The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (27 page)



“It’s snowing again,” the doctor said. “It looks like
it might get bad out.”

The window was broken because of what the thing had done
and the two of them shooting through it.

Violet stared into the doctor’s little fire and wished
that she had never called Falk. Violet wished that her husband was still alive.
She wished that she could go back to a time when her husband was angry and a
strange creature stared in her window. She was only frightened back then. There
was part of her too that could still imagine the spook wasn’t real. There was
in those times something like a hope that the people in the little town of Sparrow
were right after all and that her seeing the spook was on account of that she
was crazy. But these were dreams of before, these things could no longer be.

“When will he be here? Why do we have to stay here? Could
we not just meet at Huck’s or in the town somewhere?” she asked, and her eyes
dropped to her necklace and then back to the doctor.

“Violet, if there are more of those things out here .
. .” The doctor stopped and crouched down beside her by the fireplace and stoked
it a bit. He got up off his haunches and looked at her. “I have to ask you
where you got what you have been taking out of that necklace. I don’t mean to
pry, but I do not think that the medicine I have been giving you has helped you
as much as it could, and if I know . . .”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what it is,” she snapped.
“It was given to me by . . . by a stranger that lives out here in the woods.
All I know is that when I take it, I don’t feel afraid anymore.”

At that moment they both turned their heads because they
could hear someone coming along the path.

“Doctor, please tell me that’s him and that’s not something
else,” she said and tightened her jacket around her.

The doctor kept squinting and looking out the window.
Beside him on the table lay the satchel with Simon’s book.

He could hear two sets of steps coming too, tramping
through the snow.

The doctor didn’t like what he saw coming up the path.
Jim was walking deliberately in front of a figure that the doctor couldn’t make
out much except that it appeared to be female, it was wrapped in a black cloak,
and it made him uneasy.

Violet, sitting in the rocker, saw the doctor’s hands
fidgeting and heard his breath huffing as he tried to make decisions in his
mind as to what it was that he saw. She stood up and came up beside him and looked
through the busted-out window with him. The doctor, though he appeared soft and
round, was more like a boulder than anything. She put her hand on his hard
shoulder and asked him, “Who is that?”

Her other hand was raised now as she watched the two
figures moving down to the door. Her hand went up to her neck and began fiddling
with the empty locket that was hanging there.

A woman with her face veiled was walking behind Jim,
her steps light and all her angles sharp. Violet knew why the doctor was huffing.
She felt her skin go cold.

A witch.

Violet would not take her eyes off the witch. The witch
didn’t take any notice of Violet staring at her. They just came in the door
together, like old friends.

The witch was busy studying the doctor’s face and the
flames in the fireplace.

“I can’t understand you,” the doctor said as the two
stood there.

“Me?” Jim only half turned to look at the doctor with
one eye.

“Yes, you. A witch like this killed your mother is what
you said. What you told me. And now here you stand?”

The outlander smiled and looked at him and then at Violet.
“You believe in all that, witches and such?”

The doctor smiled a bit too, a little amazed, and then
looked at the outlander. “How can you trust this witch? Just let her come on
in! Maybe she is the same one who killed your mother and knocked you on the head.”

“This witch, as you say, she’s not the same.”

Violet eyed the witch. She was too scared to move, but
she didn’t want the witch to know that. “Not the same? The same as what?”

“I am not a witch,” said the witch. “Call me what you
like, but a witch is not what I am.”

“See?” Jim said. “We don’t have time for all this and
we have business to do. Doctor, why don’t you show me up there by the Starkey
house? Tell me what happened, about you shooting that magician,” Jim said and
gestured over his shoulder as if back in the direction of the Starkey house.

The doctor squinted and tried to read the face of Jim
Falk, but he couldn’t. Jim just looked serious and normal.

Violet’s eyes darted back and forth. “What? Where are
you two going? You’re just going to leave me here, with, with this?”

Jim turned and said, “Violet Hill, there is nothing to
fear. We won’t be long.”

They left and closed the door.

“Nothing to fear?” she called after him. “Nothing to
fear?” She turned in a half-circle away from the witch and picked up the bottle
of the doctor’s whisky and looked at the witch and took a big swig. “Nothing to
fear.”

The witch sat down on a chair near the fireplace and
stretched her white hands toward the fire to warm them. Violet looked at the hands,
covered in dark symbols ending in talons. She looked at Jim Falk and the doctor,
took another drink, and flicked her eyes once and again toward the witch to try
and catch a glimpse of the face hidden behind the veil. Despite the creature’s
weird clothing and the writing that covered her hands and even crawled up her
wrists in places to her white elbows, what Violet felt coming through the veil
was not fear—a deep, almost sleepy peace was coming from the witch.

