not as a man. He could never honestly mark the point when he had gone from being wide-eyed and naive… to what he was now, a blooded killer.

Maybe it had been his first killing.

That drifter he’d knifed in Kansas after his run from Missouri, the one that seemed eager to teach him the ways of sodomy. Maybe when he’d pulled that hunting knife and sank it clear into the stinking pervert’s belly and felt all that hot blood come bubbling out like lava through a sharp slit in the earth… maybe that had done it. For once he got that first killing over and done with, it all came real easy and natural-like. A predestined thing.

Just like Heller the Witch-Man told him, his life had become “a dark matter.”

Cobb didn’t think much of Missouri or Heller or Uncle Arlen and Auntie Maretta much after he left. Not even the horror that was his mother. Staying alive, staying whole, keeping his belly full and his scalp intact-these things tended to occupy his thoughts. He stole horses and rustled cattle. Trapped beaver in the Rockies and Wyoming’s Green River country. He bootlegged whiskey to injuns and supplied them with U.S. issue carbines for their fights against squatters and the Army. All in all, there was a lot of murdering and violence involved and this on a daily basis. All the good things in him withered like green vines in a drought and something else, something shadowed and nameless rose up to fill the void.

Something that had been there from the start… just waiting.

Waiting its turn.

When Texas decided to annex to the United States, he’d joined a group of hellraising Missouri volunteers to fight for its independence from Mexico.

War, any war, was a hard business, but something in Cobb liked it.

His first taste of it was at the steaming holding camps at Matamoros where everyone was anxious to fight and there was nothing to do but take it out on each other. The Missouri volunteers went at it tooth-and-nail with volunteers from Georgia and Indiana and particularly with the regular army, which looked down on all volunteers as trash. At best, they decided, they were mercenaries, at worst, just cut-throats and freebooters. So the volunteers gave them hell at every quarter. And when they weren’t using their fists, they were popping off their muskets at passing game, shadows, anything that moved and some things that didn’t.

Matamoros was one unruly hive of confusion and insubordination. The regular army was incensed over these brigands, these hell-for-leather volunteers.

And the volunteers themselves were amused to no earthly end.

But then Cobb and the others were jammed aboard a riverboat and taken down the Rio Grande. The river had burst its banks, then burst them again. Maybe once after that, too. Point being, the pilots were having a hell of a time with it. They couldn’t be sure what was river and what was flood plain. The boats kept getting snagged in mud flats and bottoms. And in that sparse country, the troops had to dismount every so often to gather wood for the boilers… and such a thing required scavenging for miles sometimes.

Finally, the boats arrived at Camargo… a lick of spit that was neither here nor there nor anywhere you truly wanted to be. Just a little Mexican town on the San Juan River maybe three miles from its junction with the Rio Grande. It had once been sizeable, but was now in ruins from the flooding. The troops unloaded, an irritable and ornery lot, into a camp that was plagued by swarms of insects, snakes, and blistering heat. Men washed their laundry and horses in the same water camp kettles were filled. It was a filthy, desolate place where yellow fever and dysentery raged unchecked. The hospital tents were crowded with the diseased and dying.

Cobb and the other volunteers spent most of their time arguing, swatting flies, and burying the dead.

It was that kind of place.

Death everywhere… and the fighting hadn’t even begun.

Cobb’s volunteers slowly threaded out of the rocks, dumping more cadavers on the stinking heap before them. Twelve of them now. Twelve Mexican guerrillas. The sort that preyed on small bands of U.S. soldiers. Cutting them off, gunning them down. Taking them alive if they could and torturing them. Whipping them until they lost consciousness or cutting off their flesh in small chunks until they bled to death, screaming all the while.

Maybe the regular Army didn’t know how to deal with these pigs, but the volunteer forces surely did.

When you took them alive, you made a game out of it. You buried them up to their necks in the sand and spread honey over their faces and let the fire ants do their thing. You dragged them behind horses over the rocks until they broke apart. You hung them by their feet and swung ’em through bonfires. You dropped them into pits of diamondback rattlesnakes. You staked them out and let the wildlife have their way. And, if you felt real creative, you took a skinning knife to ’em… it could last for hours and hours that way.

But, best, when you found their villages, you burned them. You shot down their children and raped their women.

One of the volunteers was pissing on the bodies and Cobb had to yell at him. “Is that how ye show respect for the dead, ye sumbitch?” he said, backing the man against a wall of stone. “Is that how ye treat these chilis? Shows that ye don’t know shit, my friend. Let me show ye how it’s done.”

Cobb pulled out his bowie knife, pressed the blade against his thumb until it bled… just to make sure it was real sharp. Then, carefully and expertly, taking one of the dead ones by the hair, he ran the blade of his knife under the jaw line and around the cheekbone and just under the scalp and then traced it back down again until he had made a bloody circle. Then, sawing and pulling, he peeled the face from the bone beneath.

He held up the dripping mask. “All set to scare the kiddies with.”

The other volunteers were laughing and clapping each other on the backs. Why, it was the damn funniest thing they’d ever seen. Leave it to Cobb to come up with something like that. Just when you thought he’d exhausted his grisly creativity by using the scrotum of a Mex for a tobacco pouch or making a necklace of fingers… he came up with something new.

Pulling their knives, the others began doing it, too.

Cobb walked amongst them, motioning with his bloody knife like a schoolteacher instructing on the finer points of conjugating verbs. Except, Cobb’s classroom was a hot, wind-blown place and his subject was butchering. He made quite a figure standing there in his filthy, threadbare buckskins, forage cap tilted at a rakish angle atop his head. His beard was long and shaggy, his hair hanging to his shoulders in greasy knots. An assortment of Colt pistols, revolvers, knifes, and hatchets hung from his belts. Along with the newly-acquired Mexican death mask and the mummified hand of a priest he’d hacked off in Monterrey and sun-dried on a flat rock.

There weren’t enough bodies to go around and there was some argument as to who was going to get what. Cobb settled that by telling the men it was strictly first come, first served. Those of you who got here first, why ye just carve yerself a face, that’s what ye want, he told them. Ye others, well ye have to make do with what ye can beg, borrow, or steal. Cobb told them-and they believed him-that there would be plenty of trophies to be had down the road a piece. Maybe tomorrow, maybe today.

“One thing ye can count on, boys,” he said to them, “is that there’s always gonna be more. Mexico’s just full of ’em.”

He watched them going to work, hacking and sawing and cutting, singing little ditties they’d learned from the Mexican folk, but didn’t understand a word of.

Yes, Cobb watched them, knowing they’d patterned themselves after him. He’d joined up as an enlisted man, but soon enough-maybe through ferocity in battle or sheer savagery-he’d become an officer and their leader. They looked up to him. They fancied all the badges and military decorations he’d taken off dead Mexican officers and pinned to his hide shirt. The necklaces of fingers and blackened ears, the skull of the that Mexican colonel he’d mounted from his saddlehorn.

They wanted to be like him.

They wanted to be a bloodthirsty hard-charger like James Lee Cobb. They wanted to leap into battle as he had at Buena Vista, shooting and stabbing and pounding his way through the Mexican ranks.

It made them fight real hard in battle so they could collect up trophies as he had.

