The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (6 page)

He felt her shudder with her whole body when he said
it. Then he said, “Let’s get you into town and then I’ll come back out here and
maybe, after that, we won’t have to worry about it anymore.”

“What will you do?” May asked.

“My job,” Jim said and meant it.

Jim got May into town.

She squeezed his arm pretty hard and ran off toward her
pa’s shop without looking back at him.

Jim unrolled his gear bag and got out his gear and checked
it. He laid down his coat. Then he geared up.

His hatchet he slung over his left shoulder on a long,
tightly braided leather strap. This hatchet had been his pa’s, and his pa had
executed many evil things with it. He adjusted the strap around his waist so
that it wouldn’t drag along as he ran.

Then he fed the Dracon pepperbox pistol with six shots
of silver-lode and holstered it. This was the weapon and ammo Barnhouse had
secured for him. He wished he had packed better ordnance; he wished Barnhouse
was along with him; but this was it, and it was time.

Finally, he put on his leather shirt and collar. This
protected his neck and chest from claws and spines and raggedy teeth.

He hefted his hatchet a moment in his right hand, straightened
his hat, and plunged into the woods.

He moved fast.

Outlined in his memory, punched like a stamp, Ithacus
Falk stood. This was his pa. “When you’re trained in on the jitters, the
jitters is trained in on you. That’s the thing, boy.”

These woods were thick, and it wasn’t long until all
he could hear was the noise of his breath and his boots crunching on the dead leaves.
Once he got in a ways, he stopped again and unraveled his pack. From inside a
small pocket deep in, he pulled out a leather pouch. Out of this, he got two
green as grass leaves. He put them in his mouth and chewed them. Then he
swallowed them with his eyes closed.

He took a good drink from his flask, rolled his pack
up, and then started back slow up the hill. The leaves opened up the colors a bit.

Where there had been only black and gray, now there was
brown and some red, even some purples and a lemon yellow.

Then his nose opened up too. The crisp, black smell of
mud and the raspberry and smoke smell of the moving wind filled up his nose. He
heard now too the sleeping insects waiting, buried, for spring. Mostly, though,
he could feel the jitter-trail now, heavy as wet rope, leading him through the
trees.

The hill rose up and up and up, and Jim walked slowly.
This served to conserve his energy as well as keep the noise down.

The two main things he was going to do today were completely
out.

He marched and stopped and ran and stopped and looked
through the woods and ran and stopped again.

Finally, he came up over a crest and saw it. There it
was. Hunched over a log. It was an ugly, messed-up thing and Bill was right—its
eyes were like egg yolks and its face was gray.

It kept using one of its mangled claws to push its drooping
bottom jaw up. As if it couldn’t keep its own mouth closed for the weight of
its lower jaw.

The whole beast looked built from the throw-away parts
of other animals: goats, horses, fish; scales glittered under fur, antlers
twisted out of its back and head, and horns sprouted from its legs and thighs.

What’s it doing scrabbling its lopper-jawed self all
over that log? Lookin’ for what?

Jim hunkered down behind a lightning-cracked tree near
the edge of the clearing. The wind was mercifully still so the thing might not
pick him up right away, but Jim knew it was just a question of time now. When
the attention came off the log its full focus would be on him.

The spook paced now, back and forth, its wet eyes staring
at the log.

There must be something alive in there.

He could see the log shaking a little, and it was just
wide enough for maybe a rabbit or a mole or a skunk.

And then there was a skunk, and, just like that, the
wind shifted the stink his way.

“And the little skunk said, ‘Well, bless my soul,’” he
mumbled.

Now up came the skunk skittering through the woods and
straight past Jim. Jim looked up and the spook caught him in the eyes and held
him in its pinhole pupils.          

Jim heard a voice in his head. It was the low, sinister
voice of the spook. “Jim Falk,” it asked, “do you want to die?”

Jim said, “No.”

The thing rambled forward shaking its massive head and
wheezing, a few pincers emerging on long, black stalks from under its mane.

