The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (33 page)

“Barnhouse was poisoned?” Jim asked and turned and looked
back out over the valley and down toward the little flickering flame that must
be the church in Sparrow.

“It’s what Wade told me.”

“William Wade. I have not met him, but I’d seen his name
enough times on Barnhouse’s books. They’re after me, Doc, sure, but they’re
after us all,” Jim said. “Whatever story comes along with them will only add
fuel to that Ruth Mosely’s fire.”

They started moving again toward where they thought Violet
and Huck had gone off to. It was hard to tell. It looked as if down where they
went everything was dark now and a wind was starting in the trees.

“Spencer Barnhouse is a good man. I don’t know why anyone
would want anything evil to befall that man,” the doctor said.

Jim nodded. He thought of the man who had helped him
so often, the man who had helped his pa, who had saved so much of what his pa had
worked so hard for. He thought too of Barnhouse’s little girl, of Emily, and
wondered if Barnhouse had been murdered, what would become of her.

“What do you know of this Ruth Mosely?” Jim asked the
doctor.

“Little,” the doctor said. “She’s from the North, though,
that I know.”

Jim turned to the doctor. “The witch said that Ruth Mosely
put a bind on her. It was true, Doc. True that she was bound and weakened to
near death. An old spell, the spell of the Witch’s Thumb, or some call it the
Wastrel.”

The doctor rubbed his chin. “The Wastrel? Ain’t that
a twist.”

The doctor glanced away and back over his shoulder toward
the cave. “The preacher will know more about Ruth Mosely.”

Up ahead of them, there was noise now and they stopped.
The trees in the little dip of the woods where Violet and Huck had headed off to
were bending with such a force it looked as if someone was pulling on them.

“Is that wind?” the doctor asked, and then darkness moved
over them. Whatever sky or moonlight had been lighting the woods disappeared,
and snow rushed down from the sky and all about them.

“We’re going to lose them in this!” Jim heard himself
shouting at the blurred form of the doctor standing there. They were in a
clearing, and so Jim figured maybe there was some more cover in and under the trees.
“Let’s get in there and find them!”

Jim grabbed hold of the doctor and started pulling him
along with him. They had to take great big steps to get through the deepening
snow. There was another noise that came from all around them. Jim knew that it
wasn’t the wind.

“Wolves?” the doctor shouted the question. “More wolves?”

“Let’s hope that’s all!” Jim yelled back.

They moved into the deep, cold darkness of the trees.
Here there was no moonlight and there was only noise around them, the noise of
the wind whipping this way and that. There might be shapes moving, but whether
it was Huck and Violet, wolves, killers, or trees moving about them, neither of
them could tell.

Jim started shouting at the doctor: “Go back! Go back
to the cave! It’s too much here! It’s too dark!”

He was shouting and pulling on the doctor’s coat, and
then the coat went limp and came off in his hand. He felt something heavy brush
against his face, but whether it was the doctor moving off into the wind, or a
tree limb, or something else, he couldn’t tell. How he wished he hadn’t taken
too many of leaves now: the power of them would have helped him to see in the
torrent of darkness that swarmed at him now.

“Doc!” he shouted, but the wind was harsh and took away
his words.

He fumbled around until he got his footing, the wind
knocking him this way and that. He pulled his hatchet and looked around squinting
and whirling in the wind.

He started to make out some light, but he couldn’t
tell what was making the light. It looked as if stars moving in the darkness.

Then it was upon him. The jagged fingers were cold and
hard and scraped at the skin of his throat. Its face was in his face, the crooked,
smashed-looking face. These creatures were somehow using the bodies of dead
men. Whatever was inside the mouth, those long worms that reached out, wrapped
themselves around his neck. He wondered if the doctor had met a similar fate.
Jim chopped upward with his father’s ax, slicing the black worms and breaking
the jaw of the thing. It slipped away from him almost immediately, shrieking
into the blackness and wind.

The doctor saw the wild shape of Violet’s hair whirling
up around her in the wind and the blue light of the moon through the snow and
made his way toward her. He figured that must be Huck standing by her, each of
them holding onto the other. Then something else moved—a dark, dark shadow that
jumped into the way. It started toward Huck and Violet, but the doctor drew and
blasted straight at it.

