The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (7 page)

This night, Lane waited, standing in the middle of the
kitchen. Benjamin didn’t return from Huck’s this night.

She held her rifle straight at the window until she could
barely see light coming up through the woods. The thing that had been rasping
just below the window seemed to fade away as the dawn rose. Whatever it may
have been, she was glad that she didn’t have to find out. She fell asleep in
the chair with her shoulders hunched up around her neck, the weapon across her
lap.

The sun rose and played in the dust of her kitchen and
brightened her face, but Benjamin didn’t come back.

Nobody was at the bar because everybody left, except for Simon
and the chicken man, and Benjamin Straddler who just came in.

The wolves had been going on for a while and the place
had emptied out. Huck and May stayed, though. May was asleep in a safe place
and Huck had his gun close.

“Tell him,” Simon said and looked at his friend, Benjamin
Straddler, and then looked at the chicken man.

Benjamin looked at the chicken man and winked his eye
at Simon. “Them chickens you sold way back is still around here,” Benjamin told
him and looked at his half-cup of whisky, “or at least the sons and daughters
of ’em.”

“Yup,” the chicken man said and took a bite of an apple.
It was small and green and far from ripe.

Huck watched the three men. Huck was tired and leaned
on the wall. Sometimes his wooden leg still hurt his knee. The chickens were
good, Benjamin was right, but the chicken man himself had an eye for May. On
top of that, Huck knew the routine of the wolf story. It ended in Benjamin Straddler
getting kicked out of his shop. He’d hoped that Benjamin had maybe had his fill
at home tonight, or that maybe Lane had helped him get to sleep or convinced
him to stay home.

Benjamin Straddler had that wolf story about his pa and
the wolf, yes. But there was also something that had happened to old Benji during
that blizzard. Huck had lost his beautiful wife, Vernon Mosely had lost his
ears, but Benjamin Straddler had lost his mind. Something had happened to Straddler
that night that had set him to drinking and drinking hard. Harder, Huck thought
at times, than he’d seen any man ever to drink.

“Them Moselys that run the church? They been takin’ good
care of them chickens you sold ’em. Sometimes the church does up a meal and
them chickens is good eating chickens too,” Benjamin said.

“Yup,” the chicken man said and gnawed the hard apple.
His eyes focused on Benjamin and on something far away at the same time. It
seemed as if he was more spitting out the apple on his chin than really eating
it.

Outside there was a yipping and then the wolves joined
in together. Because of how the wind was blowing that night, everyone had
trouble telling which direction and how far away the wolves might have really
been.

They all listened, though, looking up into the air. The
chicken man, Simon, and Benjamin all looked up and left and right, as if, through
the roof of Marbo’s Bar, they could see the wolves’ howls moving across the
night sky.

“The chicken man knows his chickens are good,” Simon
said after a moment. “Don’t tell him about his chickens. He knows about his chickens.”
Simon smiled and took his shot of whisky too. “He’s the chicken man.”

Benjamin Straddler scratched at his stubbled chin. He
was red and wet looking.

Simon listened to the howling, and it seemed somehow
to please him. He looked over at Benjamin Straddler and chuckled a bit and said,
“Tell us how you killed them wolves.”

“What’s the chicken man wanna know that for?” Benjamin
put some reddish coins on the bar and tapped on the bar with his forefinger and
leered at Huck, who leaned his gun against the back counter as he grabbed the
bottle.

Huck poured more whisky in Benjamin’s cup.

Benjamin drank it right away, all of it. He looked the
chicken man up and down. The chicken man was bony and pinkish with a spiny fin
of white hair on his head.

“Huck!” Benjamin shouted suddenly.

“Yes, Benjamin?” Huck said.

“Huck, where’s May?”

Huck placed both his hands on the bar and leaned into
Benjamin Straddler. “There’s no need to bring her name into this conversation.”
Huck looked at the chicken man. The chicken man’s eyes were pink too. Huck
looked back at Benjamin. “And if you ask me one more question tonight about
her, I will make sure you never come in here again without walking like I do.”

Huck was dead serious and hinting at his leaning shotgun.
Benjamin leaned back and the chicken man looked around stupidly.