And, yes, they could fight hard and die hard and loot and mutilate the dead all they wanted… but none of them would ever be like James Lee Cobb. They would never have his peculiar appetite for inflicting suffering and death. An appetite born in nameless places where human bones were piled in pyramids and human souls were boiled in cauldrons. They would never have that and they surely would never have the birthmark he had.

The one that looked like a red four-fingered handprint.

A handprint that positively burned when death was near.

What happened at the Battle of Buena Vista was this: Some 14,000 Mexican troops commanded by General Santa Anna charged Zachary Taylor’s U.S. forces which numbered less than 5,000. Through determination, audacity, and sheer luck, the American’s pushed the Mexican’s back.

Easy enough to tell; not so easy to experience.

On a dismal morning in February 1847, the troopers under Taylor received orders to strike their tents and march on Buena Vista. Sixteen miles later, they arrived… lacking provisions, wood for fires. Early the next morning picket guards arrived, saying that a large Mexican force was approaching and approaching fast. James Lee Cobb and the Missouri volunteers stationed themselves in a narrow ridge, just beyond an artillery battery and waited for their enemies.

Along with them, were elements of the Kentucky and Arkansas cavalry. Each man waited amongst the rocks, eyes wide, flintlock muskets and carbines primed and at the ready, knives sharpened and hatchets in hand. There was a stink in the air-sour, high, heady.

The smell of fear.

For down below, the enemy were massing and everyone spread out on that ridge could see them, really see them for the first time. The sheer numbers. For once, intelligence had neither over-inflated or under-inflated enemy strength. The Mexicans moved and marched, formed-up into ranks and scattered out in skirmish lines. From where Cobb sat… they were mulling, busy things in perpetual motion.

“Don’t look out there and see yer death, boys,” Cobb told his volunteers. “Look down there and know, know that if they take ye, yer gonna take ten of them motherfuckers with ye.”

Cannonade exploded along the face of the mountain as the Mexican guns-eight-pounders and sixteen-pounders-sought them out. By nightfall, they picked up the pace, raining hell down upon two Indiana rifle companies. Bugles sounded and men died and gouts of smoke filled the air… but the real fighting had yet to begin.

The volunteers and regular army forces waited and waited. Hungry, cold, but not daring to close their eyes as discharges of grapeshot tore up the landscape around them.

At dawn the next day, the Mexican cannons started singing again and things really started moving. Heavy fire erupted in and around the volunteers and was answered by American batteries. The entire mountainside was crawling with the enemy like hordes of Hun filled with blood-rage and steel, preparing to sack a town.

Cobb moved his troops out and charged a hidden Mexican emplacement that had been harassing the Indiana rifles, killing the soldiers and hacking on them until they lay scattered in pieces amongst their damaged guns.

But for every ten killed, twenty more came shouting up the hill at them. And behind them, Jesus, half the Mexican army. Infantry in their green tunics, cavalry in scarlet coats. They carried British East India rifles and long lances, wore brass helmets with large black plumes like raven’s feathers.

All hell broke loose.

Cannon balls whistled over the heads of the volunteers, exploding with gouts of shattered rock and flying dirt. Grapeshot ripped into men, spraying their anatomies in every which direction. Smoke hung like a ground fog over everything and the cavalry looked like ghost riders pounding through it. Men were screaming and shrieking, blood covered the ground in viscous, steaming pools. Soldiers-both American and Mexican-dropped and died, piling up like corded lumber. Some rose only to fall again and be crushed under the thundering hooves of horses. Bugles sounded out. Men crawled through the carnage, missing limbs and/or pressing their viscera back into ruptured abdomens. Some wanted to escape… but others, piecemeal, wanted to fight on.

Cobb bayoneted a soldier and slashed the face off another. He saw volunteers fall… but each time he advanced to their aid, bodies fell at his feet, blood and brains spattered into his face, enemy soldiers rushing out at him.

So he busied himself shooting and knifing, taking them as they came.

And around him, the volunteers scrambled over heaped bodies as mounted troopers of the Mississippi Rifles charged into the fray. They wore bright red shirts and broad-brimmed straw hats. The Mexican cavalry met them on deadly ground and muskets sounded and sabers slashed, horses were ripped apart by cannon balls and men fell by the hundreds, the landscape becoming a bleeding, blasted sea of bodies and limbs and glistening internals.

Behind the Mexican cavalry, a body of lancers came shouting and running, infantry with fixed bayonets backing them up.

The Missouri volunteers, many of them burnt black with powder, fought on, ready to take anything that came. Cobb emptied his pistols until they were smoking and hot. He fired his musket, loaded, rammed, fired again with swift expertise. But the Mexicans poured forward in a surging, shrieking tide, severing the American lines, and Cobb found himself crushing skulls with the butt of his rifle, opening bellies and throats with his knives, and taking weapons off dead men, fighting and fighting.

The Mexicans charged not only from the front, but from both sides and behind now. It was sheer pandemonium. Men were falling and writhing. Horses stampeding and throwing their riders, mad now with gaping wounds and terror from the pounding and shooting and screaming. Shells were bursting and rifle balls whizzing like mad hornets, smoke billowing and dust rising up in blinding whirlwinds. Musketry was crashing and big guns thundering. Wagons and their loads were shattered to kindling and everywhere the dead and the dying, blood and smoke and wreckage.

And still more fresh Mexican troops charged in.

Cobb, filled now with a tearing, raging hunger, dashed in amongst their numbers, cutting men down with musket-fire and blazing pistols. He split open the head of a lancer with his hatchet, slit the throat of another, took up his lance and speared a Mexican officer from his horse. He sank the shaft through the man’s chest and impaled him into the ground. Killing two or three others, he mounted the Mex’s horse-a fine white stallion-and charged in, hacking and cutting, shooting and stabbing.

The horse was blown out from under him, a volley of grapeshot blowing the animal’s legs into shrapnel.

From above, the landscape was ragged and gutted, a chasm filled with smoke and fire, swarming with men and riderless horses. It was a slaughter of the first degree and in the confusion, it was hard to tell who was winning and who was losing.

But Cobb didn’t know and didn’t care.

He fought on, killing more men, stealing horses, slicing through the Mexican lines like a red-hot blade. The fighting continued for some time, but eventually, the dead heaped across the ground in great flesh-and-blood ramparts, the Mexicans broke off their advance. Pounded continually by artillery, their cavalry shattered, they pulled back and even this cost them hundreds and hundreds of men.

When the fighting had ended, the battlefield was a graveyard.

A slaughterhouse.

As far as the eye could see, bodies and parts thereof, men blown up into trees, horses disemboweled by cannonball, soldiers cut in half from musketry. It looked like an image from Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death -smoke and fire, cadavers and shattered wagons. Pitted earth. Pools of blood. Thousands of flies lighting off the dead and those near to it. Men begged for medical aid, for water, for their mothers and sweethearts, for an ounce of life so they could do just a little more killing.

As Cobb walked through the carnage, his buckskins wet with blood and burned from blazing shrapnel, he saw living men drag themselves out from under corpses. Wild-eyed, blood-drenched things, they brandished empty pistols and gored knives. They bayoneted the already dead and those begging for death. Battle-shocked officers in blackened uniforms stumbled out, cursing and crying and shouting out orders to dead men. They called for corpses to rise and give chase to the enemy, while amongst them soldiers shambled to and fro, looking for fallen comrades, dropped weapons, and lost limbs.

