The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (32 page)

It was then that the thing came bounding from the edge
of the wood and toward Violet. It was so slow and had so much trouble getting
itself moving that it was almost comical to see it blundering along and hollering
at Violet. Violet turned away from the witch with her gun.

“I think it’s trying to tell us something,” the witch
said. “Nevertheless. Evil is evil.”

Violet’s gun exploded in the night and the thing
toppled backwards. It dropped to the ground, but its head fell in a different
place. Jim had lunged from behind it, his hatchet cutting clean through its
neck in one blow. Then Wylene moved from the rock and made a waving motion with
her hands, and the two separate pieces of the thing burst into green flames and
spewed a black smoke into the air until there were only ashes and melted snow. Wylene
panted.

They all looked at the pile of ashes, then they looked
at the witch, and then they looked at Violet. She was looking at the pile of
ashes too and her mouth quivered and her eyes were watery. The snow was coming
down around her red hair and she was crouched on the ground, bunched up there,
sobbing now.

“Violet,” Jim said, “I am sorry about your husband, about
Bill.”

Violet waved her hand at them as if her hand would make
them all disappear. She threw her gun into the snow. She turned and didn’t look
at them. Picking up her skirts, she began trudging through the snow back in the
direction of Sparrow.

Huck shouted after her: “Violet! Violet!” He looked at
May with wide eyes.

Huck looked at Violet walking off and looked at May again
and then ran into the woods after Violet. May took a few steps closer to Jim
Falk and Jim looked down at her face.

“What was that thing?” the doctor asked Jim.

“I don’t know,” Jim said.

“Why did it look like that? Like the chicken man?” the
doctor asked.

The witch pulled her veil back down over her face and
grasped at her side again and sat down. “That
thing
was very likely an
eye.”

“An eye?” the doctor said.

“A way for them to watch us,” Wylene said.

Jim looked around but couldn’t see or sense anything
at all. Even with the leaves, the last of the leaves running in him, he couldn’t
sense a trace of the killers or even feel the slightest vibration of the
jitters. He hadn’t felt much when the ‘eye’ had arrived, or now. He wasn’t sure
how much use he was going to be against these things if they came in force.

“There’s nothing else here,” Jim said.

“No,” Wylene said, “but someone is watching us. Someone
has likely been watching you since you came down here from the North. He will
come soon.”

“He?” Jim asked wondering if Wylene knew anything of
Varney Mull or anything of Hopestill.

“Yes. He will come to establish his ways in the little
town,” she said.

The doctor looked down at his boots.

“James Falk, maybe it’s not my place, but my pa, Violet,
you’re going after them, right?” May asked.

Jim didn’t answer, but kept looking into the woods as
the wolves yipped and yipped here and there.

“Witch . . . Wylene,” Jim said, correcting himself, “take
the preacher and May Marbo and get them back into the cave. Keep that fire
going, but keep it small. We’ll go after those two.”

Wylene stood and the three started making their way up
the hillside, May holding onto the preacher, the preacher with panic on his face.
They were all looking this way and that, listening, waiting for something to
lunge at them from the darkness.

After she had run off, Violet had not got very far before
Huck had caught up with her. She didn’t turn to look at him right away. She
just asked him, “Why are you following me, Huck?”

Her voice sounded scratchy and she sniffled. She didn’t
slow down.

Huck came up alongside of her. They both had to pick
their feet way up high in order to get through the snow that had already piled itself
up to their shins.

Her face was wet and her eyes were bright with red around
them and Huck could see that there were still tears coming down.

“What do you want with me?” she asked him.

“Violet,” Huck said in a soft way, “there’s nothing that
I want from you. I want you to be safe. Falk does. I do. We all do. That’s what
we want. You can’t run off into the snow and the dark by yourself.”

Then there were no words for a long while, just the muted
noise of the two of them stepping through the snow, and then she said, “You
know I loved him. He made every stick of furniture in that house. Everything
except that table that his granddad made. The house itself. You know, he built
probably half the houses in Sparrow. He was a good man and I loved him.”

