A miner named Danny Smith crawled on his hands and knees through a sea of blood, half out of his mind. His Colt was in his hand and he saw the beasts and saw people shooting at them and often just hitting one another. He saw a window explode inward in a shower of glass and the darkness poured in, became a clutch of clawed hands that dragged two miners out into the night. What seemed seconds later, one of them was tossed back into the barroom, tumbling across the floor in a heap. He was bloody and scratched, his clothes hanging in strips…but he was alive.

Alive and screaming, begging for help.

But there was a noose around his throat and a length of rope leading out into the night. Suddenly, as he tried to crab-crawl in Smith’s direction, the rope snapped tight as wire and he was yanked across the floor. Pulled by the throat up and out the window again.

Smith saw the door standing open, the night stygian and flowing like black silk. He could make it, knew he could make it. On hands and knees, he made a wild charge for it, his mouth babbling nonsense even he could not understand.

He got to his feet and one of the beasts stepped through the doorway, its duster crimson with blood. It held the severed hand of a man in one paw, slapped it against its leg. Smith could smell its rancid yellow breath, see graveyards and gallows reflected in those green sucking pits it had for eyes. Its wolfish face grinned with all those teeth. “Going somewhere, friend?”

Smith let out a wild cry and pumped two bullets into the Hide-Hunter’s belly and it laughed with a cruel, mocking sound. The eyes blazed with triumph and one of its hands swiped at Smith’s belly.

Smith felt the impact…but figured he was okay, okay, but then he saw that his abdomen was open in a bleeding gash and that his viscera was hanging out in glistening clocksprings.

He stood there, shocked and amazed by it.

He wasn’t standing long.

 

***

And upstairs, there was one survivor.

Up to three minutes before, there had been two others. One was slaughtered by the Hide-Hunters…another took his life before the claws fell on him.

And now there was just one.

A man. His name was Provo and he hid in a closet. He was just another hard luck miner with a bad liver and lungs crystallizing from silicosis, the much-dreaded miner’s disease. When the bloodbath began…when the beasts came leaping through windows and hammering down doors…he had been waiting for an overweight prostitute called Abilene Sue. Waiting alone in her room.

Quickly then, he darted into a closet.

In the cramped, close darkness he heard the sound of boots and the jingle of spurs as the beasts looked into the room, departed. He had not heard a sound of them upstairs in over ten minutes now. Even downstairs, it had gone to a grim silence. There was a finality to that sound. A cessation, he thought, of hostilities.

His heart pounding and his breath wheezing in his lungs, Provo opened the door a sliver.

The room appeared to be empty.

His ears listened and heard nothing but a distant dripping, a loose board on the roof rattling in the wind.

Quietly, he slipped out of his hole. His chest was tight and pained, he could barely draw a breath. He stepped out into the corridor…and promptly went on his ass in a pool of blood.

And in the light of a single oil lamp, what he saw…dear Christ.

Blood was sprayed and spilled everywhere. It was pooled on the floor and painted on the walls and even sprinkled on the ceiling. There was a smeared handprint in it just a few feet from him. There were bodies in the corridor with him, parts of them. He saw heads, limbs, a single gutted torso like something hanging in a butcher’s shop. There was tissue and flesh and the raw, metallic stink of it got down into his belly and pulled everything back up with it.

Provo vomited and sobbed and coughed.

It could get no worse than this, it could surely get no worse.

But then it did.

He heard something like a low, rasping/snarling sound and one of the beasts stepped from a doorway. It looked very much like an animal, like some wolf right down to the jutting snout and luminous green eyes and feral teeth. But it was dressed like a man, leaning there against the doorway and looking…amused. Yes, amused. It had the appetites of a blood-maddened beast, but the brain and overall form of a man. A single claw scratched at a pointed ear.

Another beast came up the steps, walking hunched over slightly, its nostrils flaring, tasting, smelling and then…yes, finding prey. Finding Provo. A ribbon of drool fell from its lips. Its brow was exaggerated, furry and jutting, shading those jade eyes in bony hollows.

Provo pissed himself.

But he could not speak, not even think of begging for his life…he was simply awed by these things, these demons what had burst the gates of hell. A stench came off them, an ugly odor of blood and meat. The beasts seemed to nod to one another, thick lips pulling back from those anxious teeth.

A third one came up the steps, elbowed past the others.

The beasts grunted and snapped at one another.

This latest one wore a duster, a wide-brimmed hat like the others. Its shirt was open to the waist, the hairy and oddly muscular chest heaving with each breath it sucked through that blood-dripping maw. It carried a Colt pistol in each clawed hand. And they were hands, Provo saw, not pads or paws, but hands. Human hands. But grotesquely long and narrow, the fingers incredibly thin and taloned.

It spit a gob of blood on the floor. Its teeth unclenched like a spiked mantrap and it made a gargling, guttural sound in its throat that became a voice of all things.” You make it past us, you little fuck, we let you live…”

The others laughed…a strangled, wet laughter.

Maybe it was instinct or terror or God-knows-what, but Provo sprang to his feet and decided to run the gauntlet. He charged right at the Hide-Hunters and such was his ferocity, they actually stepped back. And maybe he would have made it. Maybe.

But something tripped him up.

Something sent him crashing into that greasy stew of human remains and as he squirmed and fought on the floor to be free…he saw it was entrails. Human entrails spread over the floor like wet ropes and he had stepped into them in his mad dash and snared his foot.

Shrieking, he tried to untangle himself. But they were oily and rubbery and moist. He only tangled himself worse. The first two beasts stepped over to him, almost nonchalantly. Taking hold of him and heaving, they pulled his limbs free, one after the other like a child pulling the wings from a fly.

Provo tried to wriggle away, but his life’s blood pissed in an ocean around him. He gagged and coughed and his mind went with a warm wet sound that only he could hear.

The Hide-Hunter with the Colts came over to him.

It pulled his head up off the floor, staring at those glazed, shocked eyes. It stuck the barrel of one pistol into his mouth.

“I dearly hate to see these things suffer,” it said in a gravelly voice.

And blew the back of Provo’s head out. It kept pulling the trigger until there was nothing but a smoking hole at the rear of the man’s head and the slugs chewed into the wall.

It dropped him, leaving the pistol in his mouth.

Then the three of them went downstairs before the best meat was gone.

 

***

In his shack across the road, Jack Turner—the last human being in Sunrise—came out of a drunken slumber to the sound of scratching, of clawing, of something like nails being drawn over the outside of his door.

An animal. Something.

Maybe a wolf, he thought.

Damn things. Probably hungry, probably forced down out of the high country for food. But it wouldn’t get any tonight. Turner could hear it panting and sniffing and scratching like a dog at a rabbit hole.

Turner threw his bedroll aside and took up his .36 Patterson.

Carefully, silently, he pulled the bolt and kicked open the door.

It wasn’t a wolf that he saw…not really. The moon was out, riding a lattice of clouds, and it was bright enough that Turner could see it was a man he was looking at.

A man with the face of a beast.

Whoever or whatever it was, wore a hide poncho that flapped in the wind like a campaign flag. A boiling, hot, nauseous odor blew off him. Turner felt his insides run like wax.

That face.

That godawful devil’s face.

To the right it was the monstrous face of a wolf, furry and green-eyed and yellow-toothed…but to the left, just the skinless skull of a beast covered in ligament and muscle, a scarified black cavity where the eye should have been. The skin was perfectly bisected as if some invisible line were drawn down the center of that awful face…half flesh, half bone.

A discolored tongue licked over the spiked teeth.

A horrible, wizened voice seem to come from some great distance, leagues away, echoing through the mountains and riding that black November wind like coveted sin. “Welcome to hell,” it said.

And Turner expected those claws, those teeth.

But the beast brought up a sawed-off shotgun and gave him both barrels at point-blank range. The impact blew his chest to fragments and threw him back inside the shack.

Then whatever it was, stalked off.

It made an odd, droning sound that could only have been humming. Amused, satisfied humming.