Jim stood and steadied himself.

It stopped by a tree and cocked its enormous head. Its
jaw lolled against the ground. It froze. Its gaze fixed on him. It gathered itself.
Jim watched its muscles bunching.

Jim threw his coat’s left breast open. The Dracon pistol
glinted mutely in the gray forest.

The spook lunged at him, and Jim Falk drew the weapon
and popped the trigger in one move.

His hand went numb with the blast, and a singing entered
his ears. The flash of the weapon left red, sunny swirls on his vision, and his
nose burned with the blue smell of powder smoke.

Six balls of the special silver-lode erupted from the
gun and met all at once with flat, wet thuds against the spook.

One in the thing’s head below the left eye, one in the
center of the chest, one in the pooch of the thing’s baggy stomach, one in its
wrinkly neck, one in its left leg and one in its right.

“One says good morning and one says good night,” Jim
Falk said and watched it drop dead. The eyes in the head still moved.

Jim holstered his gun and pulled his weird hatchet.
He could see the silver-lode sinking away into the beast, producing gray twirls
of smoke.

He leapt on its molting back and hacked full force at
the muscular, convulsing neck of the spook.

Forged to the purpose, his hatchet rose and fell and
stuck and sawed and rose and fell and twisted and pulled many, many times before
the neck was severed enough to permit him to wrest off the head.

The forest floor was matted then with black juice and
offal. Nothing would grow here in spring.

Jim used both hands and tossed the wide, ugly head to
the side. The eyes, though dulled in luster, still blinked slowly and watched,
the mouth yawning in despair, as Jim doused its separate body in the special
burning oil and, as with flint and tinder, set it ablaze.

The smoke billowed black and thick.

Jim looked at the head and the face of the thing. It
was cruel, he thought, that something so utterly pitiful, false, and evil-bent should
be alive.

Then Jim wrapped up the head in a woven blanket and tied
it with a cord.

He headed down the hill and, at the bottom, back toward
the road. He headed for Violet and Bill’s place.

The sun washed through the white sky. It waved and flickered
through the creaking black trees. It reminded him exactly of golden wheat and
warmth—a time his father had dunked Jim’s hands in warm water when he was a boy
and rubbed his big coarse hands over his own. “Get all the dirt off for
dinner.”

Jim got a little smile then and slung the head of the
thing over his left shoulder and walked onto the road as the rays of the sun
disappeared back into the clouds.



Violet was out on the porch. She was up on a stepstool
and trying with a rag and water to clear out the rest of a wasps’ nest that had
been long abandoned, but stuffed in the corner under the roof. A little whistling
could be heard coming up the road. It was an old song. Violet knew it, but she
couldn’t quite place the words.

Soon she saw Jim Falk’s brown hat and gaunt frame marching
up the dusty trail with a woven bag over his shoulder. Whatever was in the bag
she didn’t know, but she felt a heavy chill in her heart when she saw it. Was
it moving?

She was about to run down to meet him when she saw him,
but the sight of that sack kept her back. She stood on the porch as a sudden,
harsh wind picked up her orange hair and whipped it out of its bun and blew
over her water bucket.

“Hoo-wee! Wind’s pickin’ up!” Jim called through the
sudden gale. “Gonna be a bad storm tonight! Gonna get cold! I killed your spook!”

He was at the porch now. Standing there, he looked shorter
than her and he tilted his head to look up at her. It was then the wind gusted
up again and caught his hat and floated it out into the road.

She smiled then as he scrambled after his hat in the
wind—first left, then right, trying to catch his hat, then back up the road, then
back down. At one point, the hat spun right in front of him as if an invisible
man was twirling it on an invisible cane.

This got Violet to laughing and when she laughed she
really cackled loud, which brought Bill out from the back somewhere where he had
been working.

He didn’t see much that was funny. By the time he got
there, Jim had got his hat back on his head.