Cobb and his blood-stained, fire-baptized volunteers, moved through the burning fields of corpses, parting seething mists of smoke, and began mutilating the Mexicans. Scalping and dismembering, chopping off fingers and ears and plucking free death-masks and hands. They laughed with a deranged cackling as they arranged Mexican corpses in obscene displays.

And Cobb urged them on to new and more twisted atrocities as the birthmark on his back blazed and steamed and pulsed.

Something in him was very pleased, very satisfied with what it saw.

War is hell.

And for whatever was in Cobb, this was like coming home.

Fire and heat and smoke and screaming.

The schoolhouse was burning.

Voices inside cried out in Spanish, bastardized English, Indian tongues… begging, pleading to be released, released for the love of God. And Cobb had every intention of releasing them-right into the hands of their maker.

Cobb watched the fire, fed on it, felt it burning inside him, too. His blood was acid that bubbled and seethed. His heart a red-hot piston hammering and hammering, throwing sparks and oily steam. The birthmark at his back was like an iron brand scorched into his flesh.

The volunteers ringed the schoolhouse, muskets at the ready.

“Any of them chilis get out,” Cobb told them. “Drop them bastards.”

The volunteers had tracked the Mexican guerrillas here to a little town called Del Barra. This is where they lived, operated out of. Just a shabby collection of shacks and adobes leeched by the sun and blasted by desert wind, all lorded over by an old Spanish church and schoolhouse. In the basement of the church, the volunteers found rifles and ammunition, uniforms and weapons stripped from American dead. Many of these still had bloodstains on them.

The priest had refused to let them see the cellar.

Cobb slit his throat.

So the schoolhouse blazed in that hot, arid country and the wind was that of pyres and crematories, the sun melting like a coin of yellow wax in the cloudless sky above.

Sweat ran down Cobb’s face like tears, cutting clean trails through the ground-in dirt. His eyes were wide and unblinking, red-rimmed like the boundaries of hell. A pink worm of a tongue licked salt from his lips. He could hear the sounds of the shouting and shrieking within. Flames had engulfed one side of the schoolhouse now and were greedily licking up another. Inside… old men, women, children. Pounding and screeching to be let out.

There was a sudden wild, roaring sound and the entire schoolhouse was engulfed. It didn’t take much. The wood was dry as tinder, caught flame like matchsticks. Smoke twisted in the air, black belching funnels of it. It stank of charred wood, cremated flesh and singed hair.

The screaming and pounding was dying out now.

“Just about all fried up, I reckon,” Jones said, scratching at his crotch.

A few flaming forms burst from the inferno now, stick figures swallowed in yellow and orange flame. They stumbled about, arms waving about crazily. If it hadn’t been so profane, it might have been comical. Volunteers opened up on them dropping them as danced through the doorway. More followed. Anything, anything to escape the flames. The volunteers fired, primed and loaded, fired again.

A final form came running with a weird, jerking gait, flames licking from it in flickering plumes. It carried something. Cobb figured it was a mother carrying her child.

He held his hand up.

The volunteers did not fire.

She made it maybe ten, fifteen feet, collapsed in a smoldering heap. Cobb watched her until the fire died out and she was just a folded-up, blackened window dummy, her flesh falling away in cinders. She and the child had been melted together in a roasted mass. Their faces were incinerated skulls. The smoke that came from them was hot and stinking.

Within an hour, as the volunteers sat around drinking mescal and chewing on tortillas looted from the adobes, the schoolhouse had fallen into itself in a jackstraw tumble of soot and blackened beams.

There was nothing left.

After a time, the volunteers burned the church and dynamited the adobes until there was nothing left to mark the village of Del Barra but embers and smoke and the stink of death.

And that’s how they left it.

But, of course, the war had to come to an end.

After Monterrey and Camargo, Buena Vista and Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo and Palo Alto, the Mexicans, beaten and weary and just simply tired of the carnage, signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the war ended.

The Americans filtered back into Texas and New Mexico.

Some were grateful that it had come to an end.

Others just went looking for another fight.

James Lee Cobb went looking for something, too… he just wasn’t sure what.

5

Long before the Mexican-American War, the Mexican authorities paid private armies to hunt down and kill marauding tribes of Indians-particularly Apaches and Comanche’s-that were harassing Mexican towns and villages. The Indians would swarm down from the U. S side of the border, killing men, kidnapping women, stealing livestock and horses… in fact, anything they could lay their hands on.

The Mexican army simply couldn’t contend with these raiders, so scalp bounty laws were enacted. The scalps acted as “receipts”: each worth roughly a hundred pesos. And for industrious, prolific bounty hunters the rewards could be quite lucrative indeed. One might think the repellent nature of the business would limit the amount of hunters, but this wasn’t so. After the Panic of 1837, there were plenty looking for quick cash. And they weren’t real particular as to what they had to do to get it.

During the Mexican-American War, Indian depredations diminished somewhat. Mainly because U.S. soldiers spent their free time hunting down renegade bands. When the war ended… the Indian raids picked-up considerably. Comanche’s and Apaches killed hundreds of Mexicans, stole thousands of heads of livestock, and kidnapped an untold number of women and children.

The scalp bounties were revived in most Mexican states, but particularly in Chihuahua and Sonora… and with a vengeance.

The price was now $200 American for a single “receipt”.

James Lee Cobb, like many other soldiers, found himself suddenly working for the very government he’d done his damnedest to sack during the war. The whole thing became something of a cottage industry complete with regulatory committees and inspectors. Standards were set by the Mexican authorities to prevent fraud-a scalp had to include either the crown or both ears and preferably both. This prevented fresh scalps from being stretched and sliced-up, sold off as a dozen or more.

Cobb worked with a team consisting of himself, two ex-Texas Rangers, and three Shawnee Indians who were expert at removing scalps. They hunted down Apaches, Comanche’s, even Seri Indians. They scalped men, women, children… sparing no one.

Since it was easier to work on a freshly-killed body-the living ones protested the practice vehemently-Cobb and his boys usually put their rounds into the chests of their victims. A clear heart-shot simplified the hell out of things. Their prey went down dead and you could get to work on them right away, instead of waiting for them to expire from their wounds. Because scalp-hunting was a business like any other and time was money. Of course, to save time you could slit their throats or stab them in the heart to speed things along. Women and children you could lay in wait for, lasso ’em like stock and gun them down.

Drop ’em and peel ’em, as Cobb liked to put it.

The braves took a little more stealth. Sometimes Cobb and his boys sprang carefully-arranged ambushes to bring down hunting parties and sniping from a distance had its merits. The Shawnees were real good with the wet work. They’d slit around the crown of the head and then, sitting with their feet on the victim’s shoulders, yank the scalp free. They could go through a dozen Indians in record time.

Of course, Cobb and the Texans were no slouches either.

After the scalps were yanked, they were salted and tied to poles to preserve them until they could be cashed-in.

