The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (34 page)

“A village up in the mountains?” Jim asked.

“Yes. The name I don’t remember, River Den or River Top,
something like that, but the men knew about it. The men that brought her in
were familiar with the name of the town.”

“River’s End? I’ve heard of that. There was a terrible
sickness up there. She was the only one who lived? Is that what she said?”

“That’s the way she told it. You could see it in her
eyes at the time that she’d seen something terrible and she’d near starved to death.
She looked it.”

“You know nothing more than that?” Jim asked.

The preacher shook his head, but didn’t look at Jim.
His hand curled into a little fist and he shuffled his feet and then looked at Jim.
“It doesn’t make sense to me,” the preacher said. “It doesn’t make sense at all
for my brother’s wife to turn against the teachings like that and for her to
turn against me. There’s something in me that tells me”—the preacher again had
to pause and take a deep breath—“something says that she might of even used
some kind of power over my wife. My little brother. I don’t know, I really
don’t know. I just can’t make any sense of it.”          

Jim reached out and tried to put his hand on the preacher’s
shoulder, but the preacher backed away.

“I don’t know why or how that witch saved us. I don’t
know why you killed my brother.” He started to cry.

“Preacher,” Jim said, “there are things at work here
that are greater than all of us.”

“I know that you’re right,” the preacher said. “It may
be those papers. Those writings that they’re after. I fear that it is. I fear
that somehow, this whole time, Ruth has been seeking them out. Not only Ruth,
but that somehow the wolves, the creatures that Violet Hill saw, all these
things, somehow they’ve been trying to get at me, at these things, and now I am
so afraid for my wife and my little daughter! They’re in danger, Falk!”

Jim reached out again, and this time he succeeded in
patting Vernon Mosely a little on the back. Vernon looked toward the front of the
cave and drew a quick breath. Wylene had moved while they were talking and was
now standing on the opposite side, crouched down strangely and looking at her
arms.

Jim turned to see what the preacher was looking at and
then turned back, still whispering to the preacher. “She’s not a witch. She can’t
be, although, as you know, the fiends can take on many forms.”

“You’ve said that, but it’s hard to take—fangs . . .
claws . . .” the preacher asked.

“A witch would not have helped us. A witch would not
have saved May Marbo from a wolf. A witch would have torn her bones out and drank
up her blood,” Jim said and looked at the preacher and then toward Wylene who
ignored them.

“Hmph,” the preacher said.

“This Wylene, Daughter of Earth and Sky, whatever her
name is and whatever it is that she might be, she doesn’t cast spells like a
witch. She doesn’t give out curses. She doesn’t use the Witchwords.” When Jim said
“Witchwords,” the preacher raised an eyebrow and took a sidelong glance at Jim.
“She’s not decrepit, or decayed. Her body isn’t beat down with the Evil One’s
emptiness . . . the way a witch’s body would be. And I was able to restore her
from a curse. Do you see? She herself had a curse put on her that she herself
was not able to undo. She claims it was the Mosely woman that did that.” Jim
paused and fiddled with something in his jacket pocket then said, “She’s got a
strange look about her, a look akin to how the killers look, but she’s not
exactly a killer neither. She said she’s from different things, two different
parents. And, as far as I can see, she’s not in league. There’s no pact or
covenant made between her and the Evil One. As far as I can see. Of course, my
way of seeing doesn’t always see all the way.”

“You just have a good feeling about her.”

“I suppose so. But it’s more than that.”

“I am familiar with the scriptures, Jim Falk, and I do
believe that I do know what you’re referring to.”

“If what Wylene says is true about this Ruth Mosely,
and that Ruth Mosely is the witch at Sparrow Creek, then Ruth may be the one who
has called these wolves and she may be in communication with the killers up here
in the woods. They’ve burned the church down toward whatever purposes they’re
bent to do. Next, they may mean to have these wolves to rid out what’s left of
any of the good folk of Sparrow. If that is the case, which very well may be,
then there are only a few who are left that can defend against these creatures
in the town, and it would be up to us to prevent her from achieving her end.”