 

13

While Hell paid a little visit to Sunrise and Sheriff Dirker got his first look at the remains of Katherine Modine…Tyler Cabe, unable to sleep, was over at the Cider House Saloon pulling back beers and slugging shots of Kentucky bourbon. He told himself he wasn’t going to make a habit of it. He was here to work, to hunt down the Sin City Strangler (if he was indeed squatting hereabouts)…but, sometimes, a man needed a taste. And particularly when that man was Tyler Cabe and the war was all over him, engulfing him in a bleak and horrible smell of death and burnt powder. When it got so the memories were so vivid, so very real that you could taste the blood and steel and despair on your tongue, only alcohol would chase them away.

The Cider House was essentially a log house with timber walls and a rough-hewn floor of green wood that had split and cracked in wide gashes. The roof was thrown together out of planks and scraps and leaked like a sprinkling can. A set of dusty windows overlooked the muddy street, ore samples lining the sill. There was a carved mahogany bar against one wall, a real fancy outfit, and it looked as out of place at the Cider House as lace ribbon on slopped hog. It was similar to a dozen other taverns in Whisper Lake…a place tossed-up while there was still money to be had, but surely not built to last.

Men of every stripe were gathered over steel mugs and shot glasses—drifters, tramps, miners, company men, trappers down from the high elevations for a few days of drinking and fucking—and the atmosphere was thick and close and cramped. It stunk of unwashed bodies and wet saddle leather, dirty wool and soiled buckskin, booze, smoke, and dirty dreams.

Cabe was listening to a tall, lean fellow named Henry Freeman who claimed to be a Texas Ranger and had the tin star to prove it. He wore a duck-canvas duster and a stiff-brimmed Stetson. Both spotless and gleaming. His face was gaunt, his eyes just as dead and flat as shoe buttons. Despite being a Texas Ranger, as he claimed, he did not have a Texas accent. Though, of course, the Rangers probably had folks from everywhere in their ranks by that point. But the way he talked…wasn’t like a Southerner or a Yankee. An odd, even tone without inflection.

Cabe drank him in along with the whiskey and warm beer, didn’t particularly care for his flavor, but what he had to say…that was something else.

“Way I got it figured, Cabe, is this,” Freeman said, studying his own dour reflection in the cracked bar mirror. “Our friend…this Sin City Strangler, as they like to call him…he’s smart. He’s not your average criminal. I’m of a mind that he’s of superior intelligence. That this is all some sort of game with him, you know, sort of catch-me-if-you-can. There’s a lot of money riding on his head and he gets a kick out of that.”

Cabe took a swallow of beer. “What makes you think he’s so damn smart?”

Freeman, who made a habit of never looking at who he was talking to, said, “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“Well, maybe you ought to spell it out for a dumb Arkansas farm boy like me.”

Freeman smiled thinly. “He jumps from mining town to mining town, a fish…no, a shark…that swims in the sea of the population. Mysterious, unknown, unstoppable, just another face in an ocean of them. And mining towns, I don’t need to remind you, are not like the small towns you and I sewed our oats in—people come and people go. By the hundreds. Now how can you hope to track a fellow like that?”

Cabe thought it over, arched an eyebrow. “Same way you bring a mountain cat down what’s been eating your stock…you lay low, you wait, you take your time. Sooner or later, this sumbitch will show his hand. His ego’s too big and his head’s too full of shit not to. And when he shows, then you bag the cocksucker.”

Freeman looked offended somehow. “You simplify things, friend. Simplify and over-simplify, I think.”

“I’m a simple sort,” Cabe told him. “I’m hungry, I eat. I’m tired, I sleep. I’m thirsty, I drink. I see some sadistic ass-knocker out killing women, I piss lead into him and collect my money.”

Freeman claimed to be on the Strangler’s trail, too. But unlike Cabe who’d picked up the scent in Nevada, Freeman said he’d been scouting the killer since West Texas. Said the Strangler started his killings down in Mexico, continued through Texas and then made his next stop in California, then onto Nevada…and, just possibly, Whisper Lake.

It all bothered Cabe somewhat.

When he hunted a man—and he’d hunted dozens and dozens, everything from cattle rustlers to bank robbers—he made it a religion to find out everything and anything he could about his target. He listened to facts, rumors, suppositions. Read anything that was printed. Corresponded with lawmen and jailers and common folk alike. He followed every thread. He believed in being prepared. Yet…Freeman claimed the Strangler had been busy down Mexico way and carved-up a few in Texas before California. Cabe, in all his researches, had never heard a spot about the killer before San Francisco.

Now how could that be?

Cabe pulled out his Bull Durham and rolled himself a cigarette, thought it over. Kept thinking it over as he stared at the huge rattlesnake skin draped above the bar mirror. In the morning, he was going to wire a few lawmen he knew in Texas, see what fruit it bore.

The air in the saloon was smoky, dirty and oily as the bodies that breathed it. The walls were decorated with the pelts of black bear, fox, and mule deer, stretched and tacked. Jutting in-between were the mounted heads of elk, bighorn sheep, and wolf. A stuffed Gila Monster, mouth open, was squeezed amongst bottles of liquor.

Two burly men were arm-wrestling at a table ringed by men. Money exchanged hands and bets were called and oaths sworn and it got so loud over there, you couldn’t even hear the two wrestlers straining and grunting and puffing.

Ten feet away, a group of trappers and hunters were passing a whore back and forth, spinning her around and kissing her. She was drunk and each time she whirled, they tore another article of clothing off of her. Her breasts were free and bouncing and a little trapper in a marten cap kept trying to nip them. As Cabe watched—not really surprised, but certainly amused—she finally fell onto a stack of smelly, salted antelope hides. Then the men took their turns with her.

No one seemed to notice the fornicating.

You spent enough time in places like this, Cabe knew, you stopped paying attention to such things.

“You know what, Texas?” he said to Freeman. “I almost get the impression that you respect the Strangler, that you think he’s some slick, upstanding sumbitch playing his gentlemen’s game and not some sick, twisted-up crazy.”

Freeman had thrown open the flap of his duster now, so that his guns—two fine ivory-handled Remington .44s—were plainly visible, butts forward. Cabe wasn’t sure if it was for his benefit or not.

Freeman sipped from his whiskey. “Didn’t mean to give you that impression at all, Cabe. I’m just saying our man is like no one else.”

“Shit, he’s crazy.”

“There’s no evidence of that.”

“No evidence…” Cabe felt the bourbon starting to light a fire in him, sparking dry tinder. “For the love of Jesus and Mary and the Sioux Nation, Texas, he strangles women, rapes ‘em, and slits ‘em open like prize Arkansas hogs…you don’t think that’s the work of a crazy man?”

“First off, Cabe, quit calling me Texas,” Freeman said calmly, but more than a little irritated. “And secondly, these women he’s killed, they’re whores. I’m not saying that makes it right, all I’m saying is that you don’t have to rape that kind. They’re only too happy to give it for free. To any man, any time, for a price. They have no respect for their womanhood. They are merchandise, are they not?”

Cabe’s eyes were narrowed now. “They’re turning coin on what God gave ‘em, is all. And why the hell not? I don’t see a goddamned thing wrong with it, long as it’s of their own free will. Hell, why sit on a goldmine when you can work it?”

Freeman looked offended by that and Cabe supposed it came out the wrong way. Maybe the Texas Ranger was some sort of revivalist, had Jesus on the brain. Maybe that was it.

Freeman cleared his throat. “We’re not talking a useful, productive segment of society here, Cabe. We’re talking prostitutes, we’re talking whores, we’re talking trash here, are we not?”

“Don’t know about you, Texas, but I find those ladies very productive. And not just for the obvious…some of ‘em are damn fine people.”

“Like hell they are.”

“You got some kind of grudge against ‘em, Texas?”

Freeman set his glass down and finally looked Cabe square in the eye with a dark, penetrating stare. “I told you to quit calling me that.”

Cabe, feeling the alcohol now and liking it, gave him an exaggerated courtly bow. “Excuse me…Texas.”

Freeman was about to address that—you could see it in his eyes, something bubbling away in there like hot tar—but a pair of men down the bar caught his attention. One of them was clean-shaven, oddly regal with an arrogant lilt to his mouth, wore a gray linen suit and an English flat-top cap. The other was unshaven, dressed in a fringed buckskin jacket and Southwestern sombrero.

The fellow in the sombrero was eyeing up Cabe and Freeman. He pulled out a hunting knife, cut himself a chew from a plug of tobacco and worked it carefully in his jaw. Then he spit a stream of brown juice on the floor. Had a look about him that said he dared anyone to mention the fact.

