by Tim Curran
These were the ways of the Skull Society and they were secret, taken to the grave.
The people of Wolf Creek knew little of the Gang of Ten, but they speculated endlessly as was their way. Sometimes, even the most gruesome speculation paled beside reality.
Abe Runyon, the first victim of Skullhead, was a veteran Indian-hater. Or so he thought until he took a fancy to a Blackfoot girl barely in her teens. She spurned his advances and Runyon decided that was unthinkable. He abducted her and kept her in his little cabin outside town where he repeatedly raped her until, overcome with guilt, he staved in her head with a hammer. He buried her beneath the floorboards of his cabin where she still lays, a skeleton dressed in a rotting elkskin dress, dreaming away eternity in a rage of moss.
Cal Sevens, the second victim, had been a quiet man. A loner in every sense of the word. But at night in his room above the smithy shop, he would dream of a prostitute he had known in Kansas City and masturbate fiercely…and then, overcome with guilt, would read from the Bible.
Charlie Mears, the third, was a highwayman who specialized in robbing and murdering miners in the hills. He was perpetually drunk and had been since the night he'd tipped over an oil lamp and his house had burned to the ground, taking his wife and infant son with it.
And Pete Olak, the fourth victim, was thought to have been a good father and provider for his little family. But it was he who pulled the noose over Red Elk's head and tightened it, smiling as he did so. The fifth, sixth, and seventh victims-George Reiko, Nathan Segaris, and Curly DelVecchio respectively-had been the ones who had cooked up the lynching of Red Elk and had done so under Mike Ryan's supervision. They dragged Red Elk through the streets, kicking and cussing him all the way. As a final gesture of hatred and disrespect, they had urinated on him. And Dewey Mayhew, who had pretty much stood by and watched the hanging, his bowels tight and his bones rattling beneath his skin, lived a cursed and haunted life. Like that nameless miner, he had been told the exact date of his death by Ghost Hand, Herbert Crazytail's father. And told it would be violent, painful, and unpleasant. It was. Mike Ryan, the most recent victim of Skullhead, was a very rich and powerful man. Equally respected and feared. But for all his bravado and barrel-chested machismo, Ryan had a taste for young men and, whenever possible, satisfied his urges with a male prostitute in Laramie.
The last surviving member of the Gang of Ten was Sheriff Bill Lauters. He had a fine farm and wonderful family, but he, too, was haunted. Ever since Red Elk's lynching he had been drinking heavily. Sometimes it was the only way he could get the boy's face out of his mind-that distended visage livid as a bruise, those bulging sightless eyes, crooked neck, and lolling blackened tongue. Sometimes Lauters would dream that Red Elk came to him, a dead thing, bone shaft jutting from his broken neck. He would carry a noose in his hands. His own. Lauters would wake in a cold sweat and immediately hit the bottle. Sometimes, he prayed for death.
These were the secrets of the town, a sampling at best. There were worse things, but they would never be known. For as Deputy Bowes had commented, Wolf Creek was a seething cauldron ready to boil over.
This, then, was the scene before the slaughter.
7
Longtree found the body about half a mile from Ryan's ranch. It was covered in a light dusting of snow, the world's oldest shroud. He would've missed it save that it was sprawled over the trail, twisted and flayed, a cast-off from an abattoir. It was still warm.
Lighting the oil lantern he always carried for times like this, Longtree investigated.
The face had been torn free as had the throat. The body had no arms and one leg was missing It had been eviscerated, plucked, bitten, clawed, and chewed. Longtree, nausea like a plug of grease in his stomach, searched the surrounding area and found the arms, some bloody meat that might have been a regurgitated face, much frozen blood, but no leg. A snack carted away for the trail, he decided.
In the snow and the wind, his horse whinnying with displeasure, Longtree made a fairly through examination of the crime area. He found nothing here he hadn't seen at the others: carnage, simple and brutal. Nothing more.