At once he tripped and fell into deep snow and tasted
his own blood as the wounds on his face and neck bled hot and then began to
freeze closed. Something underneath him wriggled, and he found that he was holding
onto a thin frame. There was a flash and a pistol thump, but not his own. He
felt hot blood again on his fingers, but it was not his own. There was more
shrieking, and something grasped his ankle in the dark. He felt those claws
punch into his muscle and brought his hatchet down in that direction, connecting
it with a crunch.

The wind slowed and then was gone. He could hear breathing
and panting and someone saying, “Violet, Violet.”

“Who’s there?” the doctor shouted hoarsely.

“This is Jim Falk! Who’s there?”

The doctor tried to answer Jim, but suddenly felt no
strength in himself. He thought he could feel heat sliding out of his body.

“Huck Marbo!” Huck shouted, answering the doctor and
Jim. “I’ve got Violet, she’s okay. I think she’s hurt, but she’s okay.”

The trees went calm and moonlight filtered again through
the pines. Jim could see now Huck Marbo leaning over Violet and Violet was
holding her gun and there was a dead killer on the ground beside them and another
below Jim with a smashed head. But there was another lump in the middle. The
doctor.

Jim ran, pushing his legs through the deep snow. He grabbed
the doctor and rolled him over, but the doctor’s face was stone, his eyes fixed
on something far, far away. His neck was severed and his chest and arms had
been clawed to tatters.

Jim looked this way and that, looking to see if any more
killers remained in the clearing.

“We need to get back to the cave!” he shouted to Violet
and to Huck. “It’s not safe here and it’s not safe to go back to Sparrow.”

He looked at the good doctor’s face. “Why did you come
here, Doctor? Of all the places, of all the towns here in the South. Why did
you have to come here?”

Around them, they could hear wolves howling.

“Get on!” Jim yelled at Huck and Violet now. “Get yourselves
back up in there! Hurry, run! They’re coming!”

Violet and Huck did not need to be told again. They started
moving back toward the cave, up the hill. They looked over at Jim attending to
the doctor’s body, and Violet tucked her face into Huck’s shoulder.

“Doc,” Jim said to the doctor’s body, “I am so sorry,
Doc. I didn’t mean for you to get into all this.”

Jim grabbed the doctor’s pack and slung it over his shoulder.
Then he noticed that the doctor had another pack. It didn’t look like a pack
that the doctor would have. It was heavy. He put that over his shoulder too.
When he did, he felt weak.

Then he tried to lift the doctor’s body and couldn’t.
He heard the wolves bawling here and there around in the trees. Jim thought of
what the doctor had said about Barnhouse again. Was it going to be that whoever
he came into contact with would eventually find some evil end? His mother? His
father? Bill Hill? The chicken man? He looked at the doctor’s face in the
moonlight. The doctor didn’t look afraid. He wondered if somewhere the doctor’s
wife or children or even the doctor’s parents might be waiting and wondering.

“Why did you come here, Doc? Why did you come to Sparrow?”

He heaved again, and this time the doctor’s frame came
up and Jim meant to drag the corpse off and up the hill to find a suitable grave,
but he heard a voice.

“Wait,” the doctor said and feebly reached out and put
his torn-up hand on Jim Falk’s shoulder. Jim stopped and knelt down with the
doc over his knee.

For a little moment the doctor passed his eyes back and
forth between Jim’s face and the shadowy trees above.

“What is it, Doc?”

The doctor motioned with his hand to Jim and pointed
to the heavy bag Jim had just put on. Jim handed it to him. The doctor reached into
the satchel and removed a large square object that was wrapped in a cloth. He
handed it to Jim.

“What’s this, Doctor?” Jim flipped it over in his hands
and the cloth wrapping came off and showed Simon’s book.

“Witchwords?” Jim said.

The doctor’s bushy eyebrows came together. “I
couldn’t open it. The Starkey kid, Simon. He dropped it in the mud before. It’s
his bag. I picked it up.”

“Did you open it up? Did you try to read it?” Jim’s blue
eyes flashed in the moonlight.

The doctor said nothing. He coughed and blood came out.
Jim wiped it away. Then Jim wrapped the book back up fast and dropped it back
in the satchel and quickly pulled out the doctor’s bag.

“What can I use in here?” Jim asked and began fumbling
around in the bottles.

The doctor reached out and grabbed Jim’s arm. “I’m past
all that. I’m past all that, outlander.”

