Deliverance was laid-open before them like a sprung sarcophagus, daring, just daring them to look upon the secrets its moldering depths concealed.
Cabe saw it, really saw it, and felt like a little boy lost in a graveyard full of whispering voices and ghastly screams. And he heard these things, too, but only in his head. For that was the sound of the town-a humming, dead neutrality composed of agony and tormented screeching reduced to a single low and morbid thrum.
It made his mouth go dry and his heart pound like a hammer at a forge. His skin was tight and cold, his internals pulling into themselves. Adrenalin rushed through him, making his hands tremble on the reigns and his eyes go wide and unblinking. For everywhere around them, shadows seemed to dip and scamper in the blowing wall of snow.
In the street then, in the very black heart of the town, they dismounted and tethered there horses to a hitch rail.
Harmony stood there in a flapping black coat, a shotgun in his arms and the Book of Mormon in his hip pocket. “What you will see here will look like people,” he said to the posse, the wind turning his voice into a weird, wailing sound. “But they are not people. Not anymore. Not any more than a cadaver in a grave is a person. They may try to talk to you, to get you off alone. But don’t let them, by God. Don’t let them…”
Maybe not everyone in the posse knew what was in Deliverance. But maybe they’d heard stories, chimney-corner whispers, the sort of crazy tales kids tell late at night and around fires… things, of course, they’d dismissed at the time. But now? They did not dismiss them. They remembered them, locked those tales down deep within themselves where they would not be able to feel the teeth. And maybe that was why they did not question what Harmony said. They just accepted.
“It’ll be dark in about three hours,” Dirker said to them, his face pale and wind-pinched, but very determined, “and we want this wrapped up by then. So we’re gonna break into groups and…”
But Cabe was not listening. Not really.
He was watching those shuttered windows and high, sloping roofs, the narrow spaces cut between buildings. The tenebrous shadows that oozed from them. He was watching and noticing how everything seemed to lean out over the men in the street, wishing to crush them or get them close enough to pull them into dark places where business could be handled in private, away from the light. And what he was feeling was the blood of the town-a toxic, miasmic venom seeping into himself.
“Let’s do it,” Dirker said.
And they started off.
As Dirker led Harmony and the Danites through that howling white death, the church bell began to gong. It echoed out through the storm with a hollow, booming sound.
“The bell,” Harmony said, “Dear God…”
Dirker was telling himself that it meant nothing really. That maybe the wind had snagged it, but he knew better. Hands were pulling that rope and he could only imagine why.
The snow was flying thick and fine like powdered glass, dusting the buildings with a sound like blown sand. It whipped and swirled and drifted, lashing at the men in the streets, doing everything it could to drive them back, back. But they refused to be driven. They came on with shotguns in their fists and a ragged, squinting resolve in their eyes.
Suddenly, Fitch stopped dead, his rifle brought to bear. “What… what was that?” he said and the fear was thick in his voice like ice clogging a well-rope. “Over there.”
Dirker looked quick, frigid wind blasting him in the face. He saw a suggestion of a form swallowed by the storm. Could have been something. Maybe.
“It had green eyes,” Fitch said weakly. “Glowing green eyes…”
But Dirker would hear none of it.
They pushed on past sagging houses and a livery barn with a three-foot drift of snow pushed up against the door like a wave. Next to it was a larger, two-story log building. It had been some kind of community house or saloon at one time.
Dirker tried the door.
It was open.
He kicked it in all the way and the five of them came through with their guns held high and ready to spit rounds. But what they saw stopped them dead. It literally froze them in their tracks.
A couple kerosene lamps were blazing away. Seven or eight people were in there, pushed up to the dusty bar or sprawled in chairs at dirty, cobwebbed tables.
“Afternoon, gents,” a fellow behind the bar said. He was a heavy, rotund man with a Quaker-style beard lacking mustache. There were glasses set up on the bar top before him. Using a rag, he was cleaning them out. “Pull up a chair.”
Dirker and Harmony looked at each other while the Danites formed a defensive ring, just ready to draw on anything that so much as breathed. Behind them, wind rattled the door, fingers of snow snaking across the floor.
Besides the bartender, there were three men at the bar, a few others at the tables. There was nothing exceptional about any of them. A little boy with flat, empty eyes was in the corner tossing what looked like a ball into the air and catching it. Except it was no ball, but a skull. A human skull.
“Wanna play?” he said, giggling.
Dirker ignored him. “Where’s Cobb?” he said. “James Lee Cobb.”
The others just looked at each other and started to laugh, as if the sheriff was asking where Jesus was, on account he wanted to buy him a beer. When the laughter died away, Dirker saw a little girl come from the back room. She was no more than seven or eight… and completely naked. She hopped up on the bar in a very childlike, carefree manner. Sat there, her legs swinging. She looked upon Dirker and there was no innocence in those eyes, just a leering, hungry depravity. But what was truly strange was the elaborate tattooing of her belly and chest. Dirker couldn’t be sure what he was looking at in the dim light, but it looked like… intertwined serpents and weird figures, configurations and distorted magical symbols.
As he looked on them, the illustrations seemed to move.
He looked away.
A man at one of the tables with a Confederate hat and an officer’s coat patched with spreading blotches of mildew, said, “Where’s your manners, barkeep? Offer these here fellas a drink…”
“Course,” the bartender said.
His other hand came up from behind the bar… except it was elongated, the fingers spidery and narrow. Where the nails should have been there were long black claws curved like potato hooks. Smiling, the bartender used one of the claws to slit his wrist. Then, most casually, he began filling a glass with his blood.
“Blasphemy,” Harmony finally said, breaking that bleak silence. “A cancer on the face of God…”
That got them laughing again.
About that time, the sound of gunfire rose up from somewhere in the town and Dirker knew the others had made contact, too. That the party was finally underway.
The man in the Confederate hat began to grin and a spidery tangle of shadows spread over his face. When he spoke his voice was low and grating. “Now, you boys don’t really think you’re getting out of here alive, do you?” he said, his teeth suddenly long and sharp.
And there was a weird electricity in the air, an odd sharp stink of something like ozone and fresh blood. There was subtle motion and a wet, sliding sound.
“Honey,” the man said to the little girl, “these men like your pictures, show ’em how the lines meet…”
And as Dirker watched, those weird and diabolic tattoos began to move. Maybe it was the flesh beneath, but suddenly everything was in motion. There was a rending, popping sound as muscles stretched and ligaments relocated to accommodate new and feral anatomies. The girl’s chest thrust out in a cage of bones, her limbs going long and rawboned. Thousands of fine gray hairs began to erupt from her skin until you could no longer see the skin. It looked, if anything, like millions of metal filings drawn to some central magnet. Her jaw pushed out into a snout, her nose flattened and her ears did likewise, pressing against that narrow skull of whipping locks and going high and sharp. Her eyes became green and slitted, her brow heavy, the skull beneath grotesquely exaggerated.