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 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.