Charles Graybrow tracked Orville DuChien down to a shack on the edge of the lake itself. It sat on a little hill crowded by trees that were all dead from the filth pouring down from the nearby refinery stacks. The air stank sharply of chemicals and industrial waste. The water washed in a slick of black foam. Orv was sitting on a rock, staring over the misty waters, mumbling something.
Graybrow came up behind him, making sure he made a lot of noise so Orv would know he was coming.
“They told me about it, yes sir, all about it,” Orv was saying. “Said this injun’s gonna come and gonna want to know things. Gonna have questions for you, they say, and when they say…sure, they’s always right, ain’t they? Well, ain’t they?” Orv rubbed his temples. “Sometimes…sometimes I talk crazy on account m’ head, it hurts, just plain hurts, what with them voices, blah, blah, blah!”
Graybrow nodded, figured it probably wasn’t easy. “Mind if I sit here by you?”
Orv scratched at his beard. “Injun, ain’t you? Don’t matter you being an injun, just saying it is all. I knew injuns back home, yessum, lots of injuns. Cherokee. Cherokee Nation, sure. Yes, you sit down there, Charlie…see, I remember you from way back.”
Graybrow had brought a bottle of whiskey with him. He took a slug and passed it to Orv.
“Right neighborly of you, Charlie. Yessum.” Orv took his drink and passed it back. “I try…I try to keep m’ head, but it don’t always work. I start talkin’ in circles and what not. But you…you understand me, don’t you? Some don’t, but you do…”
“Yes, I think I understand.”
Orv was gnashing his teeth. “Deliverance…the town the Devil built. Oh, think about it, Charlie! Them that don’t like the light, but the dark places! Them that lives in cellars and attics, them that don’t come out by daylight! Them that likes the meat and blood of men! Them with the Skin Medicine…oh, yessum, tattooed on their flesh!”
“Who are they?”
But Orv refused to answer. He just held himself until whatever it was drained out of him. “You…you remember Johnny Hollix?” Orv wanted to know. “He…he was the Indian Agent back home, gave them Cherokees a real bad time. Course, some of m’ kin did, too. Like Cousin Stookey…but he weren’t never worth a shit to no one. But I recall Johnny Hollix…he used to fish river cats with Grandpappy Jeremiah down on the south fork of the Suck River. Sometimes I went with ‘em and sometimes that Cherokee medicine man…you recall his name, Charlie?”
Graybrow just pulled off the bottle. “Afraid it escapes me.”
Orv began slapping his hands against his legs, shaking his head. “Yes, yes, yes, I remember! You don’t have to shout! Charlie! Tell ‘em not to shout!”
Graybrow went up behind him, feeling a great deal of pity for the man. He laid his hands on his shoulders, massaged the bunched muscles there the way his mother had once done for him. Gradually, gradually, Orv stopped trembling.
“You got them hands, good hands,” Orv said. His head tipped forward until his chin touched his chest. “Yessum, I hear, I hear. That Cherokee medicine man, Charlie, his name was Spoonfeather or something like that, but everyone called him King Paint. King Paint. Him and Grandpappy Jeremiah had a love of the roots and herbs, power doctors, eh? King Paint’s wife-that pretty young one that was all legs and tits and big eyes, yessum, that one-she got herself mixed up with Johnny Hollix. One day, old Johnny just disappeared and that squaw? Hee, hee, hee! The most horrible thing, the most horrible!”
Though Graybrow had come there to learn certain specific things, he knew he would have to let Orv talk in circles. Let him do his bit and, sooner or later, he would get to more pressing matters. So Orv told him about King Paint’s squaw and the awful punishment visited upon her for laying with Johnny Hollix on a regular basis. There was a horse that was lying in a ditch, ridden to death. Using ropes, they strung it up six feet in the air between two trees and sewed-up the squaw alive in the hide so only her head was poking out its flanks. The carcass was full of flies and ants and beetles. Pretty soon, it was full of maggots, too. That carcass was all soft and putrid and wormy. Orv said after a week, it was so filled with maggots that it looked like it was dancing up there, rolling and pulsating. And the squaw, of course, sewn up in that putrescence with millions of worms crawling on her, went insane. Laughing and cackling, spitting and screaming. She bit her tongue off, shredded her lips. The crows and vultures were picking at her face and inside that hide…well, you just didn’t want to think of what that was like, just boiling away with grave worms.
“Terrible, Charlie, that’s what it was,” Orv said, shivering now. “And it was two weeks, two weeks before that horse rotted and fell to ground. And the squaw? Dead, eyes picked out and skin stripped clean off her face…oh, and you don’t want to mention the rest, do you? No, sir! No, sir!”
Graybrow had to admit that he’d heard of some positively obscene punishments for adultery, but this one surely took the cake. The icing, too. Orv went quiet, alternately giggling and whimpering, whispering to his brothers Roy and Jesse who were apparently both dead.
“Orv?” Graybrow finally said. “Tell me about Deliverance.”
Orv actually let out a scream and began to cross himself. “I cain’t! I cain’t! Oh, that’s him, that’s that devil James Lee Cobb! He…he…he was born out of darkness, yessum, I know it. Something that crawls and slithers in them dark places where folks ain’t got no bodies, that was his father! Oh, oh, oh…his mother! Jesus help her! Help her! And Cobb, Charlie, hee, hee, Cobb he went up into those mountains and found that other one what had been waiting for him all them years! That which waited in them caves for the Macabro…oh, don’t ask me no more, no more! Because it was in Cobb and then Cobb came down…he ate ‘em, ate them men…came down and wasn’t long, wasn’t long before he heard tell of Spirit Moon…”
Orv went into hysterics after that. Crying and shrieking. Graybrow had to keep feeding him whiskey until the man was beyond pain and then he brought him into the shack so he could rest.
He wasn’t sure what it was all about, but there was no doubt anymore that James Lee Cobb was the catalyst for something. If Orv could be believed, then something sinister had taken control of Cobb up in the mountains, something that had touched him at birth.
And that something had brought him to Spirit Moon, who was a very powerful Snake medicine man.
Things were beginning to come together and Graybrow didn’t care for what they hinted at.