The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (21 page)

The cold had taken the preacher’s ears and Anna Marbo’s
life and so many of the children. Nearly all. She’d heard that things were
worse in the Ridges, but no one knew for sure. But Violet had seen with her own
eyes the spidery spook clambering on the rooftops, its disgusting maw swallowing
down the frozen and the living. She shuddered with the memory.

How could she have known that Bill would come back? Bill
could have been just as dead as the others. How could she know what would happen
when Huck found her, all that death and grief pent up inside him, all the fear
that makes men and women cling to one another in the darkness. Her mind sunk
into the moment, Huck’s arms around her body, squeezing her to him.

Then her eyes opened. The wind beat against the sides
of the house and once in a while she could hear another noise. A noise that
sounded far away, like a person singing a bad song or calling out injured in
the wind. When she became attentive to it, though, it died away again. It died
away into the darkness until she could convince herself that she hadn’t heard
it. She hadn’t heard it at all. She had only heard the wind through the ugly
trees. Then, then it would come again. It came again closer and it was a voice,
it was an unmistakable voice like a wailing.

She was sure now that it wasn’t just part of her dreams
or her imagination, and she could hear it more and more clearly now and in
between the whirling gusts of wind. It called out to her. It was calling her name.
It was Bill’s voice, but it sounded somehow wrong.

In fact, it sounded garbled and strange, and as it got
closer and closer it came not to sound like his voice at all.

There was a crash on the porch.

She got up now and ran to the front room meaning to grab
the gun.

He burst into the front door, that hideous wind blowing
and whirling behind him.

It looked like Bill, but worse. His eyes had gone all
white and his skin had gone all white and he looked dead, but he wasn’t.

“Violet!” he screamed and fell forward. His body was
covered in dark blood. He fell right on the ground, and it looked as though his
legs had suddenly gotten paralyzed. His mouth was so wide open, it was too wide
open, and from inside what looked like black worms stretched themselves along the
floor toward her toes.

“Violet!” he screamed again and blood spat out.

Violet was frozen at first. He lay in the doorway, clambering
for her. Beside him, mounted up on the wall, was the gun. She couldn’t get to
it without him grasping her.

She turned and ran back into the kitchen and, picking
up her little bag of powder and other things, she flew open the window and slid
herself out into the night, carefully moving so that she did not tear her
clothing. Then she ran. Behind her, in the night, in her home, she could hear
her husband moaning and wailing.

Now she was exhausted, but too scared to shut her eyes.

She wasn’t sure she had left him far behind, she couldn’t
hear him, but she was too scared to fall asleep now. She was hungry too, but
not hungry enough to think of eating those awful leaves she had been sucking
on.

Somewhere out here among these ugly trees she knew there
was that stranger who might help her. She’d met him before. She couldn’t remember
the exact spot now, but she knew it was around here somewhere.

She was so tired, though, and she sat and rested under
a tree, watching the shadows grow long and the sunlight crawling up over the
hill. Soon the woods went quiet and still, the beating of her heart slowed, and
the pulsing blood in her ear quieted. Now and again she could hear the chirping
of some bird that was flitting among the branches.

She looked around in the gray and brown winter woods.

“Have I been out here all day?” she asked herself out
loud.

She looked in her little bag. She had powder and some
other things in there.

“I didn’t get any rest last night at all,” she said and
thought again of the strange, pale skin of her husband and of the terror she
felt when she saw him and how she was somehow sure that it was not really him
somehow.

She thought that if she could close her eyes for just
a few minutes she would be able to figure out what to do. She did have some
choices. She could simply go back down into town from here. There was a clear
stream that ran not too far from here that went straight back into town. She
would have to find somewhere to go soon, even if it was up in this tree, because
the wolves might be around. They’d disappeared for the whole day. In fact, the
whole day had been totally quiet. She was sure that at some turn she would see
her husband’s gangly form romping through the woods behind her, but she hadn’t.
She was sure that as she rested here, she would hear the gentle rustling of
leaves as the stranger came around the tree, but he hadn’t come at all.