One time, in Durango, Cobb’s hunters killed a party of thirty braves by sniping them in a dry wash with long rifles. After they’d dropped and peeled ’em, they backtracked to the Indian’s camp and slaughtered no less than sixty women and children. Though, truth be told, they spent most of the day beating the brush for those that had run off.

Eventually, the scalp business fanned hateful animosity from the targeted tribes. They began a program of bloody reprisals. This more than anything made Cobb and the boys start hunting peaceful tribes like the Pimas and Yumas in Arizona Territory. In a single raid, they took nearly four-hundred scalps. But the real boom for them came about the time the Indians started actively hunting the hunters.

See, Cobb had come up with a better idea.

Scalps of Mexicans looked the same as scalps of Indians. There was no true way to tell the difference… so why not? Let the Mexicans pay for the murder of their own people. It was a novel idea.

One of the Texans, a fellow named Grendon, wasn’t entirely taken with the idea. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, shit, killing injuns is one thing… but Mesicans, they’s almost like real people.”

“Ye killed ’em during the war, didn’t ye?” Cobb put to him. “What’s the difference now? They ain’t real folk anyhow, they’s just injuns what like to act like white men. All the more reason to drop and peel ’em, ye ask me. Fuck, son, we got us a crop ready for the harvesting, one that’ll turn into lots of green and folding… if ye follow me on that.”

The others agreed most heartily, particularly Coolan, the big ex-ranger who it was said decapitated no less than two dozen Mexican officers during the war… using nothing but a short-bladed hunting knife. But Grendon just couldn’t get by his morals and ethics, so they shot him and Coolan scalped him as a joke.

They hit a Mexican village and caught the entire population in church. They charged in on horseback, pulling triggers and throwing knives and hatchets until their arms were sore and pistols smoking and the dead were heaped-up like sheaves of wheat. It took them the better part of four hours to scalp all two-hundred of ’em, but they went at it with the diligence and zeal that marked the professional. They made a broad sweep through central Mexico and harvested so many scalps, they began wiring them together in bails.

In 1850, just before the boom died out, they rolled into Sonora with nearly 8,000 scalps piled high in the bed of a wagon.

Shortly afterwards, the scalping business went belly-up and Cobb rode hell-for-leather out of Mexico with a price on his head for murdering Mexicans.

But as Cobb said later, it was fun while it lasted.

The next twenty-odd years of his life passed in the blink of an eye.

Cobb rustled cattle and horses. Worked as range detective for various cattle combines, a hired gun for just about anyone who would pay him. He robbed banks and stages, made something of a name for himself as a road agent. Was arrested no less than three times and escaped the noose each time by breaking out of jail. He served as scout during the Indian Wars, sold guns to renegade Apaches, and managed a brothel in San Francisco. But that came to a crashing halt when it was discovered that he and the ladies under his employ were not only robbing their patrons, but murdering them and burying their remains in the cellar. After that, he ran roughshod through Indian Territory, stealing and killing and forcing Indians and whites alike to pay his gang protection money. He became something of a terror along the Canadian and Arkansas Rivers.

Then in 1873… he lost five-thousand dollars gambling in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. Lost it to a professional gambler named Maynard Ellsworth. Cobb pulled his hatchet and split the crown of Ellsworth’s head. After that, he lived his life pretty much on the dodge.

But in 1875, he was arrested for extorting mining camps in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming Territory and sentenced to five years in the territorial prison. Of which he served every single day. As the warden was heard to say to a parole board, “James Lee Cobb is completely lacking in anything which might be even remotely considered human. He is, gentlemen, the very epitome of what the territories need to be purged of-creatures that walk like men, but think like animals.”

When Cobb got out, evading bounty hunters and numerous warrants out circulating for him under various aliases, he joined three men-Jonah Gleer, Lawrence Barlow, and Butch Noolan-in a peculiar undertaking. Cobb had coerced them into following him up into the Sierra Nevadas to search out a gold mine he had heard of in prison.

Problem was, Cobb didn’t really know where it was.

See, a voice in his head told him that up in the high Sierras he would find his destiny. The voice was not vague as usual, but quite absolute and determined that Cobb should listen to it.

So he did.

And this is how the elements of his life-a vile stew at best-finally came full circle.

6

Six weeks then.

Six weeks Cobb had been trapped up in the high country, just waiting and waiting. Gleer, Barlow, and Noolan waited with him… though Barlow had suggested a heroic outbreak through the snows that had sealed off the pass and locked them tight at the foot of the summit. Nobody took him up on it.

At least not yet.

They weren’t desperate enough.

But it was coming, God yes, you could see it just as Cobb was seeing it now as he looked into those weathered, rutted faces burned by subzero winds and discolored by frostbite. You could see it there along with the bitterness and unease and animosity that was fermenting in them. For the past week it had been raging inside each of them, a potent and toxic brew bubbling up from the seething pit of each man. A brew that was sheer poison, seeping and simmering and smoking. It was fast becoming a palpable thing in the confines of the cedar-post cabin and its stink was raw and savage.

None of them had spoken in three days now.

They were reaching the point where their choices were being made for them. By nature. By God. By whatever cruel force had imprisoned them up in the mountains with no hope of deliverance. It was fed by hatred of Cobb, of course. For, although none of them had voiced it yet, they all blamed him for their predicament. He was the one that had insisted they stay into the winter, hunting that mine, and by the time January had sealed them up tight… there was nothing to do but wait.

Wait and go mad.

Yeah, they went through a stiff semblance of culture, but culture, like ethics and morals, died a long, hard death in those godless wastelands. Gleer still worked his traplines. Barlow went out hunting each morning with his Hawkens rifle. Cobb and Noolan still cut brush for the fire. But there was no food coming in and a warm fire and plenty of water didn’t fill their bellies.

They were slat-thin to a man, like skeletons covered in membranous flesh. Eyes jutting. Cheeks hollowed into cadaverous valleys. Teeth chattering and bony fingers wrestling in narrow laps. They had already eaten the horses. Even boiled the hooves for soup. Barlow had been nibbling on his belt and Gleer was chewing on a deerhide knife sheath.

So, if there was madness here, it was born of hunger.

Of solitude.

Of hopelessness.

No game was coming in and even the few rabbits Gleer had brought in last week were not enough to stave off the hunger pangs for more than a few hours. They needed meat. Real meat. Their bellies cried out for it, their teeth gnashed for it. Their tongues licked fissured lips, dreaming of venison steaks and beef shanks. Blood. Meat.

Of all of them, only Cobb took it in stride.

Something in him was enjoying the plight of the others. Was enjoying how they’d slowly become living skeletons, ghoulish figures that would’ve looked perfectly natural… or unnatural… wandering from the gates of a cemetery worrying at their own shrouds. As starvation progressed, social amenities failed one after the other. Their thoughts were of meat. Their dreams were of meat. In that high, wind-blasted netherworld of snow-capped peaks, shrieking winds, and whipping blizzards, there was only one way to get meat.

One last, unthinkable way.

Cobb was waiting for it. He already saw it in the dead pools of their eyes. The way they looked at each other and at him. Survival had canceled out any bond they’d once shared. To a man they knew one thing in their fevered, deranged minds… only one of them could come out of this in the spring.