No one did.

Cabe was watching him, too. He didn’t know who he was, but he figured his partner was Sir Tom Ian, a legendary pistolman. Ian had come across the pond back in the ‘70’s with some British duke, part of a group that came west to do some hunting. The duke and his people had left, but Ian stayed. Had made himself a name as a shootist and, depending on who you listened to, had put down anywhere between ten to twenty men. Had backed down none other than hotheaded John Wesley Hardin when Hardin made to kill a black soldier in Tulsa. And was something of a hired gun.

As far as Cabe knew, he wasn’t wanted for anything. Just another fast gun that danced on the periphery of the law and, probably, on the wrong side of it from time to time.

Freeman turned to him. “You know who that is, Cabe?”

“Sir Tom Ian, I’m thinking.”

“Then you’re thinking is right,” Freeman said. “That gruffy-looking saddletramp with him is Virgil Clay. He’s a maniac.”

Cabe had heard of him, too.

He was no Sir Tom, but what he lacked in skill and professionalism, he more than made up for in pure rage. He was a blooded killer and not exactly picky about whether he gave it to you in the belly or the back.

Sir Tom raised his shot of rye, nodded to Cabe and Freeman. “To your health, gentlemen.”

They reciprocated.

Clay swallowed down two shots of whiskey in rapid succession, burped, and wiped his mouth. That mean stray-cat look in his eyes, he sauntered over, a Navy .36 in a cross-draw scabbard at his left hip. He spat tobacco juice about an inch from the tip of Cabe’s boot.

“What’s all this talk about whores I’m hearing?” he said. His words were slightly slurred, but sharp as tacks.

Before Cabe could open his mouth, Freeman said, “Name’s Freeman, from Texas. My friend here is Tyler Cabe out of Arkansas. He’s a bounty hunter. He’s hunting the Sin City Strangler.”

Brown juice ran down Clay’s chin. “What the fuck is a Sin City Stranger?”

“Strangler,” Cabe corrected him, wondering maybe if that was such a good idea.

“I know what I said. Don’t you think I know what I said?”

Freeman stepped in-between them. “The Sin City Strangler is the fellow who’s been murdering those prostitutes, carving ‘em up.”
Clay nodded. “I heard about that.” He laughed. “Fucking whores anyhow…who gives a fuck?”

Freeman grinned at that. A compatriot. “Well, Mr. Cabe is inclined to disagree with you. Thinks this fellow out to be run to ground, strung up.”

Clay pushed past Freeman now. “That so? Well, Mr. Fucking-Bounty-Hunter-From-Arkansas…what if I was that fellow? What you gonna do about it? Take me in? You’d die trying. Maybe I like carving me whores and you ain’t got nothing to say about it. Maybe I wish you’d try.”

Cabe made a show of looking him up and down. “Son,” he said. “I shit bigger than you.”

“Never did see a man so anxious to die,” Clay told him.

Freeman said, “Our Mr. Cabe…he don’t back down from no one.”

Cabe just leaned there against the bar. He could hear all the men in the bar shouting and arguing and telling off-color stories and wild tales—it was a steady, monotonous hum in his ears. A constant like the stink in his nose. But all that faded into the background and he saw only Virgil Clay looking for a fight and Henry Freeman egging it on. Because that’s what it was really about here. Freeman didn’t like him much, didn’t like how he dressed or talked or that he called him “Texas” even when he was told not to…so, he was going to make trouble for him.

That’s the sort of bastard he was.

Clay’s eyes were like ball bearings. They did not blink, they did not emote…they glared. “Oh, you don’t fucking back down from no one, eh? Is that the fact of the matter, you goddamn motherfucking shit-worthless scab? Is that the truth?”

Cabe stood up now. “Yeah, you heard right, you fucking moron. Wipe the drool off your lips and clean the dogshit out of your ears.”

Clay was breathing real hard. “You got some kind of sand, Cabe. I’ll give you that.” He nodded, seemed to relax…but not much. Intimidation wasn’t working on this Arkansas boy and reputation didn’t seem to count for a squirt of pig shit. This was indeed a quandary. Question was…how to work Cabe into a situation where Clay himself was sure to be victorious? Because, truth be told, most of his victims had been killed with the odds very much on Clay’s side. A shot in the back. A bullet from a hidden location. Pistols pulled and fired before his adversary had a chance to even think of such a thing.

Surprise was always Clay’s element. He liked it that way. An even fight like this…man to man…he didn’t care for it so much. Time to try a little verbal humiliation.

“What happened to yer face, boy?” he said. “Supposed to ride that horse, not get drug behind it on yer nose.”

There were a few laughs over that.

Cabe smiled. “It was your mama…she done scratched me up while I was putting the meat to her.”

Clay looked like hot iron had been shoved up his ass. He came forward, stopped, turned around, danced a crazy little jig. Sir Tom smiled at him and more than one man stepped away from the bar.

Clay looked Cabe up and down, licked his lips, knew there was a fight brewing here, but couldn’t make up his mind how to start it. How to start it and be sure he’d win it, that was. His hand drifted towards his gun.

“You pull down on me,” Cabe told him, “and they’ll be burying your ass come morning. Think about it, peckerwood.”

“Oh, I done thought about it, shithole,” Clay said, bits of foamy spit collected up in the corners of his lips like a mad dog. “Done thought about it and decided I’m gonna have to kill your ass dead.” He stood there, ready to pull iron, knowing there was no other way to save his reputation. He didn’t kill this sonofabitch, every wanna-be in the Territory would ride his ass hard on a daily basis. “Slap leather, Cabe. I’m ready anytime you are.”

Cabe chuckled. “C’mon, now. What your really saying is could I kindly turn my back so you can drill me from behind like you did all those others. Ain’t that so? Well, Clay, I’m afraid I can’t oblige.”

It was all driving Clay nuts. He was shaking and trembling and sputtering. “Maybe you don’t know who the fuck I am. Maybe that’s it, Cabe. Maybe I’ll give you one chance to get down on your knees and beg for fucking life. And if you don’t…boy, time I’m done with you, you’ll be sucking my willy and calling me daddy.”

“Won’t happen, Clay. Just won’t happen. I don’t back down from no man what squats to piss…”

That sort of insult couldn’t go unanswered and Cabe knew it. Something in him was telling him he was falling into his old habits here, getting into drunken fights. Was telling him that this was probably a big mistake, but—what with the whiskey filling his veins—he didn’t honestly give a shit.

Clay stood there, visibly shaking.

Somebody told them to take it outside.

Miners and drifters fell out of the way.

Freeman looked smug; Sir Tom grinned.

Cabe felt a tenseness at his groin, felt his guts tighten into coils tight as bedsprings. He was tight and hard and ready to pounce.

Clay said, “Ah, fuck you…” He turned away, made it maybe two, three feet, then came around fast and lethal, the Navy .36 filling his hand. He got off a shot as Cabe brought out his Starr double-action .44 in a smooth, practiced motion. The round just missed Cabe, ripping into the bar. Cabe threw himself to the side as Clay fired again and, falling to the floor, he got off a single shot. The bullet punched a hole in Clay’s chest, deflected off a rib, and bounced through his torso, macerating organ and tissue before erupting from a hole just beneath his left armpit.

Clay made a weird gagging/wheezing sound and hit the floor, vomiting out a tangle of blood. He shuddered and went still. The blood that bubbled from his mouth was very dark.

“Dead,” someone said. “That sonofabitch is dead.”

Hands pulled Cabe to his feet and he shook them off, surprised as he always was at moments like this that he had survived yet again. Some were patting him on the back and saying what a crack shot he was and what a set of balls to get into it with someone like Virgil Clay. Others were calling him a killer and still others were saying something about Clay’s father, how he was the real nasty one.

Cabe found he could barely stand. It always got like that. Going into a fight he was all balls and hot blood, coming out of it…just shaky and disoriented. Felt like his legs had no bones, were packed with wet straw.

Sir Tom nudged Clay’s body with the tip of his boot. His right thumb hooked into his gunbelt, just above the .44 Bisley hanging there.

Cabe was thinking, Oh, boy, here it comes…me and Sir Tom…I hope they bury me under a nice tree so I get some shade…

Sir Tom just smiled. His face was pleasant and easy. “That’s one fine piece of shooting, Mr. Cabe. My hat’s off to you.”