Peace? Violet chased this thought away and put her hand
into the sack on her lap and felt the cool, heavy handle of her pistol.

“You’re a dreamer,” the witch suddenly spoke from across
the fire in a soft, deep tone.

Violet’s eyes came slowly up and focused on that area
of the veil where she thought the witch’s mouth might be.

“You’re a dreamer and you dream dreams, talking dreams
and calling dreams. In the tales of the River People who live deep in the
woods, there is a story like this. Calling Woman and Talking God. Have you heard
the tale?” the witch said, and her voice sounded rich and somehow happy. She
spread her hands wide and turned them to warm the backs of them.

“I don’t take in stories that don’t come from the
church or a preacher,” Violet said and gripped the pistol tighter. Jim she
trusted, and the doctor, sure. Jim had said that the witch would not harm her,
but she was in no mood to communicate with the thing.

“I think it’s best if you and I just keep to our own
business, don’t you?” Violet said.

“Very well,” the witch said and continued warming her
weird hands.



It didn’t take Jim and the doctor long to move their
way up the winding path behind the doctor’s house and over the hill to where he
had last seen the magician.

Jim looked up the path to the collapsed house where a
thin spiral of black smoke was still twisting up over the trees and into the gray
sky.

“That’s where the Starkey house was then, right?” Jim
asked the doctor.

“Yes,” Doc Pritham said and turned in a circle looking
at the ground. His feet crunched the frozen mud.

Jim knelt down by the spot where the doctor told him
that the body had been.

“How could I miss?” Doc Pritham stopped spinning and
looked down where Jim was.

“You say you shot him in the head?” Jim asked, now reaching
down and touching the indentation there in the hard ground of the path.

“Shot him right here, look!” The doctor turned and tapped
the back of his own head just under his hat, indicating where he’d put the
bullet in Simon—but he wasn’t so sure now.

“Look here.” Jim got up and walked a few paces away up
toward the house. “Here’s his feet coming down.” He walked along with the feet.
“Coming down.” He pointed in a different place. “Here’s you coming along.”

Jim jogged back down toward the doctor a ways. “Here’s
where you stood and fired. It looks like he ran at you.” The mud made it all
easy.

The doctor said, “He was very interested, I think, in
getting the contents of his sack.”

Jim pondered this for a moment, rubbing his chin and
looking into the doctor’s eyes. He hadn’t considered the sack. He hadn’t heard a
thing about the sack until just now. Something in his mind told him that the contents
of the sack held a clue to where that little baby had disappeared to, a clue to
what the preacher said about the witch’s thumb. Somehow, Simon Starkey had
gotten a hold of some things that belonged to someone else—someone who was a
far piece more powerful than Simon may have understood.

Now Jim came right up to the doctor. “Yes, you shot at
him up close, but look here,” he said, ignoring the doctor’s reference about the
sack and its contents. “You should have brought the body with you.”

“Yes, I relish the idea of dragging a dead magician through
town in the middle of the night, wouldn’t you?”

Jim ignored that and showed the doctor the black blood
in the frosted mud and a round little hole a few inches away. “See here,” Jim
said crouching again and sticking his finger down into the little round hole.
“Your bullet’s down in there somewhere most likely. See where these feet go?”
Jim pointed along the ground in a zigzag kind of way until he was pointing at
the edge of the woods.

The doctor pulled up in his memory the final bullet that
he had snapped off, he thought, into Simon’s brain, but darkness was all he
could see. His lips quivered and twisted and his hands curled at his sides. “That
magician boy,” the doctor said in a deeper voice and pointed to the smoldering
home back up the trail. “He’s in league.”

“Is he now? Either way, we’ll not find the killers by
use of his corpse, since there is no corpse,” Jim said, turning his mind on the
witch or not a witch, Wylene.

Jim smiled a bit, but hid it from the doctor. He’d read
the signs without the help of the leaves.

The two men stood for a while in the frost, listening
and looking back and again at the woods and then at the smoking pile that was
once a home. They turned and looked down at Sparrow. They needed to get back to
Violet and the witch.

The sun was nearly all the way up now, but was only shown
by the ever-gradual lightening of the color of the sky from a dim gray to a
pale milk color. Snow came from different directions in fitful swirls down through
the winding path into town. From here they could see the little church and
Huck’s place on the east side, back behind the church. Smoke rose here and there
from the scattered little homes in the valley. They could just barely make out
the little black spot of the chicken man’s shattered cart. Nothing moved in the
valley except the twirling columns of smoke from the chimneys.