“Well, chicken man,” Benjamin Straddler said and smiled
but wiped it away quick with his thumb, “when I was a youngun, and I was workin’
for my pa, we was horse raisers and had us some horses.” Benjamin blinked and
looked up. “All them horses is gone now, but we raised ’em. Ponies too. Folks
are superstitious about raisin’ and keepin’ horses around here these days, but
this was back in the early days, when Sparrow wasn’t much of anything except a
place to stop between here and there.”

Huck Marbo went back to being far way and standing by
his gun.

Benjamin leaned into the chicken man. “But see, my pa
had to go out and get wood for us in the woods. See, they used to have a thing
in this town that you had to go out and get wood for a preacher. And it come up
his turn, so he goes out.” Benjamin squeezed his eyes for a few seconds as if
he saw something far away. “Then he didn’t come back for a long time.”

He squeezed again and took a little more whisky from
his glass. The chicken man, who was sucking on the core of the apple now, locked
his pink eyes in on Benjamin Straddler’s eyes.

Benjamin kept on. “A few days passed and then we started
looking. It was a group of men from the church that first headed it up. Old
Marley Upton, Bannings Driver, Wise Moore, and Donny Trim and his boys. Huck,
you remember some of them, don’t ya? They’ve all passed now. Trim’s boys moved
up to the Ridges. But they looked six days for my pa up there in them woods and
never found him. Strangest thing. I thought he liked t’fell in the river, or
been killed by a man from over there on the other side of the mountainside,
maybe even by a bear out from the country. Sometimes, too, there were certain
men would come down and they were killers and they killed a lot of folk in the
early days when us Straddlers first got here. Weren’t none of them first people
either, so I thought maybe one of them killers killed him. Maybe too, I thought
a native coulda killed him, like one of the River People from the other side of
Make River.”

Benjamin Straddler’s eyes got a little wetter. His one
bad eye was especially red and twinkling. “I thought a new thing about my pa
about every time I blinked. I saw a new way for my pa to get killed. I even thought
about him killing himself with his buck knife”—he was whispering now—“but
couldn’t think of a reason why.”

The chicken man was squinting hard trying to figure out
what Benjamin was trying to tell him.

Simon’s teeth were white, smiling there over Benjamin’s
shoulder.

Benjamin took a pause and got a smoke. He lit it with
a match and started smoking it. “So, a young boy as I was, I hated all the waiting.
I waited for three days, and I went to the men in the church and asked them why
my father wasn’t looked for, and they said that he was found. ‘He is dead,’
they said, ‘he got killed by wolves.’”

Simon waved a hand at Huck. “Give us all some shots,
on me. Whisky.”

Huck was quick for Simon, and the chicken man noticed
how much they smiled as the money went back from Simon to Huck, even though
Huck looked as if he didn’t like smiling right now. Somehow that Simon had a
lot of money. Since no one was really sure exactly what it was that Dan and
Elsie Starkey had left behind or how they came into it, there was always a kind
of rumor that the walls of Simon’s house were stuffed with treasures.

They all shot the whisky down.

“Them men from the church, I told ’em all how stricken
with grief I was. Stricken! I sat in that little church and bent my head and
told ’em. They told me that things were in mystery and how God’s ways was God’s
ways. They sat there and tried to explain to me the way one world crossed into
another world. You know all that nonsense they start to say when they don’t
know what to say because they don’t know what to say. They start in on telling
you there’s a purpose for this and a purpose for that. Ain’t no purpose! Ain’t
no purpose! There’s just cold, evil death. That’s all! There ain’t no purpose!
Spells and stories! Ain’t no purpose!”

Simon had not ever heard that come out of Benjamin before,
and a funny look came over his face.

“How?” Benjamin said and looked down at his empty shot
glass in his hand.

Simon filled it up for him.

Benjamin looked around and around. “You tell me. How
does a good God cause a little boy’s papa to be eaten by wolves? You tell me!”

There was a sudden and small breeze through the place
that they all took notice of. Maybe someone had opened one of the latched windows.
They all looked in different directions, almost expecting to see that someone
had passed by them all sitting there.

“My heart was sick for my father.” Benjamin looked up
at them.

