The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (17 page)

Ithacus turned and dashed toward a patch of downed grass
and found the boy shivering and pale. The boy stared up at his father, but his
eyes didn’t see him. His eyes saw something terrible. Ithacus removed his long
coat, which was still mostly dry inside, and wrapped his son inside. He picked
up the boy in the bundle and tromped through the field as the dawn rose.

“Sarai!” He was out of breath, but he managed a cry and
held close his boy. Wandering through the dim field in the rain, holding the
boy to his chest, screaming. Screaming her name.

Ithacus’s heart and mind drowned in confusion as he carried
the heavy boy home. He wanted things. Odd things, like warm honey and whisky,
like a fire and a fist fight. He wanted anything that would keep him from
wanting her back, and yet part of him didn’t believe she was gone. He wanted to
kill the witch.

And then he thought of the witch and deepest hatred burned
in his chest and arms. He held the boy tighter and looked to his left and right
and up into the air to make sure her black, shivering shadow wasn’t twisting at
him from some unexpected angle. The hate made him sick. His mind moved to the
barn again as his boy coughed and spat. He thought of the book and the
instructions he could remember. What if it worked?

That book, that bundle of old pages that Spencer Barnhouse
had given long ago to Ithacus’s father. The book had long since been lost in
the caves south of Rhymer, but he’d remembered in detail the pictures he’d
memorized as a kid on how to build the flash box and how to make the special
paper for catching the image. Maybe the witch thought he still had those pages;
maybe that’s why she’d finally come all the way down.

Bendy’s Men had chased him all through the swamps and
caves for those pages. Then again, maybe the witch wanted to do with little James
just the thing that witches do. He thought of the sketch of the flash box and
the words that were penned in the black ink in a square around the drawing. What
if it worked?

He got James up in the house and got him out of the wet
clothes and, after a while, into a warm bath. They looked at each other throughout
the process but did not speak. Both Falks had blue eyes. Though Sarai’s eyes
were brown, her son had eyes like his father’s and his father’s father’s.
Ithacus looked at the boy in the washtub and saw something different from what
was there. He saw the boy in Sarai’s arms. His wife’s eyes gleamed in the
setting light of the sun as she too looked upon the new child.

He was little more than a red and pink and wriggling
bundle of wrinkles, but his eyes blinked and caught light under the long blond lashes.
Sarai Falk held the boy out with both hands and for the first time Ithacus
grabbed up that life in his arms, that life so alive.

Sarai’s face was soft and sharp with the high cheekbones
and broad, black eyes of her mother, and now her dark lips burst into a white
smile of small, square teeth. “What will his name be?” she said and immediately
with strong hands and arms pulled him back to her. Ithacus’s gaze leapt from
her eyes to the bundle in her arms and back again.

“James,” Ithacus said. “His name is to be called James.”

They had waited to name him. Waited to be sure he would
live.

Sarai beamed at her boy and then reached out with her
hand and traced along Ithacus’s cheek and ran her finger down the long scar that
ran from his temple to his chin. “He has your eyes.”

At this, Ithacus’s own face grew dark, the deep lines
creased about his brows, and his eyes narrowed. He took a step toward his young
wife holding the child and placed his hand on her back. With his other hand he
drew her head close to his and leaned her head on his shoulder, looking at the
boy. The child’s eyes opened for a moment and his wide pupils rolled lazy in
the center of blue irises. Sarai was right: his eyes were like his father’s,
and what would those eyes see? Crooked and dark images sprung up in his mind,
and Ithacus shuddered at what those young eyes might grow to see. What scenes
of joy and dread might play in front of those bright and tiny eyes? Ithacus
kissed his beloved’s head and walked to the edge of the fire.

They’d been on the move for too long.

The New Land held a kind of vicious bounty—offering as
much food and shelter as danger. Too, Ithacus could feel the jitters at the crest
of every hill and along the edges of every river, every stream; and at night,
as his wife slept, he watched the shadows moving in the darkness.

