Skin Medicine

1

Utah Territory, 1882

The moon came up.

It slid from a satiny, wind-blown grave.

It came up over the mountains like some huge, luminous eye staring down from the misty sky above. Its pallid light sought and touched serrated horns of exposed rock, winked off drifts of snow, and imbued spruce and pine with a ghostly ambience. The wind blew and the trees bent, shadows dripping from them in writhing loops, finding craggy ground and slithering across the landscape like greasy black worms, filling hollows and glens and dark, secret places with night.

And high above, that bloated moon kept watch.

Not daring to blink.

If this was an omen, then it was a bad one.

2

The wagon came pounding down the hard-packed, frozen road that cut through the silver mining camps of the San Francisco Mountains. Like a jagged knife blade, it slit open the underbelly of night, probing, slicing. It bounced over deep-cut ruts laid down by ore wagons and was drawn by a team of black geldings blowing steam from their nostrils. Their iron-shod hoofs rang out like gunshots. A whip cracked and the team vaulted forward and the wagon thumped and bumped and careened.

“Christ almighty,” Tom Hyden said, clutching the plank seat for dear life. “You’re gonna get us killed, old man. You’re gonna pitch us straight down into one of them ravines. See if you don’t.”

Jack Goode grinned, a cigar stub protruding from his weathered lips. “Man pays me to do a job, sonny, and that job I do,” he said, cracking the whip again, his long white beard blowing up over his face like a loose neckerchief. “I do what he asks and I do it quick as I can on account I got better ways to spend my time.”

Hyden felt the wagon thrashing beneath him, wood groaning and iron creaking. His ass bones were getting jarred right up into his throat. He clung to the seat with one hand and his shotgun with the other. The box in the back rattled in its berth like dice in a cup.

“Dammit,” he cried, “all we got in the back is a body. A dead one at that. It don’t care if we’re early or late.”

Goode just laughed.

The road dipped, climbed, then cut through a shadowy cedar brake and leveled out as it meandered across a rocky plain. The moon washed everything down with ethereal, uneven light.

“There,” Goode said. “Whisper Lake ain’t but a cunt-hair down through that gorge. We can slow up some. Here, kid. Take these ribbons.” He passed the reins to Hyden and struck a stick match off his boot, cupping it in his hands, firing up his cigar again. He blew smoke and coughed. “We’re making good time. Luck holds, I’ll be in town just in time for a swallow and a tickle.”

Hyden could see sweat glistening on the horses’ flanks like dew. And maybe some of it was blood. Way the old bastard was working that bullwhip, he’d probably laid their flanks clear open. Hyden sighed, kept his eye on the countryside, kept imagining he saw dark shapes flitting about-shapes like little men. But he was tired, his eyes caked with sleep. If he didn’t put his head down and pretty goddamn soon, he was going to fall right out of the wagon. Squinting his eyes, he thought he saw something running across the twisting road ahead… something that ran upright.

“You see that?” he said to Goode.

Smoke barreled from Goode’s nostrils like fumes from a foundry stack. “Nope. Didn’t see a thing,” he said. “And I didn’t, because I ain’t looking. If there something out there, mayhap I don’t wanna see it.”

“It looked like…” Hyden sighed. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Sure, it was nothing. These goddamn mountains are full of nothing. That’s why I rode us so hard back there-if there was something back there, I didn’t want to see it. Particularly if it looked like little men that weren’t men.”

“You seen ’em, then?”

“Nope. Ain’t seen nothing I wasn’t supposed to see.” Goode stretched, his back popping. “Listen to me, boy. Just keep yer eyes on Whisper Lake. We’ll be there in an hour or so. Just think of the women and the strong drink and the sins of the father.”

Hyden just shook his head. Sometimes he just couldn’t figure Goode out. Sumbitch had a way of talking about something while he was talking about something else entirely. Hyden watched and saw no more shapes. Imagination, that’s what. Fatigue. He didn’t believe in the tales of little men. It was some kind of Shoshone legend. Hyden’s grandpappy Joe, when he wasn’t pulling off a bottle of rye and reminiscing about all the gold strikes he’d been on, talked about ’em. Said they were real. Said he’d seen ’em in the mountains. Said he knew a trapper up in the Needle Range had shot one and stuffed it, sold the mummy to some sideshow fellow from Illinois for a case of Kentucky bourbon and a Sharps rifle.