Sometime after the blizzard, the hooded stranger had
come to her when she’d been out here. He lived out here, lived in the woods. Maybe
there was a time when some people thought the stranger was a witch or a sorcerer
or something of the sort. He knew the ways of the woods. He’d told her as much.
He preferred to live on his own out here. Didn’t say much else, other than the
sayings. He seemed to know many of the sayings out the scripture. He’d given
her the powder that helped her sleep and to think clear and sharp, but he wasn’t
coming today. He seemed to know somehow when she’d run out and he’d show up
then.

Now what? To go back into town? To go running to Huck?
To tell him that her husband turned into a monster and was chasing her? Another
crazy story from Violet Hill, the weird wife of the town carpenter? She could
go to the preacher’s house. Maybe that was the thing to do. He would have to
take her in. At least for a while. He would understand, maybe. How could they
let her husband run off like that in such a state? Something was terribly wrong,
and it made her sick to think of what it might be.

She looked at her bag again and looked around. She squinted
her eyes, hoping to see the gray hood of the stranger peering around one of the
trees near the horizon. She couldn’t see a thing.

The woods were growing dim and clouds began to cover
the sky and turn the same color as the gray, ugly trees around her. She looked at
the tree she was sitting up against. Above her, climbing up the side of the tree
were batches of thorns, like horrible nests, bunched and twisted in patterns
along the bark. It might be worse climbing that than it would be to go and see
the preacher.

She didn’t want to go and see the preacher, though. The
preacher and the preacher’s brother and the preacher’s sister-in-law had all
come from up north. And they might be suspicious of her in some way. The people
from up there were suspicious of everyone in some way for something; and she
had heard that they would, if it suited their purposes, twist your words and
your life around in some way that would make you seem evil. Even if you weren’t.

Then again, the doctor might keep her safe too.

The clouds were very dark now and the thought of wolves
grew in her head, the thought of the wolves followed by the spook. She decided
that she would make her way to the creek and quickly follow the creek back into
town and go see the doctor. He might have answers about Bill. She wasn’t sure,
but she was sure that she didn’t want to wait through the night.

She got up from her spot on the ground under the tree
and began making her way over the little ridge to where the creek was. Just as
she started coming up over the ridge she heard something behind her.

Violet stopped, but she turned slow and looked intensely
around in the woods. Her face showed no fear. Her cheekbones were strong and
the cold made her face white and her eyes sparkle in the dark of the woods. She
wasn’t afraid. She was looking. She was looking because what she saw would
determine what she would do. She looked and for a while she didn’t see anything,
just the crooked trees and the cold wind blowing them around.

Then it seemed that there was something else out there,
just beyond where she could see. Yes, she could see something solid and gray
among the low branches, but it was tall, like a man. It wasn’t an animal. It
moved in and out of the shadows just beyond her vision. She squinted her green
eyes trying to see. Yes, it was in the shape of a man, but something about it gave
her a strange feeling. She was sure that whoever it was could see her, but
whoever it was was only half hiding. Whoever it was was just staying where she
could not see, but it seemed as if whoever it was was stepping just into the
light enough where she could see. Whoever it was, she stood watching long
enough to get the feeling that she didn’t want to find out who it was.

She didn’t get that feeling of comfort that came when
the stranger came upon her. When the stranger had come upon her in the woods that
time and offered his hand and showed her the way out of the woods, she had felt
comforted. There was no feeling in this presence that waved in and out of the
edge of her vision now. In fact, she noted now that when she glanced that way
there was a certain kind of blankness that came into her senses. Almost a veil
of sorts coming over her thoughts.

“What in the world could that be?” she thought and made
swift steps over the little hill and toward the creek.