They turned back to Benjamin.

“For a man like my father,” he said, drawing them back
into his memory, “for any man to be eaten by wolves.” He clenched his teeth,
the little glass of brown liquor shook in his fingers, his face twisted and
pinched into an awful grimace. “For a little boy’s papa to be eaten by wolves!”

Pretty sure that Bill was looking out his bedroom window and
up at the back house, Jim slid out the same window where the dark shape had gone
through.

He dropped low on his knees as dusk was coming in over
the yard and cleared his head. It was really cold out now. The winds had earlier
brought in a cold that would turn to frost by morning. Due to the cold, the
feeling of the eyes and the heavy jitters were lifting. Jim’s body and mind were
closing up. The cold had a strange way of covering up those things that lived
in the shadows.

Seeing that he was about to go hunt, he couldn’t afford
this cold snap lifting away of his sense of the thing.

Jim crawled around to the backside of the back house
where he was sure he couldn’t be seen by Bill Hill. There he unrolled his satchel
and got out more leaves and chewed them. He remembered again what the old woman
had told him and what his pa had told him. He remembered again what Spencer
Barnhouse had told him—that it was taking longer and longer to make the batches.
He chewed and chewed and swallowed the bitter juice and the spiky strands.

He looked at the woods and remembered more things about
being at Huck’s the night before. He remembered how he’d caught eyes with May
Marbo, how her brown eyes had glinted with deep greens just as her father’s,
how she’d taken his arm. In his memory, when he looked down at the arm of the
girl, he saw instead his mother’s arm, the hand grasping, grasping.

Jim shook his head, reached into his pocket, pulled his
flask, and gulped to help him swallow down the chewed leaves. He straightened
his hat and listened and watched the woods. There was nothing now—just a cold
breeze that seemed to bring the darkness from back over the hill, covering the
bent and crackling trees. If Bill came tramping up the back way with his rifle,
Jim would hear that for sure. Then he’d be able to slip right up into the
thicket, the same way the shadow had.

He saw Violet now in his mind, her hair ruddy as autumn,
crossing and uncrossing her skinny arms, patting her own shoulders, twiddling her
little fingers. Bill said she tore up holes with her toes in the sheets.
Running from the spook in her dreams.

Her eyes were deeper somehow now in his memory. He worked
them out in his mind so that he could see each separate, tiny jewel of her eye.
Something moved behind her eyes, a shape, a sign. Something curled and twirled
there like a smoky, dark flame.

He wished he knew where the old book his pa kept was
now, or could call its pages up in his memory. If wishes were horses . . . but this
town didn’t keep horses.

What was a spook doing down here in Sparrow? In some
ways it might make more sense if he saw one of them lurking in the shadows of the
docks in Hopestill, but he still wasn’t ready to think of that.

Then, in his chest, he felt something move.

He squinted, and the trees seemed to take on a watery,
glassy quality, shifting dim windows. Through the trees, he could see a dark
shape up there in a piece of the woods way toward the top. It swayed this way
and that. His heart beat as the leaves and the whisky grew strong in him again.

The dusk was almost complete now; only the thinnest gray
light came in through the rickety trees.

There, between some low branches, just almost out of
sight, he could see the eyes, winking, yellow, round as eggs.

The jitters jumped in him. Even in the cold, the leaves
broke through and helped him to feel. He moved slowly. His gear sack was unrolled
by his knee; with one hand he slid out the butt of his long gun, nice and slow
and neat, into the cold grass by his leg.

The eyes winked.

Now, with nimble fingers, he attached the chamber quick
and squeezed it locked with a quiet click.

The eyes lowered and thinned and bobbed.

Jim knew the thing could feel him too. That’s the toughest
part to get by on one of these beasts. More than sight or sound or smell, the
spooks had a way of feeling what it is you’re meaning to do. Jim was pretty
sure the thing wouldn’t have full command of its special sight until pitch
dark.

With a silent slide and a few twists, he assembled his
long gun and then brought the long silver bullets from his satchel and slipped
them into the chamber; he held still and breathed slowly and let his mind begin
on the wander.

The wander was a trick his pa had taught him.

