The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (24 page)

Jim wanted to tell the preacher what he knew, but he
wasn’t at all sure if he should. What he knew was that if the preacher had been
to see a real witch, he would have never returned. Witches were straight from the
Evil One’s world; there was never a human being that was helped by a witch, not
a true witch.

The preacher’s upper lip trembled a bit. “She showed
me. She showed me the Evil One and told me things that I can’t say and can’t rightly
remember.” The preacher looked at Jim dead in the eye. “You see, at first I
thought that maybe you had brought these things about. I figured maybe you was
some kind of a witch-man, or maybe even a demon of some sort, or a conjurer,
no. Then, too, I thought maybe it had been Simon all along. No. And that Violet
Hill woman, she called you here by some power, but maybe that was a power
outside her power, and that doesn’t make her a witch. She wanted to do what was
right. Somehow she had heard of you. Someone told her about you. A stranger in
the woods told her about you and she could call you by visions. This is what
the witch, Wylene, told me.”

Jim Falk looked back into the preacher’s eyes. He saw
fear. But when he looked deeper, he saw there a conviction, and deeper than that,
something solid and unchangeable seeming.

“Preacher,” Jim said, “what do you think is happening
here? This Evil One, as you call it. What is happening here? Tell me about this
witch of Sparrow Creek.”

Vernon Mosely looked back at the fire. “This evil, it’s
not the witch. She might not be a witch exactly, I don’t think. She’s just an
old woman. She showed me. We are all in danger of death,” he said. “They’ve been
here a long time and they’ve had no reason to come out. They’ve been hiding in
the hollows and in the forest. Sleeping. Waiting. Now they’re awake. They woke
up. They’re coming around now because they’re looking for something . . . maybe
you or maybe me. Do you know what I am talking about?”

Jim knew. “I believe I know,” he said. “They’re after
the ones who know the Waycraft and the writings. You know about the writings?”

“The Waycraft?” The preacher asked, but had heard clearly
what the outlander was saying. He wondered what this stranger could know about
it. He felt a bit of relief that someone else might know, but he also felt more
fear.

“The Waycraft,” Jim replied. “The writings.”

The preacher’s mouth dropped open and then shut. He said,
“Some were not lost. Some have been found.” And he couldn’t help it, but he
glanced toward the mantel of his fireplace and Jim followed his eyes.

They looked at each other for a moment and Jim looked
back at the bricks behind the fireplace.

Jim raised his eyebrows and then he stood up and walked
toward the mantel. “This witch, Wylene, how did she show you this?”

The preacher said, “Through her. She said she did nothing,
but everything was shown through her. She said she was hollow.”

“Hollow?” Jim asked and pointed to the mantel.

The preacher choked a little. “That’s what she said.”

Jim looked at the preacher in the little room. The fire
in the fireplace lit up his body sitting there on the chair, all wrapped up in
blankets. The note that the doctor had pinned to his arm was still pinned to
his arm. The preacher was afraid. It was clear to Jim that whatever it was this
witch had shown him had put a fear on the preacher awful.

Jim walked over to the fireplace and looked at everything
that was over there. There wasn’t much—a couple of candles and a dusty vase
with no flowers in it. His eyes ran along the mantel and came to the one brick
where the preacher had glanced. There was nothing different about it. It looked
like all the others.

He reached out and plucked at it. Behind him the preacher
drew in a deep breath. “Falk, Falk.”

“What is this, preacher?” Jim whispered and removed the
brick and then pulled the silver metal box from the hole. He opened it.

Inside were some old papers with writing on them, black
ink on yellowing papers. The handwriting was different, by different people on
different papers, and one was a little book not unlike his own. Jim read over
some of the papers in the firelight. He read them more, he recognized a phrase
“while you were in your blood,” a sketch of a man coming out of a cave, and
then a picture of a woman with wings holding a flaming sword on a mountainside.

He looked at the little book. He set down the metal box
and pulled the little book out and opened it.

