The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (25 page)

Samuel’s eyes were darting this way and that. He was
looking into the mist, but his eyes seemed to be following some kind of movement
down there.

It got quiet all of a sudden and the mist seemed to grow
even darker, changing from a cloudy white gradually to an oily gray. There was
no noise for a little piece and then all the wind died away.

Hattie whispered, “I heard some shots and came to see,
but it seems like there’s nothin’ to see. I tried goin’ down in there, but that
gave me the shivers so bad I got dizzy. It’s strange, isn’t it? I couldn’t see
a thing in that fog, and the more I was in it, the more I felt like something
else was in there with me. Strange, isn’t it?”

Hattie reached out when he said this and grabbed onto
Samuel’s arm. “Come on, son, let’s come away from this place.”

Benjamin said, “Hattie Jones, you’ve known me for a long
time. You’ve known all my story and you were there when the wolves killed my
pa. I want you to know that you’ve been a good friend to me.”

Hattie turned very slowly and said, “Are you dying?”

Benjamin paused a moment and thought about that because,
to be honest, he felt that sounded right even though he wasn’t really dying.
“No,” he said. “No. I am not. Not exactly.”

Hattie Jones tipped his hat and looked back into the
darkening mist and then to his left and his right and was not sure what to say.
“Well, okay,” he said and tromped off, his hand around Samuel’s wrist.

Benjamin could hear him saying, “I’m done in this town.
The devil take it.”

Simon cried. The tears were all over his cheeks and his nose
was running and he had to keep wiping his hands across his face. The fear had
him.

He looked once more through the just cracked doorway
into his mother’s room. For a moment he froze and didn’t breathe. His reddened eyes
widened and his mouth parted, his breath stuck in his chest.

There it went.

Another black shadow danced along the inside of the door
frame. The fire crackled and Simon walked quiet as he could to the door and
closed it. When it was clicked shut, his breath came out in a sob.

On the table in the room lay the Book flipped open to
pages covered in scrawl and spirals—he’d made some of these marks himself. He
glanced over and his eyebrows came together and he put both hands up to his face.
Out of his mouth came a quick bark of grief. He ran to the table and scooped at
it wildly, to pick it up or to knock it onto the floor, he couldn’t tell.

Then a noise came from inside his mother’s room, a low,
quiet chattering. Someone was talking, in a way, but trying to keep from being
heard.

Simon grabbed up his books. He looked again at the door.
His face was white and shone with sweat. He looked at the books on the floor
and on the table and he kicked one of the books. “I didn’t mean it,” he whispered,
but then he frowned and looked at the door and said it again louder, over the
fire, “I didn’t mean it! I take it back! I take it back!”

As in answer to him, a hissing came from his mother’s
room. A hiss and then a bump, and then a louder bump.

Simon looked at the Book and quickly grabbed up a sack.
His hands and body moved fast; he suddenly caught up its weight and stuffed it
in.

He heard another voice in the room now. His mother’s
voice. He heard Elsie Starkey’s voice. She said, “Who are you? What do you want?”

He turned away from the door, yanking up the sack onto
his back.

He heard his mother’s trembling voice: “Who’s here? Who
is that? What do you want?”

Simon knew that they would come for her. Whatever they
might be. They always came for their part. They had repeated that several times.
He’d kept her as long as he could, which was as long as they said he could.
He’d kept her there just as they said he could in exchange for little Rebeccah
first. Now they’d come to take what belonged to them.

He could hear the struggling begin now behind the door,
he heard the low rasping voices of the killers growling threats and curses in
the forgotten language. Suddenly there came a thrashing form from the room and
the thumping sound of fists against flesh. Simon put his hand on the latch of
the front door, quietly, slowly, fearful to move, fearful not to move, or to
distract the things from their task.

Just as he turned the latch, the door to his mother’s
room shattered and her body clumsily landed across the table.

“Simon!” Elsie shouted, her face was already swollen.
“Simon!”

Simon shut tight his eyes, his right hand gripping the
latch. He’d seen the things in the dark room, and they had seen him. For some
reason, they had stopped their onslaught and were observing him. Waiting in the
blackness of the room. Now and again, the fire flickering in the fireplace
would reveal a swatch of the smooth gray skin, or cast a pale light across the
sunken faces. In the reddish light, one could see that perhaps these were once
men. Yes, they could be just men who’d become crooked and bent into their own
evils—lost in the wilderness, wild and without mercy, their nails sharpened,
their eyes quick and flashing as a dog’s, but this was only in the light. As
the shadows passed over them, or if they receded into the dark corners of the
room, the figures grew ever more twisted and cruel, and then, rising from their
backs stretched the webbings of long-fingered wings.