There was an evil in this land, an older but familiar
evil that Ithacus did not expect to find here. In fact, he had expected to
escape it forever when he took his young bride and what few items they could
and climbed aboard that strange boat in the dark.

Yet here they had found, high in a cliff bank, this winding
cave that held no animal’s lair and no stench of death, and that would serve
well, if only for a short time. Until he had time to get what he needed to
build a place and get some animals and do some planting.

From the little mouth of the cave Ithacus could see up
and down the river, and there was only one path that lead up to the opening of
their cave. Over and behind them were nests and coils of a thick and almost impenetrable
thorned vine, and among them were thorn-covered trees, the likes of which
Ithacus had only visioned in tales and bad dreams, yet there they were. Tall
and mean-looking with hard, barbed leaves, an animal or man who dashed into
those trees for cover would sooner bleed to death than escape a pursuer. It was
a fit spot for safety.

So here they had come to rest and here this boy had been
born in the deeps of the cave. Perhaps this would be where they would make a
new home, but only time would tell.

Already the cold October winds moved the pines along
the long and muddy river. Already the leaves of other trees began turning to gold
and red. While out past the thorns and brambles, Ithacus hunted in the rich
forest behind the ridge and brought home rabbits, deer, and many small, cold
fish which he prepared special and which gave Sarai and the baby strength. They
drank the bright water from the streams that rolled down the mountainside, and
Sarai and Ithacus told stories of their parents and the old country, and they
laughed in the warm sun at the cave’s mouth and the baby laughed too.

Sometimes shadows crept to the river’s edge—the long,
lean, odd shadows of living things, maybe mountain cats, maybe wolves, but they
were soundless. Ithacus and Sarai kept the fire back away from the mouth of
their cave, but still the smoke rolled into the sky, and sometimes at night
Ithacus would watch the gliding shadows at the water’s edge. At times they were
fast and liquid-like and seemed to rise up into the pines, but other times they
hulked and paced at the water’s edge. Stopping and unmoving they seemed to be
feeling through the dark, or looking, looking through the dark for Ithacus and
his woman and the baby. Sometimes Ithacus thought he saw long, thin shadows,
like snakes, twisting from the wood’s edge and toward the cave, but when he
looked again they were gone.

Ithacus knew that if these were what he feared—and were
not men, or cats, or wolves—it would mean they were something darker. Darker
things than he expected to find in the New Land. It also meant that these
shades and shadows could not cross over the water and would have to find and
wind some other way along the water’s edge until they came to an end to the river,
a bridge or fallen tree, or some other place that was strange and would let
them pass over.

He grimaced at the thought of that darker power giving
them a way to cross and letting them come slinking up the Ridges to the cave.
Even along the pass where he could see, he stayed up nights dreading that the
shadows would come and that they would have teeth.

But for a long time the shadows did not come.

The shadows did not come for a long time, and the boy
grew strong and wild and his mother taught him well the ways she knew.

Ithacus woke up from his dream of the old days. The memories
passed out of his mind, a warmth giving way to a cold wind. She was gone. Sarai
was gone.

Neither James nor his father knew how much time had passed.
It seemed to them that the sun was moving in a different way. At times the
light would dim through the windows and darken until both were sure that the
night had fallen; and yet, through glittering tears, they would watch as their
little house lightened again. Too, the hard rain of last night had changed to a
strange dust of snow that came even when the sun shone and blues broke through
the gray clouds until time seemed mixed and the day or night no longer
mattered. The boy didn’t get out of the warm water of the tub for a long time.
His father would wake from a heavy sleep now and again and put wood in the
stove and get the water boiling and pour it into the tub.

Later, James’s mind might stab at him with the memories
of the witch. If it hadn’t been for this plan, his mother would have lived. If
it hadn’t been for him, for his wretched father.

But then, his mind immediately removed itself from those
thoughts as if the thoughts were flame and he would sink into sleep and younger
memories.

