forward, so he could stare into the merciless face of death one more time.
Skullhead knew it had to be this way. Kill, but take time to savor the fear, to sip it like wine.
Skullhead's face was huge in the grainy moonlight, the color of fresh cream, a tapestry of abraided flesh pitted with sores. And the eyes…crimson, slitted orbs sunk in bony, angular depressions.
Ryan studied this nightmare in detail. It gave him something other to think about than pain or death. He viewed the face like a map. Here were craters, there valleys, and there occasional matted growths of fur that grew in and out of the skin. The snout was pressed in, only vaguely vulpine, the nostrils flattened and wet, the teeth hooked like sickles.
Skullhead growled with a blast of hot, fetid breath and pulled Ryan's arms free with wet, rending snaps. He dropped the limbs and studied the horror on the man's face. It wasn't enough. He buried his claws in Ryan's groin and slit him up to the throat, marveling at the bounty of glistening jewels that bulged out. Ryan slumped and Skullhead caught him. He chewed his face free from the muscled housing of his skull and broke the dying man on the rocks, slamming him against them with titan force until Ryan came apart like a drenched and running rag doll.
Then and only then, did he dine.
5
Longtree lit a cigarette and exhaled in the wind. 'Did he say what he wanted?'
'No, sir,' Cal Shannon told him, 'he just said how he wanted to see you right away. That it was important.'
'I see.'
'If you ask me, Marshal, something strange is going on up there. Mr. Ryan's got men walking guard, twice the number of riders with the herds…peculiar, if you ask me. Don't tell him how I said so, though.'
'Course not.'
'His race horses got slaughtered last night. Boys are saying how maybe it's that beast folks are talking about.'
'Could be.'
Shannon shrugged. 'Anyway, he said to ride up there right away.'
Longtree nodded. 'I will. Thanks, Shannon.'
Shannon jumped up on his wagon and rode off, leaving Longtree outside the livery barn alone. He never made it up to the Blackfeet camp. After the masked gunmen had attacked him and rode off, Longtree found his horse nearly a mile up the trail and returned to town. He'd been planning on searching out Lauters, but that could wait… the sheriff's wound wouldn't heal for some time.
6
By ten that night, the blizzard hit.
It had been threatening for days, finally arriving with screaming winds and blowing snow. About the time the first snowflakes fell, Skullhead was miles away from the scene of his crime, lurking around the outskirts of town. There was only one left now, he knew, and after that…well he decided, for reasons even unknown to himself, he would keep on killing. It was such good sport.
Longtree didn't let the snow deter him from his appointment with Ryan. He'd plowed through many a blizzard and now was hardly the time to cower behind doors. He rode and rode hard.
Sheriff Lauters was at Dr. Perry's getting a bullet dug out of his arm. Despite Perry's repeated questioning, he would say little save that someone had taken a shot at him. But Perry didn't believe a word of this. Not for a minute.
Deputy Bowes stood in the doorway of the jailhouse watching the good and not-so good citizens of Wolf Creek go about their lives despite the wind-driven snow that blanketed the streets. He had a bad feeling in his gut and had for days.
And at the Congregational Church, a battered and bruised version of Reverend Claussen crouched on the altar, praying. He prayed to Jesus, he prayed to Mary, he prayed to any gods that would listen. Things had to be put right in this town, he knew, and couldn't be until Sheriff Lauters was resting in peace in the cemetery outside town. But how to accomplish this? There lie the question. Claussen couldn't do it himself and he refused to hire some sinful gunslinger. Yet, it had to be done. Prayer seemed the only viable answer. Claussen had been praying for hours, his knees aching, his back knotted with pain. But suffering was part of the process, only true discomfort could bring results. So Claussen prayed to any gods that would give him audience. More so, he prayed for his guardian angel to be sent to him.
But there were other things going on in Wolf Creek, other secrets tended in dark gardens of the soul. Many of which were closely-guarded and coveted like sin.
One of them was that Wynona Spence, that shrewd businesswoman with the morbid tongue, kept the body of her lesbian lover embalmed in her rooms above the mortuary. She had died two years before, but Wynona would not let her go. She chatted with her, fixed her hair and make up, read her poetry and took her meals with her. And at night, she slept beside her happy as only the true necrophile could be.
Another was that Dr. Perry had a serious morphine habit which grew worse week by week. It helped with his back pain but often plunged his usually meticulous and analytical brain into a fog of hallucination and dream. And lately, those dreams were becoming nightmares where he was once again a Union battlefield surgeon during the War Between the States. He was in a misty valley during the Shiloh campaign, in a barn which was being used as a field hospital. The injured and dying and mutilated were piling up around him as he performed amputation after amputation, limbs heaped like cordwood. It was a nightmare, yes, but he'd witnessed such a thing firsthand and although a man could close his eyes, some things would never go away.
Then there was the Skull Society.
No white man (and precious few Indians, for that matter) knew how exactly it had happened, how it was to call a primal monster from its grave. They didn't know that for three weeks before Skullhead's first appearance, the Skull Society-all twelve members-had prayed and fasted in the sacred grove, denying themselves any and all comforts until they were purified to a point where they could literally see one another's thoughts. Until their brains functioned as a single unit. For the last week, not a word was spoken. It didn't need to be-the extracts of certain sacred herbs and roots had amplified their latent telepathic abilities. As a single brain they were able to call up the beast from its grave, resurrect him to full potential via the Blood-Medicine-a heady brew of their own blood, reptile toxins, plant saps, and the juices of a deadly mushroom found only deep within the mountain caves. Through this, Skullhead was restored to fleshy vitality and not the mummy Longtree and Bowes had seen. In the sweat lodge each night, they would concentrate on the image of the next victim and transmit it to the Lord of the High Wood. The only drawback being, that if Skullhead could not find said victim, his bloodlust would be sated on anything and anyone he could find. And when the enemies of the tribe were gone, Skullhead would continue murdering, destroying, and devouring until he himself was destroyed.
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