And the hunger was upon them. The taboo lust for flesh of one’s own kind. And in the close, confined atmosphere of the cabin, you could smell it… a heavy, sour, vile odor tainting the very air.

And maybe it was starvation that was bringing it on, forcing them into damnable regions of thought, and maybe it was something else.

Maybe it was what they found in the cave.

Or what found them.

It was Barlow who located it.

He had been out hunting with Noolan. They both stumbled back to the cabin, winded and worn, with something like fear in their eyes. They stood in the doorway babbling, framed by a field of white and blowing death, rifles in fur-mittened hands, snowshoes on their feet.

“What?” Cobb had put to them. “What in the name of Christ is it? What did ye find?”

And maybe part of him was thinking, hoping, they’d found the mine… but he didn’t really believe it. For what he saw in their eyes plainly told him it was not good. If a regiment of injun ghosts had descended upon them, they could not have looked more grave.

“You better come,” Noolan said. “You just better come.”

So, wrapped in buffalo coats and bearskin hats, swaddled up like babies in all their gear, they fought through the drifts and winds that tried to knock them off the narrow trails along the jagged cliffs. The world was white and whipping and immense. The sky seemed to reach down and become mountain and it was hard to say where one began and the other ended.

Noolan led them to a little cave mouth set into the base of a limestone bluff with craggy walls and a jutting overhang which looked as though it might fall and crush them at any moment.

Cobb could see the snowshoe prints leading away. Looked like they’d been in one hell of a hurry to get some distance between themselves and the cave mouth.

“All right, goddammit,” Cobb said, his breath frosting in clouds. “What is it? Goddamn mother lode or the Devil his ownself?”

“You better just go in,” Barlow said, secretive as a schoolboy.

Cobb went in first, with Gleer at his heels. Both of them were grunting and puffing as they wedged their way in flat on their bellies. The shaft was barely big enough for a man to snake his way through. With the heavy furs and leggings, it took some time to corkscrew themselves into the central chamber. Like forcing a wadded-up rag through the neck of a wine bottle.

Inside it was black as original sin.

Cobb called out to Gleer and his voiced echoed eerily into unknown heights. Gleer had the oil lantern. He struck a match off the cave wall and touched it to the wick, adjusting the flame. The cavern was big enough to shelter two freight wagons side by side. It continued on up a gentle, pebble-littered slope into another darkened chamber. Cobb looked around, seeing lots of granite and gravel, great masses of bedrock that had fallen from the roof in years long past. He saw nothing else noteworthy.

Yet… yet, there was something here. Something unusual. He could feel it same way a man can feel his own skin or the balls dangling between his legs. There was something here. Something important. Something secret.

Gleer held out the lantern at arm’s length, wild lurching shadows darting about them. Rising and falling, swimming and diving and leaping. He licked his lips. Licked them again. It was warmer inside and ice began to melt on his beard, water dripping onto his shaggy coat.

“What the hell did they find in here?” he wanted to know. “Ain’t shit but dirt and rocks. Ain’t shit else.”

But there was and they both knew it, felt it, but did not dare let their lips frame it into words. Instead, they stood side by side, waiting and wondering and maybe even worrying. Way a man will when he knows something is circling his campfire. Something big. Something awful. Something with teeth and attitude.

Cobb did not feel afraid.

He told himself in many a situation that as far as fear went, he inspired it, he did not experience it. And maybe that was true and maybe it was bullshit, but, at that moment, he was not afraid. For a voice in his head was telling him that yes, yes, this is what he had come to find. Somewhere in this cave and it passages was sheer revelation.

“Ain’t nothing here,” Gleer said, his voice dry. “So let’s just—”

“There’s something here, all right.” Cobb looked over at Gleer, motes of dust drifting around him like moths. “Cain’t ye smell it?”

“Yeah… yeah, I guess I can.”

Cobb was likening it to decay. Sweet, gassy decay like a bin filled with rotten potatoes or a flyblown corpse washed-up on a riverbed. A moist, rank smell which simply did not belong in this dry, hollow place where even the air was grainy and tasted of dust.

A muscle was jumping in Gleer’s throat. “Don’t like it none. Let’s make to getting the hell out.”

“Follow me,” was all Cobb said.

He followed the stink like a tasty aroma, led it pull him into the kitchen of this place where the goods were simmering and steaming. He moved up the slope, stepping carefully around razorbacked outcroppings and over flat tumbled stones. Together they moved up into the passage which was tight and twisting, the ceiling brushing their fur caps. And in the next chamber, they found-

They found bones.

Maybe some animal bones, but mostly human.

A great central pit had been carved out of the floor, hacked out as if with picks and shovels to a depth of maybe ten or fifteen feet and it was filled with bones. An ossuary. A charnel pit of ulnas and femurs, vertebrae and ribcages. And skulls… Jesus, what seemed to be hundreds of skulls. Adults and children. And the only thing all those bones had in common was that they were charred… as if they had been roasted. Blackened skulls stared up at them, alluding to ghoulish secrets they would not tell.

A scapula shifted and it caused a minor rain of arm and leg bones. A skull tumbled from its perch and grinned at them, its lower jaw missing.

“Moved,” Gleer said, his face lined with tension. “Something in there… Mary, Mother of God, something in there moved…”

He had his Colt pistols out and he wanted very badly to empty them into something, anything. Because he was a man who handled the unknown with knife and gun, hatchet and bow. And what was eating into him then could not be found nor defined quite so easily.

“Dead,” Cobb told him. “All long dead. Just settling is all. If they was just rocks and one fell, ye wouldn’t come out of yer skin, would ye?”

Gleer calmed, shook his head. “Suppose not.”

“Well, them bones cain’t hurt ye no more than rocks can.”

But what he wanted to say was that he had a weird, unearthly feeling that whatever was in the cave, whatever was hiding and whispering around them, just might have caused those bones to shift. Just like it might cause more trouble. And maybe, hell, maybe it would make them bones stand right up and walk about.

Cobb and Gleer moved around the chamber and came to another just off the first.

And it was the same. Bones. More and more bones. Whoever had owned them had been long dead. There were what looked to be ancient, rusted ringbolts pounded into the high, flat table rock above. From them… ancient lengths of hemp rope hanging like dead snakes. From a few of them were brown, mummified hands. As if, people had been hung there and left, allowed to putrefy and drop, only their hands left to mark the grim occasion.

Cobb touched one of the ropes… it began to flake away in his fingers.

“This place,” Gleer said, his eyes fixed with an almost religious ecstasy, “it’s goddamn old. I mean really old, Jimmy-boy. Lookit at all, will you? This place… ha, ha… I think it was chopped right out of the mountain. People… injuns… worked it like we would a mine shaft.”

Cobb studied the rough-hewn walls. You could see they’d been chiseled, hacked from solid rock. None of it, save the original cavern was natural. The tool work on the walls was all-too apparent.

Gleer was making a funny sound in his throat that was somewhere between gagging and laughter. He played the light around some more. There were pictures on those walls. Primitive paintings, etchings. Mostly run-of-the-mill stuff like bear and mountain lion and bison. Things Cobb had seen splashed or carved into many cave walls and rock faces in the Southwest. Even up north in the Montana and Dakota Territories. Herds of animals. Stick figures hunting them. Dancing. Sitting around fires. Just your basic depictions of tribal life.