But grandpappy Joe, he did go on.

Hyden had a packet of home-rolled cigarettes and lit one up. They’d been on the trail since the afternoon before. Were bringing a pine box and its occupant from the Goshute tribal lands of Skull Valley down to Whisper Lake in Beaver County. Fifty a piece some injun was paying ’em. Just to bring a body home.

Shit, but it was a living.

“Hey, boy, how old you now?” Goode asked.

“Twenty-three come spring.”

“Twenty-three.” Goode laughed. “When I was twenty-goddamn-three I had me a Sioux wife and three young-uns up in Dakota Territory. Had me a strike of the yellow stuff worth near hundred thousand.”

“Then what the hell you doing hauling stiffs for a hundred bucks in this godforsaken land?”

“I spent it.” Goode went silent, thought about it. “Twenty-three, twenty-three. You ever get yer lily pressed, boy? By a white woman, I’m saying. Why, I know this one down Flagstaff way-runs herself a crib of meat-eating felines with more curves than a loose rope. This one, though, Madame Lorraine, she dunks you in a hot bath, rubs you down with oil and Louisiana perfume, then sucks yer Uncle Henry so goddamn hard, yer eyes get pulled back into yer head-“

“Quiet,” Hyden said. “I heard something.”

“Just my bowels blowing off steam, son.”

“No, damn you, not that.”

Goode listened. Couldn’t hear a thing but the wind skirting the trees and whipping through empty spaces. The sound of the horses hoofs. Not a damn thing else.

“Boy,” he said, “you quit worrying about them little folk. Got yerself spooked. You might be better looking than a bluetick, but you ain’t much smarter.”

“It ain’t that. It’s something else.” Hyden looked back in the hold, at that narrow pine box. Could see moonlight reflecting off the brass bands and square nail heads. “Something moved in there.”

“Stop with that. Dead ‘uns don’t move, take my word for it.”

Hyden just sat there, the countryside too dark and shadow-riven for his liking. He tried to think about Whisper Lake. A soft bed. Some hot food. But then he heard it again… a thumping sound. He was sure it came from inside that casket.

Goode would not look back there. He took the reins back and piloted them through the frosty night. A few snowflakes lit in the air like flies. With any luck, it wouldn’t build into anything before they reached Whisper Lake.

“What’s worrying you, son?” he finally said.

“What’s in that box, I guess.”

“It’s just a dead body.”

“I know it’s a dead body,” he said. “But I thought…”

“You better quit thinking, then,” Goode said. “We’re a long way from nowhere to be thinking such things. Dead ‘uns are dead ‘uns. They can’t hurt you no more than a rocking chair can. Keep that in mind.”

Hyden chewed his lip, clutched his shotgun tightly. “I guess I’m wondering what’s in there, what’s in that box. I don’t like it.”

“Dammit, boy, I don’t like what’s in yer head, but you don’t hear me complaining.”

They rode on and the moon slid behind a cloud and the night grew darker, went black to its roots, seemed to gather around them in clutching, sinister shadows.

“Boy, light that lantern.”

Hyden reached over the seat… froze-up tight when he thought he heard a shifting sound from inside the box… then quickly grabbed the oil lamp and lit it up with a cupped match. The shadows retreated, but the night seemed bunched around them like a fist anxious to grasp something. It hung to either side of the wagon in sheets and blankets of murk. The hold was creeping with stygian forms.

Goode said, “Yer hearing things back there and that ain’t so strange. Not really. This road is bad and that body is knocking around same as us. Don’t pay it no attention, son.”

But Hyden kept hearing those sounds and something was stirring his guts with a willow twig. “I just been thinking is all,” he said, his breath frosting from his lips. “Been thinking on Skull Valley where we got the box from. Kind of creepy up there. Kind of lonesome and desolate… it puts your mind to things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Skull Valley… that’s Spirit Moon’s grounds.”

