The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (14 page)

Jim’s face, which had looked pale and worn, hardened,
and suddenly a fierce light glowed in his eyes. He was concentrating on what
the doctor was saying. The doctor said two things that were a kind of code
among men and women who knew of the Old Ways, the “paths” and “darkness.” These
were pulled out of the pages that Barnhouse had translated and the writings
that were lost and his father’s journals.

Jim opened his lips to say something. Just then a great
wind blew at the side of the house, in through the open windows, and the candles
smoked out. There was a noise following the wind—screaming and hollering.
People were wailing and crying out for help.

“That’s coming down from up at the church,” Jim said
and leapt from the table, seized his gear bag up under his left arm, and flashed
out the front door. The doctor stumbled about in the dark of his office. He
grabbed up his medicine bag and scooped in an armful of tinkling bottles. He
darted out into the night after the outlander. In his mind, the doctor saw two
tangled spiderwebs.

It was dark for sure and the fog was still heavy on the
town. Jim could hear the people wailing in the church, but he could see nothing
but moonlit fog.

They were crying out, but he could not understand. The
wind was whipping the noise of them this way and that way, twisting their words
up in the fog—making it so you couldn’t understand a thing. The fog was thick
enough that his own hot breath came back against his face as he ran.

Things clicked and flashed in Jim’s mind. When he’d left
Huck and May Marbo behind they’d waved friendly-like in the doorway, the light
of dusk blending them into the dark of the wood. He wanted medicine. He wanted
to chew the leaves. His boots pounded on the dirt road. Behind him, he could
hear the doctor catching up to him. The old man was fast. He heard the bottles
clinking.

Jim thought about the people in the church and he thought
about his pa. The doctor reached his side, jostling with a sack full of his
vials and medicines.

The doctor said to him as they ran toward the church,
“I know you are looking for your father.”

“Give me some medicine,” Jim said and stopped. “My hand
is on fire with this itching.”

The doctor stopped too, turned, frowned, and shook his
head, but was quick with a brown vial to Jim’s mouth. “We don’t have time for
this.”

Jim grabbed at the bottle in the doctor’s hands and gulped
eagerly.

“That’s it,” the doctor said, pulling it away.
“That’s all for now. I’ve never had anyone to take so much.”

“Or to heal so fast?” Jim asked and under the bandage,
the doctor saw a wiggling in the wounded hand.

They turned together and ran again.

As they ran together in the fog, a smile broke out on
Jim’s face. This was definitely the Pritham that he’d seen on Barnhouse’s inventory
sheets. Barnhouse had mentioned him in a throwaway way a few years ago,
pausing, his eyes stuck in a point in the air and then looking at Jim and shrugging
his shoulders.

It was coming to Jim that the circles were closing. In
his mind he saw himself moving along a map, a dark and dirty map with changing
lands and scribbled buildings, strange claws jutting from messy trees—Jim was
moving, paths were crossing, closer and closer to his father. . . . Pritham was
a kind of proof of this—the paths crossing, closer and closer to the
conjunction of all paths.

Jim slung his pack on his right shoulder and, with his
left hand, he pulled his hatchet. They could see the lights from inside of the
church through the fog putting big circles of yellow up in the gray clouds. They
could hear the people hollering, but they couldn’t see much of anything but
moving up near the church.

The light from the church came through the fog in yellow
spots. The two men walked slowly, quietly toward the dark shape of the building.

Jim saw the doctor walking next to him out of the corner
of his eye. Was this the man? He’d started to remember. Barnhouse had told him,
“There are others, Falk. There are others who are realizing the danger. There
are others who know that the Evil One seeks to destroy the Way. They will come.
They will come for me and for you.”

Jim smiled and smiled. He saw the church up ahead. He
saw its little roof, the hand-worked walls, the glowing windows, the smallness
of the place that made it look like a smoking stove in the middle of the road.

He remembered his pa teaching him about places such as
this, places hidden away in the mountain where time stood still, where the people
were God’s people, and where evil from the old days came to dwell.