“I’m not sure, Falk. I’m not sure. You healed me, but
my brother is dead now. What is my sister-in-law doing? What is Ruth Mosely doing
here in Sparrow?” the preacher asked Jim and rubbed his hands together. He
looked over at the fire and at May Marbo, who was sleeping there. He did not want
to wake her up. Huck and Violet were curled up one on the other and their eyes
were closed too, but he didn’t think they were asleep. What would May think
when she woke to find the doctor was gone?

He glanced at the witch at the front of the cave looking
out into the night and thought of his sister-in-law again. Thought of her past.

He asked Jim a second time, “What is Ruth Mosely doing
in Sparrow?”

“Preacher, whatever questions you have for Ruth, and
whatever you need to talk to the preacher about, you don’t speak a word of this
book to anyone. Now I’m going off to make quick work of it. I’ll be back.”

Now Jim was alone with this book in the moonlight and
trees. He looked at the wrapped-up book in the woven blanket. Somewhere along
the way, the doctor had got himself one of these woven blankets, almost just
the same as he’d got from Old Magic Woman a long time ago. Jim hunkered down by
a tree and looked out into the dark woods. Just for a moment he thought he
could see something like a mist moving out there in the woods, but he squinted and
saw it no longer. He glanced over his shoulder and back up the side of the hill
to see if he could see the front of the cave. He couldn’t. Here, in his hands,
he held one of those old books, those books that contained the Witchwords.

Ithacus had taught him to read these words. His pa could
write in them when he needed to, which wasn’t often.

“How’d you learn those words, Pa?”

His pa would say nothing.

There was only a single time that Jim could remember
his father ever having need of using the words. It was a strange issue of something
that had got caught in John Goodwater’s barn. Ithacus knew Ways that Jim never
got to learn from him before he disappeared. His pa could fashion special wood
boxes or boxes of metal to trap certain kinds of things in, but it was so
seldom that he had to do it and Jim wasn’t sure that the craft for making these
things was something he would ever have to learn. But that time, when John
Goodwater had that thing down in his barn, Jim’s pa had to take one of those
special boxes and write Witchwords all around the outside of it.

After the deed was done, Goodwater always brought around
food and lots of it, but his pa had been sick for months and his hands had
taken on a kind of gray color and the fingernails turned black. It wasn’t too
different from the way the preacher’s hand and arm had looked before they had
restored it to him.

Jim unwrapped the book. However much or little the old
doctor knew of Waycraft, he’d known enough or been told enough to keep the book
wrapped up in an old magic blanket.

“The weave,” Old Magic Woman told him, “the weave shuts
out the shadows. Or shuts them in.”

Jim kept a small collection of woven blankets of this
type in his satchel and one he always carried slung over his shoulder, and a
group of them were sown into the lining of his jacket. Old Magic Woman spent much
time weaving. Some of the older blankets he had come to have a strange feeling
about when he held them, like a noiseless humming about the fabric. This one
that held Simon’s book had that same feel about it. It was old.

He wished he could ask Old Magic Woman about the blanket.
He wished he could ask his pa what to do. They were gone now. Faded into the
forests.

“It is one thing,” Old Magic Woman said to him back then,
“it is one thing to know the trees, the forests, and the mosses, to know when
the bees honey, and how to make the Leaves in warm darkness. It is another thing
to know the Way and it is yet another to walk the Way.”

In his memory, Jim watched her wading in the sparkling
stream. The water moved around her robes and carried them here and there, the
sun shining on her dark eyelashes, the old skin of her hands dipping here and
there at a fish, maybe. They had been out in the water all morning, fishing
like that. Catching nothing, but talking.

Jim looked away from his memory and down at the unwrapped
book that was now starting to catch flakes of snow. Over the years there had
been times when his mind had turned over learning the things contained in one
of these books and how his pa had come to be able to read the words inside.

The leather of the cover was thick and felt somehow smoother
than it should. Jim shuddered to think what hide covered the book. Wild
carvings and scratches covered the surface, as if some kid had tried to draw
monsters on it. Mean, horned faces bunched together and overlapping, hooves,
fangs, and lizard tails. None of the faces were as ugly or awful as those real
faces—like the one he and the doctor saw outside the church that night.

