“ This place,” Gleer said, his eyes fixed with an almost religious ecstasy, “it’s goddamn old. I mean really old, Jimmy-boy. Lookit at all, will you? This place…ha, ha…I think it was chopped right out of the mountain. People… injuns…worked it like we would a mine shaft.”
Cobb studied the rough-hewn walls. You could see they’d been chiseled, hacked from solid rock. None of it, save the original cavern was natural. The tool work on the walls was all-too apparent.
Gleer was making a funny sound in his throat that was somewhere between gagging and laughter. He played the light around some more. There were pictures on those walls. Primitive paintings, etchings. Mostly run-of-the- mill stuff like bear and mountain lion and bison. Things Cobb had seen splashed or carved into many cave walls and rock faces in the Southwest. Even up north in the Montana and Dakota Territories. Herds of animals. Stick figures hunting them. Dancing. Sitting around fires. Just your basic depictions of tribal life.
But Gleer, whose mama was half-Chickasaw, seemed fascinated by them. He studied them, making those gulping/giggling sounds in his throat, whispering things beneath his breath.
“ See? See?” he said. “See how down low here, down here you got your oldest images. Most of these are faded, worn by time…shit, hundreds and hundreds of years old if not more. Maybe thousands.” He was breathing hard now, licking his lips. He followed the paintings and cuttings up the wall with the lantern. “You get up here, Jimmy Lee, you get up here and, sure, you can make ‘em out better. These ain’t as old, eh? But still old, old, very old.”
Cobb still was not impressed. Just injun-art. What of it?
But Gleer wouldn’t let it go.
He explained in some detail what it all meant, what the rock was saying to them, how it reached out across the centuries telling them a tale of life long gone from these hills. Hunting. Fishing. Battling enemies. Birth. Death. Religious ceremony. Marriages. Funerals. If you could read it and it wasn’t too hard, Gleer said, it was just like a book.
“ Looks like a village there,” Cobb said, indicating a cluster of lodges. “Wonder what the hell happened to it?”
“ Probably down there in that valley, what’s left of it,” Gleer said. “Covered in snow.” He followed the art across the wall. “See? See this?”
Cobb saw it. Was so impressed he stuck a cigar in his mouth and smoked it, knowing there was more here than just silly injun-art.
“ They…they were working this mountain, maybe these caves, tunneling…”
Cobb could see it fine. Stick figures at work. Using what might have been primitive shovels and picks, staffs and baskets to haul out rock. Looked like drawings of ants working their hive. Figures everywhere.
Gleer was getting real excited now. “Right here…Jimmy, right goddamn here, something happened,” he said, stabbing the wall with a dirty index finger.
“ What?”
Gleer told him it was big, bad medicine, whatever it was. All the symbols and hex signs attested to that. To Cobb it looked as if down in their tunnels they had dug into another chamber. The chamber was represented by a jagged gouge…and out of it, something like smoke misting out.
“ A catastrophe,” Gleer said. “See? All them figures are laying about now. All dead.”
“ Gas probably. Hit a pocket of poison gas.”
“ No…no, I think it’s worse than that.” He was panting now, rubbing grime and settled dust from the walls, close to something, but he wasn’t sure what. “There…not gas…something else…something they dug out of the ground, something real bad…”
Cobb was studying it pretty close himself now.
Another representation of that jagged chasm, more smoke or mist seeping up and out. Only the mist was now shown to have gathered above the dead and the living like some storm cloud. A storm cloud made of skulls and devil-faces. The drawings went on and that cloud appeared to have come up out of the cave and settled over the village.
“ It got to ‘em,” Gleer said, his eyes wide and the lantern trembling in his fist now. He looked afraid. His face was tight and set with wrinkles and taut cords. “It got to ‘em, Jimmy? Don’t you get it? Don’t you?”
The paintings abruptly ended there and there were no more.
Cobb didn’t really get it. Something was crawling in his belly like worms and it made him feel giddy. The birthmark on his back was throbbing. Something was happening to him, but he didn’t see. Not really. Not just yet. The Indians had been mining or something. They had cut deep into the mountain and uncovered a hidden chamber, dug into it…and something, something had come out. Something that killed a lot of ‘em. Something real bad came out of the ground.
Gleer was half out of his mind now.
He was running around, handling bones and skulls, waving femurs and tibias about. He set the lantern at the edge of the pit and dove into all those bones like some insane swimmer into a charnel sea. He paddled and sorted, handled and searched. His fingers traced the craniums of skulls, poked into orbits, tapped at yellowed teeth set in pitted jaws. He stroked the rungs of a ribcage, eyed a blackened pelvic wing like maybe it was his own.
“ Get the hell out of there,” Cobb told him and meant it. “Yer losing yer mind, damn ye!”
Gleer climbed out, the bones falling away from him with a sound like tumbling kindling. Cobb grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pitched him to the floor.
“ I ain’t mad, Jimmy! It’s just…hell, it’s just that I know! I know!” He was cackling now, drool running from the corners of his lips. His entire body was shuddering. “These bones…lookit ‘em, will ya? Look close.”
Cobb did.
And then he got it…or some of it. The bones? all the bones in fact? were riddled with tiny cuts and gashes and nicks. Somebody had been hacking and cutting on their owners. And maybe worse…because he found what looked to be teeth marks set into them.
“ Cannibals,” Cobb said in a low voice. “Just like in them Pacific islands I read about when I was a kid. Man- eaters…”
“ That’s right, yes sir, that’s right.” Gleer was still laughing, but tears had welled in his eyes now. “But they didn’t do it on their own, Jimmy Lee, no sir! What they cut out of the ground…whatever it was…it turned ‘em that way, took hold of their savage heathen minds and turned them into monsters…”
Cobb took hold of him and got him out of those caverns. Gleer was stark raving by that point. And maybe it was just Cobb’s imagination, but that high, hot gassy smell seemed almost stronger. Rancid, even.
As if whatever was dead in there, had begun to decay once again after many long years.
Cobb got Gleer outside and with the help of the other two, they wrestled him back to the cabin. But he was in a bad way. They had to shackle him to the wall with chains snapped from beaver traps and nailed into the logs themselves. He was talking crazy, shaking and gibbering, hearing things scratching around outside that none of the others could. Talking with people that weren’t there. Going native like his mother’s people and asking for protection from the Great Spirit. So they left him shackled for a week like that, pissing himself, drooling and screeching.
“ Think I’m crazy, don’t you? Think I’ve lost what mind I did have, don’t you?” he rambled on incessantly one afternoon as the wind made the cabin shake. “But I ain’t nohow crazy. Because I know what was up there…I could smell it there and I can smell it here now. Maybe you, Cobb, or you, Barlow…maybe you don’t know what I’m taking about. But Noolan…I don’t know about you. It might have touched you the way it touched them injuns. Ain’t saying it did…but it got to one of us, ‘cause I can smell it! Hear? I can smell it. One of you, yes sir, you know what I’m talking about on account you’re just waiting for the lights to dim so you can feed on the others. I know it! I know it! Oh…ho, ho, my God, my dear Lord Jesus, them injuns, them injuns. Roasting babies and sucking brains from skulls and chewing on the flesh of their young…eating, eating. Offering up their daughters to that, that thing come straight out of hell…”
“ Shut the fuck up!” Barlow snapped finally. “You shut up with that talk or I’ll kill you! I swear to God I’ll kill you!”
Gleer was getting to everyone by that point. Maybe even Cobb. But you couldn’t tell it from that cool smirk on his face. Noolan calmed Barlow down and took him outside for some fresh air being that it was the one thing they