But Gleer, whose mama was half-Chickasaw, seemed fascinated by them. He studied them, making those gulping/giggling sounds in his throat, whispering things beneath his breath.

“See? See?” he said. “See how down low here, down here you got your oldest images. Most of these are faded, worn by time… shit, hundreds and hundreds of years old if not more. Maybe thousands.” He was breathing hard now, licking his lips. He followed the paintings and cuttings up the wall with the lantern. “You get up here, Jimmy Lee, you get up here and, sure, you can make ’em out better. These ain’t as old, eh? But still old, old, very old.”

Cobb still was not impressed. Just injun-art. What of it?

But Gleer wouldn’t let it go.

He explained in some detail what it all meant, what the rock was saying to them, how it reached out across the centuries telling them a tale of life long gone from these hills. Hunting. Fishing. Battling enemies. Birth. Death. Religious ceremony. Marriages. Funerals. If you could read it and it wasn’t too hard, Gleer said, it was just like a book.

“Looks like a village there,” Cobb said, indicating a cluster of lodges. “Wonder what the hell happened to it?”

“Probably down there in that valley, what’s left of it,” Gleer said. “Covered in snow.” He followed the art across the wall. “See? See this?”

Cobb saw it. Was so impressed he stuck a cigar in his mouth and smoked it, knowing there was more here than just silly injun-art.

“They… they were working this mountain, maybe these caves, tunneling…”

Cobb could see it fine. Stick figures at work. Using what might have been primitive shovels and picks, staffs and baskets to haul out rock. Looked like drawings of ants working their hive. Figures everywhere.

Gleer was getting real excited now. “Right here… Jimmy, right goddamn here, something happened,” he said, stabbing the wall with a dirty index finger.

“What?”

Gleer told him it was big, bad medicine, whatever it was. All the symbols and hex signs attested to that. To Cobb it looked as if down in their tunnels they had dug into another chamber. The chamber was represented by a jagged gouge… and out of it, something like smoke misting out.

“A catastrophe,” Gleer said. “See? All them figures are laying about now. All dead.”

“Gas probably. Hit a pocket of poison gas.”

“No… no, I think it’s worse than that.” He was panting now, rubbing grime and settled dust from the walls, close to something, but he wasn’t sure what. “There… not gas… something else… something they dug out of the ground, something real bad…”

Cobb was studying it pretty close himself now.

Another representation of that jagged chasm, more smoke or mist seeping up and out. Only the mist was now shown to have gathered above the dead and the living like some storm cloud. A storm cloud made of skulls and devil-faces. The drawings went on and that cloud appeared to have come up out of the cave and settled over the village.

“It got to ’em,” Gleer said, his eyes wide and the lantern trembling in his fist now. He looked afraid. His face was tight and set with wrinkles and taut cords. “It got to ’em, Jimmy? Don’t you get it? Don’t you?”

The paintings abruptly ended there and there were no more.

Cobb didn’t really get it. Something was crawling in his belly like worms and it made him feel giddy. The birthmark on his back was throbbing. Something was happening to him, but he didn’t see. Not really. Not just yet. The Indians had been mining or something. They had cut deep into the mountain and uncovered a hidden chamber, dug into it… and something, something had come out. Something that killed a lot of ’em. Something real bad came out of the ground.

Gleer was half out of his mind now.

He was running around, handling bones and skulls, waving femurs and tibias about. He set the lantern at the edge of the pit and dove into all those bones like some insane swimmer into a charnel sea. He paddled and sorted, handled and searched. His fingers traced the craniums of skulls, poked into orbits, tapped at yellowed teeth set in pitted jaws. He stroked the rungs of a ribcage, eyed a blackened pelvic wing like maybe it was his own.

“Get the hell out of there,” Cobb told him and meant it. “Yer losing yer mind, damn ye!”

Gleer climbed out, the bones falling away from him with a sound like tumbling kindling. Cobb grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pitched him to the floor.

“I ain’t mad, Jimmy! It’s just… hell, it’s just that I know! I know!” He was cackling now, drool running from the corners of his lips. His entire body was shuddering. “These bones… lookit ’em, will ya? Look close.”

Cobb did.

And then he got it… or some of it. The bones? all the bones in fact? were riddled with tiny cuts and gashes and nicks. Somebody had been hacking and cutting on their owners. And maybe worse… because he found what looked to be teeth marks set into them.

“Cannibals,” Cobb said in a low voice. “Just like in them Pacific islands I read about when I was a kid. Man-eaters…”

“That’s right, yes sir, that’s right.” Gleer was still laughing, but tears had welled in his eyes now. “But they didn’t do it on their own, Jimmy Lee, no sir! What they cut out of the ground… whatever it was… it turned ’em that way, took hold of their savage heathen minds and turned them into monsters…”

Cobb took hold of him and got him out of those caverns. Gleer was stark raving by that point. And maybe it was just Cobb’s imagination, but that high, hot gassy smell seemed almost stronger. Rancid, even.

As if whatever was dead in there, had begun to decay once again after many long years.

Cobb got Gleer outside and with the help of the other two, they wrestled him back to the cabin. But he was in a bad way. They had to shackle him to the wall with chains snapped from beaver traps and nailed into the logs themselves. He was talking crazy, shaking and gibbering, hearing things scratching around outside that none of the others could. Talking with people that weren’t there. Going native like his mother’s people and asking for protection from the Great Spirit. So they left him shackled for a week like that, pissing himself, drooling and screeching.

“Think I’m crazy, don’t you? Think I’ve lost what mind I did have, don’t you?” he rambled on incessantly one afternoon as the wind made the cabin shake. “But I ain’t nohow crazy. Because I know what was up there… I could smell it there and I can smell it here now. Maybe you, Cobb, or you, Barlow… maybe you don’t know what I’m taking about. But Noolan… I don’t know about you. It might have touched you the way it touched them injuns. Ain’t saying it did… but it got to one of us, ‘cause I can smell it! Hear? I can smell it. One of you, yes sir, you know what I’m talking about on account you’re just waiting for the lights to dim so you can feed on the others. I know it! I know it! Oh… ho, ho, my God, my dear Lord Jesus, them injuns, them injuns. Roasting babies and sucking brains from skulls and chewing on the flesh of their young… eating, eating. Offering up their daughters to that, that thing come straight out of hell…”

“Shut the fuck up!” Barlow snapped finally. “You shut up with that talk or I’ll kill you! I swear to God I’ll kill you!”

Gleer was getting to everyone by that point. Maybe even Cobb. But you couldn’t tell it from that cool smirk on his face. Noolan calmed Barlow down and took him outside for some fresh air being that it was the one thing they had plenty of.

When they were gone, it was just Cobb and Gleer in the cabin. The logs popped and shifted in the hearth. The air was smoky and thick. It stank of body odor and charred logs. What it didn’t stink of these days was food.

“Ye’ve got to get a hold of yerself, Gleer,” Cobb told him. “Ye carry on like this… well, one of them boys is gonna shoot ye dead.”