“I recognize these. These are like the writings that
my father lost in the caves since before I was a boy, the spells, the Waycraft,
the stories from the River People.” He flipped the pages. “This is my father’s book,
but it’s written by other people. How is that possible? Preacher, how is that
possible?”

“I do not know, Falk. I do not know.”

Falk flipped greedily through the pages. He wondered
if there was anything in here at all that could help them. He hoped.

“This is what they are after?” he asked after a bit.

The preacher nodded. “I think that’s a fair assumption.”

“I need to find that witch.”

The preacher pointed with his good arm toward the North.
“She is hidden. You’ll need to get that little box from Simon and what’s inside,”
the preacher said.

Jim tipped his hat to the preacher. “What’s inside?”

“A thumb.”

“A thumb?”

“Her thumb.”

“Where do you think Simon came across the little box?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

Jim scratched his chin.

“Preacher,” Jim said, “whatever happened to that Starkey
baby? What happened to that little girl?”

The preacher said, “No one knows what happened to the
little baby Rebeccah.”

Jim turned and left and the preacher watched him go,
feeling his limp arm with his right hand.



“What is all this knowing or not knowing?” Benjamin Straddler
asked Lane. He was smiling and looking at his face in the little mirror. He was
smiling for real.

Lane was almost afraid to look anywhere but straight
at her husband’s mouth, afraid that if she blinked, that smile would disappear.

“You know something,” he said, “or you don’t know something.
What does it do? Where does it end?”

Lane was close to him. His shirt was off and his hands
were clean and his eyes were bright. The morning light was coming in through
the windows in the kitchen, casting long shadows of the rickety chairs, making
his eyes gleam with the sun’s light.

He dried his hands on a rag and then grabbed her hands
up in his hands. He pressed her open palms suddenly on his hairy chest.

She felt his heart in there, something like a big frog
jumping against his bones.

“That’s it!” he said and laughed. “That’s what we know.”

She put her arms around his neck and kissed his big face.
She was looking at his mouth and the way he was smiling so wide. Then his mouth
twisted a bit, but the smile stayed there.

Benjamin started sobbing, “My father, my father! I saw
my father’s face—it wasn’t a dream, Lane. It made me know. It made me know just
like this, like my heart thumping, it made me know.”

The feeling Lane had in her chest turned inward on itself
and, as she held him, a shiver of something passed through her mind. She thought
of all these years she’d spent with him, taking care of him as he drank bottles
and sobbed about his lost family, never listening to her talk about hope, him
never changing, always arguing against it, some excuse, some memory blotting it
out. She thought of her prayers nightly—prayers for his peace, for him to be
sent peace. The shiver in her mind told her that God, if there was a God, had
given him a peace here—even if it was the twisted peace of madness, it was
peace.

Yet he’d not picked up a bottle since seeing the outlander
lying there in the mud. He’d not done a thing but sleep, sleep and eat and
smile with that weird light in his eyes. And now, here he was in front of her,
getting ready to go out. She let go of him, feeling the shiver blossom in her
stomach.

“I’m going to the Marbos’,” he said.

Her heart went cold. She walked to the stove. This is
what she had feared. “They’re closed up,” she said quietly. “They’re closed up
on account of what’s been going on.”

“What’s been going on?” he asked.

“The happenings,” she said, fearful. “Bill Hill gone.
The chicken man gone. Both dead, probably. Says there’s been demons around,
spooks. Haven’t you heard? Now what—you gonna go up and have a drink and see
about it?”

“No,” he said after a moment’s thought. “No. I am not
going to Huck’s for a drink. I’m going over to the Marbos’ house. I need to tell
Huck and May too. I need to tell them what’s happened to me and start setting
some things right around here.”

“What did you see?” Lane turned and looked at him. Her
heart wanted this hope to be real, wanted her husband to be back and to be what
she once thought he could be. But this tremor lay in her and a greater and more
real-feeling fear mixed in her and soured the hope. He had gone out of his mind.

“What did you see, Benji?” she asked again as he didn’t
seem able at first to answer her.