“Old Bendy’s Men lived in these hills at one time,” his
pa had told him. “That’s why these places become such places. That’s why no one
is too much interested in passing through these places anymore. Maybe they don’t
even know why they don’t go through a certain way. They just get a sense of it.
The thing is that there were these men here. Long before the River People came
to know this place. Long before even a lot of these animals. There were these
evil men here and we seen ’em. We seen ’em in visions and in the land, back in
the waves of time, and sometimes we just plain out seen ’em.”

They stopped in front of the church.

A few low voices could be heard from inside.

The doctor looked at Jim’s silhouette in the fog. Jim
was tall and thin and his hat was on and his coat was raggedy and worn. In the
fog he looked a bit like a scarecrow made out of outlaw clothes. He had an axe
in his left hand and the pack on his back where he kept what else the doctor
didn’t know. The doctor had an idea, but he didn’t know. Jim Falk was a man of
the Way, though. The doctor knew that now for sure. Jim Falk was a man of the
Way and what else was in his pack was for the ridding out of spirits or for
destroying evil.

Jim Falk looked at the old doctor. The old doctor was
thick in the chest like a barrel and his glasses twinkled in the church light.
The doctor had brought along with him a little pistol and he was holding it out
in front of him and to the side. Jim saw the doctor’s eyes flickering about
keenly in the fog. He could see the light in the doctor’s eyes. He felt sure
that there was something much, much more about this old doctor that Jim was
supposed to find out and know. There was something deep inside the doctor that
was beyond Jim to see right now.

Now things were quieted down. There were voices in the
church, but they were hurried whispers. It was still outside the church and someone
was whimpering on the inside.

Jim and the doctor walked in a small circle with their
backs facing the other’s. Nothing happened.

The wind blew a little and the fog swirled. Jim felt
the tug and dull moving in his chest. The jitters, just like that, started up.

Jim nodded to the doctor and jerked his head in the direction
of the stairs to the church door. The doctor, pointing his gun out into the
darkness, made his way backwards up the steps.

Then there was a noise from somewhere beyond what they
could see in the dim swirls of fog. It was a dark sound, an intake of breath
that made the fog twist and race out of sight and then shift and move back.

Jim whispered, “See who’s in the church and get inside
there.”

The doctor turned to try the lock. As he did so, he saw
one of the shadows near the church crouch.

He didn’t move. His left hand, reaching for the iron
latch to the door, began to shake.

Jim was facing the other way.

The doctor did not want to look back. Doc Pritham had
never seen anything like what he had just seen. Whatever was crouched down there,
it was inky and thin and wicked-looking.

He froze up.

Then he saw Jim moving quiet and fast behind him. “Get
inside, Doc!” Jim said in a low voice. “Get inside!”

The doctor heard something else too. Something close
to him, whispering to him, calling him. Whispering something twisted into his mind.

He rattled the handles and heard the folks inside holler.
The door was blocked and he couldn’t move it. Behind him he heard a sudden
noise like a grunt, and he looked to see Jim battling against something in the
darkness.

He pointed his pistol at what he thought he saw.

There, in the shadow beside the wall of the church, something
had its pointed, long fingers dug into Jim Falk’s back. There was hair on the
fingers, shining black hairs. Something of it made the doctor think of a
horsefly. He got a sick feeling and drew back the hammer on his pistol. He saw
the thing’s black eye roll and twinkle. It was looking at him. It was tearing
away at Falk, but it was looking with one dark eye right at the doctor.

Then the doctor got a sense of stillness about him. He
felt he suddenly was filled with a power. His hearing and vision sharpened, and
he stepped down the steps without fear toward where Jim was being whipped around
in the shadows. The doc’s gun trained in effortlessly on the dark spot where
its head must have been.

He saw the thing’s eyes now, black and twinkling in the
darkness—its face something like a man’s face without a nose, the gray spotted
skin on its neck, the broken glass teeth in the black maw glittering and
something like tubes reaching from inside toward Jim’s face.

Jim’s hatchet shone in the church light as it shot up
into the air and then landed heavy and cracked on the thing.

Jim sprang backward, away from the creature and toward
the doctor, and the doctor pulled his trigger.