Crazy thing was, he seemed to mean it. Like maybe Clay had been no friend, but just some stray dog that had been following him around and sometimes dogs get run down by horses. Life goes on.

Cabe was going to say something, but then Henry Wilcox—Dirker’s massive deputy sheriff—was plowing his way through, men falling out of his way like cut trees.

Everyone seemed to be talking at once and Wilcox listened, understanding perfectly that Virgil Clay wasn’t nothing but trash and that this was bound to happen. He told Cabe as much, told him it would go down as self-defense…but, there was such a thing as due process. And until a coroner’s inquest, he’d have to be held.

“So, give me your gun,” he said, “and we’ll take a walk.”

Cabe took a step backwards…but knew he really had no choice. So, sighing, handed his weapon to Wilcox. “I want that back,” he said. “I carried it since the war, had it converted to cartridge at no little expense—”

“You’ll get it back,” Wilcox promised him. “Let’s go.”

“To the jail?”

Wilcox nodded.

As he led him away, Cabe said, “Tell me one thing…does Dirker still have that whip?”

 

 

 

14

So, two cells down from Orville DuChien, Cabe was deposited like so much refuse. He was given an army blanket, a piss pot, a jug of water, and told not to dirty the straw if he could help it. He said he’d do his best.

Wilcox told him he was honestly sorry about having to lock him up, but the sheriff had set down specific rules concerning such things. A man was gunned down or knifed, his assailant had to be locked up until the facts were sorted out. No exceptions.

So Cabe was a prisoner.

He was not truly angry about it, knew and knew damn well it was his own fault, dancing with that inbred shithound Clay…least he was the one locked-up and not toes-up in the mortuary. That was something. His cell was big enough for a cot and a little slip of floor upon which to pace. To either side were the bars separating his from the other holding cells. He tried pacing for a bit, but his head was pounding from the cheap whiskey and excitement. He sat down then, massaging his temples.

He remembered then the farm back in Yell County, up in the foothills of the Ouachitas. It wasn’t much of a place—just a plot of land with some hogs and chicken, corn and barley. Cabe’s old man rented it from some rich bastard name of Connelly from Little Rock who owned just about everything and everyone in the county. It was but one miserable step up from being a sharecropper. Connelly’s monthly rent was so high, that even when things went good—which was seldom—the elder Cabe barely had enough to feed his family.

Tyler lost two sisters to a diphtheria outbreak. His old man had a fatal heart attack in the fields one afternoon. And his mother had a stroke and died while Tyler was off fighting the War Between the States. The land and Connelly’s greed had wiped out his kin. The Yankees had burned and looted Connelly into the poorhouse during the war. And that was the only time Tyler Cabe ever cheered for the North.

But thinking of the farm…he could see his old man sitting on a willow stump one morning, dirty and sweaty and beaten from trying to wring a living from the thin soil. “Tyler,” he said. “Yer my only boy. Ye ain’t the smartest I’ve ever done seen, but damn if ye ain’t the most determined. I figure ye’ll do okay. At least, I shore hope so. But whatever ye do…don’t ever let another man own ye…”

And Tyler Cabe never had and never would.

He figured if he had nothing else, he always had his self-respect.

Wilcox let him keep his Bull Durham, papers, and matches, so he rolled himself a cigarette and felt sorry for himself.

Damn, he thought, old Crazy Jack was going to love this one.

Locked-up, eh, Cabe? Killed a man, did you? Still the same hotheaded old Southern boy you was back when, ain’t you? Figured it would come to this, boy. You ain’t got the brains God gave a piss-drunk rooster.

Damn.

Water was dripping down on him, just a few droplets, but he figured he’d be soaked by morning. Soaked and freezing and didn’t he just have that coming?

“Cot’s not bolted down,” a voice from the next cell said. “Slide it over to the other wall or your blanket’ll be frozen stiff come morning.”

Cabe struck another match, held it up to the bars off to his left. He saw an old Indian sitting cross-legged on his own cot. He was dressed in a blanket coat and campaign hat, his hair long and steel-gray. His eyes were black dots set in a worn face with more wrinkles in it than an unmade bed.

“Just a suggestion,” the Indian said. “I’m good with suggestions, but not much with following them.”

Cabe smiled despite the pounding in his head. “Name’s Tyler Cabe…you?”

In the gray darkness, Cabe saw that the old man just stared dead forward like he was seeing something no one else could. “You want my injun name or my white name?”

“Injun name would be fine.”

The old man adjusted his hat. “No, you couldn’t pronounce it and I can’t remember it. In white tongue it meant “One Who Waits”. Something like that, I recall.”

“And what is it you’re waiting for?”

“Don’t know rightly. Figure I’ll stay around until it comes to me.”

“Just keep waiting, eh?” Cabe said.

The Indian shrugged. “Surely. I’m always waiting for something. When I was a free-running injun, I suppose I was waiting for the U.S. Government to take my land away. When they did that I used to wait on the reservation for my beef ration, my flour and corn. Never came too much, but I always waited for it. Now I wait here in Whisper Lake. But if I wait in any one place too long…some white-eye feels the need to kick me around. But that’s life as an injun: You wait long enough, something always happens.”

Cabe didn’t know what to make of all that. The old man seemed to be joking and to be dead serious at the same time. But Cabe knew from the Cherokees back home that they were not like white men and you could not read them as such.

“What’s your white name?”

“Charles Graybrow,” he said. “Graybrow…that’s injun, too. Means man with gray brow.”

“Really? I’d have never figured it.”

“Learn something every day, Tyler Cabe.”

Cabe rubbed his temples again. Christ, it was a doozy, that headache. Older he got, harder the liquor was on him. And Graybrow wasn’t helping none…Cabe got the impression that he was being insulted and befriended at the same time.

“Here,” Graybrow said. “This’ll help your head.”

Cabe lifted his hand and a small leather pouch was passed to him. The Indian’s fingers felt very rough like untreated hide.

“What is it?”

“Injun head-magic,” Graybrow said. “Though some whites just call it headache powder.”

Cabe washed it down with water, splashed some more water in his face. He passed the pouch back through the bars.

“Why were you locked-up, Tyler Cabe?”

Cabe grunted. “For being a damn fool, I suppose. I stopped by the Cider House for a drink. Next thing I know, I killed a man. Shot him. Virgil Clay was his name, they tell me. Hell, one less speck of trash in the world.”

“Virgil Clay?” Graybrow clucked his tongue. “That’s bad medicine there, I tell you. Oh…when an injun says ‘bad medicine’ it means the shit’s about to fly and you’re gonna catch some.”

“Don’t say?”

“Yep.”

Graybrow told him that the Clay’s were an ornery mountain clan from back east in West Virginia. Something happened to them during the Civil War and they pretty much had to leave their beloved hill country or face prosecution. Graybrow couldn’t be sure, but he thought he’d heard something to the effect that the clan had been doing more than a little murdering and horse-thieving and most of the county had hounded them out. They’d ended up in Utah Territory, attracted maybe by the mountains. Most of the clan was gone now. As far as Graybrow knew, only a few of ‘em lived up in the high country and they didn’t cotton to strangers poking about…as more than one miner or trapper had learned the hard way.

Cabe asked about Virgil.

Trash, Graybrow told him, just like you said. A speck of trash in a big smelly heap called Whisper Lake. He thought of himself as the fastest gun since Wild Bill, but to call him a shootist would be giving him far too much credit. Shit, Graybrow said, calling him a man was giving that animal too much credit. Virgil was strictly a bottom-feeder, a product of a demented backwoods clan that bottle-fed their young on violence, hate, and intolerance. You wanted to call Virgil Clay something, “murderer” was always a good tag. Maybe sidewinder or weasel was applicable. Bottom line here, Graybrow pointed out, was that Virgil Clay was an ornery, dirt-mean life-taker with all the morals and sense of fair play as a leg-chomping river gator.

“Man like that? I tell you what, Tyler Cabe, you don’t hang him; you hang his mother for pumping out that filth and his father for grooming him into the reptile he became.”