The old man licked his lips slowly, deliberately. “I hear tell Spirit Moon’s dead.”

“Some say he don’t die same as others.”

Goode laughed. “Bullshit. Besides, Spirit Moon is from the Snake Nation, boy. Skull Valley is Goshute land. What would Spirit Moon be doing there?”

“The Snake is just Shoshone, anyhow. Goshutes are tight with ’em. I heard his tribe is up there in the hills, doing what they do.”

“Maybe, son, but what you heard about Spirit Moon… those is just witch-tales, is all. Injuns think he’s some big bad medicine doctor, but a white man should know better. Just some Snake witch doctor. A damn injun and he don’t scare me none.”

But Hyden didn’t believe that. Goode even pronounced Spirit Moon’s name kind of low in a whisper… like he was afraid the old injun would hear him from his grave. And maybe he would at that.

“You ever hear of Walking Mist, boy?”

Hyden said he had. Another Snake medicine man, but from years back.

“Well, let me tell you about him. Walking Mist was a Snake hoodoo man, too, like Spirit Moon. In fact, he was his ancestral granddaddy. Well, back in the ‘30’s, so I was told, up in the Wasatch, Walking Mist got on the wrong side of a couple beaver trappers from Fort Crockett. The three of ’em were boozed-up and looking for a fight and happened upon Walking Mist who, it was claimed, refused their offers of marriage to his sisters. They shot Walking Mist down, chopped off his head and buried it in a box. They buried his body somewheres else.” Goode’s face was set and stern in the lamplight. “Well, now old Walking Mist he had himself a high yeller girl for a wife, some nigger out of a Baton Rouge plantation. She was said to be one of them conjure-folk. Said she used to make up love potions and cures for the sick. Made little dolls out of clay and burlap, sprinkled the hair and fingernails from someone she didn’t like in ’em and put the hex on ’em. Folks used to pay her to do so… horses, skins, rifles, what not.

“Well, this high yeller girl goes into one of her voo-doo trances and, sure enough, she locates old Walking Mist’s head with a rod cut from an ash tree. She opens that box and old Walking Mist’s head, powerful crazy medicine man that he was, is still alive. Eyes open. He tells her where his body is buried. Not long after, Walking Mist is seen ambling around, head stitched back on, a funny light in his eyes.”

“And what about them trappers?”

Goode grinned like a bear skull. “They found ’em one day. They had twenty-foot stakes shoved right up their asses. Up their asses and right into their throats. Just bobbing in the wind up atop them stakes that were driven into the ground. Thing was, nobody never did find their heads.” Goode spit his cigar butt into the night. “I heard that from an old Ute I used to do some drinking with.”

“I thought you didn’t like Indians?”

“This ‘un was different.”

Hyden was nodding his head up and down. “That story, I believe it. My grandpappy Joe said that Spirit Moon was part demon and part human, could do anything he set his mind to. Grandpappy said a copper miner lost his hand in a cave-in and Spirit Moon rubbed something on it and called names into the sky and a month later, that hand grew back. Grandpappy Joe said it was true. Said Spirit Moon had eyes like coals. When them eyes looked at you, you were never the same again.”

“Country’s ripe with bullshit, son.”

“Some of it’s true.”

“Maybe.”

“There was a Paiute from the Cedar Band that had two heads,” Hyden said. “I saw him once. It was true enough.”

Goode laughed. “Next you’ll be telling me you can rope a bronco with yer pecker and still have enough left to make a dance hall gal whistle Dixie in the dark.”

Hyden felt his ears burn like they’d been branded. “If you don’t believe in nothing, then why you tell me that story of Walking Mist?”

“To pass the time, boy, strictly to pass the time and to see how gullible you are. And dammit, yer gullible. That Ute believed what he told me, but I expected better from you being a white man. If I’d known you were afraid of spooks, I woulda got me another boy to ride shotgun.”

“My grandpappy Joe-“

“Yer grandpappy Joe was full of more shit that a privy pit,” Goode said. “And don’t take that the wrong way, son. But he liked to talk is all. Now, enough with this fool yarning, I say.”