Gleer just played with his chains, running the loops through his fingers. He nodded. “I know, I know… but I’m scared, Jimmy Lee. I’m damn scared. I’m thinking… thinking that one of us just ain’t what he appears to be. That something got in him… inside him… and that man, he’s a monster now…”

Cobb considered it a moment and shrugged. “Maybe ye right,” he said. “Maybe you and me, maybe we better had keep an eye on them other two.”

Eventually, Gleer came back to his senses.

Barlow managed to shoot a couple wolves. They were rawboned things with hardly any meat on them, but it was something in their bellies. And Noolan made a hearty soup from the blood and fat. It didn’t taste all that wonderful, but it stuck to the bones. With some meat and soup in him at last, Gleer came to his senses.

They cut him loose.

But they kept an eye on him.

In fact, everyone kept an eye on each other. It was like everyone was afraid to be alone with anyone else. All four of them went about their daily routines with knives and pistols hanging from their belts. And when one came upon another out in the woods or poking through the ice that covered the stream… well, it was only sensible to give advance warning. For up there in that awful place, only the guilty sneaked around or moved silently.

Things got bad in the week following Gleer’s release.

The wind shook and rattled the cabin continually. It picked up sheets of snow and flung them all and everywhere. Visibility outside was down to eight, ten feet at any given time. The air was unnaturally cold. Sometimes the wind carried funny sounds with it, sounds like weeping or screaming. The voices of children chanting in some distant place. There were odd noises in the dead of night… noises like something walking up on the roof or scratching at the shuttered windows. A pounding at the outside walls. Weird distorted tracks found in the snow outside. Tracks that started suddenly and ended just as abruptly… like something had leaped down from the cold stars above and then leaped back up there again.

Noolan and Barlow could be heard whispering prayers at night.

Gleer just hid beneath his elk hides silently.

And Cobb, he just grinned, head always cocked like he was listening for something.

Because he had secrets from the others.

They didn’t know about him slipping off that night they’d found the cave. About him crawling in there in the frigid, dark hours. Walking amongst the bones with a lantern in hand. They didn’t know how it was for him when the gassy, fetid odor rose up from the trembling marrow of the mountain and fell over him like a shivering, stinking blanket. Or how it held him and made communion with something already hiding deep within him. Something planted there like an obscene seed in the blighted soil of his soul by his father. How it reached out and found this sleeping other and became one with it.

Because Gleer was right-there was a monster among them.

And it was getting hungry.

It had been three weeks since they found the cave now.

Two weeks since the last of the soup and wolf meat was eaten. Their bellies had been stark empty since and something in each and every man was decaying at an unpleasant rate.

Except for Cobb.

What was in him had already rotted to carrion.

Cobb was alone in the cabin… or nearly.

Noolan and Barlow had run off hours ago. Run off when they’d returned early from their hunt and found Cobb dressing out Gleer’s corpse, happily sorting through meat and muscle, selecting the finest cuts for steaks and the poorer ones for stews.

“Hungry, gents?” he’d said, gore dripping from his mouth because, well, dammit, it was hard to do that sort of work without a little taste here or there. “Pull yerselves up a seat and see what old Jimmy Lee can do when the proper victuals is available.”

Barlow and Noolan just stood there, rifles in hand, mouths sprung like spittoons, staring and staring. One of them-Cobb couldn’t be sure which-let out a wailing scream and together they’d run off into the snows. Damn fools left the door open, too. Born in a goddamned barn, the both of ’em.

That had been three, four hours before.

But Cobb knew they’d be back. Unless they decided to winter it out up in the cave; but they wouldn’t like that very much. It was one thing to be up there with light and heat… but when the lantern died out and the blackness swam up like some ravenous shark from a primeval, godless sea like it had for him, well that was an entirely different kettle of fish, mind you.

Cobb had long-since finished slaughtering Gleer.

When Cobb had pulled his Arkansas toothpick and walked up to him, speaking in the voices of long-dead injuns, Gleer had just gone to jelly. Slicker than shit, Cobb had slit his throat ear to ear and Gleer just accepted it. Now, there wasn’t nothing but a pile of bloody bones to mark his passing. His skin was drying on a rack before the fire, smartly salted for leather. His organs were gently layered in a black pot of brine, seasoning up for a fine stew that would last Cobb for weeks and weeks. The meat had been carved from his buttocks, belly, and breast and packed in snow so it would keep fresh and sweet. His blood had been drained off into buckets for soup and broth. Even his fat was saved. His ligaments and sinew were drying for catgut. And right that moment as Cobb listened to the wind speaking and cackling in the chimney pipe, he was grinding up muscle and organ to be stuffed into bowel casings for sausage.

Gleer’s head was sitting across from him.

The eyes were blanched and the tongue protruded blackly from those seamed lips. His bearskin cap was still on his head. A few greasy strands of hair had fallen over the sallow, blood-spattered face.

If Cobb concentrated real hard, he could even make it speak.

When he was done stuffing his sausages, whistling some old Indian deathsong he’d never once heard in his life, he nibbled on a little finger food he’d boiled from the bones below. One of Gleer’s legs was spitted and roasting over the fire, carefully seasoned. It was getting nice and brown, gobs of fat dropping from it and sizzling in the flames beneath. The meaty, rich smell filled the cabin and went up the flue.

Cobb knew the meat-smell would bring the others home.

They wouldn’t have a choice.

And he would welcome them, surely. He figured two more kills and he’d have more than enough meat to put up until spring, if he practiced a little conservation, that was. Avoided his usual gluttony. But he was no savage. He would invite both Barlow and Noonlan to break bread at his table. He’d give ’em both a good meal before putting them to the knife.

It was the Christian thing to do.

So Cobb nibbled and waited, a curious light flickering in his eyes.

He remembered the night he’d crept back up to the cave, something in him telling him it was the right thing to do. That what was in there, what was hiding in the cracks and crevices and maybe the bones, too, was the very reason he had come. Not gold. But… it. Whatever in the hell it was. The very thing them injuns had cut from the ground. He could remember it started with that gassy smell. A foul, yellow odor it was, a terrible sweet smell of unburied corpses and miasmic tombs.

It had touched him.

Physically touched him.

In his head? as it held him tightly, nursed him against its breast like an infant? it had told him what to do. How long it had waited for him. How it was he could survive if he could simply overcome certain social taboos, that was.

But Cobb would not listen, would not.

He’d been thinking along those lines, but he wasn’t ready just yet.

And the thing had pressed him into itself, squeezed him so that he thought his bones would come busting out of his mouth. It told him there was no other way. If he wanted power… and he did want that, didn’t he? Then there was only one way to have mastery over men. Same way you had mastery over animals? by eating them. Devouring the flesh and absorbing all that they were and could be.

This, it said, was the path to invincibility and immortality.

But Cobb just was not sure, so the thing sweetened it a bit for him. It talked to him like an old friend. It didn’t try to intimidate or terrify him, it just talked in a natural, easy rhythm. And, funny thing, it had a deep Southern accent, a hellbilly accent just like his kin from the Missouri Ozarks.

Well, at least it seemed that way… but maybe it was just a breathing gray sibilance forming words in his head.