Cabe listened and listened, finally couldn’t help himself. He asked Graybrow if maybe, just maybe now, he had an ax to grind against old Virgil. That made the old man sigh. “Ax to grind?” he said. “I’m an injun, Tyler Cabe. We grind stone knives and tomahawks, didn’t you know that?” Graybrow told him one day, well over a year before, he and his brother-in-law Robert Sun-Bird—finest, kindest injun that ever lived, had to feel sorry for him marrying my foul-mouthed, snake-mean sister—were on the road outside Frisco. They were bringing a wagon of lumber back to the reservation to throw up a couple lean-tos. They’d paid real money for it, too. He said the ore wagons came and went and no one paid the Indians much attention until a lone rider showed.

Virgil Clay.

He seemed pleasant enough when he stopped Graybrow’s wagon, inquired about the weather, saying only injuns could truly predict the weather. Sun-Bird told him this was true, looked to the sky and forecasted a dry spell for the next week. Clay thanked him, asked for a match to light his cheroot with and was promptly given one. And, yep, he was a pleasant sort, Graybrow said, but his eyes were just plain crazy, beady and close-set. A scorpion wearing a man’s flesh. After Clay got his light, he pulled a pistol and shot Sun-Bird dead. Before Graybrow could do much more than wipe the blood from his eyes, Clay yanked him from the wagon and pistol-whipped him there on the road until his eyes were swelled-up and he couldn’t see.

“So, maybe you’re right, Tyler Cabe…maybe my ax needed some grinding. Maybe in my heart I still sharpen it from time to time.”

Graybrow told him that that was Virgil Clay, what he knew of him. Though it was rumored he’d run roughshod over Indian Territory, running whiskey in the Nations and robbing and looting redskins and whites alike up and down the Arkansas and Canadian Rivers. Was put on trial once at Fort Smith…but was acquitted of something involving rustled cattle and changing brands with a running iron. In Whisper Lake, he hung tight to Sir Tom Ian ever since Ian showed in town a month back.

Cabe said, “I suppose the rest of that brood is just as bad?”

“Worse,” Graybrow said. “Damn worse.”

Only person Graybrow ever knew that rode up to the Clay family spread and rode back down again was Jackson Dirker. Dirker made himself pretty clear on the subject of the Clay’s: Long as they obeyed the law, he couldn’t run ‘em out of town, but they so much as spit on the sidewalk, he would ride a posse up into the hills and burn the lot of ‘em out.

No, there wasn’t many of them left…but one of them happened to be Virgil Clay’s old man, Elijah, and he was plenty. Graybrow told him to imagine Virgil, but bigger, meaner, just as crude and coarse as a rutting hog…a hog that ate raw meat and shit razor blades, thought that roasting babies on a spit was how you whiled away a slow Sunday afternoon.

“That bad, eh?”

“Bad Medicine,” Graybrow told him. “When an injun says that—“

“Yeah, I know.”

Cabe figured none of this was good news. If he got out of this mess, the Clay clan might come gunning for him. He’d better watch his back. Course, Dirker might find it amusing—one crazy Southerner hunting down another.

“But, you know, Tyler Cabe, I’m an injun and sometimes we do go on. I got a good imagination,” he said. “I can read, you know that? I like reading them dime novels and I know everything they say is true. All those stories of redskins attacking wagon trains and kidnapping white women and children…just a shame. I know whites would never kill and burn like that. It’s a good thing the white man came out here and sorted out all us heathen red devils. I’m truly thankful for it.”

Cabe ignored that, lighting another cigarette. “Well, tomorrow, the next day,” he said, “you see that sumbitch Elijah Clay riding in after me, you let me know.”

“I will…if I’m sober.”

Cabe asked him what he was locked up for.

Graybrow took his time in answering. “Not sure. I was drunk at the time. But I figure I musta done something. Maybe I scalped some innocent, God-fearing whites or peed on ‘em. Something like that. I been known to do both and sometimes at the same time.” He was silent for a time. Finally, he clucked his tongue, sighed. “Whatever I did, must’ve been bad, you think? To be thrown in here? You don’t suppose I got locked-up just because I’m an injun, do you?”

“No, white folk wouldn’t do that. We got too much respect for you people.”

Graybrow slapped his knee. “You’re right. But for a minute there…boy, I was scared.”

Cabe told him he didn’t strike him as a man who scared easy and Graybrow launched into a tirade about how he was just a simple savage and the white world was so fast and complicated…it frightened him. All he wanted from life was a tipi and a fire to dance naked around. And maybe a buffalo robe and a chew of tobacco. Maybe a woman…or two of them. And some horses and cattle. Maybe his own bank and livery, now that you mention it…

“All right already,” Cabe said.

“Sure, I go on. I know that. It’s because I got a taste for the firewater, makes my head funny. Can’t think right.”

The talk drifted to what Cabe was doing in Whisper Lake and he told the old man all there was to tell. The old man agreed with Dirker that the Sin City Strangler had finally found a place he could call home. He recounted much of what Carny the bartender had told him earlier that night at the Oasis—vigilantes, animal attacks, tensions brewing.

“There are two Mormon villages heresabouts, Tyler Cabe,” Graybrow said, now dead serious. “One of ‘em is called Redemption and was once a mining town. The Mormons have taken it over and are fixing it to right. People around here, they blame them from Redemption. But they’re wrong. Redemption is just an ordinary town.”

“What about Deliverance?”

“That,” Graybrow said, “is another matter. I’m tired now. Maybe another day I’ll tell you about that place, but not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. That is, if I’m—”

“Sober?”

“Yep.”

 

15

Cabe figured he slept maybe two, three hours and then came awake to the sound of keys jingling at his cell lock. The door swung open and there was a figure standing there. His head still throbbing from the booze, his eyes glued to slits, and his mouth carpeted in fuzz, he wasn’t sure if he was awake or not.

Regardless, he knew the dim figure was Jackson Dirker.

“Sorry to disturb your beauty rest, Cabe,” he said. “God knows you need it, but you don’t belong in here. C’mon, we need to talk.”

Cabe, after some effort, got his boots down on the floor and managed to sit up. His head pounded and his guts tried to climb up the back of his throat. “Shit,” he said. “I feel pretty much like shit.”

In the cell next to him, Graybrow was snoring away louder than a crosscut saw biting into hardwood. Cabe once heard that Indians were real quiet, that they didn’t even snore. So much for that one.

He splashed water in his face, gulped some down, and pissed into the pot, getting some on his boot. Making moaning sounds, he followed Dirker out into the front office. Dirker shoved a cup of hot coffee into his hand.

“Drink it,” he said. “I need you fresh…or as fresh as you can be.”

Cabe drank the coffee and it tasted like maybe they had made it with water dredged from a privy, but it went down, all right. Dirker poured him another cup, leaning up against the wall, looking very dire. Cabe had to wonder when the hell it was that Jackson Dirker slept.

He set his cup down. “Now, listen to me, Crazy Jack or Sheriff or whatever the fuck they call you here...it was self-defense. Before you go off on some wild tangent on how I’m shooting up the town…that boy there…goddamn Virgil Clay…he pulled on me, got off the first shot. I put one in him because I didn’t have much of a choice.”

Dirker just nodded. “I know that. I heard all about it.”

“Then you ain’t charging me with nothing?”

“No, not this time around, anyhow,” he said. “But hear me on this and hear me good. I won’t have you going around shooting people whenever the need strikes you. After awhile folks are going to start tripping over the bodies and they’re not going to like it.”

Cabe told him it couldn’t be helped. And Dirker said maybe and maybe not. He had no love for Virgil Clay or the clan that hatched him. They were trash and everyone knew it. If it hadn’t have been Cabe, it would have been someone else. But…and he emphasized this pretty sternly…the witnesses, a lot of ‘em anyway, were saying that Cabe had been drunk and running his mouth. That he could have walked away from it at anytime, no harm done.

“Oh, but there would have been harm done, Dirker,” Cabe said. “I would have lost all credibility with them people there. They would have thought I was some sort of coward.”

Dirker licked his lips. “Those people you talk about, Cabe, they’re not exactly high-stepping gentry. Most of ‘em would slit your throat for a ten-dollar gold piece. You got nothing to prove to that bunch.”

Cabe knew he was right, but wasn’t about to admit as much. He finished his coffee. “Can I go now?”

“No.” Dirker unlocked the property cabinet and gave him back his Starr, knife, and cartridge belt. “You’re gonna take a little walk with me. There’s something I want you to see.”