Jim wondered if maybe he too could read the Witchwords
the way his pa could. The doctor had said that he’d only seen scribbles. But
Jim knew since he was young that there was something about him having a knack
for the Waycraft and other things that others didn’t have. Maybe his own pa
never had to learn to read the Witchwords because he’d always known how. Maybe
Jim could open up this book and get the secrets. Maybe the secrets would help
him rid the land of whatever was left of the killers.

“It’s gone quiet,” Benjamin Straddler said.

“Quiet, sure. But them wolves only get quiet when they’re
busy,” Hattie Jones said. Hattie Jones sat there in Huck’s place, which was
empty except for Hattie Jones, Benjamin Straddler, and Samuel, who sat in a corner
poking at the floor.

“Seems to me like there’s been some kind of a noise going
off in my head starting around about the time that that outlander showed up.”
Benjamin Straddler took a sip of strong coffee from his little mug.

Hattie got up from the bar stool and went over to the
fireplace in the wall and messed around in there for a while with the wood and
embers. Soon the fire was crackling again. Benjamin started thinking about the
church and how he and Lane had looked at it burning out their window and seen
the form of Ruth passing here and there in the smoke. Sparrow was very quiet
now, though.

“That dang church is still on fire. Little church like
that shouldn’t burn so long. And with all that snow coming down? Way I figure
is, we’ll have another blizzard here and all kinds of trouble and death.”

Hattie came away from the fire and glanced at Samuel
over in the corner and then came back and sat on a stool by Benjamin and took a
swig of the hot coffee.

“In terms of supplies,” Benjamin said and glanced around,
“what do you think we’ll need?”

“Well, you might as well leave it here, unless you’re
planning to take it all for yourself. And you won’t need to worry about an old
man like me. No, sir. Samuel and I are fixin’ to move outta here for good.”

“Where you going to move to?”

“We’re fixin’ to head somewhere, south, maybe north,
but maybe west, but probably most likely south. We’re through with winters and spooks.”

Benjamin took another drink of the coffee and said, “Medicine,
bandages, ropes, candles, shovels. If we’re going to be digging through the
snow, we’re going to need shovels. There’s probably a whole set of other things
around here.”

“With Vernon and John both crossed over, there’s gotta
be someone to stand up and take the leadership as well. If a man don’t step up
to do it, you can be sure as sure that that Ruth Mosely is going to start
giving orders.”

Benjamin looked around the place. “There’s no one left,
Hattie. You and I are just as well in line to head up this town as anybody else.”
Benjamin made a terrible face and his eyes got wide.

There was a long time of quiet between them. Somewhere
they could begin to hear a sound like metal hitting on rock.

Benjamin mumbled, “That church burning and burning like
that is some kind of a sign. They got men digging a grave for John Mosely, but
Ruth seems bent on occupying herself with looking for the burned-up pieces of
Huck Marbo and the outlander and all the rest of them was in the church.”

“You think that was a witch that came in there? A
real witch?” Hattie asked and looked at the floor. Then Benjamin Straddler got
out a cigar and chewed off one end and lit it up.

“I don’t know how to figure it. We seen a witch when
I was a boy, but it was way worse looking than that lady in black. The witch we
seen was like a demon or a shadow. I hate to even remember it.”

Hattie said, after he watched Benjamin puff a few times,
“Thing about this thing is whether it was a witch or not, I can’t tell how a fire
like that even got started in the first place with the church. When I talked to
one of them Ving brothers from up on the ridge, he said that he thought he saw
the church lit like a candle. That the roof shot out a flame.”

“Can’t be right,” Benjamin said. “Them Ving brothers
always have something to say even when it’s nothing.”

“No,” Hattie Jones said and got out his pipe. “No, you’re
right. It can’t be right.”

There was a quiet over Sparrow so that, even inside Huck’s
store, you could hear a few folks talking and mulling around the ashes of the
church still. Once in a while too, they could hear the voice of Ruth quacking
around in the night air. From somewhere else came the sound of the men digging
John Mosely’s grave.

“I figure on more graves,” said Hattie and lit his pipe
up and took a long puff.

“Yeah,” Benjamin said, “I figure on more graves.” And
his eyes wandered along the bar and rested on the glass bottles full of brown
whisky.