“Of course you did,” Huck said, “and I loved Anna.”

They were quiet with each other then.

Now and again, Violet began to glance over at Huck’s
face, watching his clear, green eyes searching out in front of them, looking
into the snow and sticks and bushes to find a place for his wooden leg to
stick. It was hard for Huck. It was hard, but he was doing it anyway. She felt
something warm in her heart, but as soon as it came it went. Her husband was
dead, gone, and beyond any of this now. She was sure of it, and she cried hard
for him as they tramped through the snow. But even as she cried herself blind
in the snow and in the dark, she couldn’t quite get her mind clean of Huck and
his strong arms around her—that night those years ago—the two of them trapped
and never thinking they’d see the light again. No one knew and how could anyone
ever know and how could anyone ever understand? Only Violet could work it in
her mind to the point that she was convinced that anyone else would have done
just the same.

The woods got darker and darker. At some point along
the way, whatever little light of the moon had come blue and dim through the trees
had disappeared. Whatever clouds that brought the heavy snow had darkened the
sky and dropped heavier flakes, and wind came so strong that it cut through the
trees and blew hard against the two. The wind was loud and cold and it forced
them together.

“This is a bad storm!” Huck shouted. “We should have
stayed! You should not have run off!”

She pushed herself against him and folded her arms into
his chest as he opened his coat and wrapped her into it.

“I am so afraid,” she said in his ear. “I am so sad and
I am so afraid.”

“We’ve made it through this before, Violet Hill. We will
make it through again.”

Huck did not stop walking. He kept the two of them moving
along with his one good leg and using the peg on his other as a sticking point
to keep him from slipping in the cold. It was very slow movement, but it was
steady and sturdy, and Violet could feel the warmth of Huck’s chest heating her
arms and his breath on her neck as they struggled together in the frozen darkness.
They could not tell which direction they were going in any longer. They could
not see the sky or the trees. They could not tell anything much except that
they were moving.

When they saw the little lights ahead, they did not speak,
each of them hoping that they were already seeing the windows of somebody’s
house on the outlying edge of Sparrow. But they knew in their hearts that they
had not traveled far enough for that to be so.

“What?” Violet whispered, her voice shaking with the
cold.

The little lights moved when Violet spoke—two little
sparks that disappeared off into the darkness and then reappeared slowly, one at
a time. The little lights were green and white and they blinked.

Then they saw two more of the lights join the first two,
side by side. The lights slowly moved toward Huck and Violet. Huck’s cold fingers
grabbed at his shotgun and Violet stepped behind him and pulled her pistol from
its holster. Huck wondered to himself how an eye could shine with its own light
in such a dark wood, but he was too afraid of the right answer.



From over the hill and down where Sparrow was in between
the hills and alongside of the creek came the deep and hollow sound of a big
wolf howling. The howl was answered from everywhere.

Jim peered out into the hills dark with night. The moon
was near full and, when the clouds parted here and there, it sharpened up all
the shapes of everything. He could see the deep, dark of the woods that flowed
into the valley below, the long twist of the black river, the thin patch where
some road had been beaten by the years and, down there in the valley, a yellow
light dancing by a crook in the creek. The church still burned. A cool wind
came through the trees, and he could just make out the shapes of Violet and
Huck moving along the pocket of the hill.

The doctor and Jim headed down the hillside. The doctor
walked behind him whispering, “Why did you come here? Why did you talk like
that to us? That woman, Violet, she says that she called you?”

Jim turned a little toward him. “Doc, you know me in
some way. You have an idea of who I am and why I am here. I can hear it in your
voice and see it in your eyes. How is it that you know me?”

“Tales,” the doctor said, and even though they were in
the dark, in the night, and wolves prowled, he smiled a little. “Tales that folks
tell all over. I haven’t always been a doctor just in Sparrow, you know.”

“Tales?” Jim asked.