“Unless it looks like a bed, I don’t want to see it.”

“You will, I think.”

“Why?”

Dirker swallowed down something. “Because your boy is in town. He’s finally struck.”

 

16

Figuring that he was hungover, trail-weary, and hadn’t had much sleep, Cabe didn’t need to be looking at this. Didn’t need to be seeing the slashed and hacked remains of a whore named Mizzy Modine in all their ghoulish splendor.

He stood there in the doorway, his guts percolating away, bile kicking up the back of his throat. His jaws were locked tight.

Dirker was standing there with him. “Well?” he said. “Any question in your mind that this is your boy?”

Cabe did not answer him, could not answer him. His jaws were still locked-up and his voice had sunk down into some dark, muddy pit. All the rooting around he did down there did not produce it. What he was looking at…Christ, it was the worse yet. The very worst.

“Excuse me,” he finally said, stepping out into the chill air.

Cabe had seen a lot of death over the years. A lot of blood and flesh mangled up in the worse possible ways. He’d come to the conclusion long ago, that the human being…though possibly God’s finest creation…was also the most disgusting when you opened it up and saw the slimy, drippy things that made it operate.

Cabe had not been physically ill in years looking at a body, but, damn if he wasn’t real close right now. That bile in his throat tasted of cheap whiskey, flat beer, and things far worse. He tried to roll a cigarette, but his fingers were thick and clumsy and maybe the light from the lantern hanging outside Mizzy Modine’s crib just wasn’t enough.

Dirker rolled one for him. Rolled it, stuck it between his lips, struck a match and cupped it against the wind while Cabe puffed it into life.

Dirker said, “It hits you hard the first time you look on it. I been looking on it for hours now…but the shock just won’t go away.”

Cabe nodded, pulling off his cigarette.

Okay, he thought, enough. You went on a good one tonight and you put a man down, but pull yourself together because you have to look at what’s in there. You have to take a good, long look. Dirker wants to know if it’s the Strangler and he expects you to tell him.

Can you do it? Can you?

But Cabe knew he could. Somehow. Some way. Still dragging from his cigarette, he thought about when he took up the trail of the Sin City Strangler. It was in Eureka, Nevada. The fourth victim. The fifth was in Osceola and the sixth in Pinoche. In Pinoche, Cabe got his first good look at the handiwork of the Strangler. The sheriff there was a hardcase named Cyrus Long who carried a sawed-off double barrel shotgun in a sheath at his hip. The stock was plated in iron and it was dented from Long smashing it over the heads of miscreants…or anyone that pissed him off. Long was rumored to have been a Kansas redleg during the war whose obsession, it was said, was hunting down Confederate guerrillas in Missouri and skinning them alive. He was a cruel, evil sort and that look in his eyes…like simmering death…even made Cabe bristle. Cabe had been asking questions about the victim and finally Long himself took him to view the body.

Working a plug of chew in his cheek, Long said: Now I’m only gonna do you this favor once, Johnny Reb, hear? You bounty hunters…you come stomping about my town, kicking things up, leaving your bootprints all over my ass…and not a one of you ever had the decency to let me know he’s even here or what for. But you have, Reb, so I’ll do you a good turn back…’cept, you ain’t gonna think it’s so good once we’re done. One thing, though, Reb…yeah, I don’t give a good fucking shit what your name is, Reb…you just listen and shut that cracker mouth for two minutes or I’ll goddamn well do it for you. I had my fill of your peckerwood Southern asses during the War of Rebellion, so shut it and shut it quick, boy. Okay. Now, I don’t mind you bounty hunters coming here and all, just as long as you let me know straight away what you’re dirtying up my town about. Don’t matter if you’re hunting wolves or injuns or men…I wanna know.

He was a real sweetheart, that Long. You just had to love him. Reconstruction had never touched this boy. He was as mean and ornery and intolerant as he’d been during the war. He took Cabe upstairs of a brothel and into a room at the end of the hall. A white sheet was thrown over a form on the bed. There were great red stains on it. Long pulled it off the body and it came away with a sticky sound like tape pulled from a board.

Long took out a knife and began. See here, Reb? See how she’s been opened from belly to crotch? That’s a sure sign of the Sin City Strangler. Trust me…I saw the other one in Osceola. Slit right open, see? Ain’t that something? Long followed the incision with the blade of his knife, using it like a pointer. Like he was an anatomy instructor. See, this crazy bastard, he stuck the knife right in her business there, dragged it up to her throat. Then he cut her widthwise just below her tits here and then again right at her bellybutton. Opened this bitch like a Christmas present. See? She’s all hollow inside on account this bastard scooped out all her goodies, spread ‘em around like birthday streamers…you see that? One thing missing, though, is her heart. Yep. He always takes that part with him. Now, out in San Fran they had themselves some hotshot surgeon what looked at the body and said the woman there died about the same time she was strangled. I wouldn’t know about that. But see those purple marks at her throat…yeah, them ones…them are from fingers. You can see ‘em fine, thumbs and fingers. Now, she died from strangulation and was opened afterward, Reb. I know that on account of what I’m seeing. No, don’t turn away. This is the important part. Her eyes are full of blood and her color is blue…oxygen starvation causes that they tell me. She was strangled, all right. Now, Reb, what you’re looking for here is a dirt-mean, deranged cocksucker who fancies whores and likes to fuck ‘em and choke ‘em and gut ‘em. Got another secret for you, too, Reb…he fucks ‘em after they’s dead, too. So you find this character, he’ll have a long, sharp knife and maybe a heart and a few other things boiling in a pot…where you going, boy?

But Cabe had had enough. Only a ghoul could linger in such a place. There was something definitely wrong with Cyrus Long. He was too clinical, too detached. It almost seemed he’d been enjoying it. Sick redleg sumbitch.

“You ready now?” Dirker said.

Cabe crushed out his cigarette. “You?”

“Nope. Not in the least.”

They went back in, Cabe leading. They went in and stood at the foot of the bed. The air was redolent with the stink of voided bowels, fresh blood, and salty meat. It was a heady, nauseating odor that crawled down inside both men and made something shiver in their bellies. Cabe looked at everything but what he was supposed to be looking at. He took in the velvet tapestries, the oak chiffonier, the red tapers melted down now. Everything was red and warm and selected to induce passion, he supposed. But what was on the bed induced anything but.

Like the whore in Pinoche…Mizzy Modine had been eviscerated.

But it was worse this time. All her internals had been cut out, arranged next to the body in some unguessable sequence. Her bowels had been draped over the headboard and coiled around her head in a halo. Her eyes had been plucked out and replaced with coins. Her breasts hacked off and set on the nightstand along with her eyeballs and privates.

“Yeah…it’s him,” Cabe breathed. “I got a firsthand tour in Pinoche. It looked like this. Only this time it’s even worse.”

Dirker just nodded. “All right, then.”

Together they went outside, stood together, let the wind blast them clean. A light mist hung in the air…but even if it had been pouring, it couldn’t have hoped to wash the stink off of them. A stink that was mostly in their head by that point.

“You can go, Cabe,” Dirker said. “Get some rest. There’s no more you can do here.”

Cabe looked at him, started to say something…then just shook his head and started down Piney Hill through the muddy, damp streets.

17

At the St. James Hostelry, Janice Dirker said, “My, my, Mister Tyler Cabe, but you smell like the Devil’s own brewery. For a man who didn’t come to Whisper Lake to ‘hell around’, you certainly managed to dip in the waters of our taverns quite thoroughly.”

Cabe just stood there. “Yeah…it was a hard night.”

“You look like hell, Mr. Cabe. If you don’t mind me saying so.”

“I don’t, ma’am.”

He wanted very badly to get into bed, to sleep away the day, but she insisted he join her for breakfast. He didn’t figure it would be polite to resist. So he followed her into the dining room, thinking it was going to give old Crazy Jack a heart attack if he came in and none other than Tyler Cabe was breaking bread with his woman. Maybe yesterday that would have given Cabe pleasure…but after what he’d been through this day or night or whatever in hell it was, he just didn’t have the strength to feel any animosity for Dirker.

It just wasn’t there.

The cook brought out eggs and hotcakes, maple syrup and coffee.