How long had he been asleep? He’d dreamed of her again.
Some nights he saw her among the gray figures. There they went, disappearing
into the dark hills, the men in the long gray coats leading them away. He heard
a woman’s voice calling to him, maybe his mother’s voice. He could not know. A
word, over and over. He couldn’t understand, some sharp-sounding word. The
woman’s square, white hand with neat little nails thrusting out suddenly from
between the dark coats, the voice calling, calling—calling his name. Yes, it
was his name! His real name. His real mother. The things that he never knew.
Some nights he would dream this dream and wake up in his little cabin having
forgotten the truth just for a moment, and just for that moment before looking
at the dwindling fire, he would feel light as though a wind blew in his heart.
And then the fire, and then Dan Starkey’s coat, where it had hung since he
disappeared, and then the raspy breathing of his other mother in the room, the
door closed.

This time he woke in the stranger’s hut with his ears
almost aching, as if in the silent dark of his dreams his ears could somehow
stretch back to the sound. To know the sound of his real name on his real
mother’s tongue.

That long, deep burn of the doctor’s bullet stung like
a line of hot fire. It itched and he wanted to dig at it.

The smell of fish in the hut and the firelight dancing
around made him sit up.

That weird wolf dog slumped next to the hooded figure
licking its chops and watching with its black eyes the burning filets in the
iron pan.

The stranger turned his darkened face toward Simon. “Come
and eat. Come sit by the fire.”

Simon moved slow off the cot, an itchy blanket wrapped
around him, remembering the stranger’s last words, “the Waycraft.” He went over
to the fire in his bare feet. The stranger rose and pulled the two small fish
out of the fire and set them somewhere near to him where Simon couldn’t see.

The wolf’s eyes went wherever the fish went, but the
snout stayed, resting on the pointed paws. The wolf chuffed in disappointment when
the fish didn’t slide down off the plate and land in front of him.

Simon hadn’t been this close to this kind of an animal
before. Now that he could see the thing’s eyes, he wondered if the poor animal
was blind or diseased or both. The eyes seemed shattered in the center. The
wolf’s pupils, like tiny pieces of dark, broken glass in golden water, floated around
inside.

The more he studied the thing, the less it looked like
a wolf and the more the shape of the thing looked like pictures he remembered
as a boy carved into the handles of knives and swords that his father kept.
Winding serpent’s tails etched and lengthening into jagged mouths with flaming
swirls of tongue.

Then a hot plate of fish was in his hands. The stranger’s
face hidden in the darkness of the hood hovering behind the brazen and steaming
stack of filets. Simon, overcome by his hunger, stuffed the flaking pieces of
steamy fish into his mouth.

“Slow down,” the stranger said from the darkness beneath
the hood.

It was the first time Simon had got anything solid into
his belly since that damned doctor shot him.

Even now, the memories of that night flitted about in
his mind. Those ugly things in Elsie’s room.

“Slow down,” the stranger said again. “You’ll be sorry.”

Simon felt the tightness rumble in his stomach and bowels.
He had been standing straight up by the little fire and the stranger, but now
he sat back on his cot and held his stomach and touched at his bandaged head.

The stranger reached over and took the plate from Simon’s
hand and set it on a little shelf and then handed Simon another cup of hot
medicine.

“All of it,” the stranger said.

Simon took the cup. The wolf’s weird eyes looked from
the plate to the darkness under his master’s hood. So it was not blind.

Simon swallowed down the medicine. Its smell cleared
his nose as it warmed up his belly and blood. A twinkle came then in his eye and
his mind started moving faster.

“What kind of a dog is that supposed to be? Is that a
wolf?” he asked the stranger, taking another big swig of the stinging brew.

“Because it looks more like a dragon to you?” the
stranger asked. His voice was quiet, hoarse, but somehow a sweetness had come
into it.

Simon squinted his eyes and tried to see the stranger’s
face under the hood. “Yes,” Simon said, “that’s right.”

The stranger flipped a piece of fish at the dragon wolf,
and its mouth flashed open red and then shut with a clomp.

“Yes,” the stranger said, “Fenny does look like a dragon,
doesn’t he?”

Simon looked back at the dragon wolf. The floating black
shapes in the wolf’s eyes now seemed to come together and form a slit down the
center like a snake’s eyes. Its back arched and Simon thought he could see the
long, hard bones and lines of webbed muscle that would rise and flap like wings
lining the dog’s back.