Now, let me tell ye something, Jimmy Lee. Jus’ mind me and listen, hear? Shet up now, this here’s important. Once upon a time, there was these injuns what lived up here in these hills. Just yer ordinary savages, I reckon. They was some shirttail kin of the Shoshoni called themselves the Macabro. Well, cousin, these Macabros, they started tunnelin’ in the earth like worms into pork… well, sir, weren’t long before they dug somethin’ up, somethin’ mebbe they weren’t a-supposed to find at all. It jumped up, said hello and how you be, and rode down hard on them savages like Christ come to preach. Now this thing here, it crawled into their skins. Ran roughshod all over the tribe like Yankees marching through Georgia. I shit you not. Ye remember them bad things what were supposed to live down in them hollers back home in Missourah? Yessum. This thing, it was like that. Now, it weren’t exactly neighborly, this critter. It got into them injuns deep. Sure as Christ was hammered to the cross, the Macabro belonged to this thing.

Now, cousin, lemme tell ye how it were fer them.

These injuns, they took to etin’ human flesh and what not, sacrificin’ their firstborn and all. The shaman would et the little shitters raw and wrigglin’. Yep, their own children, that’s what I said. But adults, too. Jus’ about anyone. And virgins… heh, that sumbitch what out of the ground, he was real sweet on maidens, see. Now, the Macabro were always fighting one tribe or another. When they caught some, they’d make burnt offerings of their enemies, nail ’em upside down to poles and sometimes put ’em to the flame and sometimes jus’ left ’em there to rot to bone.

Now wait, son, keep yer Henry in yer pants… yep, there’s more. See, these Macabro… they started digging up their dead and the dead of anyone they could find, yessum. Started worshipping bones and skulls. Made altars of ’em and doin’ things with the dead uns ye just don’t want to think about. They was jus’ real soft in the heads, this bunch.

Now these shaman, priests? whichever ye want to call them baby-rapin’ devils? they was quite a bunch. They called all the shots. Sumbitches didn’t cotton to bathin’ no how. A filthy lot what jumped and hopped about in their cloaks of baby-skins, snakes just a-twisting in their long filthy hair. They sang them profane songs and wore skull masks and chattered their teeth what were filed to points to rend and tear, ye see. These shaman, they controlled everything. Their bodies were tattooed with snakes and symbols and witch-sign, what they called the Skin-Medicine. Some sort of conjurin’ and magical formula written right on their skins. It was said that with this Skin-Medicine, them heathen devils could control the spirits of the dead and change themselves into man-eating beasts jus’ any old time the need struck ’em. Now on nights of the full moon, the Macabro priests would light big fires and them injuns would dance naked in the snow while the priests read from their own skins. Injuns what had been captured from other tribes would be slaughtered, their flesh eaten, and the snow would just stain red with their blood. And if the Macabro could get some of those injun’s young-uns, well, a regular party they’d have chompin’ up that fine, fat squib.

Well, cousin, ye get the picture.

These injuns was mad, yessum, but they had it half-right about etin’ other peoples to absorb all they had. Now the Macabro, they was all wiped out by the Ute two-hundred year ago, but what ye found in the cave, yes sir, that was their legacy. See, the Ute herded them Macabros what weren’t killed outright and all the dead uns up into that cave, burnt ’em up alive, seeded their bones in them pits. Yessum, the cave. It was fitting, I reckon, in that the cave is where a lot of that pagan sacrificin’ went on.

And now, Jimmy-boy, ye understand? Do ye? Do ye?

Cobb didn’t remember much after that.

Just that he wasn’t quite the same. Sometimes he was himself and sometimes part of the thing that had impregnated his mother and sometimes part of that rabid hillbilly out of the cave. Sometimes they were all just one mind. The next day and all the days after, Cobb just waited and plotted the getting of skin and meat and bone.

And that’s how it all came about.

Cobb, a chunk of finger meat packed in his cheek, went over and turned Gleer’s leg on the spit. He poked it with a fork and the juice ran free and clear, telling him it was done. His belly was rumbling at the nauseating stench.

Just then, he heard movement outside the cabin.

He grinned, his eyes flashing with hellfire. It was Barlow and Noolan being real quiet and stealthy, sneaking about like red savages. They were doing a good job of it, too, but Cobb heard them. The sound of their boots breaking the crust of snow. The roar of the blood in their veins, the throb of their hearts. And mostly, yes mostly, he could smell their fear and to him it was like freshly uncorked brandy.

Cobb went about setting the table.

His back to the door, they came bursting in, the both of them. They held pistols on him and they were both shaking from the cold, their faces pinched and mottled and edged with fear.

“You’re crazy, Cobb, you sick sonofabitch,” Barlow said. “Now real careful like, I want you to take that pistol out of your belt… with your left hand. Real slow now, let it drop to the floor…”

But Cobb just giggled. “Ye stop with that talk, friend. I’m just a-setting the table here. I want the both of you to sit with me and have a fine meal. Ye know ye want to, so why fight it? We’ll have us some eats and discuss this like men.”

Barlow and Noolan just stood there, not sure what to do. Cobb was insane, sure, but why was he so damn calm? What was that funny light reflected in his eyes? There was something very wrong about all this and it wasn’t just the cannibalism either.

“We better just shoot him,” Noolan said.

“That wouldn’t be very neighborly, cousin,” Cobb said.

“See? See? He’s crazy! Watch him now, watch him real careful, because James Lee Cobb he’s right fast with that Colt,” Noolan was saying. “He can pull it so fast you—”

“Drop that gun on the floor,” Barlow said.

Cobb sighed, shrugged, went for the gun with his right hand. And actually cleared leather before two bullets ripped through his belly. But all that did was make him laugh as his blood dripped to the floor. He dipped one finger into the hole in his buckskin shirt like a quill into an inkwell. He pulled it back out, licked the tip. His face was narrow and pallid, real tight like a skull wearing skin, his eyes lit like glowworms.

But he had his Colt out and, barking a short laugh, put a slug right between Barlow’s eyes, dropping him dead in the doorway.

“Now,” he said to Noolan. “Why don’t ye join me for supper? What’s say?”

The pistol dropped from Noolan’s fingers and he started to whimper. Whatever was in Cobb’s eyes had him tight. He stumbled over to the table, his own eyes wide and unblinking and filled with tears. He sat down and watched dumbly as Cobb pulled the leg off the spit and began to carve it up.

Then he began to eat.

His fork jabbing and his teeth chewing and his throat swallowing, his mind gone to a formless putty. He ate and ate while Cobb watched him, all the while holding Gleer’s head by the hair. And the real bad thing was that Gleer was speaking, that white furrowed face was speaking. The eyes were rolling in his head and that black tongue was licking his lips. Cobb asked him questions and he answered in a dry, whistling voice, telling Gleer exactly what it was like down in that black pit of death and how Noolan’s kin were all down there burning with him.

Sometime later, Gleer’s head screaming and the cabin filled with chanting injun voices, Cobb slit Noolan’s throat and dressed him out.

In the Spring, Cobb came down from the mountains on foot, his parfleche still packed with dried human jerky. His travels after that were unknown for the most part. What is known is that he assembled a crew of blooded killers with similar leanings and tastes as his own. That they accompanied him back to Missouri where there was something he needed to collect. And sometime later he made for the Shoshoni peoples. Knowing he had something in common with them now.

And somewhere along the way, he heard about a Snake medicine man called Spirit Moon.