“You’re not. Show me what to do, old man! Show me what
to do!” Jim was nearly yelling at him.

The doctor was calm. The thing that grabbed his chest
was powerful and its hands were hot like fire against his skin. The wound, he
knew, was so deep that it was bleeding inside and out. There was nothing Jim
could do, but the doctor said, “Get the blue bottle with the square stopper and
give me that.”

Jim did so immediately, and the doctor drank. Jim grabbed
a long, wide bandage and began pressing it onto the doctor’s chest.

“What did you see in the pages? Did anything happen?”
Jim asked quick.

They could hear again the wolves howling somewhere in
the night.

The doctor looked at Jim and said, “Scribbles, shapes,
nothing. There was nothing. It looked like a book full of spirals and blotches.
But it gave me a chill when I opened it.”

“You saw no words or pictures?” Jim asked. He pressed
the bandages into the doctor’s chest. There was too much blood.

“Words? No words.”

“Good,” Jim said, and the doctor looked at him with eyes
wide and his mouth half parted and Jim took in a short breath. “You don’t know
what it is, do you, Doctor?”

The doctor coughed, “No.”

“This is a very old thing, Doctor. A book of Witchwords
and it must be destroyed. That you looked inside is bad enough. We’ll have to
destroy it soon as we can.”

The doctor’s eyes were wide. He thought about Simon.
He thought about Simon’s strange card trick—the moving hole.

“Jim, when you go back to the others, I don’t want you
to hide anymore. The time for hiding and for fear is over.”

“Fear?” Jim asked and kept the bandage tight over the
doctor’s heart.

“Can you read that book, Falk?” the doctor suddenly asked.

“No one should read a book such as this,” Jim said angrily.
“It must be prepared and burned up.”

Jim could feel that the doctor wasn’t breathing right,
but whatever medicine Jim had given him had brightened the doctor’s voice a
little.

“Jim, those people back in Sparrow will need you. May
Marbo, the Straddlers, all of them. They need you.”

“Doc, we’re not going to get out of this without you.
What will we do without the medicine? Without the healing ways?”

The doctor didn’t answer. His eyes were open, but he
did not see anymore.



Jim was telling the preacher about the evil book. “There’s
words you must say over it, Preacher, to bind it. Certain words. Then burned
and washed away in a river or a creek. That’s all. My father had gotten rid of
books like this before. It takes some doing to get it gone.”

“Doing?”

“Preacher, you could tear this book to shreds and throw
some of the pieces in Sparrow creek and some of the pieces off the mountain.
Those little bits would find each other and rebind to the binding. There’s a
certain way to rid the evil out of the book, and it appears that I’m the only
one who knows how around here. Others who once may have known are absent from
our company.”

The preacher didn’t understand exactly what Jim meant.
He looked at his hand and his arm, which Jim and the doctor had restored to his
body. He thought again of that night when the witch had showed him the terrible
thing on the other side of the darkness. She was young now and Jim was telling
everyone that she wasn’t what she appeared to be. Then his mind went to his
sister-in-law.

Jim looked back toward the preacher, who was standing
there looking scared, this way and that. Jim whispered to him, “Preacher, I
know this time is hard for you. We’re all sorry for the loss of your brother.
We can’t know why things happened the way they did. We need to know about his
wife, though. We need to know about Ruth Mosely.”

Vernon stepped toward Jim, quietly, wanting not to awaken
anyone and looking cautiously toward the witch, who seemed not to hear them. He
was still wringing his hands together. He said, “Some men that had gone out
into the mountains for game had found her and brought her back. Just alone out
there, coming down a steep mountain way with a hungry horse. She told us many
had died. She told us that it was a sickness come and killed her two brothers
and everyone else. She was all there was left, as she told it, and warned the
men against going up any farther along that way on account of a sickness that
was in the water. She warned them against drinking the water. We took her in,
even though people thought we ought not. My brother, John, he took to taking
care of her because she was skinny and seemed like she might be sick herself.
We kept her off from the rest of the people a long while. Only John would go
see her and take care of her.” When he spoke the name of his brother, the
preacher paused and his eyes wiggled and got wet. He swallowed and looked down,
rubbing his eyes with his right hand, took a deep breath and continued on. “I
guess that’s when him and Ruth became fond of each other.”