“Once,” his pa told him, “there were an evil kind of
people in this land. Long before even the first people lived here. And these evil
people were in league with the Evil One. Bendy’s Men is what they still call
’em in stories. And they used to live up high in these woods and way back on
old roads and in the hollers where folks don’t go anymore. But folks like us,
James, we travel in the Old Paths—the paths that are almost now forgotten. We’re
the ones who were born to see. You and me. Bendy’s Men have a different kind of
seeing; they could see what was on your mind. That’s a power the Evil One give
’em. Maybe they couldn’t even see you. Maybe, maybe they wasn’t even near you,
but they could see thoughts that was in your mind. Old Magic Woman showed me a
way of making your thoughts wander, or even go blank and black. She said that
you shouldn’t learn to do that when you’re so young like you are now, but I’m
gonna show you how. I am going to show you anyway.”

Jim fired.

He lost his own sight for an instant in the flash, but
the gun made only the smallest sound of a sneeze.

The spook made another noise, a hoarse, empty whine that
started low and went high. That noise meant that the silver-lode had hit the
spook deep. The whole of the woods seemed to shiver with the noise—and then,
then started the wolves.

The howls came first from the north and then the wind
picked up and whirled the noise around. Answers came from all directions now,
covering up whatever yowling the spook might be doing.

Jim watched the yellow eyes falter and then lurch off
into the ever-darkening trees. He slung his gun on his back, rolled up his sack
quick, and gave chase.

The jitters were hot in Jim’s heart now; he could nearly
see them waking out behind the fleeing beast. Through the darkling trees, he
could see here and then there, its hulking shadow stopping to turn and bray at
him, flashing its strange, curving teeth, whipping spines behind as it whirled
and fled.

One eye, Jim could see now, was completely blacked out.

“I hit you good,” Jim said to the thing, running behind
it. “This time I’ll burn every piece of you to smoke and let the river wash you
away.”



It was night and the wolves were howling. Doc
Pritham opened the door, and in walked William Wade.

“John,” William Wade said. The moon came in the door
behind him, putting his face and messy hair in a shadow.

“William Wade,” Doc Pritham said.

“I’m getting too old for these trips,” William Wade said.
He had with him a big leather case and some black bags that tinkled as he passed
through the doctor’s door and into his office.

“Too old?” Doc Pritham said, and a small smile started
on his face. “You’re practically a baby.” But Pritham stopped there; he could
see now by the oil lamp on his wall, he could see in Wade’s eyes a kind of
blankness that comes with fear. “Something the matter, Will? Here, here, it’s
only wolves,” the doctor said and started moving around all the papers and empty
bottles and scribbled writing that were cluttering up his table. He cleared a
spot just enough for William Wade to set down his carryings.

William Wade took a deep breath. “Have you got something
to drink, John? I’m parched.” William Wade looked up at the ceiling as though
he could see the howls.

Doc Pritham went to his shelf and grabbed a brown bottle
and a heavy cup. He poured and gave it to William Wade. “Wine,” the doctor
said. “It will bring the color back to your face. It’s a dark wine from the
south.”

A smile came up on William Wade’s face when he took a
gulp. “It’s sweet.”

The two men stood there quietly while William Wade drank
the rest of the cup. Doc Pritham quickly refilled it.

William Wade went to the leather case and began unbuckling
it. He breathed heavy again. “There’s an issue,” he said.

“An issue?” Doc Pritham’s hands went to the back of his
scalp and he scratched his old head with both hands.

“A problem,” Wade said.

“A problem with the shipment?” Pritham asked.

Inside the case were many small dark bottles, some with
labels, some with strangely shaped stoppers, some filled with liquids, some
with powders. There were also paper-wrapped packages bound with coarse string
and some smaller lidded boxes.

“Yes,” Wade said, “a problem with your shipment, but
more than that.”

“Just tell me, Will.”

“I couldn’t bring everything you ordered.”

Doc Pritham went to his desk and shuffled around in the
papers there and picked out a sheet and laid it over the items in the opened
case. “Well, fine, it’s not the first time. Here’s the order, what’s missing?”

