The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (35 page)

“The Marbos?” Simon said to himself.

“And a red-headed woman. I saw the whole lot of them
moving through the woods and then out past the Ridges and on into the mountains.”

Simon used his arms and slid himself down off the little
cot and he stood on his own legs and limped closer to the fire and the stranger.
His legs felt strong, like they were his own.

Then the stranger raised his cloaked and musty-smelling
arm and put his hand on Simon’s shoulder. “You’re safe here,” the stranger
said. “You can stay with me until you’re well. We’ll keep an eye on this town a
while longer. They may need you soon.”

“And what do you want from me?”

“Let me teach you.”

“Teach me?” Simon tried again to see into the darkness
under the hood.

“You think, if you chase these monsters down, these creatures
that took your little sister and took your mother, that you’ll be able to
destroy them somehow? That you’ll be able to get revenge?”

Simon looked down at his hands.

“Do you think, if you are able to recover your book of
spells from whoever may have taken it from you, that you will be able to learn
the dark ways and that the dark ways will help you get revenge?”

Simon said nothing for a long while. A hum started in
his head and he thought he could hear music, a kind of tinkling bell music. He
felt sleepy again and he felt all his pain lifting away. He sat quietly on the
little cot while the stranger worked at the long wooden table with the shelves
over the top of it filled with odd-shaped bottles and jars of dark stuff. Every
so often, the stranger would stop and hum for a while something that sounded
like the song that played in Simon’s head—a crooning, rising and falling song
of bells and wind. Simon never heard a song like that again and could never
remember it after.

“What’s that you’re doing?” Simon asked.

“Medicine,” the stranger said, “making medicine.”

Simon hadn’t any idea how long he’d been staring at this
stranger without a face. He thought it was a few days, but considering he’d
been shot in the head, he wasn’t sure he could be so healed in only a few days.
The soft brown walls of the hut seemed to move in and out with his breath. At
times he couldn’t tell whether he was thinking things or saying them out loud.
The wild dog, Fenny, was flickering with the strange shadows around the fire.

“I’d like to go outside,” Simon said, a fear growing
in his gut.

The stranger turned his hooded head a little to the side.
“Outside?”

“I think I need some air.”

The stranger lifted a hand and in his hand there was
a bright silver knife, long and ornamented with an odd, twisted blade.

“Take this with you in case there’s something out there.
I’ve heard wolves howling tonight.”

Simon looked at the sleeping dog and back at the man
in the robe. He slowly got up off the cot and walked toward the man.

“Something you want to talk about?” the faceless man
asked. Simon looked at the knife that the stranger was holding. He concentrated
on the blade. At first he thought that etched along its handle he could see the
face of the dog that was by the fire, but then he pinched his forehead and looked
again. There were dragons on it—dragons that twisted and curled up and down the
hilt, dragons in a maze of dragons. The blade twisted too, like a slow corkscrew,
to a spaded tip. In fact, it looked less like a knife and more like the tail of
one of the silver creatures twisted around the hilt. He recognized it. It
almost spoke to him.

“Where did you get that knife?” Simon asked.

“Does it matter?” the stranger asked without turning
his head. “I am giving it to you now.” The stranger said and set the knife there
on the table.

Simon walked slowly toward the faceless man and his knife.
This knife was very familiar to Simon. In fact, it looked just like the knife
that he remembered from his dream, the knife his father had slung on his belt.
It was one of the few memories that had stayed together in his dreams from when
he even knew his parents at all. It was a true memory now, flashing forward
from his deeper mind: his father’s dragon knife bouncing in front of him as
they walked along a path by a river somewhere in Simon’s past. In fact—and he
knew it now—this was his father’s knife.

Simon reached for the knife, but did not grab it. He
yanked the hood and yanked it hard.

The back of the stranger’s head was gnarled and the long
black hairs that swirled there against the brown and gray skin were thick and
almost bright. Something came off of the head like a wave and hit Simon in the
face. At first that’s what it felt like. It felt as if something hit him in the
face, but that wasn’t quite right. Whatever was coming off of the back of the
stranger’s head was more like light or wind or something that pushed at him like
heavy water. Simon’s desire to see the face of the stranger left him as a kind
of hum pushed into his mind. His stomach curled and his head went dizzy. He was
sure that suddenly he could hear voices, forbidding voices. He looked away from
the back of the stranger’s head and to the knife. He was sure that it was his
father’s dagger.