Yet, he knew there was always more to be gleaned than what struck the eye. This was the work of the Skullhead, the marshal full well knew, an act of revenge perpetrated with an animal's hunger and a man's sadistic imagination. This man, whoever he might have been, had to be one of the Gang of Ten. Unless the Skullhead had allowed a serious slip in methodology, it could be no one else. The mysterious ninth member. But who?
He searched the corpse for signs of identification and found none.
It was no easy task. Such was the degree of atrocities performed on the cadaver that its clothes and flesh were threaded together. Both were frozen stiff with blood, it being hard to determine where one started and the other left off. After a few minutes of this with nothing to show for it but filthy gloves, Longtree gave up.
His horse had pawed through the snow and was happily munching some tender grasses. But he heard whinnying. He looked around. The snowfall obscured everything. The lantern's light was growing dim, fuel running low. It sputtered and spat. He set out on foot, trying to pinpoint the direction of the sound. Noises were broken up by the wind, scattered, and set back upon themselves so it was impossible to trust his ears. He found a rifle in the snow, a Sharps buffalo rifle,. 50 caliber. It had to belong to the dead man. From the smell of powder on the barrel, it had been fired recently. Maybe at the beast.
Longtree searched the area in ever-widening concentric circles that slowly brought him out of range of his own horse. Had he not been a scout at one time, he would never had attempted this. It was dangerous to wander off in a blizzard in such desolate country, but Longtree's sense of orientation was flawless.
He found the horse some time later, picketed behind a high shelf of rocks. It was a fine muscular gelding, sleek and proud. A rich man's horse. He searched the saddlebags and found some papers of a business nature, all bearing the signature of Mike Ryan. He also found a Springfield 1865 Allin Conversion in the rifle boot, finely customized. A brass plate on the butt identified it as Mike Ryan's weapon. There was no doubt then, the body was either that of Mike Ryan or someone who had robbed him. Longtree decided on the former.
Mike Ryan had been the ninth member.
But why was he out here? Shannon had said he was expecting him at the ranch. So why would Ryan be out here?
Then it came to Longtree. It was all too obvious, a child's leap of logic. Ryan had asked him up here in order to kill him. He had hidden on the trail, probably atop the rock outcropping, waiting for Longtree to ride by, the Sharps rifle at the ready. But the Skullhead had found him first.
Another assassination attempt thwarted. This time by the killer himself…or itself.
Quite by accident, Skullhead had saved the lawman's life.
Longtree laughed grimly in the wind, taking Ryan's horse back to the body. He now knew who all the rustlers were. Only one remained alive. Lauters. Ryan had probably been the other masked rider with Lauters. It all fit together seamlessly. If Longtree wanted to stop the beast, it was only a matter of sticking close to Lauters.
Because the beast would come sooner or later.
And as unpleasant as it was, Longtree would have to follow the sheriff wherever he went.
8
Sheriff Bill Lauters had a little farm outside Wolf Creek. And as the storm picked up its intensity, the eldest of his three sons-Chauncey-was sent out into the cold. As the eldest, he was considered man of the house when his father was away, which was often. More often than not, Chauncey, with the assistance of his brothers, pretty much took care of the place. They milked the cows, fed the chickens and slaughtered them, slopped the hogs, tended the grounds-everything. When their father was around, which was seldom, he was often too drunk to do more than sit on the porch or collapse in bed.
Tonight, Chauncey braved the elements to drive the hogs into the barn where they'd be safe from the cold. His brothe
rs were supposed to do it when they got loose and do it before sundown, but as usual they'd forgotten.
"Git!" Chauncey cried, kicking the sows towards the barn, snow hitting him in the face like granules of sand. "Get a move on, will ya? If you think I like being out in this cold, yer damn wrong!"
The barn door was open, swinging back and forth in the wind. Another thing his brothers had forgotten to do. No surprise there. Chauncey wrestled the hogs through the door, knowing they'd be paid in full for their treachery once slaughter-time rolled around.