Jim smiled a little and licked his lips and looked around
and hefted the sack from off his shoulder and onto their little front yard. The
grass was all dead here.

“Well, you folks don’t need worry anymore. I killed your
spook, and here’s its head in my woven sack.”

He raised the sack, but the couple just stood there.

He raised it again and pointed back toward the
woods.

Jim didn’t know what to say next, so he said, “As for
any kind of a fee, I am going to waive it on account of I guess I expected this
hunt to take almost a month and be hiking in snowy woods next week or two. Since
I did none of those, I just figure a good meal and a night’s rest before I head
on my way will be payment enough.”

Violet smiled wide, but Bill’s eyes were fixated on the
woven sack. It was of checkered cloth, red and black and yellow and blue. It
was also seeped with a blackish, oily blood.

“Mr. Falk,” Bill said, “I would like to see this thing’s
dead head as proof.”

Jim looked at Bill and then looked at Violet. The wind
grew still and now the shadows of evening crept in on the edges. Jim looked
down at the sack in the dwindling light and said, “It may be best for Violet to
go inside, then.”

“What will you do with it?” Violet asked quick as though
she didn’t mean to.

“Do?” Jim kicked it a little. “You do the same thing
to all of them. You burn them and scatter the ashes in running water.”

“You do all that later.” Bill took a step toward the
bundle. “Violet, you go on up inside.”

Violet looked at the two men who were looking at each
other. Then she went up the steps, over the porch and into the house. She closed
the door and stood right behind it with her back to it, turning her green eyes
toward the door as if she might see through it.

Jim hunkered down and flipped open the blanket. Inside
was the severed head of a pony.

Bill Hill winced and jerked his head.

Jim’s eyes darted over the stinking pony head, searching
for the ugly face he had seen in the woods. Where was the great maw and the
yellow-yolk eyes with the black pinhole pupils? Where was the grisly neck that
had taken thirteen hatchet swings?

Bill said, “What the hell is this? Some kind of trick?”

Jim mouthed something.

“What? What did you say?” Bill asked again. A power,
an angry power was growing in Bill’s voice and throat.

Jim could suddenly feel how close he was standing and
saw Bill’s fists clench and tighten.

Jim mumbled again.

“I suppose you come up around here to play parlor tricks
for me and my Violet.” The anger burned in Bill’s every word now. He stepped in
toward Jim and stared him straight in the eye, nose to nose.

Bill’s voice got low to a whisper. “My wife . . .”
He put his hand on the back of Jim’s head and pulled his ear closer to his
mouth, and whispered now, even hoarser, even lower. “My wife can’t sleep. She’s
going crazy with fear. She has night terrors. She cuts the sheets with her
toenails trying to run from this thing in her sleep. Sometimes she mistakes her
own husband in the night for the beast, and curses me in God’s name
. . .
” His voice had become a rasp; his clutch
on the back of Jim’s head was desperate now.

“Stranger,” Jim said calm and clear, “I don’t know you
and I don’t know your Violet, and I don’t know why I would play such a trick,
unless I was charging you money and planned to run off with your money. Which I
am not and do not. Now, if you would, please let go my neck.”

Bill did let go and Jim said, “The tricks of the Evil
One are not new to me, nor to anyone who was schooled in the ways as I was.” He
walked in a slow circle around the pony head. “Sometimes the Evil One, by means
of a metamorphosis, will transform one of his fiends into a fair form in order
to . . .”

He stopped and looked at Bill and then he rolled the
pony’s head from the blanket. “What I killed in the woods was not a pony, Bill.
But the Evil One has made a mockery of my good deed.”

Bill looked Jim Falk over. Jim looked fine and honest,
but Bill sensed something wasn’t right. The Evil One? Did he mean the Evil One?
He thought of Violet, his beautiful Violet.

“Leave,” Bill said, “Leave Sparrow and don’t come back.
If you come back I will kill you dead. My wife has no one to turn to now.”

With that, Bill Hill walked back up in his house, leaving
Jim Falk with a checkered blanket and a pony head.

