Tim Curran - Skull Moon

"That grave was opened," Longtree said. He pawed in the trench with his shovel. "Empty. Now why do you suppose the body was carted away?"

Bowes shook his head.

Longtree took the lantern to another grave a few yards away. This one was particularly ornamented with skull poles and painted up hides on frames and slabs of rock covered with drawings and writings that were obscured by the years. There were no less than half a dozen human skulls here and twice that many of wolves. Some of the poles had fallen, the skulls shattering like brittle yellow porcelain. It looked to be very ancient.

"Who do you suppose is down there?" Longtree asked. "Ghost Hand?"

"No, he's farther up on the next hill."

"I'd say whoever it was must have been important."

Bowes licked his lips. "They're all important up here. All big, bad medicine men," he told Longtree. "But this one…shit, he's been in the ground a hundred years or more. Maybe twice that."

Longtree was thinking the very same thing. He wasn't sure why, but he was certain there was an answer up here somewhere. And this grave…it was so ornamented, so well-tended…it spoke to him.

Longtree removed a stretched yellowed skin atop the cairn and it came apart in his fingers like candied glass. He began to loosen the stones with powerful swings of the pickax.

"I'm finished," Bowes said, throwing up his hands. "I wanna know what the hell this is all about."

Longtree kept working. "When we find it-if we find it-you'll know."

"Goddammit, Marshal, I'm risking my neck out here! Tell me what's going on or I'm riding out!" Bowes shook all over. Then, calmer, "Digging up Red Elk's one thing, but this one…Christ, he's been dead for centuries. What can he have to do with anything?"

"I hope nothing," Longtree panted.

Bowes spat. "Damn you, Longtree." He came over and started working.

It took them longer to take apart this cairn. Countless generations of rains, freezes, and baking summers had welded the rocks together as if they'd been mortared in place.

When they were done, both men had long since shed their coats, sweat steaming on their faces. A slab of rock was beneath the cairn, this one painted with things that were neither animals nor men. They had to use the shovel handles like levers to slide it free. And then they had to chop through the frost line and the hard packed earth beneath.

The wind had picked up considerably, howling out of the north. Wolf hides and moldering ceremonial blankets rustled and snapped on sagging willow frames. That wolf started up in the distance, baying its ancient dirge. The pale moon looked down, piercing the grotesque, dancing shadows.

Longtree found the first tattered remains of something like a skin-tarp and the two of them cleared away dirt and rubble. The tarp came apart in their fingers, rotted and half-frozen.

"Christ," Bowes said, turning away, "that stink."

Longtree smelled it, too: A heavy, thick smell of decay and grave mold. An odor nothing dead for untold years had the right to possess. It was a black smell, a suffocating evil odor of slaughterhouses and disturbed graves.

"This ain't right," Bowes said in a weak voice.

The grave, once completely unearthed was huge. Gigantic.

The body was stitched up in a hide shroud, too, but blackened with age, covered in spots with mildew and damp gray fungi. And it was not buffalo skin. It had a smoother texture. Was very fine. Longtree suspected human skin, but didn't mention the fact. Whatever it was, given the size, it had taken a lot of pelts.

Longtree slit it open, not being too careful. His fingers trembled. The baying of that wolf took on a high, shrill 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.