"And I'll enjoy it this time," he promised them.
The last time he hadn't. It was hard to care for an animal for years and then kill it, particularly when the animal in question didn't die easy. But fought and screeched till the bitter end.
The hogs safely in their pen, Chauncey froze. There was a stink in the barn. A viscid, rotten odor of spoiled meat. It hung high and hot in the air despite the chill. Swallowing, Chauncey lit the lantern that hung on the wall and checked the horses on the other end. They were silent. They usually started snorting when someone came, thinking it was feeding time, hungry for attention.
"Old Joe?" he called. "Blue Boy?"
The first thing Chauncey's brain took notice of was that their stables were broken open, the wood shattered as if by an ax and cast about. The next thing it took notice of brought him to his knees and stopped his heart.
Oh, God, no…
The horses had been killed; more so, butchered. There was blood everywhere, the straw red with it. They'd been taken apart like dolls a child has grown tired of-bits of them scattered everywhere. They'd been gutted, decapitated, stripped to the bone. The head of Old Joe was impaled atop a corral post. Blue Boy had been skinned, his hide driven into the wall with spikes. The wet, still steaming intestines of both were strung like Christmas garland through the stable fencing and up into the rafters.
Chauncey went down on his knees, vomiting, his head spinning. This couldn't be, this just couldn't be. Nothing could do this…nothing. No beast was this savage, no man this deranged. When the dry heaves had subsided, Chauncey looked upon the atrocities once more, tears in eyes, bile on his chin.
Something wet struck him in the back of the head.
Chauncey turned. There was a clump of damp warmth in his hair. With a cry he pulled it free. A piece of bloody meat…no much worse: a tentacle of flesh connected to a single swollen eye. Blue Boy's. Chauncey threw it aside, his guts churning. Another object came whirling out of the darkness, flipping end over end. It came to rest against a stack of hay bales. The remains of Blue Boy's head…skull cracked like an egg, brains scooped out, tongue chewed free, eyes licked from their orbits.
Chauncey screamed.
Something else whistled from above: A femur stained red, shattered, a hunk of bloody meat and white ligament trailing from the knob of bone like a pennant. He ducked and it missed him.
Chauncey went red with anger, gray with fear. He glared up at the hayloft. "Who's up there?" he croaked. "Who the hell's up there? I've got a gun…"
A lie, but it gave him strength.
There was a low growling sound, then a wet ripping followed by chewing. Nothing more. A segment of vertebrae was dropped into the hay. It had been sucked clean.
Chauncey's brain was telling him to run; anything that could take apart two draft horses with such ease would make a nasty mess of him. But he couldn't run. He wanted to see this thing, look it in the eye and make it feel his raw hate.
There was a groan from up in the loft and a blur of motion.
No time to run now.
The beast landed about seven feet away. Chauncey stared at it, drinking in every hideous detail. Chauncey was nearly six feet tall, but this thing dwarfed him. Its flesh was scarred and raw. And that face, lewd and colorless and revolting.
The beast took a step forward. Its huge, misshapen head quivered with grotesque musculature, scant, threadbare tufts of fur bristled. Its jaw was thrust out, almost like a snout, its eyes red as spilled blood and slitted, covered with a shiny transparent membrane.
Chauncey turned to run and promptly slipped on the horses' entrails, stumbling forward and catching a coil of intestine across the neck that put him promptly on his back.
The beast had him by then, one huge hand locked in his hair, bending him back over the bony ridge of its knee. Chauncey opened his eyes and saw the mouth opening, the shaft of the black throat. Crooked teeth jutted from discolored gums which were pitted with wormholes. Chauncey smelled the charnel odor of its breath, saw the flickering lantern light gleam off those needled teeth and then they were in his throat, buried to the hilt. When they came away, he had no throat, just a bleeding flap of flesh. The pigs began to squeal.
