pitch. Swallowing, Longtree pulled back the shroud. Bowes held the lantern.
'Jesus in Heaven,' he muttered.
Longtree backed away, his skin cold and tight with gooseflesh. A nameless dark madness teased at his brain.
Whoever it had been…he wasn't human. He was a giant.
The head was huge and distorted, ridged with jutting bone and covered in a tight flaking gray skin that had burst open in spots like badly worn canvas. There were darker patches of mildew stitched into it. The heavy jaw was pushed outward like a flattened snout, the blackened gums set with irregular crooked teeth, sharp as spikes, fragmented and splintered. There were no eyes, just black yawning sockets, one of which was threaded with moss. Tufts of silver hair jutted from the obscene skull in irregular patches, blowing in the wind like strands of cornsilk.
Longtree just stared. There were no words to be said. A flat, clawing emptiness raged in his brain and he knew then what it was like to go insane, how sometimes madness was the lesser of two evils.
'It can't be, it can't be,' Bowes kept saying over and over in a silly, defeated voice.
But it was.
Longtree kept looking. The cadaver had been interred in this unhallowed ground in a shroud of skin that had rotted to rags now, through which protruding bone and withered flesh could be seen. One skeletal hand was thrown over the chest, the fingers covered in parchment skin and ending in hooked claws. There were only four fingers on that hand and they were easily twelve or fourteen inches from knuckle to nail tip. Big enough to palm a man's head. The giant also had a tail wrapped around it, a bony thing that looked oddly like vertebrae.
One of the fingers moved.
'Jesus,' Bowes whispered, 'bury it! For the love of God, bury it!'
Longtree turned away from the horror in the grave. This is what he'd been looking for, what he knew they must find, but in finding it, the revelation was simply too much. He listened to the wind howling, the wolf baying, could feel the sickly light of the moon on his skin.
It wasn't human, whatever it was. Not in the least. Just a mummy of some ghoulish, perverse tribe, some nameless monster far larger than a man and twice as wicked.
Skullhead.
Yes, of course. It's body was skeletal and chitenous, the head like a huge misshapen skull. It all fit.
Bowes' eyes suddenly went wide and he stumbled back and fell. He was pointing and muttering gibberish, drool coursing down his chin.
'What-' Longtree began, but by then he knew.
A huge and hideous shadow fell over him with the icy kiss of tombs. He heard something like old, dehydrated kindling snapping and popping. The wind carried a musty stink of old bones and wormy shrouds.
He turned and saw what he knew he would. A warm wetness spread in his belly; his head was full of noise. His lips opened and he could draw no breath.
The thing was standing up in the grave, a decayed scarecrow with a grinning, crumbling skull for a head. Its mummified skins flapped in the wind. The jaws parted with a groaning click, a hissing, reptilian noise issuing from the collapsed throat. It stood seven feet if it stood an inch. That tail-like the spinal column of an animal, all spines and bony ribs-whipped around it and thudded against the ground.
Longtree couldn't move; he was paralyzed.
Bowes fumbled for his gun and drew it, his hands trembling so badly he couldn't hold it still. The first shot ripped apart the stagnant night with a thundering explosion, the bullet whistling past its target.
The dead thing shambled over to Longtree, a discordant, bellowing howl rising from its throat and echoing through the burial ground. One atrophied claw snatched at Longtree's hair, yanking back his head, as the bobbing skullish face went in for the kill, the shriveled lips drawing back a good inch from hooked, yellow teeth and festered gums.
The next two shots found their marks.
The first took the top of the ghoul's head off in a spray of dust and filth. The second punched in its chest, dirt and sandy fragments blasting from the wound. The jaws opened with a great whining squeal, a cheated sound, the desiccated flesh of the face splitting open with a series of fanning cracks from the stress. It released Longtree, staggering back, more bullets opening it up in more places.
By then, Longtree was on his feet, a shovel in his fist. When he heard Bowes gun click again and again on an empty chamber, he launched himself at the monster, swinging the shovel like a club. The blade bit into the ghoul's throat and cleaved its head free with the sound of roots being yanked from the ground. The ruined head spun back into the grave. For a few moments, the headless monstrosity stood there, its knotted fingers clawing at the air. Then it went still and fell straight as a plank to the ground, striking with a cloud of dust. It was nothing more than a heap of brittle, broken bones and filthy rags now. There was no life nor semblance of the same.
It was some time before Longtree moved and when he did, it was slowly. He turned from the moldering wreck and went to Bowes. Bowes wasn't moving, just staring with unblinking eyes. Longtree put a hand on his shoulder and Bowes slapped it away.
'Don't touch me, by God,' he snapped. 'Don't you dare.'
'Easy, Depu-'
'Don't touch me, dammit!'
Gently, Longtree said, 'Let's bury that thing and get out of here.'
Bowes shook his head. 'I can't…I can't move.'
'Then stay here and I'll do it.'
It took Longtree some time to fill in the grave and pile the stones. When it was done, he helped Bowes to his feet.
'What was that?' the deputy inquired.
Longtree looked away towards the mountain. 'It's the patron saint of the Skull Society. The same kind of thing that's killing people in your town.'
37
It was nearly two in the morning by the time Longtree made it back to his little camp in the sheltered arroyo. Bowes and he had made it out of Blackfeet country without any trouble. Even the shots fired had brought no attention. They both ate and had baths drawn for them at Bowes' house. If nothing else, this unknotted Longtree's muscles-none of which were feeling too good after hours spent digging in the frozen graveyard. And to add insult to injury, all the exertion made the bullet wound on his ribs ache all the more. Afterwards, Longtree rode back to his camp and found Laughing Moonwind waiting for him. He knew someone was there long before he got there-a fire was blazing and he saw the smoke from a long way out. He was glad not to find Gantz or Lauters waiting in ambush for him. But had they been, it was unlikely a fire would be lit.
'Have you been here long?' he asked her.
'Yes. I was waiting for you.'
Longtree sat next to the fire and warmed himself. She had made coffee and he helped himself to a cup.
'Word has reached me,' Moonwind said, 'that you have made dangerous enemies.'
'You don't miss much, do you?'
She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. 'It's not my way.'
Longtree rolled a cigarette and lit it with an ember from the fire. 'I seem to make enemies wherever I go.'
'I think that is our way'
Longtree laughed dryly. 'You could say that. No one seems to like the law and I doubt they ever will.'
'Sheriff Lauters is a dangerous man to cross, Joseph Longtree,' Moonwind said, showing little concern. She was simply stating a fact. 'I heard you were shot today.'
'Just grazed.'
'Soon, you will have worse enemies than Lauters.'
