The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (26 page)

She placed her old hands in front of her face, studying
her palms. The swirls and crisscrossed tattoos, the winged and arrow-ended
circles and staffs—it was no longer possible to tell anymore which lines were
drawn at birth and which had been stitched with ink and needle. She traced for
a moment, with the index finger of her left hand, the nub where her right thumb
once was. She remembered the woman who had taken it from her.

The pointed chin and thin lips were all she could see
under the dark hood. They came in the night. Wylene rolled herself into a ball
on her cot with the memory; the soft, serrated edges of the scars on her back
tickled against her robes.

“You can’t hide now,” the woman’s voice whispered harshly
in her ear. “We’ll hold you until they come for you and then we’ll burn the
whole lot of you. None of you will escape.”

The figures in the square hoods behind her stood quietly
by with whips and hatchets, the cloth hoods moving in and out with their
breathing.

Wylene endured and was left naked and twisted on the
dirt floor of this shed.

All these years, she’d wanted away. She’d wanted freedom
and to run in the night again—to run free and not in fear. She wanted to be
free again, but she’d not wanted revenge. These folks, scurrying through the
night with their hoods and hatchets, their scriptures tucked away in a satchel,
they simply did not know. How could they? They were animals who’d encountered a
fire—standing, staring, or perhaps nestling close to get warm, none of them
knowing where the fire came from, its power, its potential. The people of this
world did not know that there were lightless fires that could freeze, and they
certainly did not understand that mercy and goodness could come from strange
faces with black eyes.

No, she’d never wanted revenge on these poor animals
who could only be guided by fear, but freedom from their cruelty, yes. That would
be enough.

As the morning light filled up the house, Wylene stood
and walked to the back wall of the cabin, winding tight her black and gray
wraps around her. She put her hands as close to the light as she could, but the
spell with which the woman held her caused even the edges of the light to sting
and bring smoke from her skin. She turned and shuffled back and lay in the
small, dirty cot to sleep away the light.

She woke abruptly to see a long shadow fall onto the
western wall of her cabin. Squinting into the light of the open door, she saw the
outline form of the outlander with his long coat and beat-up hat. His hands held
the little black box that the preacher had brought with him. Inside was her
thumb. She shuddered. He had come in the day. Come at a time when he was here
either to dispatch her for good or to force her through pain to a revelation.
But men like this? She opened a black eye and peered at him. Men like this. She
could see the green mist that shimmered around his body: he was a man of the
Waycraft. If he thought she was a witch, a true witch, he would drag her into
the light and she would burst into flame and die. She would not panic, though.
These men were often weaker and more confused than their brashness projected;
they were often fallen, too taken to drink and whoring, and their minds were
often clouded and confused.

The witch unrolled the fabrics from her cowl and stood
up like a black ghost. She pulled the dark veils over her face to protect her
eyes from the pouring light that came from behind the outlander. To the outlander
now, she appeared as only a black shape in the dark of the shed.

“Old woman,” he said being cautious and formal, “stay
at your bed.”

“What do you want, outlander? Why have you disturbed
an old woman’s rest?” she hissed.

Jim took a step forward and, seeming to realize her discomfort
with the light, used his foot to clap the door shut behind him.

Wylene did not relax.

He set the box down on a disintegrated stove.

“Old woman, the preacher told me that you were hollow,”
Jim said and raised an eyebrow. “I have not come here to rid you out.”

The old woman didn’t move.

“I have the power,” Jim said, “to restore your hand.”

The old woman didn’t move.

“What is it that you want, James Falk?” she asked, a
puff of her cold breath escaping from behind the dark veil she wore.

“You know that the old evil has awakened in the land,”
Jim said, trying to see her face behind the cloth.

She was quiet.

“I know that it was not your doing. I know that you have
not brought this about.”

“And what would you, child, know of such things?” she
asked.

Jim didn’t smile. “I was raised by the one they call
the grandmother of the woods. Do you know her?”