Cabe stared at the food, his belly growling, but he kept seeing Mizzy Modine laying in that slaughterhouse. He picked up his fork and set it down again.

“Please, Mr. Cabe, eat,” Janice Dirker said. “The other guests are not up yet. I usually dine alone, but I’m grateful for company. I can remember the days when my husband would share breakfast with me. But he’s simply too busy these days.”

“I think I need sleep, ma’am,” Cabe said.

“Of course you do. But sit with me for a moment or two.”

She cut a small bite of cakes and chewed it quite delicately. Cabe could see she had fine breeding. Womenfolk he knew back in Yell County shoveled it in before somebody snatched it off their plates.

“So where do you hail from, Mr. Cabe?” she asked.

“Arkansas. Yell County. Yourself?”

“Georgia. Daddy owned a plantation there. He owned lots of things.” Her eyes misted for a moment, but something wouldn’t let the pain come, maybe breeding. “Daddy’s gone now…everything’s gone.”

She went on to tell him of her life in Georgia, the sort of life she’d had that he could only dream of. The privileges. The fine schools. The genteel upbringing. It was all in great contrast to the South Cabe had known…which had always been hard and unforgiving. She was a lady and the Yankees had destroyed her family’s holdings and yet she had gone and married one of them. She was an enigma to say the least. But the war, he knew, had created a great many of those.

“Were you in the war, Mr. Cabe?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But you don’t like to talk about it?”

“No, ma’am.”

She seemed to understand. “My husband was in the war, also. He, too, does not like to discuss it.”

“It was a bad time, ma’am. A real bad time for all concerned.”

She smiled conspiratorially. “But, perhaps, worse for us Southerners…wouldn’t you agree?”

He nodded. “I would. The Yankees what stayed behind, stayed home…they probably had it all right. But the ones that did the fighting? No, I can’t say they had a good time of it. No one who went through that hell could possibly have fond memories. The Yankees were better equipped than us without a doubt. But they bled and died all the same.”

Janice admitted that her husband was a Yankee. “I remember him…this was a few years after the war. How tall and proud he was on his horse, how handsome. He wooed me and won me. I am not ashamed of the fact.”

“No reason you should be. North and South, men are men and women are women.”

Janice told him she appreciated his understanding for there were many Southerners who did not feel that way. Regardless, many girls married Yankee soldiers. She wasn’t sure what it was…maybe there was a certain attraction in that they were the victors. Maybe it was a matter of power. Powerful men were…enticing. And maybe it had something to do with wanting badly to get out of the South, the ruin it had become. To escape memories and demons and melancholy things that were buried along with the antebellum South and wouldn’t rest quietly in their graves.

“I knew many dashing men that went off to war, Mister Cabe. Those that returned, well, they were broken, beaten men. Their eyes were vacant and they were bitter, angry. At the Yankees, maybe at themselves, their commanders, the politicians that had put them in such a situation to begin with,” Janice explained. “Many of them did nothing but drink and fight amongst themselves. Some were touched in the head, didn’t believe the war was over. It was all very sad. Maybe I had to escape all that.”

Cabe understood. He knew nothing of the life she had led. Privilege and money were alien things to him. When he left for war he had nothing. When he came back, he still had nothing. He got out of Arkansas soon as possible, wanting desperately to be anything but what his father was—just a rich man’s belonging. He would not be a tenant farmer, a sharecropper. So he rode west with all the others, looking, looking for something he still had not found.

Cabe cleared his throat. “Your husband…he is a good man?”

“Yes, I think so,” Janice said. “He always tries his best, always tries to do right by people…sometimes he fails as we all do, but he never stops trying. In his job, well, let’s just say he is unappreciated when things go smoothly and vilified if they do not.”

Cabe listened and heard, but was not sure if any of it registered. His thought processes were garbled and he wasn’t sure what day it was. He kept seeing the hacked prostitute, Virgil Clay, the old Indian at the jail, Henry Freeman, Jackson Dirker…a parade of faces and incidents that flowed together and lost solidity.

Sipping his coffee, but not tasting it, he thought: Everyone but me seems to think Dirker is a good man…maybe I’m wrong and maybe they don’t know him and maybe he’s changed and I have, too.

“Do you know my husband?” Janice asked of him.

“The sheriff,” Cabe said, nodding. “I’ve met him.”

“Do you know him well?”

Cabe swallowed. “No, ma’am, I guess I don’t know him well at all.”

 

18

The next morning, Henry Wilcox released Charles Graybrow from his cell, told him to keep away from the booze and he’d keep out of trouble. Graybrow told him that he had a powerful taste for the whiteman’s devil-brew and that him keeping away from it was like a cloud trying to stay away from the sky.

Wilcox just shook his head. “On your way, Charlie.”

At the door, Graybrow stopped. “What did I do, anyway?”

Wilcox sighed. “You don’t remember? You honestly don’t remember? Or are you playing me again? No, I guess you don’t recall. Well, Charlie, you gotta take a shit, we’d appreciate it you don’t do it on someone’s porch. People are touchy about things like that.”

Graybrow scratched his head. “I’m just an ignorant savage, what do I know of your ways?”

“Oh, get the hell out of here.”

Although outwardly somber, inside Graybrow was grinning like a kid that had written dirty words on the blackboard. Maybe whites didn’t find him amusing, but he enjoyed himself immensely at their expense.

He stepped out and although the sun was shining and drying up the mud, there was a chill in the air.

Another deputy, Pete Slade, tied his horse to the hitch post and nodded to Graybrow. “She’s a cold one today, eh, Charlie?”

Graybrow shrugged. “I’m an injun…we don’t feel the cold.”

Slade just shook his head and went inside.

Graybrow pulled his blanket coat tighter to him, shivering. He was about to start down the street when another man came out behind him. He nearly stumbled off the plank sidewalk, then gathered himself. He was thin, lanky, face bruised-up, his dirty sheepskin jacket smelling like he’d just pulled it off the sheep itself. He scratched at his shaggy, knotted beard.

“They got m’gun in there,” he said, not seeming to address Graybrow, but someone standing behind him. “1851 Colt Navy. Big .44, that’s what. Killed them bluebelly sumbitches with it in the war, didn’t I? They got it, say I can’t have it back. Not until, until…what did they say? Y’all remember?”

Graybrow told him that he had forgotten.

He knew who the man was: Orville DuChien. Some mixed-up white-eye thought he was still in the war. He talked crazy and people crossed the street when they saw him coming. He was not only disturbed, but dangerous if pushed. A couple miners had decided to have fun once by knocking him around and DuChien had sliced them up pretty with a deer knife.

Like a rabid dog, it was wise to keep your distance from the man.

Graybrow had only seen DuChien from a distance, had never been this close to him before. And now that he was…he was struck by something. He could not put a name to it. Not the smell or the uneasiness he inspired, but something deeper, something peculiar.

Orv started to shake and his eyes seemed to lose focus. “Yessum, Daddy, I remember all about that, yessum. Grandpappy say I got to go down into the holler tonight, yessum tonight. Them roots and what…only show by moonlight, he say. Yes sir. I dig ‘em and Grandpappy brew ‘em up, make them warts just fade right away. Like that time…remember, daddy? Old Wiley, he had that tumor. Grandpappy…he calls them names from the hilltop, them ones Preacher Evrin say is bad, bad, bad, make the stars shake and the dead a-tremble in their graves. Them ones? Yessum. Then he…Grandpappy, yes sir…he say them words and push his hands into the innards of that slaughtered hog…lays ‘em on Wiley’s tumor. That old tumor, Mister Tumor, he pack his bags and be gone. Yessum. Grandpappy say I got the gift, too…but daddy, I don’t like it. Scairt me bad…”

Graybrow knew and did not know. He stepped back from Orv, something in him finding revelation in that crazy, moonstruck hillbilly.

Orv said, “Yessum, ain’t nothin’ good gonna come of this here town. Not what with them…them other ones all touched by his hand.”

“Whose hand?”

That made Orv laugh. “The old hand…the old hand from the mountain…”

Graybrow told him to relax, that everything would be fine, fine, but he knew and knew damn well that whatever had Orville DuChien was not something that would ever let go. It was bone deep. It was special.