Quietly, the stranger turned to face him. Simon almost
fell backward into the fire. It was a woman—an old woman with a kind smile and
bright eyes.

“Where did you get that knife?” Simon asked, holding
his head and curling his lips.

“You know this knife, Simon Starkey,” she said. “This
knife once belonged to your father. Your real father.”

“My real father is dead.”

“And so your real mother.”

“Did you kill them? Is that what you’re telling me? I
could end your life right now, old woman.”

“Could you? Perhaps. But then you would never know what
it means to live a life without fear. You would never know how to live a life
in which you could see them again. You’ve lived so long with fear. It is a part
of you now.”

Simon sighed.

“I can show you that. A life without fear. I can show
you much more than that, though. I can let you see your father again, and your
mother. I can show you the Waycraft.”

“They’ll come after me and kill me for sure then. The
Waycraft. What you’re talking about. That’s what they’re out to destroy. You
know that. It’s a weak way. It’s a way of herbs and prayers. They’ll come for
me for sure.”

The stranger turned. “They’ll come after you anyway.”

The stranger handed Simon the knife.

Simon took it and held it in both hands. He looked at
it quietly. Every strange twist and curve of the blade brought odd, hacked bits
of memory into his mind’s eye: his father’s brown hands, his mother’s coat coming
over him in a snowstorm.

“What do I do?”

“You must trust me. First you must decide to trust me.
Because I might tell you to do things that aren’t going to make any sense to
you. Things that won’t make any sense at all.”

“I need to think about this.”

“Then go. Take the knife. You are free to go.”

“Go?” Simon asked. “Go where? My home is burned and they
are sure to come for me. The outlander and the doctor will hunt me for a witch.”

Simon looked at the stranger’s kind face. Then he slid
the knife into his jacket and walked out of the little hut and into the cold
night.

He stood in the darkness outside of the tent and pulled
the knife out of his jacket and looked at it. He listened to the wolves baying
in the distance.

The air was crisp and he felt the strength in his legs
and in his arms. He went to the edge of the hill next to the little valley where
the stranger’s hut was. On top of the hill he saw the deeper valley below. This
was not a small hill. The stranger had brought him up to the top of a tall
mountain. Far below him in the valley, he could see a brown and orange thing
rising from a patch of brown, a long gray string of smoke twirled up into the
sky. It was the church. The church was burning.

He mumbled to himself, “This is what they wanted.”

He looked back at the stranger’s hut and saw that the
big gray wolf, Fenny, had stepped out into the darkness too. It had a great,
wide, hairy back and the light from inside the hut passed around it, making a
moving shadow of its form. The old wolf wandered lazily through the snowy
hillside and came up beside him looking down into the valley below and panting.
Simon looked at the knife again. Could he? She was offering him something that
he’d never dreamed to be offered. He thought of his real mother disappearing
into the hands and cloaks of those evil men when he was young, and then he
thought of Elsie. Hadn’t he done the same to her and worse? Hadn’t he given her
over to a worse evil than even his real mother? It had been his own hand that
handed her over—and now this old woman was offering him a way. A way. Before he
had only wanted power, but now he felt there was something beyond power,
something different, and he felt something in him shift and lean.

The sky was darkened by racing clouds. Here and again
the moon would suddenly shine big and bright and round through a hole in the
clouds that moved along. There were barks in the distance and then a whooping
and a howl. Another long and low howl answered from the valley.

Fenny didn’t seem to mind and he didn’t answer. He looked
along in the valley and then back up at Simon. Something grew warm inside of
him as he looked down across the valley.

Simon was thinking that the killers had spent years trying
to destroy this town, this little town of Sparrow that was miles from anywhere
except the Ridges where the people that didn’t believe like the people in
Sparrow went to live.

The killers had nothing to do with the folks at the Ridges
as far as Simon had heard. Each time a spook had shown up, it followed just
after the wolves had come down off of the mountain. It might be this very mountain
here that the spook lived upon and fed on what was about until the wolves were
run out of their own territory. These things were old. Many people had stopped
believing in them. There were three places where Simon had read about things
that were like the killers and were like these creatures that the folks called
spooks or demons. One place was in the books that the killers had given him to
study the evil way, one was in the scriptures, and the other was in Sparrow.