And it was enough.

Hyden was thinking about Skull Valley. The day before, they’d pulled into a little Goshute camp situated at the base of a rise punched through with caves. Some young buck in an army shirt and bowler hat was waiting for them with the pine box at the side of the dirt trail. A couple old men in trade blankets were standing in a loose circle muttering some nonsense. The buck-didn’t look like no medicine man-paid Goode without so much as a word, seemed relieved almost. The body was that of some white man who had kin in Whisper Lake. They never learned what the Goshute were doing with it and they didn’t ask. But now, thinking on it, Hyden was wondering what those old men were up to and if that young buck was some kind of shirt-tail relation to Spirit Moon.

Hard to say.

Hyden didn’t know if they were Goshute or Snake. He’d only seen Spirit Moon once. Over at the store in Ophir, Toole County. Spirit Moon had been there with his sons, who were loading his wagon. The old man was wrapped up in a buffalo robe and there were beads and feathers braided into his hair. His face was a maze of tiny scars that seemed to move like writhing maggots. Hyden had turned away then, before the old man looked upon him. Before-

There was a shifting in the box and both of them heard it this time.

They looked at each other in the eerie, flickering lantern light, something like fear cut into their faces. They quickly looked away. Hyden licked his lips, but he didn’t have any saliva left.

Something was happening.

He could pretend otherwise, but something was building around them like heat lightning and they could both feel it. But they were men. Grown men with a job to do and it had to be done.

From the box there was a thump, then a rustling.

“Boy,” Goode said, his breath not coming real easy, “take a look back there for the love of Christ… what the hell am I hearing?”

Hyden felt a white-hot terror in his belly, felt it feeding up into his chest. He leaned over the seat, shotgun in one hand, lantern in the other. His skin was crawling in undulating waves. He was cold to the bone… but it was not from the clammy April night. He looked at the box, the lantern casting tongues of light over its lid. The brass hasps were still fitted into place. All them those-Jesus, had to be a hundred of them-still pounded into the lid. Only… only, didn’t it almost look like five or six of them were sticking up now? Like maybe something inside was pushing them through? Hyden felt a grim weight settle over him, crushing him down like a granite graveyard slab. He felt weak, paralyzed even. The atmosphere around him was blanched, soured, thick with something that just ripped the heart straight out of his chest.

As he watched, two of the nails slid out of the lid with a groaning sound. They popped free and clattered into the hold.

“What in the Christ?” Goode said, his voice sounding choked and dry. The moon came back out and his face was discolored and sickly. “Mind me, boy! What was that?”

“Nails…” Hyden tried to say, but there was no air in his lungs. Just something blowing and drifting like desert sand. “Them nails… they’re starting to pop free…”

“Yer imagining shit!” Goode said. “Or… or maybe that body’s bloating. Known ’em to burst a box right open… happens sometimes.”

But Hyden just shook his head. Things like that didn’t happen in cold weather.

Then they both heard it. A noise from inside that box-a scraping, scratching sound like fingernails on wood. There was horror in both men’s eyes. A huge, relentless horror that spilled out like tears and into the night, surrounding them, enclosing them, wrapping them tight in a shroud. The darkness slithered and whispered.

Then: thump, thump, thump. Pounding fists.

Goode drew in a sharp breath: “Get up! Get up!” he cried to the horses, his whip cracking like thunder. “Get-up you sonsofbitches! Get-up!”

Hyden just kept watching the box, wondering maybe if his scattergun would be of any use against what tried to climb out of it. Whatever was happening in there, it wasn’t good. Wasn’t natural. There were arcane mysteries fermenting in there, dark alchemies brewing, spectral truths rattling their teeth. In the black, noisome darkness, something was breathing and aware. And that something was worse than anything Hyden could imagine.

The wagon was really rolling then, down a bend that cut through the hills and over a creaking wooden bridge that spanned a rushing, icy creek.

“Only a few miles now!” Goode cried out, the wagon thundering towards its destination, the horses pounding forward like the devil himself was chasing them… and maybe he was. Goode kept looking over at Hyden apprehensively, then back at the box. “Just hang tight! I can… yeah, I can see the lights below!”