Orv broke into a coughing fit, then seemed to find himself. “I…I was talkin’ to that what ain’t there, weren’t I? I keep doin’ that, don’t I?” One filthy paw was clasped on Graybrow’s shoulder, squeezing, squeezing. “I talk to them no one else sees and hear them voices. They tell me…tell me what’s gonna happen and to who. Tell me things, secret things, about other folks. Things I shouldn’t know.”

“How long you had it?” Graybrow inquired.

“Always. Told Jesse and Roy they was gonna die, gonna die, gonna die! Didn’t believe me, but they died! Yankees killed ‘em like I say! Hear? Like I say…”

Graybrow knew what it was. Sure, he was crazy. Crazy because of what was inside of him. Whites would have said he was just plain touched or maybe bewitched and they would be right on both counts…but there was more to it than that. Much more. For Orville DuChien had the talent, he was “sighted”. He had the gift. Just like that grandfather he spoke of. It ran in families sometimes. The tribal shaman had it…ability to see sprits and know what would happen before it did. Yes, this hillbilly was a prophet. Undirected, but a prophet no less.

Orv pointed at something, something Graybrow could not see, started jabbering, then shook his head. “You tell yer daddy, you tell him it ain’t right takin’ the strop to you. Weren’t yer fault that pony ran off…weren’t yer fault…”

Graybrow was shaking himself now. That pony. He remembered. He had forgotten, but now he remembered. The pony that ran off into the hills and how very angry his father was. The hillbilly had plucked it from his mind.

Orv walked out into the street, stopped, nearly got run down by a lumber wagon. He stumbled back, fell against the hitching post. “Injun…you hear me…you…you tell him the bad man, the bad man is real close…the bad man will kill a fine lady what ain’t no whore!”

“Yes, I’ll tell him, I—”

But Orv was already gone, running away down the street, clutching his head in both hands, as if trying not to hear something. And people fell out of his way like dominoes, because everyone in Whisper Lake knew Orville DuChien was just plain touched.

Everyone except an old Ute Indian.

 

19

And each in his or her own way, greeted the new day.

At the Union Hotel, Sir Tom Ian strapped on a customized leather cartridge belt and slid a British .44 Bisley pistol into the holster. As he did so, he thought of what he had witnessed at the Cider House Saloon the night before. He was impressed that Tyler Cabe, though well into his cups, had managed to survive an encounter with Virgil Clay. It was sheer luck that Clay had missed his target at such close range…but there was no luck involved with a man who could dive out of the way and shoot with such accuracy as he fell. Impressive. Sir Tom had no love for Virgil Clay. He had put up with the man following him around like a stray, amused by his lack of social graces. That he was dead now, meant little to Sir Tom. He had a job waiting for him down in Sedona, Arizona Territory…a wild town in need of a crack pistolman with a reputation. But he was in no hurry. And particularly now that Tyler Cabe would have to deal with the likes of Elijah Clay…

And high above Whisper Lake in a sheltered arroyo surrounded by stands of juniper and pinon, Elijah Clay was loading his pistols and sharpening up his knives. Word had reached him about Virgil’s murder…and, to Elijah, it was murder. Chewing a strip of jerky, he ran the blade of a bowie knife over a wetstone, thinking hard and thinking long about a Arkansas bounty hunter named Tyler Cabe. For Elijah was from hill people. He was part of a hill country clan back in West Virginia. And there were certain codes that were invariably followed. Wrongs were always righted. When kin was killed, blood called that you settled matters. Flesh for flesh. That Cabe was a Southerner meant very little to Elijah. He had taken up no side in the War Between the States, knowing that one government was equally as corrupt as the next. He was a free-liver and a free-thinker as all hill people were. And when it came to vengeance, hill people meted it out accordingly. Thinking these things and knowing them to be true, Elijah found himself thinking of that fancy pistol fighter from Texas that had gunned-down his brother Arvin. It had taken that cowardly sumbitch near eight hours to die when Elijah had worked him with the knife…

At the Callister Brother’s Mortuary, Caleb Callister found himself looking at a horror. His new embalmer, Leo Moss, though every bit the ardent professional, was equally as morbid as Caleb’s deceased brother Hiram. As Caleb had been going through the books after a heady night of sex and gambling, Moss had called him into the undertaking parlor at the back of the building. You’ve got to see this, Moss told him. On the slab was some transient found dead in an alley. Thin, wasted, he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Moss had been sorting through his innards since before first light and now proudly revealed his prize. A tapeworm. He had it in a five-gallon glass jar of alcohol. It floated in the brine, coiled like some obscene snake. A parasitic flatworm, cut free in sections. Thirty-two feet, Moss told Caleb. Now ain’t that just something? Caleb had to agree it certainly was. Life was just full of odd surprises.

In his rooms at the St. James Hostelry, Jackson Dirker bolted awake from a nightmare which he could not remember. But as he lay there…the war was on his mind and he could just guess what he’d been dreaming of. Dirker had been with the 59^th Illinois Infantry under Post. His first real taste of war had been at Pea Ridge. He could remember riding up on Tyler Cabe and his ragtag crew of Johnny Rebs. Remember them looting through the heaps of mutilated Union boys. Jesus…those, boys, they’d been scalped. Disemboweled. Faces carved from the bone so that their own mothers wouldn’t have recognized them. Dirker’s soldiers wanted to kill the graybellies there and then…but Dirker meted out a different punishment. He could remember the feel of that bullwhip in his fist, snapping, snapping, eating into flesh. Looking down on those dead boys, he’d lost control. Lost all sense of propriety. What he’d done was wrong. He knew that now…just as he knew now—and maybe had that day—that Cabe and his men had not desecrated those bodies. But knowing it and admitting it were two different things. For pride was a harsh mistress.

Like Dirker, Tyler Cabe also dreamed of the war. Faces of fallen comrades floated through the mists. He saw all the blood and death, wandered from one battlefield to the next, clawing through heaped Confederate and Union dead, trying to escape, escape. Dirker passed by, shaking his head, asking him how he could allow his men to mutilate those bodies. Cabe told him, no, no, no, we didn’t, I would never allow that, never. And Cabe came awake, eyes fixed and glassy…he could smell the powder, the filth, the blood. And then it faded and he closed his eyes again.

In a seedy hotel rooming house, the man who called himself Henry Freeman and claimed to be a Texas Ranger sat on his bed, naked and cross-legged. On the bed before him was a Green River knife with a six-inch blade sharper than a straight razor. At one time, the Green River was pretty much the official knife of fur trappers and mountain men. A practical weapon for fighting, hunting, and butchering. It was also favored by buffalo skinners, who could skin off a hide in record time with the versatile tool. And, as Henry Freeman knew and knew well, it had other uses…such as eviscerating women and cutting out their hearts. He had one such trophy before him, carefully wrapped in deerhide. Freeman rocked back and forth, listening to the voices in head. Whores were fine, they told him. They needed to be purged. But there was other game…like maybe the gentile Southern lady who ran the St. James Hostelry…

Over in Redemption, the Mormons rushed about like busy ants, throwing the old mining town into shape. All you could hear were the sounds of saws and hammers, of lumber being stacked and wagons plying the dirt roads. Old shacks and houses were stripped to the frames and sometimes pulled down altogether, rebuilt from the ground up. The air was chill, but there was no lack of spirit or ambition as the abandoned town was rediscovered. Everywhere then, hammering and pounding, cutting and gutting. Sweat and hard labor and aching muscles. For Redemption had to be resurrected, body and soul…it was God’s will. And it had to be fortified, for one of these nights, the vigilantes would ride again.

And in Deliverance, the Mormon hamlet that—it was rumored—had given itself bodily to the Devil, there was a haunted stillness of graveyards and gallows. It hung in the air like some secret, noxious pall. Hunched buildings and high, leaning houses pressed together in tombstone hordes, coveting darkness within their walls. Wind blew down from the hills and up the streets, membranes of ice forming over puddles. Weathered signs creaked above bolted doors and empty boardwalks. Sunlight seemed to shun this cramped and deserted village and the shadows, here gray and here black, lay like webs over narrow alleyways and sheltered cul-de-sacs. Now and again there could be heard a moaning or a scraping from some damp cellar or an eerie, childish giggling from behind a shuttered attic window. But nothing more. For whatever lived in Deliverance, lived in secret.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Three:

James Lee Cobb: A Disturbing and Morbid History

 

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 naïve…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.