had plenty of.
When they were gone, it was just Cobb and Gleer in the cabin. The logs popped and shifted in the hearth. The air was smoky and thick. It stank of body odor and charred logs. What it didn’t stink of these days was food.
“ Ye’ve got to get a hold of yerself, Gleer,” Cobb told him. “Ye carry on like this…well, one of them boys is gonna shoot ye dead.”
Gleer just played with his chains, running the loops through his fingers. He nodded. “I know, I know…but I’m scared, Jimmy Lee. I’m damn scared. I’m thinking…thinking that one of us just ain’t what he appears to be. That something got in him…inside him…and that man, he’s a monster now…”
Cobb considered it a moment and shrugged. “Maybe ye right,” he said. “Maybe you and me, maybe we better had keep an eye on them other two.”
Eventually, Gleer came back to his senses.
Barlow managed to shoot a couple wolves. They were rawboned things with hardly any meat on them, but it was something in their bellies. And Noolan made a hearty soup from the blood and fat. It didn’t taste all that wonderful, but it stuck to the bones. With some meat and soup in him at last, Gleer came to his senses.
They cut him loose.
But they kept an eye on him.
In fact, everyone kept an eye on each other. It was like everyone was afraid to be alone with anyone else. All four of them went about their daily routines with knives and pistols hanging from their belts. And when one came upon another out in the woods or poking through the ice that covered the stream…well, it was only sensible to give advance warning. For up there in that awful place, only the guilty sneaked around or moved silently.
Things got bad in the week following Gleer’s release.
The wind shook and rattled the cabin continually. It picked up sheets of snow and flung them all and everywhere. Visibility outside was down to eight, ten feet at any given time. The air was unnaturally cold. Sometimes the wind carried funny sounds with it, sounds like weeping or screaming. The voices of children chanting in some distant place. There were odd noises in the dead of night…noises like something walking up on the roof or scratching at the shuttered windows. A pounding at the outside walls. Weird distorted tracks found in the snow outside. Tracks that started suddenly and ended just as abruptly…like something had leaped down from the cold stars above and then leaped back up there again.
Noolan and Barlow could be heard whispering prayers at night.
Gleer just hid beneath his elk hides silently.
And Cobb, he just grinned, head always cocked like he was listening for something.
Because he had secrets from the others.
They didn’t know about him slipping off that night they’d found the cave. About him crawling in there in the frigid, dark hours. Walking amongst the bones with a lantern in hand. They didn’t know how it was for him when the gassy, fetid odor rose up from the trembling marrow of the mountain and fell over him like a shivering, stinking blanket. Or how it held him and made communion with something already hiding deep within him. Something planted there like an obscene seed in the blighted soil of his soul by his father. How it reached out and found this sleeping other and became one with it.
Because Gleer was right-there was a monster among them.
And it was getting hungry.
It had been three weeks since they found the cave now.
Two weeks since the last of the soup and wolf meat was eaten. Their bellies had been stark empty since and something in each and every man was decaying at an unpleasant rate.
Except for Cobb.
What was in him had already rotted to carrion.
Cobb was alone in the cabin…or nearly.
Noolan and Barlow had run off hours ago. Run off when they’d returned early from their hunt and found Cobb dressing out Gleer’s corpse, happily sorting through meat and muscle, selecting the finest cuts for steaks and the poorer ones for stews.
“ Hungry, gents?” he’d said, gore dripping from his mouth because, well, dammit, it was hard to do that sort of work without a little taste here or there. “Pull yerselves up a seat and see what old Jimmy Lee can do when the proper victuals is available.”
Barlow and Noolan just stood there, rifles in hand, mouths sprung like spittoons, staring and staring. One of them-Cobb couldn’t be sure which-let out a wailing scream and together they’d run off into the snows. Damn fools left the door open, too. Born in a goddamned barn, the both of ‘em.
That had been three, four hours before.
But Cobb knew they’d be back. Unless they decided to winter it out up in the cave; but they wouldn’t like that very much. It was one thing to be up there with light and heat…but when the lantern died out and the blackness swam up like some ravenous shark from a primeval, godless sea like it had for him, well that was an entirely different kettle of fish, mind you.
Cobb had long-since finished slaughtering Gleer.
When Cobb had pulled his Arkansas toothpick and walked up to him, speaking in the voices of long-dead injuns, Gleer had just gone to jelly. Slicker than shit, Cobb had slit his throat ear to ear and Gleer just accepted it. Now, there wasn’t nothing but a pile of bloody bones to mark his passing. His skin was drying on a rack before the fire, smartly salted for leather. His organs were gently layered in a black pot of brine, seasoning up for a fine stew that would last Cobb for weeks and weeks. The meat had been carved from his buttocks, belly, and breast and packed in snow so it would keep fresh and sweet. His blood had been drained off into buckets for soup and broth. Even his fat was saved. His ligaments and sinew were drying for catgut. And right that moment as Cobb listened to the wind speaking and cackling in the chimney pipe, he was grinding up muscle and organ to be stuffed into bowel casings for sausage.
Gleer’s head was sitting across from him.
The eyes were blanched and the tongue protruded blackly from those seamed lips. His bearskin cap was still on his head. A few greasy strands of hair had fallen over the sallow, blood-spattered face.
If Cobb concentrated real hard, he could even make it speak.
When he was done stuffing his sausages, whistling some old Indian deathsong he’d never once heard in his life, he nibbled on a little finger food he’d boiled from the bones below. One of Gleer’s legs was spitted and roasting over the fire, carefully seasoned. It was getting nice and brown, gobs of fat dropping from it and sizzling in the flames beneath. The meaty, rich smell filled the cabin and went up the flue.
Cobb knew the meat-smell would bring the others home.
They wouldn’t have a choice.
And he would welcome them, surely. He figured two more kills and he’d have more than enough meat to put up until spring, if he practiced a little conservation, that was. Avoided his usual gluttony. But he was no savage. He would invite both Barlow and Noonlan to break bread at his table. He’d give ‘em both a good meal before putting them to the knife.
It was the Christian thing to do.
So Cobb nibbled and waited, a curious light flickering in his eyes.
He remembered the night he’d crept back up to the cave, something in him telling him it was the right thing to do. That what was in there, what was hiding in the cracks and crevices and maybe the bones, too, was the very reason he had come. Not gold. But… it. Whatever in the hell it was. The very thing them injuns had cut from the