“Well,” the doctor said and tried to look over at Jim.
The snow and the darkness covered Jim’s figure and whirled around him; the moonlight
only cut dimly here and there the shape of the outlander against the drifting
gray. “I can’t tell from the stories who they are about exactly. Someone who
fits you, though. Maybe they are about you, maybe they are about your father.”
He watched Jim’s eyes and face for a reaction, but there was none. “Maybe the
stories—they’re about your grandfather’s grandfather. Who can tell? Maybe the
stories are about all of you at once.”

The doctor crunched along in the snow, lifting his big
legs and moving his arms this way and that to keep his balance. “Some of the
stories are pretty interesting: shadowmen, tree spirits . . . witches.”

The clouds broke and the moon shown down across the hills.
The snow was already so deep. It was up to their knees, but it really didn’t
seem as if it had snowed enough for the snow to be that deep already. They came
down where there was a little offshoot of Sparrow Creek, and now could see
Violet Hill and Huck Marbo tramping through heavy snow out ahead of them.
Violet and Huck were leaving a messy trail behind them, enough for anyone to
follow, but it was being filled in fast.

Jim called out to them, but they didn’t stop or even
turn and wave. Could they not hear him? He yelled at them a few times, but they
didn’t do anything to show that they could hear.

Then, Huck and Violet pointed and gestured with each
other and moved into a darker set of trees and could no longer be seen from where
the doctor and Jim were.

“We better hurry,” Jim said. “Maybe the wind is taking
our voices away.”

Jim looked at the doctor. The doctor looked back at him
and asked again, “Why did you come here, James Falk?”

Jim’s face was blank for a moment. The shadows of the
night seemed to rush in and cover his face so that only the tiny sparks of his
eyes twinkled in the dark patch under his beat-up hat. Then he tilted his head
just a bit to the left so the moonlight came in under the brim and gave a blue
light to his sharp features and he said, “I saw a darkness in my mind—a darkness
of the same shade as what took away my father. It was there, moving in my
vision.” Jim looked forward, indicating Huck and Violet up ahead. “The Hill woman,
Violet, she was in the dream too. Or at least a figure that looked like Violet.
I would wake from the visions and feel in my bones a direction and so I would
move. When I slept, more dreams. I dreamed all along the way to Sparrow, but I
can’t remember anymore. I knew evil awaited me here and that this path would
lead to my father. More than that, I couldn’t know.”

The closer that they got to the grove of dark trees,
the louder the noise of the wind was, but there was no wind where they were.

“Did dreams lead you along a path to Hopestill as well?”

Jim recoiled and stopped. The two were close together
in the deep snow.

“Pritham,” Jim said under his breath, “what are you at?”

Doc Pritham didn’t move. His lips barely moved, his body
didn’t move, but he said, “Well, I ain’t sent for you if that’s what you’re
thinkin’.”

“I know you’re not sent for me, elsewise you would’ve
poisoned me in your little doctor house with potions. Now tell me what your
business is, Pritham. There’s other kinds of business to be had. Especially
from those up north. Those who are working with Varney Mull.”

The doctor puffed at the pipe that stuck out of his mouth
and said, “So you’ve heard of him too. Look, Falk, just a few days before you
got in to Sparrow, a young man called William Wade came through here down from
Hopestill. Not because he was looking for you, Jim Falk, but because I’d ordered
a batch of healing herbs and some other ointments and such a few weeks prior.
Wade’s a runner for me and for someone I think you know. He brings me things
from about for a wage. He moves around, but he’d been stayin’ up a while in
Hopestill. He said there’d been some kind of trouble up there that had to do with
a witch man who’d stolen weapons from a ship and had poisoned a man called Spencer
Barnhouse.”

“Doc,” Jim whispered, “do you think I did this thing?
Do you think that I am, as you say, a witch man? You think I killed Barnhouse?
Or do you think I’m some fiend? Why’d you patch my hand then, why give me
medicine and help me live?”

Pritham sighed and smiled some. “Other tales. Other tales
that rang truer than those. Wade said that he’d also heard around the edges and
in the public houses that the culprit, the one they called a witch, was a man
who was on the run and it wasn’t the right man. That they’d pinned a queer
murder on an outlander so someone in a high place might go free. More than
tales, though, Falk, I just had a feeling about you.”