Bill paused inside the door and looked back out to see what
Jim Falk was doing out there. Violet was standing with her back to him.

Jim was wrapping up the dead head.

Bill was looking. He was looking and then his belly got
ill. Looking at the pony head, watching Jim roll it back up into the woven blanket,
he started to turn away and shut the door. But just then, did he see the eyes
move? Did they? Did they roll around in the head and look right up at him? Did
they turn yellow?

Bill swallowed hard and shut the door. He looked at the
back of his wife’s head, the way her red hair draped down her neck and back. He
remembered that once she had been young and that her smile had been bright and
that she danced with her arms linked with the others girls in a circle. He
remembered that there had once been a laughter that came out of her that made
his own hard face brighten, that made him think of clear skies and good wine.

He looked around at his home: that wood table his pa
made, the book of scriptures, the dirty candles.

Maybe he didn’t see those pony-head eyes looking at him.
He shook it off and pinched between his eyebrows together with his thumb and
forefinger, as though he could squeeze a better vision by that. He looked again
around his front room: that little table and chairs and the hard, brown wood of
the floor.

When he looked up, Violet was gone. He heard Violet shuffling
around in the bedroom off to the side and the wind blow against the side of the
house.

“Nahhh,” he said aloud and went back in his bedroom to
talk to his wife.

She was in there changing the sheets on the bed and she
had a look in her eyes that he hadn’t seen in some time.

“Where’s Mr. Falk, gone off so soon?” Violet said when
he walked in. She was looking at the bed.

“He’s getting to his stuff. He’s all done now,” Bill
said and looked away from her. Out the window of the bedroom he could see the worn-out
side of the back house.

“He got the spook, Violet.” Bill said.

He looked at her and saw right away that she wasn’t sure
she believed that.

“What did it look like?”

“Violet, I don’t want to say.” Bill wanted this to be
the end of it.

She finished up the pillow and looked back up at him.

Her eyes were hungry for specifics. “And then will he
burn the head?”

Bill leaned up against the wall by the window. “I suppose
he’ll take it off somewhere and scatter its ashes in the water as he said.
Maybe he’ll take the old path down the creek to the river and do it there. I
don’t know. Tonight, maybe. All’s important now is that you don’t need to worry
anymore.”

She patted the pillow.

Some of the settled hardness lifted from her pretty face,
and she walked toward him and squeezed him close with thin arms. “I knew it
would work,” she said. “I was scared at first what Vernon and Ruth and all the
others would think if we had around a man like Jim, but now . . .”

She let go of her husband and went over and sat down
on the bed, looking out the window and then up at the ceiling. “Now, whether they
believe me or not, we know what we saw and what he killed and now it’s over.
Whether they ever believe us or not, now we can know.”

She stared at the window. “Those whispers and those
things I saw in the snow.”

Bill stepped in front of the window.

She stood a moment with her hands in fists at her sides
and then swallowed and ran to him and kissed his balding head and then his
mouth, hard.

She kissed him again and again and again.

Bill didn’t kiss back.



Outside, Jim was finishing up.

He knew what he had to do, but he had no idea what to
do; but he had to do something.

He wrapped up the head again and looked at the blanket.
He looked at the colors on the blanket and thought of long, long ago. He
thought of his father talking with the old woman. He remembered the fire and the
dancing men of the river tribe. He was getting bothered and he reached into his
pocket and grabbed his little book. He flipped about in it and looked for something,
glancing back at the blanket that was still sopping with the gross blood of the
spook or the pony head.

The thing about it was that he didn’t know for sure now
if he had killed the spook and killed the spook right. He paged furiously through
his notes.

Never before had he seen one of these metamorphoses.
He talked about them because he heard his pa talk about them at Old Magic Woman’s
tent. He’d also read parts of it from a book that his pa had showed him—a book
that Barnhouse didn’t have.

