“Neither,” was all Harmony would say. “But in my mind, it was the seed of human evil. There were those in Deliverance that said it was the Devil himself that was chained up there.”
Dirker thought about it all. Thought about it long and hard. “And Cobb… he disappeared from the mortuary. If he was dead, how could that be?”
“I don’t think he was dead,” Harmony said. “But surely not alive. His was the living death, Sheriff. No man will ever know what happened to him after he climbed from his casket. Some things are better not known.”
Dirker was not about to argue with him. He was surely not convinced about any of this. Something had happened, yes, and Cobb was no doubt involved, but the supernatural? Dirker had heard stories and wild tales like any other, but he was not ready to accept such a thing.
“I can see, by the look on your face, Sheriff, that you are skeptical. But what I tell you is the truth as the Lord is my witness. What happened in Deliverance is unspeakable… pagan rites, Devil worship, human sacrifice. It has been said that the first born, all the first born of Deliverance were given to Cobb as burnt offerings. To him and that demented thing up in the hotel.” Harmony looked close to tears now. “If God in His infinite wisdom would only smite that serpent’s nest from the land.”
Dirker said, “Well, maybe God’s gonna need some help this time.”
22
Cabe pulled off his cigarette, sent the smoke out through his nostrils. “So, I reckon from what you’ve been saying that you talked to your Indian friends?”
Charles Graybrow nodded. “Yes, I have.”
“And…?”
“Worse than I thought.”
They were sitting in Cabe’s motel room, on the bed, sorting out those things that a week before would have been unthinkable by any sane man. Now, however, there was no choice but to look the devil, as it were, in the face and give him his due.
“First off, you have to know about a Snake medicine man called Spirit Moon,” Graybrow said, his fingers coiling uneasily in his lap, unused to being without a ready bottle. “Now Spirit Moon… oh boy, he’s big mumbo-jumbo heap plenty bad injun witch doctor—”
“Would you quit the dumb injun bit already?” Cabe said impatiently. “It’s funny at times. But now ain’t one of those times.”
Graybrow nodded, smiled. “Sure, sure, understood. Okay, now Spirit Moon, you know something about him?”
“I’ve heard a few things.”
“What you heard is true. That’s one injun with the power, I tell you,” Graybrow said with complete certainty. “I won’t go on about things he’s done, the sick he’s cured and the bad ones he cursed… we’ll let it go by saying Spirit Moon is the genuine article. He refused to go to the reservation with the others, claimed that the Snake Nation would bow before no man, white or otherwise. So him and his followers hid out up in Skull Valley on Goshute land. And old Spirit Moon, he knew things that have long been forgotten, things others might want to know…”
“Like who?” Cabe asked.
“Like James Lee Cobb.”
Ah, that name again. Cabe was beginning to get this picture of that crazy bastard in his mind and he had horns and a tail. Even the sound of that name was starting to leave him cold.
“So Cobb went to Spirit Moon?”
“That’s how the story goes. Cobb and his gang of bad men went to pay Spirit Moon a call.” Graybrow broke off, wanting to get it right as he’d heard it. “Now, understand that Spirit Moon didn’t make Cobb wicked, he already was. They say he was born of darkness. That he lived a life of depravity and the like. That up in the mountains… up there, well, he didn’t eat his friends because he just wanted to, but because something crawled into him. The sort of thing the Ojibwa up north might call a Wendigo. A cannibal devil, a soul-eater…”
Graybrow told him then the story he had heard from an old Goshute named He-Who-Runs-Swift.
Cobb and his boys rode right into Spirit Moon’s camp, a thing many others would have been afraid to do. At first, Cobb was friendly. He made up some bullshit story about needed sanctuary for a time being that the whites were hunting him and his men. It was a lie, but essentially true in that just about all his boys were wanted for something, somewhere.
But you could not fool Sprit Moon.
He had the gift to look into minds, to see truths, things that had not yet even come about. He instructed his people to be kind to Cobb and the others, for even at that point he knew what Cobb was, hoped only that he would ride off given time. But it was not to be so. For what lived in Cobb, the seed planted there at birth and nurtured by what Spirit Moon called “the Old One of the Mountain”, was not in complete control just then. But it had found fertile ground and was blossoming by the day.
Before long, Cobb admitted that he knew of Spirit Moon, knew of his great knowledge and that he had come to learn from him. By that point, everyone in the tribe was afraid of Cobb. Afraid of what was inside him and the hideous smell emanating from him, the voices heard speaking in his tent by night… even when he was alone. Spirit Moon told Cobb he would indeed teach him, but only him. That he must send his men away. Cobb agreed. Spirit Moon had no intention of teaching him; he planned on killing him. There was no other way. For Cobb was evil and he had to be purified and death was the only way. But Spirit Moon knew he had to be careful… for if it was done wrongly, what lived in Cobb would rise up and kill the entire tribe.
“Well, Tyler Cabe,” Graybrow went on, “before Spirit Moon could do what had to be done, a woman disappeared from camp. Her remains were discovered shortly thereafter. Cobb had nearly devoured her…”
“Jesus. They caught him in the act?”
Graybrow shrugged. “Perhaps. I do not know. Only that when he was questioned about the crime by Spirit Moon and the elders, he freely admitted that, yes, he had eaten her. He boasted of it. Of the many people he had eaten. That his strength was absorbed directly from the flesh of those he feasted upon.
“Well, it took no less than five or six strong warriors to hold him down so he could be shackled,” Graybrow said. “So maybe there was some truth to what he said. And next…”
What happened to Cobb next, was not pleasant.
The Snake called it “the Living Death”. It was a sacred, dark ritual reserved only for those who could not die in the normal way and were possessed of something discarnate and malevolent. Spirit Moon decided that it was the only way. For what was in Cobb had to be starved to death. Only this would force it into cold dormancy. So Cobb was cursed with the Living Death. Hung by the wrists, Cobb was bound by the medicine man’s sorcery. He was treated with herbs and roots, secret chemicals and wasting prayers. The skin was literally eaten from one side of his body by ants. He was hung in a medicine lodge, dangled from the roof and smoked over a fire of holy balms for three days while Spirit Moon and the other holy men chanted a ceremony of entombment over him. When it was over, Cobb was neither dead nor alive, but somewhere in-between.
“What happened then?” Cabe wanted to know.
“He was nailed shut in a coffin. He was to be buried alive like that. For what was in him had to be slowly starved to death. It was the only way.”
Spirit Moon learned that Cobb had a half-brother in Deliverance, so the casket was sent to him via Whisper Lake. But Spirit Moon had underestimated the strength of what was inside Cobb. It should not have woken until it was in the grave, but instead it woke up on the trip to Whisper Lake. And when Hiram Callister opened the box…
“Cobb returned to the land of the living,” Graybrow explained. “Returned in probably a foul mood. A week later, maybe, he and his confederates rode on the Snake camp. They killed everyone, including Spirit Moon… Cobb was too strong to fight by then.”
But Cobb’s gang did more than kill the Indians.