Benjamin looked at his beautiful wife and saw that awful
fear in her eyes. He stepped up to the table and pulled away a chair and sat on
it.

“Come,” he said.

“What?”

“Come and sit down. Sit down and we’ll talk.”

“About?”

He smiled again. “About what’s happening, Lane.”

“What’s happened here?”

“Yes, I saw something that . . . well, I saw, yes, but
it’s more than that. It’s more than that, Lane.”

“What did you see, Benji? The stranger’s face in the
dark? With wolves all around and lightning flashing and whisky in your stomach?
And you saw your father? That stranger is not your father.”

“Lane, come and sit down.”

She’d begun to cry a little bit.

“I want to tell you exactly,” he said.

She started shaking her head no.

He looked at her for a long time, watching her shake
her head and stare at the floor with her eyes wide, too many thoughts moving in
her mind.

Benjamin wanted to speak, but he did not. He wanted to
say something, but he did not.

More than anything he could feel that something somewhere
inside of her had shut itself off from him. That this moment he’d wanted, where
she would sit across from him and the words would come out of his mouth that
would make her understand, that moment would not be.

She turned away from him and walked toward the side window,
looking out.

Slowly he stood and thought of going to her, but again
he felt that shut-off feeling coming from her and he stepped back toward the
door.

“Yes,” the voice said in Lane’s mind. “There’s no telling.
There’s no telling what he’ll do.”

“Lane,” Benjamin said at last, “I’ll be back and you’ll
see. I mean to set it right.”

She did not turn around, and she felt it, too. She thought
of him, but nothing happened in her heart. What about her? What was he going
off to set right that didn’t start right here? Here at this moment when she
wanted to be able to turn to her husband and hope, she could feel nothing except
a flatness. She looked out the window at the frost on the grass.

She heard the door slowly open and close behind her.
She began to gather her things.

Benjamin Straddler walked through Sparrow in the early
morning. The frost was on the grass and there was a clean, wet scent somewhere
underneath everything, too. Benjamin thought there was something that smelled a
bit like gunpowder.

Then he heard the reports, loud and clear, coming from
down where the doctor lives.

He ran up the little hill to see if he could see. He
got to the top and looked down toward the doctor’s house. He could see figures moving
about, but some kind of a fog had descended on the whole area down there so
that he couldn’t really see. He heard more reports then and saw figures running
about. He could see something bigger than a man, something dark and much bigger
than a man whirling around in the mist.

Benjamin patted his waist and his sides. He’d nothing
with him, not even his knife. He thought about running down there to find out
and help whoever was down there in the mist. He squinted and looked in again.

Behind him was the long road out to the Marbos’ and the
Hills’ house. He could run home and get his gun. He stood there looking. Now a
deeper thunder and crackle came, and the mist seemed to grow thicker. He took a
few steps toward the mist to see if he could get a better view.

He heard a voice beside him. “Are you lookin’ too?”

It was Hattie Jones and Samuel. Samuel’s eyes looked
keen and liquid down toward the noises.

“We’ve been hearin’ the noise for a while,” said Hattie.
“It’s like they got an animal down there. I think it might be one of them bears
like a big black bear from somewhere down there, like one of them black bears
mighta come out of the woods just like the other critters, the wolves, and the
raccoons. You had any trouble with raccoons? We sure have. You know the woods have
gone barren, they say. And worse than that. They say that there’s places you
get to where the trees turn to dust if you touch them.”

Hattie Jones turned his eyes away from the mist as two
more thuds came up from below. He looked at Benjamin.

“My gracious,” he said, seeing Benjamin’s face. “My gracious.”

Benjamin looked back at Hattie; his old forehead was
wrinkled up in some kind of wonder.

“Look at you!” Hattie said and smiled and kind of went
back on his heels.

Benjamin smiled too. Knowing now that what he had seen
in the mirror this morning wasn’t just wishful thinking or that his hope and
whatever this feeling was inside him just made him think that he looked that
way. There really was something different, there really was some light in his
eyes that hadn’t been there.