But later, in thinking back on the things, the mind could
never be fully satisfied or convinced that it had seen anything more than a
trick of the shadows and the wild men of the woods—perhaps a tribe of old natives
from deep country.

Now those things held back, but they peered into the
room where Simon and Elsie were.

Elsie began to recover, sitting up on the table. “I’ve
been asleep?” she said. “How long? Was it a dream? Simon?”

Simon could feel Elsie’s eyes on the back of his head.
He turned the latch and disappeared into the night as behind him the things
launched from Elsie’s bedroom and onto her.

As he ran from his home he could hear crashing and gurgled
screams coming from behind him. This was the end for her. But for him, for him,
this was not the end at all.

He held the book tighter to his chest and ran down the
main road into town. For a moment Elsie’s face flashed up in his mind. He remembered
that she had been there. Someone had taken him away from those people. There
had been some blurred time of terror and a strange figure between those people
and Elsie—those people who made him tired, screamed at him in a language he
didn’t understand, caged him. He remembered it as if it was some legend told to
him by a storyteller, he remembered some cloaked man fighting with the people
who had imprisoned him and then Elsie’s warm hands hugging him close. What had
he done?

The memories sickened him. Their softness began to sharpen
and mix with the images of these dark things that came to him in the blizzard.
They spoke of a power to get revenge on those slavers that took his real mother
and killed his true father. They spoke of a power that would free him from his
current life, bound to a hopeless mother, in nowhere Sparrow, fiddling with
parlor tricks, searching, searching. The Way of the preachers and the church
were empty tales told by hypocrites and farm hands. The dark things spoke of
practicality, of wealth, of power.

But this mother, Elsie, she had been kind, bright as
a flower in the moonlight, now . . . “We will show you these powers, but we will
take our part. We always take our part.”

He ran on. He was running in fear deep and true and he
knew that now. The fear kept him going. On this night, the agreement between him
and the dark things was ended. He had the Book now, though, but he would have
to get away, far away. They could do as they pleased, as could he. He was no
more protected from them anymore than the rest of the folks, but now he could
try the powers.

On up ahead of him, he caught sight of a shape at the
edge of the path. Out of breath as he was, he put on an extra burst of speed
and cut hard away from the shape, thinking that this would get him by. But
instead he found himself suddenly lying on his back and struggling for air.

Something had pounded his chest and dropped him hard
into the cold mud, his satchel of books somewhere beside him.

“Simon Starkey,” a man’s voice said to him, “where are
you headed in this night?”

Simon tried to get himself up, but Doc Pritham kept him
down with a heavy thrust of his boot.

The doctor was looking at the house up there at the end
of the path and something looked not quite right about it, but he couldn’t quite
figure out what.

“Where are you running off to?” the doctor asked.

Simon smiled up at the doctor. “Doc, you gotta let me
up. Something terrible’s happened.”

The doctor let him up, but grabbed him tight by his elbow
on the left arm and twisted a bit. He could see a blazing fire suddenly pouring
upwards from the Starkey house and he could feel that Simon did not intend to
stay put.

“The killers,” Simon said in a harsh whisper and scrambled
about. “The killers! Old Bendy’s Men! Like from the old stories. They’ve come
and they killed my ma! Elsie!”

Doc Pritham glanced up toward the Starkey house which
was crumbling into flames and smoke.

“We’ll see about this,” the doctor said and, dragging
Simon by his arm, began to head up toward the house. “Who set this fire? Who
set this fire, magician?”

“No!” Simon shouted. “No! Doc! No! They’ll kill us!”

“Kill us? Who’s going to kill us?”

Simon spun hard to the right, but the doctor was heavy
and his hand was strong—he tightened his grip on the kid’s arm and Simon’s wiry
frame buckled and he went down on one knee in pain.

“Look, Doc,” Simon was saying, glancing back down the
road. Somewhere there in the mud and darkness was his leather satchel with the
Book. “Doc, don’t you know what those things are?”

The doctor shoved his face into Simon’s face. “Why? Why
would I know? You have some reason why I should know what these things are? Stories!
Monsters from stories? You got a good reason for me to believe old spook
stories, magician? Did you conjure them up? Or did you set fire to your own
house? What I can believe, Simon Starkey, is that some kid is mixin’ up with
some kind of false magic, expecting dark miracles from old books, and now he’s
got blood on his hands and he’s finding out that all them books and symbols
aren’t worth anything but a few card tricks!”