Hyden took his word for it.

He did not turn and look.

He could not turn and look.

His eyes were wide and staring, that frosty wind buffeting him mercilessly. But he did not feel it. Did not feel his numb fingers on that wooden stock. Did not feel that icy mortuary chill that crept through his bones and locked them tight and hard as iron in a deep freeze. All he knew was the box. It was the center of his universe. It was a dark star and he was a speck of dust caught in its malefic orbit. All he could do was watch those nails twist up and pop free, one after the other.

And in the box, a flurry of scratching and pawing and thudding.

Something in Hyden suddenly snapped. A wild, shrieking terror ripped through him and he began to shout: “I’m getting out of here! I’m jumping out of here! This is crazy-“

But Goode forced him back down and told him to shut up, shut up, goddamn it, it was all in his head, all in his head. But the idea of being alone in that wagon with that box in the back and what it contained… Goode knew he couldn’t do it by himself. Just couldn’t. And Whisper Lake was right before him now. To either side were the derricks and mainframes and hunched shacks of the outlying mining camps.

Something back there made a loud, snapping sound and Goode didn’t need to turn to see that one of the brass bands had broken open and the other wouldn’t be far behind and then… and then…

Hyden’s breath was coming in sharp, hurtful gasps. He was shaking so badly he could not hold the shotgun. It clattered uselessly to his feet.

And then they were in town and whatever was in the box seemed to sense that, for it settled back down into its cold berth and waited things out. Goode and Hyden let out a collective sigh, but did not relax until they found the undertaker’s and got rid of the damnable thing.

3

Hiram Callister was who they found.

Rotund, greasy Hiram Callister, undertaker and cabinetmaker. He prepared the bodies and fashioned the boxes they were tucked carefully into. Cheap pine affairs or sometimes imported black mahogany shipped in by rail for rich miners or railroad men. Hiram preferred to work by lamplight just as his younger brother Caleb-and co-owner of Callister Brothers Mortuary-preferred the light of day. And when Hiram was not handling wood and deadwood, he secreted himself into his chambers above and poured over his collection of pornographic pictures, most of which were sent to him by a friend in New Orleans where such things were readily available to the connoisseur… for a price.

Hiram had never been very good with women.

With people in general.

At least, not living ones. He had been a plump, bookish child and had become a heavy, unsightly man with a bevy of quivering chins that herded about his lower jaw and neckline like pink hogs at a trough. He was fond of cakes and candies. Had an abnormal condition of the sebaceous glands which caused him to sweat profusely. His hands were oddly cold and he was given to stuttering in civilized company. Children often pointed to him on the streets. He could be found by night, chewing taffy and chocolates and French cremes amongst the sheeted forms in the mortuary, dabbing continually at his moist face and brow with a handkerchief. For this was his world, a world of caskets and chemicals, corpses and silver gleaming instruments. A world that was close and dim and smelled of iodine and alcohol and less pleasant things.

But it was Hiram’s world and he coveted it.

Let Caleb have the daylight. For Caleb was something that belonged in the daylight-handsome and charming and sure. He spent his days consoling widows and his evenings in gambling dens and brothels telling off-color stories of the dead. People called him friend and lover just as they called Hiram ghoul and deviant, telling nasty stories about him.

Hiram did not care.

In the end-man, woman and child-they were always his.

He fancied the women. Particularly the young ones. Not the upstanding wives and sisters-if there were such things in a seething mining town like Whisper Lake-but the prostitutes. They had been touched and fondled in life, so Hiram figured it was no sin to do the same with them in death. But only the prostitutes. Never anyone else. Regardless of what people whispered about him, he did have standards, professional ethics.

When the two men with the casket showed up, Hiram had the body of a young whore stretched out before him like a cedar plank. She’d slit her wrists. Hiram was touching her, sweating and breathing heavily… then those two banged on the door. One was some old grizzled desert rat, the other a kid with freckles on his cheeks. But both had wide, unblinking eyes and hands that shook. They looked like they’d seen their own ghosts threading at them in the darkness.