She got there and started through the gray forest along
the creek down the hill and into Sparrow. Her mind flickered through the things
that she had seen, and her heart began to skip beats as she ran. A cold sweat
broke on her forehead. The faces of the frozen children kept coming up in her
head. She stopped by the creek and listened as the water trickled and tinkled
in the dwindling evening. She reached into her blouse and pulled the necklace
and little jar of powder. It was almost empty. Her hands were shaking now and
her left eye twitched maddeningly. She looked around. Behind her, just at the
edge of the shadows, she saw the figure. This time she could see clearly the
shape of a man—the shape of the man, but the head was not the shape of a man’s
head, and long, wild horns like branches twisted out from either side of the
head.

Her heart thumped in her chest and she crouched down
and went about her business with powder, quickly, quickly. The energy shot into
her mind and heart. Her thoughts quickened and strength and color returned to her
face.

She gathered herself up and tore off into Sparrow.

She ran straight for the doctor’s house and got inside
with the door slammed behind her.

Jim finished burying the husk of flesh that was once
the preacher’s arm. He got out the little book that he had kept his own writings
in over the years. He flipped around in there. There was something in there
about when the flesh was rotted by the touch of evil, but he couldn’t remember
where. He had a vague memory of talking with Spencer Barnhouse about it in
connection with his father getting pulled into the hole.

He found it and started reading over the shallow grave
of the arm with his head bowed slightly. He wished he could say for sure whether
he believed in the power of these things or not. He knew there was a force in the
world, some force that had taken his mother’s life, taken his father to some
other place through what looked like magic. But there were too many questions
in his mind about it and no one seemed to know any kind of satisfactory
answers. And he was so weak—weaker than he’d even imagined himself to be.
Always on the run. Getting an old man in Hopestill even to steal the weapons
for him. He’d known he didn’t have the ability himself, especially as fuzzy as
he’d got with the leaves and the whisky. There was no telling what would have
become of him. And yet, he felt driven to try to help some way; he felt that so
heavy, that he was supposed to help this town somehow, and that somehow this
whole mess would lead him to his father.

But those wolves had dragged him around, ripped him up
and whipped him around, taken part of his hand and his fingers. Maybe Bill Hill
was right, what Bill Hill said. Maybe all Jim really knew was tricks after all;
maybe he was a kind of trickster who had eventually tricked himself into believing
that his tricks were not tricks, that they were real. Maybe there was something
in that. Not directly, but indirectly, like a message, a message that he should
leave Sparrow. What was he to do? Anything more than Spencer Barnhouse was able
to do up in Hopestill? Barnhouse was one man who knew something and only
something of the truth, and he stood against all those who were bought and
controlled by some other mysterious man named Varney Mull. Varney Mull was
supposed to be in league with the Evil One. If that were true, as he well
expected it was, and as he suspected that this Doc Pritham suspected it was,
and as he suspected that the preacher man, Vernon Mosely also suspected it was
. . . if it were true that Varney Mull was in fact in league, what would any of
them be able to do? The Evil One? Surely this was a power that was beyond him
to rid out, maybe even beyond them all. On the other hand, he had just
regenerated the arm of a preacher through the craft he had been taught by his
father and Old Magic Woman. He wondered if he would ever see her again—if any
of it was possible, or if he had only the bitterest hope of a child’s dream.

He was leaning against a tree and thinking such thoughts
as this when he saw the thing. He looked and he looked again and then he
squeezed his hurt hand under the bandage. He did that because it would hurt and
he needed the pain to tell him that he wasn’t having some deep dream memory because
of the doctor’s medicine. It wasn’t a dream or a memory.

It was tall and thin, and dead-looking antlers went out
from either side of its head, which was like a cat’s with no skin, but its body
was as if someone had taken a man’s body and beat all the innards out and stretched
it upwards and fixed terrible claws on the end of the too-long arms. This
looked not like the spook that he’d seen up in the woods behind the Hills’, but
he did recognize it. Yes, this was something other entirely, but not unknown to
him. Its cat eyes beamed back and forth, stiff black hairs bristled on its body
like quills. Its mouth was full of yellowish daggers, and what looked like tiny
black snakes or worms wriggled and peered this way and that from its open
mouth.