Also, there was another thought. He hadn’t taken too
many of the leaves over time, had he? Old Magic Woman said you could eat too many
leaves and that they might have some permanent effect of memory loss. Or the
leaves might get too potent and burn your mind up in an instant.

“Them leaves’ll help you out as soon as they mess ya
up,” his pa said to him around the fire one night. “Now you take one now, and you
sit here with me, and I’m gonna take one, and we’re gonna sit here together,
and when the world starts changin’ around you, you just sit tight. Keep still
and then there’s no problem. That’s the key. Keep still.”

He tried. He tried to keep still.

Old Magic Woman, though, after that, she tried to teach
him the art of growing the plants just right and making it so that they didn’t
get too powerful, and told him when to pick ’em so that they didn’t turn to
poison
.
But he didn’t listen well and he couldn’t recall any of that anymore.
And she was gone.

He relied on Barnhouse now. But those sources were back
up north. The decision was that he would go on out alone.

But hold on. Jim was sure he hadn’t got too many leaves
in him that day to believe that a pony was a spook. And besides all that, the
pretty Marbo girl, May, she said there were no more horses around. So why would
there be any ponies at all?

That thought stopped him for a second. No horses. Somewhere
in his mind he remembered a story that Old Magic Woman had told him. A story of
a great warrior who had been killed by the horse people and because of how he
died, the people in the village no longer were able to keep horses. It was hard
to remember. He tried remembering too, another story of a baby born of the Evil
One with horse’s hooves and a tail . . . he couldn’t remember.

He hadn’t a lot of time, though. He moved to the back
house to snatch up his gear. He got the feeling that Bill Hill’s rifle snout
might come poking out of one of the windows and drop him like a duck. He resumed
his urgency.

He got in the door and put down the woven sack and got
all his gear. He rolled out his gear on the bed and checked to make sure it was
all there: the long rifle, all his pouches, his bullets, extra silver-lode, the
powders, the hatchet, and the other pouches with specials in them. He glanced
it over, his eyes picking out each detail. He rolled it back up and strapped it
on his back.

Once he got it all together and strapped up on his back,
he turned to go out the door. He’d decided to take the old trail all the way to
the river and then burn and distribute the ashes of the head there. It was a
strong river.

He reached down by the door where he put the sack and
pulled it up.

It was empty.

Jim whirled back around and scanned the room across—table,
chair, bed, window. There, just in time, a dark form, a watery shadow in the
corner of his eye, slipped out through the half-cracked window, and he watched
it float lazily off into the woods.

Then, once it melted into the thick woods, he felt immediately
the eyes staring at him. His neck, chest, and belly got heavy again with the
jitters.

The eyes of something waited just beyond the edge, out
the window, just up in the tree line. Something he couldn’t see, but something
that could see him. The eyes winked, bright with evil.

He wanted to run back down to the Hills’. To run down
there and bang on their door and scream at them to get out, get out! He’d dump
his special powder in a circle around the house; he’d catch up Violet over his
shoulder . . .

He didn’t budge. His gut told him that Bill was not a
maker of idle threats. He fully expected to be shot and killed if he came down
by that house again.

No.

His word was his own to keep. He said he’d leave Sparrow
and he would.

He’d leave Sparrow, but he’d go by way of these woods.
He’d go right at those killer eyes and find out.

He looked back in the corner by the door where the woven
sack sat. He looked at the space where the dead head used to be and knew beyond
doubting that the Evil One had taken an interest in Sparrow.

Then he looked out the window into the woods.



Through the night, the howls came again and again.

Benjamin Straddler sat at his table with his wife and
listened.

They were eating some pork chops, and both of them were
looking at each other.

“Do you want another pork chop?” Lane asked.

“There haven’t been wolves in Sparrow since I was a boy.”
Benjamin watched her fork over a chop.

Lane got up from the table and went to the stove. “There’s
two more sitting in here, and I won’t be able to eat another.”