It wasn’t enough that the little pig had learned its
way out of the pen, but it would stick its nose in the air now and buck its snout,
laughing. James ran in the mist. Again and again he heard the wet drumming of
the little pig’s feet going along this way and that, and he turned again this
way and again that way to follow. His own bare feet slapped hard the cold mud.
He couldn’t see it, but it was out there.

Soon he heard his pa holler from in back of him
somewhere. His pa was mad. James wanted to train up the little pig; he’d seen
its own special pig smarts and liked how it laughed at its own smarts, jutting
its little face up in the air, proud and looking around.

An open patch in the fog appeared and he could see the
fresh little hoofmarks dug in the mud, skittering off one way or the other. This
went on, zig and zag, his pa hollering, the tiny thumping of the hooves, the
fog swirling and clearing with the sunshine.

James stopped short, his head pounding, his feet burning
with the cold mud. He listened. He closed his eyes and listened. No noise. No
hooves. With his eyes still closed, he tilted just a bit to his left and then
burst, disappearing into a heavier patch of the fog. Emerging with the squealing,
kicking piglet. Laughing with little Eli in his bare arms.

And then he woke in the warm tub in the strange weather.
His father was standing by the stove, looking out the front window out toward
the barn.

“James,” he whispered, “get your clothes on and go feed
the pigs.”

Hot tears came from the boy’s eyes, but he splashed water
in his face to hide them and clambered out of the basin and headed to his room.
Pulling on his pants, he heard the front door open and shut and knew that his
pa had walked out into the strange weather to see about the witch trap.

James came into the hay barn to find his pa standing
at one end with the weapon. He’d only caught sight of the ax once before. The strange
ax with its shining, waved blade and curved and heavy handle. His pa stood with
his head down. There were candles lit on a path in the dirt all along to a post
in the center of the barn. There on the post was a pale square of paper. Upon the
pale square of paper was burned the image of the witch. The face on the square
was even more hideous than what James had imagined as he lay there with the
thing breathing over him. What made it so terrible was that the real face of
the witch was a person’s face. It was a dead face and filled with broken shards
of teeth, slashed with cuts, bruised, the eyes even seeming to be squeezing
from the sockets. The thought that there could be any life in that face was
what made him sick. Anything that looked like that ought to be dead, but there
was no mercy in the Devil’s Way.

“If you’re not going to feed the pigs,” his pa said,
“stand away.”

He did as his pa took a deep breath and then a deeper
one and then his pa’s body seemed to go limp as if he were about to fall over.
Without warning his pa’s arm whirled, the post thudded, and the silver blade
rang as it marked deep in the post and right through the wicked image with a
whistle. The candles blew out and off somewhere in the strange weather of the
morning a howl went up that pitched into a wail and then into a screech that
made the hairs on James’s neck rise up. His pa looked toward the barn doors and
then back at the post.

The picture was bleeding.



The doctor was sitting there looking at him and when
he saw the medicine was all gone and that Jim had stopped talking he said, “Falk,
I can’t give you any more of that medicine until tomorrow.”

Jim frowned.

“It’ll poison your blood permanent,” the doctor completed.

“It doesn’t matter. She’s dead. There’s no getting her
back.”

“I suppose not,” the doctor said.

“If I can’t have any more medicine, give me some whisky.”

The doctor nodded and, getting up, clinked around for
a few seconds and then returned with a little mug of sweet-smelling whisky and
put it in Jim’s left hand.

Jim sipped it and coughed a bit and said, “That creature,
that thing, the witch, whatever she was . . .” He turned and looked at the
doctor. “There I was, lying in the hay, my eyes shut, and that thing came
slinking in by way of the high window and she came right down close to my face.
Like a spider, Doc.”

He looked up at the doctor’s eyes. “She eased herself
down through the air like that.” He made the motion with his good hand, the
hand floating down. “And only the devil knows how.”

Jim drew in a deep draught of air and looked back out
the window. “I kept quiet like I was sleeping, but I could feel her there. I
could smell her cold, terrible breath. I wonder. I think sometimes I wasn’t convincing
enough. Why did she leave? Why did she go after my mother?”