Wylene’s clawed fingers went limp when she heard the
name. A heavy motion of some sort passed from her hips to her head, and she had
to move her feet to stay standing.

Jim edged closer and closer to the dark figure standing
near the cot.

“Woman, some think that you are a witch, but I know witches
and you are not one,” Jim said, and now knelt on one knee so that he could try
to look behind the veil, directly at her face. “These powers that have awakened
are stronger than I can face alone. You know what I am talking about. They are
hiding some way. I cannot feel them as I once was able, or see where they’ve
gone off to. They are too much in the darkness for my eyes. But maybe not for
yours.”

The witch’s body slumped under the robes, and she turned
her head away. “They will kill me,” her voice croaked. “The rest of them are
not like you. The others here in Sparrow. They are not what they seem either.
They bound me here by way of some dark power that they do not know, but they
will kill me as soon as the time comes—when the powers have grown full and their
master comes from the North.”

She sat back down on the edge of the little bed, searching
in her mind for the reason for the feeling that she felt now, so foreign and
heavy, and yet it felt like a cool water tingling and bubbling in her chest.
She recalled suddenly finding a rabbit’s den and the tiny ones bounding this
way and that, and then she remembered this feeling. It was hope.

“No, old woman,” Jim said. “They will not kill you, because
I will not let them.”

Jim stood and brought the box and set it in her lap.
Kneeling in front of her now, Jim said, “I know the difference. Evil is evil only.
You can’t make it into good. You are not those things that you see, those visions,
those voices. You are different somehow from those things, aren’t you? You are
hollow. Just as I am.”

Jim opened the box in her lap and from it he drew the
crooked piece of decayed flesh and bone.

“Give me your hand,” Jim said.

“They will kill me,” she said, but she almost sobbed
with joy.

“No harm will come to you,” Jim said strong and gruff.
“They do not know evil. They cannot discern it because it has nearly consumed
them.”

From somewhere beneath the dark folds of cloth came the
witch’s wrinkled, tattooed, and thumbless right hand.

Jim united the thumb with the stump and covered it with
his own two hands, his right still wrapped in the white bandages. Jim bowed his
head over his hands and a stillness filled the little shed, then a cooling wind
blew in through the cracks and Jim could smell the burning fire of the healing
taking place as a pale gold light lit his face.

The witch felt a feeling in her hand, something like
a tiny animal suddenly squirming and hot—and then the warmth of water cascaded over
her whole body and behind her veil her eyes felt wet and there was a sudden
moistness in her nostrils. She could smell something burning, and the light of
the sun in the cracks of the cabin warmed and defined itself. Her muscles
became lithe and itching, not just in her hand, in her whole self.

Jim stood back as she stood up and dropped back her hood
and veil. Her black hair rolled in heavy curls from under her cowl, her face
pale and sharp as a half-moon, the carved cheeks over pale, full lips.

Jim mumbled for the woman was young and beautiful.

Her eyes, though, were still without whites, black as
oil in the sun and sparkling with dark rainbows.

The talons of her restored hands stuck out from her
black sleeves. She stared at them momentarily and then stepped lightly to the
boarded window. She tugged at the boards and allowed a wide blaze of
green-tinted sunlight to fall on her hands and face. She curled and stretched
her white, sharp-tipped fingers in the light, and they appeared beautiful and
white and wicked.

She warmed her face in the light and then she smiled,
revealing her perfectly sharp teeth.

She turned and her black eyes met Jim’s blue eyes. In
a clear low voice she said, “Old Bendy’s Men they are. They must and can be lured.
If we are to destroy them, we must draw them out from beyond the veil so that
they might be burned. We can draw them out with a fresh corpse.”

“The Starkey boy’s been shot,” Jim said.

“The magician?” she asked.

“The doctor’s shot him. He’s dead in the mud not far
from here.”

“They’ll come in the night before dawn; we must move
quickly,” Wylene said and dropped the heavy outer portion of her black cloak to
the ground, beneath which was a very thick black cape.

