The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (22 page)

He remembered the old songs of the River People, the
songs and singing that frightened him as a boy. The songs about Kitaman, who came
from under the earth to eat the flesh of Eyabe’s people, to eat the River People.
These were the Katakayish people, the tribe which Old Magic Woman had come
from. Could this be Kitaman in front of him now? Was this the earth demon of
the tales of the people of this land, or was this something else, something older,
more evil? Was this a creature sent by the Evil One? A true demon? Perhaps
both.

It was creeping itself down into Sparrow, along the creek
and down toward town where the doctor’s house was. It stopped and seemed to
hear or smell something. Its wicked head turned. It looked straight at him. He
did the trick to make his mind go blank again. If he trained in on it with the
jitters now, it would see him for sure. He blanked out his mind. He swerved his
mind this way and that and brought up a bright memory of a field full of sunshine,
then a snowfall, then a lightning storm.

It was just far enough off that he wasn’t sure it could
see him, but too he was sure that it looked at him and took notice of him there,
but it did not seem to mind him there. Like an animal sizing him up to see if
he was a threat or not and then deciding that he wasn’t. The yellow eyes on him
sent a cold and buzzing fear through his whole body. What would any of them be
able to do if these were beasts the Evil One had sent along?

He watched it go by, its weird horns disappearing into
the morning woods. He looked at his hand wrapped in the bandages and thought of
his father. He thought of the doctor. He thought of Violet and he thought of
May Marbo. He watched the woods growing dim as storm clouds gathered. He
started moving at a distance, following that thing, allowing his thoughts to
wander and go blank, the way his father had taught him.

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The doctor was sitting there with his head in his hands
when she slammed the door behind her. He popped up out of his chair and drew
his pistol and pointed it at her face.

John and Ruth Mosely were sitting at the table with him,
looking angry and suspicious with their arms crossed and their eyebrows squinted
in the same way.

When she looked into the doctor’s eyes, she saw that
he did not mean to shoot her, but she did see that he was frightened, very frightened.

“It’s coming!” Violet said. “It followed me down from
on top of the hill. I don’t know if it’s behind me or not, but it was coming
behind me.”

“What’s coming?” John Mosely said and stood up. Ruth
looked around and took a deep breath.

The doctor didn’t ask any questions or answer any questions.
Violet’s face told him everything. He went to the wall and pulled a box off of
the shelf. From inside the box he pulled another pistol and loaded it with
special lode and gave it to Violet.

“You know how to use it,” he said with a kind of matter-of-fact
tone. “The special lode will make it stunned. It might even drop it to the
ground, but it won’t kill it exactly. You will have to use all the rounds and
get them in it, and it will fall. Then we’ll have to take off the head and burn
it.”

“Burn it? Burn it?” John asked again. “Burn what?”

Ruth looked at him and said, “Shut your mouth, John.
Can’t you be of any help?”

The doctor turned to them both and said, “Despite what
the two of you believe or don’t believe about me or about the outlander, you’d better
get in the back room.”

“Why is she staying out here?” Ruth pointed at
Violet.

“Because she knows how to shoot,” the doctor said. “Now
get back in the room with your brother!”

The two obeyed, though Ruth was making a sour face the
whole time.

“Is the preacher here too?” Violet asked.

“I think we’ve got most of Sparrow back there at this
point,” the doctor said. “You aim straight for its head, the silver lode will
do the rest, and then we’ll have to take off the head and burn it.”

Violet was looking at the big, weird pistol in her hand
and back up at the doctor.

“You’re talking about the spook, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I don’t know what I mean. The outlander gave me these
weapons and those instructions.”

“Jim Falk?” she asked.

“Yes,” the doctor replied and moved to the window to
look out into the growing darkness. The clouds had made a black swirl in the afternoon
sky so that all appeared twilight.

“Where is Jim Falk?” Violet asked, coming up behind the
doctor and looking over his shoulder out of the little window into the darkening
afternoon.

“Now that I think of it, he might be out looking for
you. He left,” the doctor said. “Is he following you here?”