He looked back at the tent. Whether he followed the Way
or wandered the forests, there would be no peace for him. He was made to live
in a time of hatred and fire and slavery and men who murdered parents. He was
made to live in a time when demons hunted the living. This old woman was offering
him something, but who was she? She might herself be a kind of witch. But she
was offering him something different.

He looked at the animal that sat neatly beside him on
the cliff as more howls were answered in the valley. This wolf seemed to be studying
the situation just as he was. The animal seemed thoughtful and it wasn’t
snarling or growling at him. In fact, it pushed its nuzzle up under Simon’s
hand and nudged his palm.

He patted Fenny’s head and Fenny butted his muzzle into
Simon’s hand. He watched the smoke of the far-off church twist around and back
and forth in the wind. The killers had wanted this all along, but maybe couldn’t
find a way to do it themselves. Maybe they had needed help somehow from the
people of Sparrow. Maybe Simon himself had somehow become trapped in this
scheme. Perhaps he was never meant to survive. His mind started to put the pieces
together of a very strange puzzle as he scratched the wolf’s head.

As was regular in her preparations, Ruth Mosely walked backwards
in a slow circle around the table sprinkling some dark powder from a pouch as
she went. She mumbled to herself and looked up toward the ceiling, showing the
whites of her eyes. She went this way around the little table three times. Then
she got into another sack that she had on her and produced some long candles
and stands and set five around on the table. She moved some chairs around,
adjusting them here and there, and then she stopped all her fidgeting, went
slow to her knees, and cried.

Ruth cried hard, hard enough that a wail came up from
inside of her belly and out of her mouth. She couldn’t stop it. John Mosely was
dead. He’d been shot in the face by the outlander whose ashes were now black
and blowing in the snow and wind over the cinders of the church. But they’d
killed John. Shot him in the face. She wondered if John had known before he’d
crossed over that his face was gone—or if he’d only felt a heat and then . . .

She sobbed again, but started to get to her feet. In
her mind, she cursed the day she’d made the pact. She’d paid along the way for her
power. Paid in shades and forms that she’d pushed down inside her mind never
again to be uncovered, but the life of her husband John Mosely was a heavy
toll. It hurt her heart, surely, but it might also hurt her plans. It hurt the
truth that she stood for, but at the same time, too, it might help her. This
brother of his, Vernon the preacher, had got himself tangled up somehow in the
business of talking to known witches, like Wylene.

Ruth’s eyes went into a dark squint. Somehow that Wylene,
the one they’d called another name long ago, the one who’d somehow crawled up
from the beforetimes, had regained her strength.

In the ultimate scheme, tying in the preacher of the
Way with a known witch would serve her well. It would serve her well and Varney
Mull would hear of it today. The two of them had shut Wylene away, shut her down
with the Wastrel, and she didn’t know how it was that the creature had escaped
the powerful spell. The turnkey, which was the witch’s thumb, had come up
missing, and she was sure it had something to do with that Jim Falk. She thought
about that man for a moment, that outlander, his strange blue eyes, the packs
and satchels around him, the beat-up hat. She recognized the feel of him from
tales of old.

Even though the killers and others, like Varney Mull,
had spent ages removing the bloodlines from the earth, there were always rumors
that there would be another, another like the first, and that he would come
again and again until his stories were remembered as true. She shuddered and
cleared her head. Varney Mull was coming with his men, if they were men. Even
if, as she thought, this James Falk was one of these ancient hunters, it was
over now anyway and Varney Mull would pay her handsomely for her deeds, in money
or powers or both. Falk had been burned to ashes along with his witch prey and
a preacher and the rest of that troublesome lot that had formed up around him.

Ruth mumbled some quick and strange words to herself
and stood up and started lighting the candles. Soon after the room was washed in
the yellow light, the knocks came at the wood door to the cellar.

Then they came, creaking down the narrow stairs. One
by one the faces came out of the dark opening of the stairwell into the candlelight.
Down came the faces to sit around the table and the candles, each face solemn,
the eyes half closed and twinkling in the candle flames. Men and women of
Sparrow, some from the Ridges, but not many. Not many yet. Just enough to fill
this little dark room.