Skullhead moaned low in his throat, the taste of hot human blood an ecstasy of no slight intoxication. It filled his being with a sense of roaring omnipotence that was almost too much for even him. The horses had been amusing, sweet tidbits to torture then kill, but they were gamy things, they lacked the satisfying richness of the boy. Skullhead ate him slowly, savoring every honeyed clot of marrow, every hot sip of blood, every sweet nibble of gray matter.
And then it occurred to him and he couldn't understand why it hadn't before: He was a god. A king. A lord. Nothing less. And the people, those that had called him and those that opposed him, were his servants, his cattle. He could picture it in the hazy, red confines of his brain. Picking out the tasty ones, killing the others for sport; slaughtering the old ones to relieve boredom, dining on the young ones. It was their destiny-to fill his belly. He'd eat women and boys, pull apart the men like fragile flowers, snack on the heads of infants like candies.
Yes, that was how it had been in the Dark Days and would be again.
Skullhead, caked with dried blood, Chauncey's spine lying across his swelling belly, thought about these things. He knew there was a reason he was brought forth from the boiling firmament of the grave. It wasn't merely to kill the white men, it was to kill everyone. Appetite was his destiny and it was enough. What more could he want?
A poet might have said: He ate to live and lived to eat.
It was so childishly simple. Skullhead closed his eyes, belched, and waited for necessity or mere boredom to force him into the house, the dining hall. There were others there…he could smell their parts-hot, secret, wanting. Skullhead dreamed as the wind blew cold and the lantern went out. He dreamed of a fine tanned smock knitted from the soft hides of children. Warm and toasty, covering his innumerable bare spots.
He waited for carnage. It was all he knew.
9
After Longtree had turned over the body of Mike Ryan to Deputy Bowes, he had a look for Sheriff Lauters. No one had seen him. He wasn't at Doc Perry's and Perry claimed he didn't know where he was.
Longtree didn't believe him.
He knew the doctor was a friend of the sheriff's and had been for some time. Perry knew where he was, but he wouldn't tell, not even if Longtree put him under arrest and slapped him around. Perry was a very loyal man. Longtree respected this. Lauters was out there somewhere, holed up in some saloon or whorehouse, drinking himself blind. His career was over and he knew that now. He was in hiding and the only thing that would bring him out was the Skullhead. And sooner or later, this would happen.
Longtree stabled his horse in the livery across from the Serenity Hotel and set out on foot. He had to find Lauters and if that meant checking every saloon in town, then this is what he'd do. He didn't want to arrest Lauters just yet, merely put him under a sort of protective custody. Whether the sheriff liked that or not didn't concern Longtree. He wanted the man behind bars in the jailhouse so Bowes and he could get a crack at the beast when it came for him.
It was a plan.
The snow was still falling, the wind still blowing when Longtree passed the smithy shop. He stopped there. Dick Rikers was the blacksmith and according to Bowes' records, he'd been one of the few to witness the vigilantes actually stringing up Red E
lk.
Longtree went in.
It was hot in there, Rikers working branding irons at the forge.
"Marshal. What can I do for you?" Rikers asked, his powerful arms wet with sweat.
"I'd like to ask you a couple questions, if I may."
Rikers nodded, setting aside his work and wiping his face and neck with a towel. "Just fashioning a new set of irons for the Ryan combine. It can wait, though."
"Mike Ryan?"
"Don't know of any other."
Longtree rolled a cigarette and lit it slowly. "Ryan's dead, Mr. Rikers," he said.
"Dead?" Rikers looked shocked.
"Yeah, murdered. Killed by the same thing that's killed the others. The thing you saw, I believe."
Rikers went pale, remembering the night he'd seen the creature run off after assaulting Dewey Mayhew. "Ryan," he said, "Mike Ryan."
Longtree nodded. "I don't think he'll be the last, either."