“He’s not gone back into town,” Jim said.

“He’s most likely run off,” the doctor said.

“Or he might be looking for the book and his sack,” Jim
said.

The doctor didn’t say anything.

Then they saw someone walking across the town toward
the church. Then they saw two more. Jim was pretty sure one of them was May, standing
in front of where the door had been busted. But there were other people holding
rifles. They were looking left and looking right. Then they could make out the
forms of Ruth Mosely and John Mosely headed up toward the church.

Jim said to the doctor. “If someone saw me . . .”

The two rushed back into the woods and through the path
to the doctor’s house as snow started dumping out of the sky and everything started
to turn white.

Violet was chewing on some hard bread, still watching
warily the witch on the other side of the fireplace, when the two men came
through the door.

Jim said, “Grab up your things, Violet.”

The doctor moved forward and picked up a bucket of dirt
and threw it on the fire.

“We’ve got to move. Simon, the magician, is alive,” the
doctor said and picked up the sack of books that once belonged to Simon and rolled
it up tight. “He’s moving off to the west.”

Jim watched the doctor pick up the sack.

“He’s following after them,” the witch said not moving
from her rocker.

“Them?” the doctor asked.

“The ones he hates.”

Jim said, “We don’t have time for this. Something’s going
on down at the church. We saw some men with rifles and Ruth and John rushing up
there.”

A fit of snow burst suddenly into the broken window.

The four of them said nothing, but Violet gathered her
things and the witch, Wylene, stood up.

Benjamin Straddler walked alongside Huck Marbo. May was behind
them, looking this way and that. Each of them, their breath steaming, carried a
bundle of wooden slats or tools, a heavy bag of nails jingled at Benjamin’s
side.

“Bill would have fixed this right up,” Huck said, looking
at Benjamin Straddler. Benjamin was looking at the sky.

“He sure would have,” Benjamin said. “I’d like to see
a blue sky sometime, wouldn’t you?”

May nodded her head and Huck said, “Yes.” The snow started.

The three of them got to the church in the center of
town. Benjamin Straddler, with a wide smile on his face, took a long look up and
down at the busted door on the front of the little church.

Huck got himself up the stairs and began studying the
twisted hinges.

“I’d say that we can do a part fix today,” Huck said.
“At least get this part of the door back on, but we’ll have to do more cutting
and all to get this right—more than we can do. We’ll have to ask Hattie, or get
someone from outside Sparrow, to fashion a whole new door if we want it to look
right again, seeing as how the man who made the door is the one that tore it
down and I guess he’s most likely dead now.”

May thought about that. She thought about Bill and Violet
and remembered back to when she was just a little girl. She remembered sitting
in the pews at church between her ma and pa and turning around in the little
wooden pew while the preacher was talking. She remembered turning around and
seeing Bill and Violet sitting there in the back, their faces looking bright as
the sun came in the little windows along the side, the sunlight making Violet’s
red hair glow orange. Now what?

May looked at her pa and Benjamin Straddler and felt
good to be with them. She felt something changing, but couldn’t quite tell exactly
what it was. Something was changing in Sparrow and maybe inside of her, but she
wasn’t sure if it was for the better. The sun seemed a little darker and the
colors and shapes of things a little harsher. She looked back and forth.

Her father started in on some instructions, pointing
and gesturing, but she couldn’t pay attention.

“Alive!” she remembered Benjamin saying over breakfast.
“I know it!”

May smiled and almost laughed remembering her pa’s face
all scrunched up and concerned and then across at Benjamin’s face all wide open
and young-looking, his eyes glittering. “Your Anna lives, Huck Marbo!”

But her pa was angry now. “You need to keep your religion
to yourself, Benjamin Straddler! You may think certain things or see certain
things. But that’s not the way it is with all of us.”

Benjamin turned his eyes down and looked at his
eggs. He fumbled a bit as he talked about seeing his own father’s face in the
face of the outlander, and talking of how his bad dreams had gone, and how the
fear in his heart had disappeared. A lot of what he said didn’t make sense, not
even to him, and Huck couldn’t see where he was going with it or why he was
even saying it. May couldn’t piece it back together in her mind, but what she
could see and what her father saw was that Benjamin Straddler, no matter how
clumsy his words were, believed every word of what he was saying and that his
eyes were shining.

May was smiling as she remembered and giggled a little
at Benjamin’s beaming face.

