They ritually slaughtered them. Women were raped and skinned, men drawn and quartered, children roasted over fires and eaten. Spirit Moon was encouraged to eat the flesh of his own young… when he refused, he was cooked himself. Cobb and the others ate him and absorbed all that he was.
“They became beasts, Tyler Cabe,” Graybrow said, looking very concerned now. “They had tasted that which was taboo. It brought out the beasts within each man. And Cobb, now in possession of Spirit Moon’s secrets or those the man’s soul could not covet into the afterworld, was far worse than before. He was in possession of what the Snake call the ‘Skin Medicine’.”
Cabe’s mouth was dry by this point. “What… what the hell is that?”
“A system of black magic, I suppose. Very ancient and forbidden. Instead of a formula written in a book or scratched on a rock, it is tattooed into the flesh. The Skin Medicine allows the beast that lives in all of us to come to the surface, to make itself known in blood and flesh…”
“And that’s what’s killing people? These Skin Mediciners, these beasts?”
Graybrow nodded.
Back home in Yell County there had been another name for men who changed into beasts. Werewolf. Cabe recalled a story he had heard as a youngster about a village of them that were supposed to live high in the Ozarks. Just a story… or was it?
There was a knock on the door and it swung open.
Jackson Dirker was standing there, looking gallant and handsome in his fur-trimmed overcoat and round buffalo hat. His eyes blazed like blue fire. “Charles,” he said, “I need to have a word with Mr. Cabe.”
The Indian nodded. “Sure, sure. There’s things white men can’t discuss before injuns. I was just here to see if I could be of service. You know, shining shoes or emptying chamber pots.”
If he found himself amusing, it wasn’t working on Dirker. He left the room and Dirker closed the door.
And Cabe was thinking: He looks pissed-off. Looks like he wants to kick the shit outta me. Maybe he knows, maybe-
Dirker sat next to him.
Close like that, he could see that Dirker wasn’t really angry. Something was broiling in him, but it had nothing to do with the man he’d come to see.
“Cabe,” he said, staring down at the floor now. “Tyler. May I call you that?”
“Of course.”
Dirker patted him on the leg. “We’ve surely had our differences, haven’t we? You’ve spent years hating me and I don’t blame you, for I think I’ve spent years hating myself over that business at Pea Ridge. But it is over. The war is long gone and we are one people again. I like to think since you’ve come here, things have changed between us. If we are not friends, then surely we are allies now. Would that be a correct assumption?”
Cabe swallowed. “It would be.”
“Once we fought on opposite sides and I honestly don’t know any longer who was in the right… sometimes, sometimes I can’t remember what it was I was fighting for.” Dirker smiled, then looked embarrassed. “The time has come when we must fight side-by-side. So I’ve come to you with an open heart to ask you, to beg you even, to ride with me on Deliverance…”
“You want me at your side?” Cabe said, overwhelmed by emotions he couldn’t even begin to guess on.
“Yes. I would trust you at my side more than any man now living. I would like to deputize you, have you lead a posse with me on that hellish place. Am I out of order asking this of you?”
Cabe cleared his throat. “No, you are not.” He felt something warm spreading in his chest. He stood and looked out the window at the streets below. He turned back to Dirker. “I would be honored to ride at your side.”
And then they shook hands and everything for them, finally, ultimately came full circle.
23
Two hours later, the posse assembled outside of the Sheriff’s Office.
The freezing rain had become snow now that drifted through the frigid air like ash blown from some huge funeral pyre. And that seemed pretty fitting given where the men were going and what they were going to do.
There were some fifteen men there when Cabe rode in on his strawberry roan. Most of them were miners that Cabe did not know. But Pete Slade and Henry Wilcox were there, the office left to another deputy. Sir Tom Ian, the English-born pistol fighter was there. As was Charles Graybrow and Raymond Proud, the big Indian carpenter. The one that really surprised Cabe was Elijah Clay astride a chestnut mare.
“Afternoon, Mr. Cabe,” he said, quite cordially. “The sheriff here has let me join this huntin’ party. He says I have to behave m’self. As far as ye killin’ Virgil, well, I knowed he weren’t nothin’ but trash. So I don’t hold no grudge no more.”
Cabe relaxed a little at hearing that. He pulled his Stetson with the rattlesnake band off the saddle horn and place it on his head. “I’m ready, then,” he said.
“Okay,” Dirker said. “You know where we’re going and what we’re going to do. So let’s get it done. And we don’t come back until Cobb is put down.”
“Yessum, Sheriff,” Clay said. “I’ll tell ye boys one thing and I’ll tell ye just the once. If’n I get that peckerwood devil in m’ sights, I’ll shoot that trash just deader’n Jesus on the cross. Yes, sir.”
And that, it seemed, was a good parting remark.
They rode.
It was at the fork in the road, at that old lightening-blasted dead oak, that they found more riders waiting for them. Mormons. Eustice Harmony was there. As were four surviving Danites-Crombley, Fitch, Sellers, and Archambeau. All of whom were anxious to destroy what lived in Deliverance once and for all.
So, then, twenty men rode on that town.
Twenty men who were willing to give their lives to stop the killing and what lived in Deliverance was more than happy to take them.
One by one.
By the time they passed through those high banks of withered, dead pines outside of Deliverance, the storm had filled its lungs with ice and had become a full-blown blizzard. Visibility was down to less than thirty feet. But no one suggested turning back. What had to be done would not be easy in any weather.
As they came around the bend, everyone brought up their guns.
They saw what they thought were two men waiting for them on either side of the road. But they were not men, but scarecrows impaled on sticks. As the posse got closer, they saw they were actually corpses and ones long dead by the look of them. Their clothes were shredded rags that flapped in the wind. Hollowed, skullish faces with empty eye sockets appraised the riders as they passed.
Although Cabe had seen countless dead men, he found he could not look upon those frostbitten faces. He was afraid they might smile at him, speak to him in voices of cold dirt.
Well, he found himself thinking, you volunteered for this fucking mess. Got nobody to blame but your ownself. If things get ugly-and they will-y’all just keep that in mind, Tyler Cabe.
“Ye can feel it, cain’t ye?” Clay said.
And Cabe could only nod, wordlessly.
For he could feel it. Feel some ancient, unspeakable terror erupting in his belly, licking at his insides with a cold tongue. Something in him knew the smell of this place, the malefic feel of it, and not from yesterday but from days long gone. It could smell those that haunted Deliverance and it frantically warned him away, filling him with an immense, unreasonable fear that made him physically ill. It settled into every cell and fiber in a black, wasting totality.
And then, as they rode in guarded silence, the town began to appear. It swam up out of the blizzard like a decaying ghost ship out of ocean fog: the masts and prows, decks and rigging. Yes, the ruined buildings and sharp-peaked roofs, false-front stores and boarded high houses all described by churning tempests of snow that shrieked through the streets.