Why the men and women of River’s End resisted, Ruth couldn’t
say. She held her body tight, preventing the shudder she felt as she saw the
faces of her brothers being swallowed up in the dark maw of the thing Varney
sent. The Waycraft. Those two words poisoned her mind. The simple people who
followed the Waycraft and its supposed healing power, its kind-hearted magic,
its total lies. Her brothers were among the folk that believed. Even when the
beasts came, they couldn’t summon the wisdom to see through the falseness of
old stories and join her cause. They resisted and they died.

She and John had discovered this room the day after they’d
put their stuff about in the little house. There had been an odd, dark-smelling
smell, and Ruth and John came down to see what it was and to try to clean it
out. The place hadn’t been put to any kind of use in a long time, though, maybe
years, maybe more than years. There were worms and fat trap spiders that must
have been feeding on thick beetles in the spring and summer and spent their
lives in some strange, frozen wakefulness through the winters. The black, scurrying
bodies were quick out of the holes, but Ruth was quicker and her heels came
down again and again to smash them—her own eyes darting in the cellar, John
hollering now and again as another black shadow would shoot along the edge of
his vision.

No more of them, though. And no more of him. Ruth and
John had cleaned this space out good and put in a table and shelves, had packed
the dirt hard in places and dug away other walls until they hit the bare side
of a rock wall that must have been the original walls of the cellar. That had
got them digging and digging until they were able to find three walls, or what
was left of them. The fourth wall they could not get to, at least where they
thought it was, because the dirt had got too hard on that end.

Now the faces hovered in the candlelight around the little
table and Ruth put her hands on the table and the others put their hands on the
table so that all the hands touched one another but didn’t overlap and didn’t
touch the candles. Each of the faces with eyes down-turned seemed so solemn and
so still that they might have been sleeping. Ruth took a small breath and
started reciting the words that the killers taught her.

The men and women who were with her joined in the dark,
chanting the deep song with its terrible words. Soon they were joined by voices.
Not voices from within the dank cellar, but voices from outside, the voices of
the wolves in the mountains. The baying of the wolves.



Jim felt the jitters.

He crouched down in the dark woods and, real slow, wrapped
the ugly book back up and hid it somewhere in his long coat. Then he got out
his strange ax.

Jim squinted his eyes in the moonlight. The witch at
the edge of the cave whispered to him again, but he gave no answer. Doubtless, she’d
picked up on what Jim had picked up on. Now he could see movements coming along
the path up the hillside. Jim gripped his ax in his left hand. His right still
wrapped in the bandages. He could see the wicked heads move off the path and
shift from tree to tree. He wished for Leaves to help him see in the dark. Too,
he wished for his fingers back.

The killers moved across the hillside with their desperate
way of running and leaping crookedly into moon-shade, flicking their gangly
bodies from tree to tree, whipping thin shadows along the snow. They were close
to Jim fast and his heart thumped too hard. Without those Leaves, he couldn’t
stay as calm as he needed and he couldn’t get his mind as blank as normal. They
could hear his thoughts, or something of them, for sure, and that’s how they
moved right at him.

Jim was sure they would be on him. Quietly he unscrewed
his little silver flask and drained it down his throat. His nerves weren’t
trained enough without the Leaves to keep his hands steady when the jitters
were strong as they were now. When the warmth of the whisky spread through his
body, the thing hit him hard from his right side and sent him toppling downhill
through the brambles so hard and so fast that he was sure that he’d left part
of his nose and an ear up at the top of the hillside.

When he stopped, the thing came crashing against
him, but his left hand was quick with the curved ax blade and it struck deep
and sure across the wilted face of the killer. Yowling and flailing backward
now, Jim changed the direction of his ax and cracked the backside of the ax
against its jaw and felt it crush upwards into the killer’s face. Jim stomped
down hard on its chest, forcing it back into the brambles. He got it down and
stomped its head into the tangled thorns. Then, panting, he drove the spike-staved
ax handle into its throat and it gurgled.

Another shadow shot past him toward the cave entrance.
But before he pursued, he doused the flailing body with oil and struck the
tinder. The oily blaze gave out a thick smoke. Jim scrambled through the thorny
bushes and caught the other one just as it dived out of the trees and toward
the cave, but it whirled about and scampered out of his reach.

It was then that Wylene stepped from the mouth of the
cave and into the moonlit patch of snowy rocks. The three of them stood in the
clearing.

The killer heaved and stared at the witch, Wylene.