“What’s funny?” her pa suddenly asked her.

“I don’t know exactly,” May said. And she didn’t.

Then a man with a rifle was standing there on the steps
of the church. She had seen him before at her pa’s. His name she couldn’t remember.
But she remembered him being one of them men that drank and played cards and
went home and didn’t talk much.

“There’s a witch,” the man said. “The preacher’s daughter
seen her and she’s in town. She’s down with the doctor is what she said. She
says that Falk brought the witch down into town just an hour ago or so and that
he’s fixing to turn her loose on what’s left of the good folk of Sparrow. How
can we stand for that? Marbo? You hear?”

Huck was standing there and he was listening, but this
didn’t make any sense. There were too many superstitions in this town, but this
man was standing there with a rifle and Huck looked at May and then back at the
man. “I hear.”

May felt cold and she moved away from the man with the
gun. Falk? A witch? It couldn’t be right.

“What? You say that Falk brought the witch to town?”
Benjamin Straddler asked the man.

“That’s what Merla Mosely said, said she saw him come
in here about an hour ago, that they must’ve been up, way up in the woods and
come down near the hollow where the doctor’s house is. I knew that doctor was
no good. Well, I knew that outlander was no good, but I knew that that doctor was
no good. I won’t be a bit surprised to find out that that magician boy Simon
ain’t somehow wrapped up into all this with them either.”

Then Ruth Mosely and John Mosely were coming up the path
with Merla Mosely and her ma, Aline. Aline had a bruise on her face from where
Ruth had smacked her last night. They were walking fast.

“Get the rest!” Ruth started shouting. “Get everybody!
We’ve got a big problem!”

“Where’s the preacher?” Benjamin asked Huck.

Ruth moved up the steps and didn’t look at Benjamin or
Huck or May and neither did John Mosely; they just went on by and went inside
the church and so did Aline Mosely and Merla Mosely.

“Now what are we going to do?” they heard Ruth saying
inside the church. “Well! Get in here!” she shouted now to the three who were
standing outside. “This involves you too! Get in here!”

There were more people coming now, many of them May didn’t
recognize, but some she did. Some people were people whom she had only seen in
the church and some people were ones whom no one really ever saw ever. But
somehow, Ruth Mosely had drawn them all together here, and May could guess pretty
easily that it was on account of Merla Mosely’s report that Jim Falk had brought
a witch to town.



Simon stumbled again and leaned against the cold tree
in front of him. The morning light in his eyes only brightened the pain that
ran hot and deep in his stomach. The doctor’s bullet was in there somewhere. He
was thirsty and his mind was cursing the doctor for not killing him.

It was hard for Simon to move his body at all without
screaming. Now and again he would look up and see that he’d moved ahead or in
some direction and that he was in a different place from where he was before.
He found himself thinking only half-thoughts and seeing pictures of things that
weren’t there—his mother, strange animals—his memory was full of flashing holes.

He leaned on the cold tree and moved his other hand up
to touch the sticky hair and the burning stripe of open skin that the doctor’s
second bullet made. The blood there was crisp and frozen, but at his belly it
dribbled and sopped. He thought he could hear faint voices and the movement of
feet crunching in the grass. Was that his own voice? His feet?

He staggered onward into the cold, white morning.

Then, with shaking legs, he was crossing over a frozen
stream and then up a hard, little hill. Against a tree, he sat on the little
knob of grass there at the top. Under him, down his sides, the hot blood was
feeding the frosted ground.

He couldn’t believe he was even alive. He raised up his
hands in front of him to see if they were really his. The long, delicate fingers,
so able to be quick and conceal and turn a card, now they were stained red and
flopped toward him. His hands already looked dead. There wasn’t even enough
strength in them now to shake, and before his eyes, against the icy background
of the woods, those hands looked unfamiliar to him, fake, like a bad trick. A
shiver poured through his chest and legs that turned hot quick and then back to
shivers. This happened over and over again, and soon he had forgotten what cold
and hot were at all. He just felt warm and numb and sick and his thoughts raced
away into the frozen sky.

It was then that he saw the shadow move suddenly from
his right. A dark, hooded figure. He was sure he’d seen Death coming.

The figure leaned over him and whispered something. Whether
it was to Simon, he could not tell, he could not even be afraid. He was too
drained. His eyes rolled toward the spot where the figure’s face should be under
the hood, but there was only a flat darkness there. Many times in his life he
had wondered what the end would be like.

“Who . . . who . . . who . . .” Simon managed to croak
with cracked lips.