“I might go over to Huck’s tonight.” He waited for her
to reply, but she busied herself. “There’ll be men over there talking about the
wolves, and there’s a bright moon tonight too, Lane. A bright moon,” he said
and turned his head a bit toward the window as another round of baying struck.
“And there’s wolves.” Something far away caught his memory for a moment.

“Well, what am I supposed to do while you’re there?”
she snapped suddenly with a flick of her long, brown hair. “Lock the doors?”

Lane turned back to the sink and then back to Benjamin.
She didn’t care how many men got together to sit around and drink and make
decisions. A few years back, when the snows had come and the wolves came down
from the mountains looking for food, those men sat around drinking and deciding
and nothing came of it then except some decisions about who would get what
house in case the other died.

She looked in Benjamin’s good eye. “What if while you’re
down there talkin’ something comes through here? What if a pack of them gray
wolves comes through here? Or what about what if the Hills are right?”

She looked down at the floor and then back up at him.
Her brown eyes were watery. “Benji, what if them wolves are bringing with ’em
what they brought before? What if the Hills are right?”

Benjamin Straddler held closed a place in his mind that
kept a memory. “Lane, no one really knows what all happened back then. This is
a different time. Things aren’t just like they were back then just because
we’re hearing wolves in the night. I’ll come back. I won’t be far off, and I
won’t be long. I am going to go and see and then I’ll be back. I’ll come back
and we’ll sit together.”

She paused in memory and squeezed her eyes together and
remembered all those years ago.

All those years ago, Benji came home one night during
that big blizzard, that big blizzard that froze off Vernon Mosely’s ears, and
Benji was screaming and carrying on something awful. Usual times when he was
doing this sort of thing, Lane would either run out the back and wait it out,
or yell at him until he was shut up, or even please him until he was shut up
depending on how it was he reacted to things.

He came in.

It was cold and he was standing there and his eyes were
red and his skin was white and blue. He went forward and backward.

She ran to him and threw a blanket on his body and he
slumped down on a wood chair and she started some hot water in a pot.

He stared at the floor of the house and, after a while,
a long stream of vomit came up his throat and slapped at the floor of the
kitchen. It stank, it stank bad.

She started to clean it anyway and he started to talk.

“There was a way they could find animals,” he slurred
and stood teetering looking out the window and shaking his head. Almost sobbing,
he sat back down only to stand again, his eyes wide, his finger pointing at the
window. Then he sat down again and mumbled something and was still for a long
time.

Then suddenly he shouted: “Did
they
know it? No!”
He moved his hands around as if there were a lot of people listening. “
They
didn’t know the way! I knew it!”

“I know, Benji,” she whispered. This was an old story
to her. She’d heard it from all angles—sober, drunk, asleep, and in prayer.

She kept cleaning, and small, hot tears traced her cheeks
and dangled from her chin.

“Them stupid, greedy animals!” He pounded his foot near
her head, pinching her long hair.

“Them stupid, dumb-as-dogs-and-pigs animals!”

When her finger, through the cloth, got warm on the vomit,
she gave up. She retreated to the kitchen table. She put her head on the table.

“I was just a little boy! ‘I don’t care!’ I said!
‘I’ll tie you up! I’ll eat you alive!’”

Lane was sobbing now, surrounded by her dark hair, sucking
in air over the table.

“Tie ’em up. Tie up their mouths!” Benjamin Straddler
stood up in his kitchen and took off his coat and his shirt and his pants.

“Lane!” He looked at her sad and poisonous. “Don’t look
at me. Go to bed. Go to bed! You can’t see me! You can’t see me!”

Now she was done crying. Her fury was bright, but her
words came in a whisper. “You’ll die this way, Benjamin Straddler. You’ll die
like this! There’s nothing on this earth can save a man so poisoned!”

Benjamin reeled in hot, drunk anger. The door to his
bedroom clapped shut and locked as Lane fled from his swinging arms.

He wet himself and fouled the kitchen, all the time thinking
about the black, hot heart of the wolf filling his mouth.