The stranger said, “Fenny looks in a way like a cat,
though, doesn’t he?”

Simon looked back at the stranger and then to the dragon
wolf again. He saw the pointed ears and whiskers and the long pink tongue
lolling and licking the black, diamond-shaped nose.

Simon sipped again the tangy medicine and felt a heavy
spin in his head. He was sure now that the stranger’s medicine was doing the
tricks, making him see strange shapes in the flickers of fire and shadow in the
hut.

The fish had tasted good, though, and he wanted more.

“You can have more fish after your medicine’s gone,”
the stranger said.

“How long have I been asleep?” he asked.

“Only a few hours,” the stranger said and turned to pour
boiling water into a cup and pinch in some dark powders and dried leaves. Simon
watched the stranger’s wrinkled, brown hands do the job. The hands were strong,
but somehow delicate and careful.

“Who are you?” Simon asked. “Why are you out here and
why are you helping me?”

“I’ve told you,” the stranger said.

Simon said, “Tell me again.”

The stranger shook his head. “You’ve made a pact
with Old Bendy’s Men.” The stranger stirred the brew with a wooden spoon. “The pact’s
gone bad, Simon Starkey. They’ve claimed all and left you with nothing. Left
you for dead. As they do. Their kind only comes to steal and to destroy.”

How could this man know so much about what he barely
knew himself? How could this crooked old man in a hut know?

He thought again of his dream. He saw the figures carrying
away his real mother to the woods. He saw Dan Starkey’s hand reaching into the
cage to pull him out. He smelled the thick smell of Elsie’s stew and saw her
belly grow with Dan’s baby. The boys of Sparrow prodding him and laughing—then
the dark whispers in the night . . . Power, they told him, “power beyond imagining.”

“Everything,” Simon said, and his face went blank. He
clasped his hands together and brought them up to his forehead and let out a long
breath.

“You learned some tricks, some cheap sorcery. You got
your reward.”

Just a few pages of that cursed book of Witchwords was
all he’d been able to read after four years—a stupid card trick, some special
seeing, hardly even a beginner’s beginning.

Simon didn’t say anything. He looked at the fire.

“They wanted you to think that you had no choices, that
you were powerless and without choices.”

“When they took the little one, Rebeccah . . . I thought
if I learned enough, one day I would be powerful, one day I could turn those
powers against them. Make them pay.”

Simon swallowed hard and squeezed his face with his hand
so that he wouldn’t cry. Any movement of his head hurt.

“What is it that you want, Simon Starkey?”

“I don’t want to be afraid anymore,” Simon whispered.

“The Waycraft,” the stranger said, “the Waycraft will
make you strong against them. I can show you.” The stranger finished up whatever
he’d been brewing and brought it to where his lips must have been under the
dark hood. “You can’t use the same powers they showed you to fight against
them. There is only the Way.”

“Those are stories.”

The stranger lifted the cup up again to the darkness
under the hood. “So they are, so they are,” the stranger said, “but some stories
are true. They’ve burned down the church.”

The agony that had been churning in Simon’s stomach was
only a dull throb now, and when he swallowed more fish the pain flared again,
but the medicine brought a strength back to his eager body and a certain shine
back to his dull eyes.

“They thought that the witch and the outlander were trapped
inside the church, and so they burned it down.”

“The witch?” Simon asked and tried to see the face under
the cloak.

“Yes,” the stranger said. “Old Lady Wylene’s grown young
again and strong and has sprung from whatever spell that held her in her home.
I guess she’d made friends of a kind with that outlander. They used that little
token you gave to them.”

“They’re dead now? Why do you know so much about it?”
Simon asked.

“Sparrow is a small place, Simon Starkey. There are not
many secrets here. You may think that there are, but many things are known about
this little town. I doubt that they have achieved what they think they have.
It’s something to trap and kill a witch. It takes more than fires and churches.”

“They’re alive?”

The stranger turned toward the little fire in the tent.
“I saw them making their way up to the Ridges. More than just the witch and the
outlander. A doctor, a preacher, a peg-leg, a young girl . . .”