Hiram had never seen two men so… afraid.

They brought in the box, set it on an empty table and got out just as fast as fast could be, practically fighting to be the first out the door. But some people, Hiram knew, were apprehensive around the dead. No matter.

He had been wired about the casket.

It contained the body of James Lee Cobb. Cobb had been something of a hired gun and outlaw, a notoriously sadistic, evil man and the world was better without him. His only kin was a Mormon squatter over in near-by Deliverance-one of the Mormon villages. A half-brother name of Eustice Harmony who was willing to plant him… long as Cobb’s injun friends footed the bill. And they had.

As Hiram looked over the box, he saw that many of the nails fastening it shut were missing. One of the brass hasps had broken free. Rough handling. But the sort of thing Cobb deserved.

Hiram left the box where it sat.

He had more pressing matters than dead outlaws.

4

Long after midnight, a sense of dread settled into him.

He could not explain it. Did not try to.

After he’d finished with the painted lady, had locked her down in a cheap cedar box paid for by her madam, Hiram started on the Byrd brothers, Thomas and Heck. He pulled back the sheets and studied their graying faces. A shame. Both had been business owners-Thomas owned a livery stable and Heck a meat market. And now, of course, they were only so much meat themselves. It was no secret they’d both been romancing the same woman… Heck’s wife… and it was only a matter of time before such wanton fornicating would lead them here.

Hiram knew only a few details.

They’d gotten into a drunken brawl at the Cider House Saloon and Heck had pulled his old Army Colt and shot Thomas and Thomas, before his blood had run out, had slid a skinning knife into his brother’s throat. They had died in a communal pool of their own blood, locked in a fighting embrace. They had been brought in that way. It had taken both Hiram and his brother to pull their stiffened limbs from one another. Heck’s wife Clarissa was paying for the funeral, wanted them in nice boxes and wanted them presentable so they could be photographed side-by-side, cheek-to-jowl for kin back in Missouri. She could afford it-as the only living relative, she owned a livery stable and meat market now.

With gray, watery eyes like wet tin, Hiram got down to work.

His fingers were nimble and busy, forever searching and prodding, slitting and plucking. He stitched and sewed, gummed and pasted. Knives flashed and saws bit, wax pooled into hollows and catgut sealed cadaveric mysteries intact. He embalmed the brothers with a solution of arsenic and covered them with sheets until the caskets arrived.

Pumping water into the basin, Hiram pulled off his rubber gloves and washed his hands thoroughly.

The wind picked-up outside and a tree limb scratched at the roof. For a reason Hiram could not understand, a chill swept up his spine. That sense of dread again. It had been gnawing at him for hours now… but why? He found himself thinking of the two men that had brought the casket.

They’d been scared white.

But why? Why? Fatigue, maybe. They’d been on the trail for two days from Toole County to Whisper Lake. And cold, inhospitable days they had been. Such deprivation and exposure could do strange things to men. Hiram cleaned up his instruments, decided against working on Cobb tonight. The oil stove in the corner was chugging away, yet he felt cold. Worse, his skin actually seemed to be crawling in turgid waves. He wanted out of the mortuary in a bad way and was not sure why.

He paused, a droplet of sweat coursing down the hill of his cheek.

There was something, something.

He could not hear anything, but… he turned around, staring at the casket. He stood there, watching it, his brain filled with cryptic thoughts. It was ridiculous… but he had the unnerving sensation that he was being watched, studied, stared at.

Children peeking in?

No, it was too late and the shades were drawn. Carefully, slowly, he went to the windows, peered around the shades. The dirt street outside was empty. He could see the town stretching out in the distance? clustered roofs climbing the hills and dipping into hollows. He could hear the wind skirting the lonesome spaces. Hear a wagon somewhere in the distance. The sound of voices over towards saloon-row. The ever-present rumble of mine machinery.

But no one looking in, watching him.

The shadows seemed to be growing longer in the mortuary, spilling out from crevices and cracks and crannies, tangling like mating snakes across the floor. The lanterns still burned bright, yet everything seemed oddly murky.

Eyes watching me.

Imagination?