“No. It’s not Falk, there is something evil out there,”
Violet said.

“The woods of Sparrow are no place to be out in,” the
doctor said.

“No, Doctor, you’re right. The woods of Sparrow are no
place to be out in night or day,” Violet said.

They stood there as the sky grew darker.

They listened.

They could hear John and Vernon and Ruth whispering and
grumbling about things in the other room.

They waited then together in the doctor’s little house.
The doctor and Violet. They waited for the thing to come running out the woods.

When Violet’s hands started to tremble, the doctor felt
bad for her. This pretty lady with so much trouble. Without taking his eyes off
the window he backed up toward the table and, undoing the clasp on his bag, and
reached in and plucked a blue bottle and lifted it out. He brought it to her
and said, “Keep your eyes on the edge of the wood and open your mouth.”

He gave her some heavy medicine to calm her, but she
stayed awake, her eyes fixed on the edge of the woods through the window. She felt
the medicine flow through her.

In her mind, Violet was sure that she could feel the
force of the thing coming upon them now like a slow wind across a stream. The woods
themselves appeared suddenly crisp, the lines of the crooked trees deep-etched
against a smoky background of browning leaves. The sun, when it pierced through
the black clouds, somehow seemed purposefully to cast longer, blacker shadows.

Violet was perched at the doc’s window, one hand on the
sill, the other holding the heavy silver gun in a trembling white hand. She felt
cold, but she was not afraid.

The doctor looked her over from the side and glanced
at her shaking hand.

No, he thought. That is not a tremor caused by fear.
Her left hand is so relaxed. Her lips are a little blue, but they are not trembling.
This is some kind of reaction in her muscles because of something her system
needs that she does not have. This is caused by her not receiving the dose of
whatever those powders are that she carries in her necklace. The stilling altha
I gave her is not even enough; it must be something potent. I wonder where she
got it.

The doctor glanced back at his bag again and
wondered if he too should take something to calm him. The conversation with the
Moselys had been almost as disturbing as the outlander telling him that there
was a demon lurking about.

The whisky he had been sipping left a burn in his belly.
There was that other feeling there too, the dismal worming around of fear. What
was this thing? How could it be true? And when the only possible answer came to
him, he said a prayer in the back of his mind that it might not be so.

Violet’s eyes darted about and then stopped on a spot,
her black pupils quivered in her green irises. Her mouth dropped open wide as
she drew in a sharp, rattling gasp.

She whispered so carefully each word, “I see it, Doctor.”

The doctor, who’d had his attention focused on Violet’s
face, snapped to and looked where she was looking out to the edge of the wood.
Without a doubt, as if it had stepped out of a terrible painting, the thing
came, sticking its twisted face out into a shaft of light and then recoiling
quickly back. Seeing the rawness of the thing in the dim afternoon was somehow
obscene; both the doctor and Violet felt as though they were watching some
despicable act.

Its face had a jagged mouth and black, rolling eyes.
There was an emptiness that ran in it deep. It was hollow and false, like some horrible
mask. The light of humanity was not in its eyes, yet it did not seem animal
either. It was something else entirely. Long, sharpened horns twisted out from
either side of its bulbous head, and shiny black tubes stretched from its mouth
like reaching worms.

The doctor said, “Save us.”

Violet stood up and took a step back from the window.
“That’s not it,” she said, raising her silver gun to the window. “That’s not
what I saw at night, or in the winter. That’s not what attacked my . . .” She
suddenly stopped speaking and her body deflated in her dress. She sobbed in
great whelps and finally managed to whisper, “. . . husband.” She never took
her eyes off the monster.

The beast recoiled slowly into the darker woods, stepping
backwards on its curving legs.

They waited with the heavy feeling that at any moment
it might crash through the window.

“What’s going on?” Ruth whispered harshly from the backroom.

Violet shushed her.

With a shaking arm, the doctor slowly creaked the window
open and put his gun through, still pointed at the place in the woods where it
had disappeared. Violet peered out, breathing shallow and quiet as she could.
The woods and the clouds stood still so that the sunlight broke downward through
the gray and dark clouds in white shafts.