There was a poof noise and they were awash in a bright
yellow glow followed by a crackling and snapping wind.

They both turned and felt the hot wind of the house fire
roll over them.

“Elsie!” Simon shouted.

The flames were enormous now, reaching in a kind of column
up into the night and then dwindling quickly into a smolder. Pieces of the
little home flitted about and burned away here and there in a tree or landed in
the soft mud still glowing red and orange embers with white tips, wide swatches
of burning cloth flapped by the doctor’s head. He grabbed his hat and held it
tight on.

The doctor let go of Simon then and the two men stood
there staring into the big, bright fire.

In the fire, they saw the outlines of what looked to
be men, five of them. The dark silhouettes stood together and then, as if noticing
they had been seen, they shifted, rose from the ground, and disappeared into
the smoke.

The doctor looked at Simon.

Simon looked at the doctor.

Stubble covered most of the doctor’s old face and neck.
The wind blew hard and the house fire whipped the shadows around on his face.

Doc Pritham smiled a quick smile and said, “You’re scared,
aren’t you? What are you scared of?”

Simon began to walk away.

The doctor looked at the house still licking flames into
the night and then back at Simon. He could hear Simon picking up the pace, putting
distance between the two of them.

“Simon!” the doctor called after him. “What happened?
What happened to your little sister? What happened to Elsie’s baby?”

Simon turned and looked at the doctor. The house blazed
up again behind the doctor. He took a few steps back toward Doc Pritham so that
the doc could see his face.

Simon pointed at the house. “They came during the blizzard!
You know!”

Somewhere off in the sky, Simon thought he heard a whispering
voice and he noticed that the night wasn’t so dark, at least not in the road
where his satchel lay with the book inside. He could see it up there in the
road just behind the doctor. The doctor was keeping him from it.

“Who came?” the doctor asked.

Simon said, “Doc, you know who came. Men like us; we
don’t have to pretend. Men like us; we don’t have to lie. We know what we know,
Doc. Yes? Don’t we? We know what we’ve seen. We know about the darkness. And I know
that you know, or that you pretty much can guess where that little girl is.”

Simon took a few more steps forward and felt a kind of
heat coming at him from the bag that was over there in the mud. He saw an image
in his mind of the doctor flailing and falling aside; in his mind he picked up
the Book, gripped it, and as he did so, symbols floated up in black swirls. He
saw a drawing of a kind of knife-fingered glove, he saw a conjuring circle
sketched by a sharp pen with four triangles pointed to four directions. He felt
his heart beating, beating. It was the Speaking Book that he’d been promised by
the killers. It was speaking to him!

This old, fat doctor was not going to end his journey.
In fact, no one could.

The doctor saw something in Simon’s eyes and he moved
his hand slowly down toward his belt where his gun was holstered.

A smile drew across Simon’s face and his white teeth
shone in the firelight. His voice grew louder. “The killers, Doc!” Simon laughed
and raised his arms a little and took another step toward the doctor. “Isn’t
that what you call them? The killers? The Sons of Nod? The sons of Cain? Yes,
yes! From the mountain of the angels? They survived what the others didn’t!
They survived the great flood waters! How did they do it? How did they do it?”

Simon drew his hands together like a prayer and something
shifted in him, and he seemed momentarily to stumble as if a big wind blew him
from behind, then his features grew dark and unseen and he rushed wildly at the
doctor.

The crack of the doctor’s pistol stopped Simon and he
fell down in the cold mud. The doctor walked up to him and saw him sputtering
and twisting there on his back. He gave him another round in the head to stop
the pain.

“No friend of the Evil One,” the doctor said, “is a friend
of mine.”

The doctor left Simon’s body lying there in the mud in
the night. By the light of the burning house, he could see where the magician’s
bag was plopped in the mud just down the path. He went and got the bag and
closed it with the Book inside and took it with him. He didn’t know what was in
it, but he took it anyway. He headed back to find Jim and Violet.



Wylene, who was called by some a witch, and who was called
Wylene by the people of Sparrow, lay in her broken cot in the center of the
abandoned shed she called home. The darkness of night was disappearing, and gray
and blue morning light seeped in through the slats. Long ago, her sense of smell
had disappeared too, but somewhere back in her head the tiniest curl of a scent
rolled up from her memory—the steely smell of frosted glass, the pines scratching
the roof.