Jim and Wylene stepped out of the house and headed through
the woods. Behind them a wind blew through the trees and the house quietly
collapsed and slowly swirled away into a dusty wind and was no more.

As Jim looked at her and thought about what the preacher
said—that she was hollow—a notion came to him. She was going to help him. She
was going to help him rid out this evil. Whatever powers she had, without even
blinking, she had already given him a key to drawing these creatures into the
open so that he, so that
they
could finish them. Jim felt a strange
warmth in his chest and recognized it as hope.

Wylene smiled at the sound of the little house collapsing,
her sharp teeth glinting in the morning sun, but she did not turn back to look.

As they walked along, a cold wind blew through the tops
of the trees and Wylene took a deep breath of the air and felt in her breath
the tiny sparks of ice that meant snow was coming.

Jim came to the edge of the woods and looked down on
the town. Snow was coming now, and it was dancing here and there in sunlight and
clouds. Wylene had stepped into the trees behind him and he could not see her
at all. He motioned for her to stay behind. Looking around and not wanting to
whisper for her, he was pretty sure she was the shadow that looked a little too
tall over by the crooked tree on the bank.

It was risky to bring her across through the open part
of town and down around the bend to the doctor’s place. It was risky for sure,
but they were running out of time. Whatever the thing was that they’d killed
out in front of the doctor’s place, it was different from the others and it was
stronger. It was stronger and stranger than anything that he’d ever seen. The
other thing about the thing was that he couldn’t shake the idea that it looked
just like Kitaman. How could it be? It was one thing to understand that demons
and spooks and witches were coming out of the woods, but it was another thing
to consider that these old tales told by the old people of the woods and rivers
were true too. It was too much to think about, and they were running out of
time. But she was here now. This strange woman who was a witch or not a witch.

Jim had used the ancient words given to him by his father
to restore her to her true form, and when she was restored she offered help.

He looked around again and squeezed his eyes and tried
to clear out his mind so he could think of all the possibilities of what might
happen if they started out of the woods and someone saw them. He felt around to
see if anyone was standing about. Something in his mind told him that it was
safe, but they had to go right now, right now, or else someone would come
along. He waved at her to come with him and right away.

Wylene looked at him from her shadows. Here was this
raggedy man in a beat-up hat who had for some reason restored her to herself. She
wondered if he really even knew what he had done or how he had done it or why.
Now, for some reason, he was leading her back into the town where she knew her
captors from long ago were still lurking, still waiting. Yet there was something
that was speaking to her through this broken-looking person. Something from
long ago nudged her toward him, and she did move out of the shades and down the
embankment toward Jim Falk. She wanted to help him.

There was a worn-out road that went up from what probably
used to be a well just at the edge of the wood. Somewhere around here, long
ago, might have been a house. They stuck to the edge of the clearing, making
their way around the long way around.

The snow was still coming, and it made the clearing a
silvery pink and white as it mixed with the morning sunshine. Wylene smiled underneath
the veil that hid her face. Her eyes were hungry for the light: she yearned to
take off the veil and run into the sunshine, it had been so long, so long.

Jim and Wylene came to a spot where they had to cross
directly across the old road and then down into the little hollow where the
doctor’s house was. Wylene seemed to have no problem completely vanishing from
sight while she stood along the tree line, but Jim was just a man after all. He
looked left and right and right and left and squinted and looked and looked
again. He couldn’t see much but trees and snow swirling and the old, dirty
road.

“Let’s go,” he whispered to her.

They crossed so quickly and vanished into the hollow
so fast that anyone who wasn’t staring straight at them would have only thought
their eyes were playing tricks on them. But Merla Mosely, who was staring out the
window and down the road and right at that spot, saw them both. She saw the shape
of the outlander who had brought all the evil, Jim Falk, go across the road,
and what she saw following behind him made her shudder. A moving shadow, a
shadow that slinked and flickered across the road, following behind him, not
pursuing him, but following the way a hound follows a master. Jim was leading a
witch into town.