And then the thing did come, marching straight out of
the woods toward them as a cloud bank rolling overhead, dimming the scene to a
dull purple. It came toward them. When its hulking form passed through shafts of
light, a thin mist rose from its exposed flesh.

It was quick and all its movements were sharp and jerking.

Violet took a stance a few feet back from the open window.
The thing’s eyes were pinned on her. They were not like the spook’s eyes, they
were black with sparking yellow pupils in the center like little cracks with
fire behind. They were fixed on Violet.

She raised her pistol at it and her hand did not shake.

“What is it?” the doctor asked and looked up to the ceiling.
Then he raised, with both hands, his heavy revolver at the thing.

The thing made the distance faster than expected, and
the two, Violet and the doctor, opened fire—the pistols cracking into the morning,
both of them going deaf from the reports, the smoke stinging their nostrils.

Violet could see the thing slow down, its body
jerking where the shots were landing, its face distorted, and it made a noise
like a dry heave, but the volleys only worked to irritate the thing.

The doctor was yelling now and pulling his trigger again
and again. He missed the mark, and he missed again, but Violet had a good eye
and she landed three shots across the thing’s shiny, black chest.

It was close enough now that she could see the sparkling
quality of the coarse hair on the thing, and beneath its crooked collarbones
another darker, glistening color that grew and spread downward as it lurched.
“Yes,” Violet whispered, “yes, you bleed.”

The doctor’s pistol was clicking empty. The thing staggered
momentarily and then, with impossible speed, it was at the window, shrieking at
them and reaching inside with its spade and spider hands. Violet snapped
another round into its chest before one of its gripping claws dug deep into her
left shoulder.

The doctor had taken a few steps and turned, rummaging
for his ammo, when he felt his head jerk backward too quickly and the unmistakable
force of the thing’s claw on his head, the sting and gouge of the ragged nails
in his temple. His left eye was blinded by his own blood. His revolver clacked
onto the floor as he was raised up in the air.

He heard Violet scream. She wasn’t screaming as if she
was scared, though. She was screaming curses at the thing that had her. Both of
them were dragged out through the broken window, and Violet was hurled against
the house. Her back hit the wood hard and the back of her head smacked and she
went out cold.

Now the thing gripped the doctor with both arms and raised
the doctor all the way up over its head.

Violet’s eyes fluttered open and she could see, dimly,
the thing’s jaw unlatching like a snake’s, its maw growing ever wider and
darker until the whole mouth seemed to overtake the thing, and it looked like
nothing but a darkness surrounded by sharp, broken teeth. The tubes that were
once worms whipped and curled about the doctor, thick and thorny. More arms
came now, sticking up from behind like an insect’s legs, ready to pack the doctor
into its mouth and swallow him whole, once and for all.

The thing held the doctor up in the air a little higher
to get a good angle on him for the swallow. His legs kicked weakly. The doc’s
eyes were wide with fear, but he couldn’t make a noise. Suddenly, the thing
shuddered in an odd way and a plume of black and purple smoke rose up from
behind it and its arms lost their strength and it dropped Doc Pritham onto the
green grass in front of it. There was another noise then, like a whistling and
then a loud pop and a crackle, and Violet saw a bright yellow fire leap out of
the beast’s right flank and smoke and dark liquid sprayed out its side.

It fell on its other side as another whistle and
explosion burst out of it, this time in its leg. The explosion sent the right
leg whirling in three pieces across the grass. The mouth had collapsed like a
bag; its eyes were rolling and rolling in pain.

Behind it, Violet saw a gray shadow dart from the
woods and move across the hill toward them. The gray shadow was that of a man
and the face in the middle was Jim Falk’s.

He was on the thing. Straddling it, he used some kind
of brace with his left hand, forcing its bellowing mouth closed. He had fastened
a long, shining blade to his wounded right hand still wrapped in the bandages.
He sliced at the thing’s neck until the whole head was completely removed from
the twitching, flailing body.