Hiram had no use for superstition. He would have no truck with it. Yet, something in him was alive and electric and concerned, afraid maybe. He walked across the room to the casket. Licking his lips, he ran his hands over the roughhewn cedar, fingering nail holes and splintered knots.

Eyes staring at me.

That body in there… James Lee Cobb… Hiram began to wonder about it as something inexplicable began to take hold of him, but so gently he was not even aware of it. All he could think about was the body in the box, body in the box. Cobb had died up in Skull Valley, they said. His injun friends had bought him a casket, paid for him to be shipped back to Whisper Lake.

Now why would injuns do that for a white man?

Hiram wiped sweat from his brow. He knew there was a reason, but he couldn’t seem to remember what it was. Cobb had come home to the only kin he had. Sure. Had a half-brother over in Deliverance, the Mormon settlement just west of Whisper Lake. That’s why Cobb was sent. The half-brother was going to pick up the box day after next, he said.

Hiram’s hands were trembling now.

He mopped more sweat from his brow, thought: What the hell is wrong with me?

He couldn’t seem to think straight. His brain was filled with wild, leaping thoughts that could not be strung to together into anything reasonable. There was a tenseness behind his eyes. Perspiration was beading his face, pooling under his eyes, streaming down his jowls. A few droplets struck the surface of the box. Plop, plop.

For one irrational moment, Hiram thought it was blood.

Yes, like a sacrifice. A blood sacrifice offered up to some malefic pagan god. Blood. Burnt offerings. A tribute of blood and flesh and burned entrails. Atonement. Expiation. Some gods demanded these things, they-

Hiram began to whimper, tears mixing with sweat.

Eyes that won’t shut, won’t die, won’t stop staring.

He stumbled over to the tool bench, found a small crowbar.

Standing over the casket, he looked upwards, seeing only the stained tiles of the ceiling, but maybe hoping for some divine intervention from God. From the Lord Jesus Christ even though Hiram did not believe in him or anything else. Regardless, something had hold of Hiram now and his thoughts were a jumble and his brain a buzzing hive of wasps. His eyes were wide and unblinking, tears bled away, taking his sanity with them. His lips moved, but no sounds came out.

Blood offering.

Watching me.

Frantically, he began pulling the nails from the box, ripping them from the cheap plank coffin. One after the other until he was panting and wheezing and his heart was pounding and his temples throbbing. He broke the remaining brass band and it clattered to the floor along with the crowbar.

The eyes are watching me.

He tore the lid from the box and let it drop away. Then he was looking inside the box and seeing he did not know what. A body in a black burial suit, yes, but wrong, all wrong. Too many shadows crawling and slinking and shifting and maybe not shadows but the body itself.

Hiram’s heart thudded dully, his breath was locked in his lungs.

Something in him shattered like white ice and he saw the eye. A single green eye, wide open and staring. Like a silver coin, it shined and glimmered, reflecting a burning light that got inside Hiram’s head.

Then there was a scalpel in his hand and he held his left wrist out.

Blood offering. Expiation.

He slit his wrist, dark arterial blood streaming into the box in loops and spirals. Something in there moved and rustled.

“God help me…” Hiram’s voice echoed from another room.

And a single rawboned, fleshless hand snaked from that pit of conspiring shadows and took him by throat.

It was like the hand of God.

5

Early the next morning, Caleb Callister found his brother’s body.

It had been stuffed in the casket, white and bloodless and shrunken. Caleb did not cry out or go into theatrics. He summoned the coroner quite calmly for he was a man used to death in all its unpleasant forms.

The coroner came and gave his verdict of suicide.

An odd suicide at that. Hiram, for reasons unknown, had slit first his left wrist, then his right. Then he had climbed into the box. The scalpel was still locked in his fist. The box had contained the body of James Lee Cobb. But as to where that body had gotten to, no one could guess.

Suicide, then.

The only thing that concerned the coroner were the bruises at the throat, the crushed windpipe. But he was willing to overlook this on account he had no viable explanation and Caleb was not interested in pursuing it.

Let the dead rest, Caleb told him.

Forever Amen.