William Wade said, “It’s not exactly what’s missing from
your order as it is what’s missing. Rootfire, Apoplexy, Inhere.”

“I don’t order Rootfire or Apoplexy. What would I want
with those?”

“Someone took them from the inventory. Last month. I
count every week. I had to leave Hopestill and go to Woodmeer to get extras of some
of the usuals. The new man in charge up there in Hopestill, that Varney Mull’s
demanding to take all the firsts of the goods that come off the ships now, so I
had to head up to Woodmeer. When I got back, someone, somehow, had gotten into
the storage. I don’t know how. I couldn’t see how they got in. They took those,
but they took something else too, John, they took the translated pages.”

Doc Pritham raised his bushy eyebrows and patted around
in his jacket for his pipe and paced back and forth in the little room.

William Wade sat down, taking another drink from the
cup. “Your order is incomplete.”

Doc Pritham started up his pipe with a match and said,
“Who would take, who would even know that you had those pages? Who could even
know to take them?”

Wade said, “You know what could be done with those ingredients
and those pages. It’s been strange in Hopestill for the past few months.
Shipments come slow from the east, slower and slower, supplies are less and
less. Some of the captains are telling me it’s on account of the weather, others
say a war at sea, but they only mumble these things to me and don’t look me in
the eye . . .”

“Wade, the only person to know about the translated pages
other than you and me would be he who is translator of those pages,” Pritham
said.

“That’s the worst part of it, Doc; they’re saying he’s
been killed. Not only that he’s been killed, but that he was killed in some
strange way, by a poison or something of the kind. There’s a rumor that a strange
man has come to town, been visiting Barnhouse, and that when they found his
body, it was burned up, as if it had been burned from the inside out.”

Doc Pritham took in a deep smoke and sat down at his
cluttered table and then blew it out. This moment was one he had feared since he
had been shown the ancient writings that Wade was talking about. There were very
few people who knew about them, and even some of those who knew about them didn’t
believe in the power contained inside of them. If it was the truth that Spencer
Barnhouse had been burned up from the inside out, it would mean not only that
someone had stolen some of William Wade’s ingredients and stolen the papers,
but that it was someone who was somehow able to read the papers and use what
was contained in them. There were no people on this earth who knew how to do
such things outside of himself and Spencer Barnhouse, and maybe, just maybe . .
.

William Wade fussed at the fasteners on his big coat
and took it off. He hung his jacket on the doctor’s coatrack and took a seat at
the table.

“Well,” Wade said, “it’s a strange set of events. I can’t
get Rushwater or white pollen for nothing, so if you even wanted to derive a
simple from those, you couldn’t get one. And there’s less and less gunpowder
coming off the ships. I only brought what I had to bring, which I haven’t
measured. So I only want you to pay for what I could bring.”

“Why would someone kill Spencer Barnhouse?” Doc Pritham
said and closed his eyes.

“No one else has the abilities that he does.”

“That we know of,” Pritham said.

“That we know of,” William Wade said.



Vernon Mosely ate a piece of chicken off the end of his
fork. He looked at his daughter, Merla, and she smiled at him. The morning sunlight
came through the kitchen window and lit her cheerful face. She was a happy girl
and good at chores, but she was always so very quiet. Vernon had imagined his
daughter to be more like him, cheerful, sharp, and ready to talk. She was
cheerful and sharp, though.

Vernon smiled on days like these probably more than some
might think a preacher should. He couldn’t help but feel that his life had been
spared, that there were things in this world that one should enjoy. Even if
there were joys beyond measure to come in the heavenly kingdom, there were certainly
some measurable joys in front of him just now. He also knew how quickly things
could change.

But his younger brother, who was in front of him right
now, didn’t often bring along much joy. No, John Mosely had been something
other than a joy on many occasions. There had been so much hope in Vernon that
once John had married up with Ruth Eavan, this would somehow create a way for
his little brother to grow up all of a sudden—to become a little bit more of a
man of his age. Unfortunately, almost the opposite occurred. He grew down. This
Ruth woman was one who assumed some role over him so that John fell into a kind
of servitude with her and turned into something of a combination of her little
boy and her little servant. It made Vernon angry, but still, here was his
brother, and his brother was his brother.