The powder flashed them both blind for a moment. He’d
missed the thing’s head, but the shot must have met a mark somewhere in the
creature’s body. The wiry shape of the thing shuddered and toppled back into
the shadows with a squeal and then a deep, sawing groan.

Jim and Doc Pritham stood in burning anticipation for
the next mêlée, squinting into the blackness about the little church. Then they
saw its wild and crooked form scampering off into the edges of the fog. Somehow,
it appeared to spread and expand into the edge of the woods as it went into the
fog.

The fog rolled back into the surrounding woods, and the
moon broke from the clouds and suddenly shone bright onto the church. On the
ground by the stairs were steaming little pools of some liquid.

The doctor broke open his bag and dropped to the ground.
This might be the blood of the thing, he thought. He pulled a glass dropper,
put the tip in one of the little pools, and began squeezing the bulb.

The doctor was busy collecting when he saw Jim’s left
hand snatch the brown bottle again from his satchel and take it to drink.

“You’re going to reverse the effects and lose your memory
permanently if you keep on!” the doctor shouted up at him.

Jim put the bottle hastily back into the pouch. The night
looked like day to him now. Sparks leapt from the edges of things, the door to
the church glowed red like a warning. “Step aside, good doctor,” Jim murmured.

Jim knocked at the door of the church. He’d thought the
jitters would have gone, but they hadn’t and yet they weren’t exactly the same.
His breath was coming out now in heavy white wisps. He looked down to see that
his bandage had been ripped asunder in the struggle with the creature. He could
see the blood spotting on his tattered bandage and the puffy white flesh of his
healing hand.

He knocked again, ignoring the red glow of the door becoming
ever brighter.

He could hear someone move up to the door and through
the red light, could see a black mass.

“Folks? Folks? You can open the door now. We’re here
to help, the doctor is here with me.”

Jim turned to the doctor. “Why are they all in there?”

The doctor said, “Sometimes they go there when they’re
scared.”

Jim put his ear to the door. He heard whimpering and
whispering; no answer came to him from inside the church, but he could feel the
people on the other side. He could feel the fear. Jim wondered if Bill and Violet
might be in there. He wondered if, when they came and opened the door, Bill
Hill might level his rifle at him and blast him. He wondered if May was inside.
He thought of how her face looked when he woke up. He saw her sweet hands
pouring the medicine into the cup.

“It’s Jim Falk!” he said louder now at the door. “The
outlander. I’m out here with the doctor and whatever there was to fear out here
in the night, it’s gone. It’s run off. Now you don’t have to open the door if
you don’t want to. You can keep it shut if you’re safe in there. But if anyone
is hurt in there, the doctor can come in and give them a hand. Can you open the
door?”

“Doc Pritham?”

A young girl’s voice came through the door, but Jim didn’t
recognize it.

Jim said, “Hey!” to the doctor, who was carefully squeezing
droplets of the black liquid he had collected into a tiny glass vial.

“Who’s that?” the doctor yelled at the door, barely looking
up from the task at hand. “Is that you, Merla? It sounds like Vernon Mosely’s
daughter,” he said to Jim.

The doctor put his things away quickly and ran up to
the door. “Open this door!” he yelled. “Open this door!”

Jim saw the black mass getting bigger and bigger, coming
toward the door.

“Get back!” he shouted at the doctor and pushed him sideways
as the wood of the shattering door burst into the night. Something came
running.



Vernon Mosely didn’t have a memory of how he’d got
back to Sparrow. He stood on the steps of the church and looked around. The sun
was coming up through the cold trees. He could see his breath in front of his
face, floating and disappearing.

He was even too confused to think about the witch and
what had happened. He just felt tired—too tired for his own mind. His head shuffled
through all kinds of things but couldn’t stay on one thing long enough to form
a real thought.

Why had he come here to the church? He should have gone
home. Were there people here, maybe waiting for him? Home to his wife and his
daughters. He couldn’t see their faces. His mind felt terribly heavy. He could
have curled up in his bed and forgotten everything—his life, his learnings, his
parents. Forgotten about Simon and the box with the thumb inside.