The dark figure in the hooded cloak knelt down now beside
him and a little glass bottle came up to Simon’s lips and he sucked at the lip
not caring if it was poison or water. A taste like metal and a flood of relief
came spreading through his veins. The nausea left him and the pain came back,
quick and twisting into his stomach. He could hear again the wind through the
bare trees and the rustling of the figure beside him. His ears were burning with
cold. His vision sharpened and he saw the withered and strong, brown hands of
this stranger working at Simon’s naked belly, pressing something dark against
the wound.

The pain of the sudden pressure was too much and he went
out.

Simon woke up in a warm tent. There was a little fire
somewhere near him and he could feel someone close by.

“Don’t try to move.” The voice was hoarse and muffled,
somehow far away.

His head, he could feel, was wrapped tightly with something
that burned and itched and felt oily. The figure was suddenly over top of him,
adjusting him roughly, fidgeting with his wrapped-up head.

Simon rolled his eyes around to take in the tent. It
was made of animal skin and it was square, like one of the homes of the River People.
One wall he could see looked to be made entirely of blackish mud and rocks. At
the same time he smelled it, he saw a mangy-looking dog asleep on its side on
the dirt floor. It was speckled with patches of bare skin, but it had bulging,
coiled, almost cat-looking muscles. But it was a dog. It smelled like a dog.
Was it a wolf?

The figure dropped Simon’s head back down and moved away
to sit on a stone by the fire. The wolf sprung up and meandered to the figure’s
side. Its big, pointed head had powerful jaws and bright silver eyes. It
dropped and resumed its splayed position with a huff on the dirt floor beside
its master.

The figure looked nothing more than a tall pile of dark
rags beside the animal. Then, a hoarse voice from the rags, “There were two men
who came looking for you.”

“Who are you?” Simon asked.

“What do you think they’ll do if they find you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think they’ll kill you? Give you a trial maybe?
Force you to say things that aren’t true like they’re doing in the North? They
think you’re in with the Evil One. What will they do when they open your book
and see what’s written in there?”

“You don’t frighten me.”

“I shouldn’t. I am not the one you should be afraid of.
You should only fear those who have powers to destroy both soul and body. Besides,
I’m only here to help.”

“Why?”

“Because you were dying there by that tree and I found
you.”

Simon was exhausted suddenly from talking. He took a
deep breath that sent bolts of pain into his sides. Then he slept again and dreamed
troubled dreams of being a boy in a cage surrounded by monster men.



Hattie stepped back from the drawing and turned in a
little circle and looked at it again. He figured it might have disappeared if he
looked away; or maybe if he looked away, when he looked back there would be some
other picture there. Some other drawing that didn’t have all those specifics in
it, something that a boy should draw, but not this thing. But there it was, in
curved and even elegant lines—a monster crouching over a heap of twisted and
torn meat and bones that was once a horse. It was looking up right at Hattie,
eyes wide in surprise as if Samuel had caught it there and frozen it somehow in
that instant looking at him, pieces and parts of horse dangling and dribbling
from the side of its weird mouth. Hattie looked closer at the drawing. Samuel
drew the skin there with wrinkles all through it, wrinkles and pocks and scabs
and cracks, so many lines. And worms or tubes like long leaches grabbed from
inside its mouth, burrowing into the horse’s hide.

The arms and legs looked like a man’s, but they had been
stretched long and they bent differently against the normal way and wherever
they seemed to need to as if there were no bones in them at all. The face was
what really got to him. It was not just one face, but looked to be the faces of
many different animals and men all patchworked and layered and fitted somehow
over a wedge-shaped skull that ended in that weird maw of broken, angular
teeth. That mouth was ready to take whatever shape was necessary to fit whatever
prey inside, pulled and bitten by the long, dark worms that twisted this way
and that from the open mouth.

On its back were long, pointed quills that ended in what
appeared to be little pointed hands or in some places like a bug’s pincers. And
its eyes were wide and empty and, more than menacing, they looked themselves to
be frightened and pitiful like the eyes of someone in hopeless anguish.

Samuel sat over in the corner of the room now, rocking
in place and humming to himself. Hattie didn’t know what to do and he was tired
of that feeling. He was tired of not knowing what to do. He was tired of thinking
of leaving Sparrow altogether, but where would he go? This was his father’s
house and his father’s house before him. Where would a Jones go, but Sparrow?

Hattie picked up the drawing and walked over to Samuel.

“Samuel,” Hattie said and knelt down beside the boy,
putting the drawing near his round, plain face. “Samuel, where did you see this?”