The moonlight came bright across the clearing and, where
the killer’s features were caught in the light, they looked man enough. Here
and there, though, its body bled into twisted, sharp forms in the shadows. From
behind, Jim saw only the thing’s shadow shape, its jagged claws and twisted
wings and pointed ears. Wylene only saw something of a wild man blinking at her
in the moonlight.

It stepped toward her and spoke.

“What are you?” it said.

It might have said something more, but Wylene raised
her arms in front of her in a crooked way and pointed her sharp fingers and thumbs
toward the killer. She stomped with one leg forward, and the killer got shaky.

Wylene whispered to the thing, “Go back into the Wydder.”

Had Jim heard her right?
The Wydder?

Noiselessly, the thing shriveled into the middle of the
air—a tattered, black rag, stuffed into a tiny floating hole. Jim’s eyes flashed
from where the thing was to Wylene’s eyes. Wylene’s mouth was open almost as if
what she just did shocked her the way it shocked Jim. But it wasn’t fear that
was in Falk’s eyes; it was hope. In that moment he saw that there was one who
could open that door for him. If this Wylene-who-was-not-a-witch could send
these creatures to the other side, then maybe, just maybe, she could bring
things back through. Elseways, maybe she could send him through to find his
father.

Huck Marbo stepped into the clearing and the preacher
was behind him and Violet came out pointing her gun this way and that. May
stayed at the edge of the cave.

All of them were hungry. All of them wanted to sleep.
All of them wondered what would become of the town they lived in and the homes
they once knew.

May said, “We’re hungry, Jim Falk.” She was looking around
this way and that. She was counting heads.

Jim looked at Wylene, who’d sunken herself backward into
the dark rocks at the edge of the cave.

They hadn’t noticed or they hadn’t seen or they didn’t
care to say. No one but Jim appeared to have seen what Wylene did to the killer.
Jim scratched his chin and looked at May.

“Hungry?” he asked and smiled a bit. “You’d think you’d
be happy just to be alive. There’s a little bread. I’ve got some. Early in the
morning, maybe the preacher and I will go down to the other end of the creek
and bring us in some fish.” Jim took a glance at May and then over to the preacher,
who was just sitting in the cave blinking and looking about as if he were
looking for someone. “Once we eat in the morning, that will be the time to make
decisions.”

“Decisions?” Violet asked.

“On who stays and who goes,” Jim said, “and who goes
back to Sparrow to take it back.”

Jim fiddled around in his sack and drew them into the
cave. He started handing out the pieces of hard bread. Small pieces.

“Back?” the preacher asked, gnawing on the chewy chunk
Jim gave him. “What do you mean, take back Sparrow?”

“Way I figure it,” Jim said, “your dead brother’s wife’s
fixin’ to take hold of Sparrow as a stronghold for the Evil One. Somehow she got
hold of a good family and now she’s in league. She’s gonna take the town and
make it into whatever she wants, or perhaps what another is telling her to make
it. This is just as long as the killers don’t come and take her sooner. That’s
what I can figure. That’s why they’re comin’ around here.”

Wylene did not eat any bread. She looked at Jim, though.
She wanted to tell him something.

“What did you do?” Jim stepped a few steps in the dark
toward Wylene.

All the rest of them were in the cave entrance looking
out. May Marbo was standing a little more in front of the rest of them, and
Violet had her hands on May’s shoulders as if she was trying to keep her from
running out into the middle of the field where strange men, probably demons,
had just killed the doctor. Huck stood behind Violet with one hand on Violet’s shoulder
and his other hand holding his shotgun. The preacher was standing there with
his arms crossed. His mind was full of questions.

“What did you just do? How did you do that?” Jim asked
her again.

“I came into the world with the power to open and close
doors into the splitways.” Wylene said and then slowly dropped to one knee. “It
makes me tired, though.”

“You can open the holes?”

“Yes.”

“Where do they go?”

“The otherside. There are only so many ways to open them
and only so much you can do.”

“Can you travel through them?” Jim asked, taking another
step toward the dark figure of Wylene.

“Why are they coming?” The preacher suddenly yelled from
the entrance to the cave. “What do they want? What do they want? Why can’t they
leave us alone?”

Jim Falk looked over at the witch who was not a witch.
She stood slowly and lifted her veil in the night and looked at Falk. She
turned her head then to the preacher and pointed the sharp index finger of her
right hand at the preacher.