The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (8 page)

After a moment he looked up at his brother, smiling,
and swallowed, his brow pinched.

John Mosely looked at his brother and raised a cup of
water to him.

Vernon wiped his mouth, “Well, go on.”

“Well,” John said, “Ruth had a . . .” Merla put a plate
in front of him. “Thank you, Merla. Ruth had a talk with that non-believing
Benjamin Straddler last night.”

Vernon smiled and considered this and his brother’s thin
face for a moment, waiting. He waited longer. “Yes?”

John Mosely eyed Merla. She was a talker. Sure, she was
quiet enough now, but he could tell by the way she held herself—she was a talker.
John Mosely didn’t like talkers. He didn’t like girls who went on talking at
all.

John looked at Vernon and sort of nodded his head to
the side. Meaning for the girl to get out.

“Merla,” her father said and tipped his head back to
catch her eye, “give your father a kiss and go mind your mother.”

She kissed him and was off through the house to her mother’s
room.

Vernon bit into another morsel and looked at his plate
and not at his brother as his brother spoke to him.

John said, “So she said that Benjamin Straddler had come
by the house and said strange things.”

“Not a surprise.”

“That he was drunk.”

“Not a surprise.”

“Well, she said that there was a man come to town and
he said some strange things and that this man may be some kind of”—John whispered
now—“may have some knowledge of the craft as you call it.”

Vernon Mosely stopped chewing for a moment and looked
at his brother. Then he started chewing again and looked back down at his
plate. “Explain.”

“Well,” his brother said, his fingers twitching at the
table as he talked, “she said that Straddler said that the stranger stood up
and announced to everyone—they were at Huck Marbo’s, of course—that he stood up
and announced his name to everyone there, and said he was Jim Fox, or some such
name, and that he had some kind of powers to cast out demons.”

“Powers?”

“Well, yes,” John Mosely said and his hands stopped playing.
He looked at Vernon with a serious face. “That’s what Ruth understood from
Benjamin.”

Vernon started back in on his chicken.

John picked up his knife but didn’t eat. In the knife
he could see his own eye. In the other room, he heard a shrill cackle. Vernon’s
wife, Aline, laughing.

Vernon smiled, but wouldn’t look at his brother. “Benjamin
Straddler,” he swallowed, “has been hanging around a long while with that Simon
Starkey, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“Simon was said once to have a book of magician’s tricks,
and a lot of folk say that they seen him do tricks, making things appear, and
the like.”

John was surprised at his brother. “So you already know?”

“Know already what? There is no already about it, brother.
This has been going on for a few years now—am I right or am I wrong? I heard
that the preacher before me, Taylor, before he passed, had even spoke directly
to Simon about this. Am I right?”

“I think so,” John said. “That sounds right. But this
is something serious. Something needs to be done.”

“What, brother? What needs to be done?”

John Mosely’s face was red. He didn’t like outlanders.
He didn’t like them one little tiny bit, and neither did Ruth.

“Well,” John finally said, “I ain’t the right person
to say what needs to be done. I guess that should be up to you and up to the doctor
and up to the other men of the town that run the town meetings.”

“Well, anyway,” Vernon went on after nothing was said
for a while, “all this stuff with magic and the Starkeys and Benjamin Straddler
and his drinking and the wolves and all, all that was before my time and yours
in Sparrow. But if he’s been up to it again, and he’s been bending on Straddler’s
ear about mystics and magic, and Benjamin’s been taking to drink, there might
be a little less to this story. There might be a lot less to this story. You
know, the chicken man is in town. The chicken man always brings out strange
stories for Benjamin. What’s his name? I can’t remember. Everyone just calls
him the chicken man. It’s good chicken!” He waved his fork in front of his face
with a piece of white meat dangling from it.

“I suppose, Vernon, but Ruth is awful concerned about
this, and she wanted me to come over right away. Benjamin wanted to wake me up
last night and tell me, but Ruth wouldn’t let him, seeing as how he was drunk
and all, and she didn’t want to wake me up for that, but she was awful concerned
this morning about it.”

Vernon put his fork down. “Go home, John Mosely. Tell
your wife that I will be by shortly.”

“Well, okay,” John Mosely said and left his food untouched
at the table. He went out the door and closed it.

Vernon Mosely stared at the closed brown door for a long
time. A darkness came across his features and his hands ever so slowly made
themselves into fidgeting pink fists.

“Powers?” he whispered and worried.

Soon he was back in his den. His wife and daughter were
in the other room talking, making plans for the big winter feast in three months.
He stood in front of the fireplace and stared at a little white brick in the
mantel. He went to the window and drew the blind. He could hear Aline joking
about the paper dolls that Merla had made for the winter feast decorations last
year. He was glad to hear them laughing together. He pulled the blind tight and
went back to the mantel.

He used his fingers and thumbs to ease the white brick
out of its place in the mantel and from there drew a long silver and flat box.
He sat in his chair and opened it.

Years ago, Spencer Barnhouse had given this treasure
to him. It was one of only a few—how many he didn’t know, except that there weren’t
many.

He opened the box, and there, on the flat yellow paper,
was the strange handwriting. The ones who’d written the stories, the ones who’d
written the stories of the coming of the great Hunter. The ones who’d seen into
the future and said that he would bring the power to heal and to kill. These
papers were papers that Barnhouse himself had spent years translating into the
common tongue. There was no one that Vernon knew of who could speak and
translate the old tongues anymore except for Barnhouse.

Powers. The Craft. The Hunter. So many thought that these
were only rumors, or the leftovers from old stories, from times long, long ago.

Closing the heavy silver box, he began to think, think
of the next place he might hide them, of the next town he might take his family
to, of the next step in their journey so that he could keep them safe. If there
was such a step.

Truthfully, Vernon didn’t believe them so much either.
Except that if they weren’t true, why would there be so much danger in keeping
them? If they weren’t true, then why, when his brother came by to tell him that
there was a man in town who seemed to have powers, why was it that his hands
had gone cold and his mind was set to whirring?



In the dark, Jim could see up ahead the thing’s good
eye go wide, disappear, and then dip low.

Jim had given it a good shot in the head, but the thing
kept going. It was strong.

The moon came out from behind the clouds and the forest
turned a cold, bright blue between the black shafts of the crooked trees.

Jim stopped and hunched and watched. He wasn’t ready
for a face-to-face fight now; he wanted to get the spook when it was tuckered out,
or wait until it had stopped along somewhere thinking that it was hidden. Then
he could have a chance to hit it again good with his long gun. Another deep
shot of the special silver-lode in its head would make for a quick and easy end
to this.

The wolves howled as the moon appeared. They sounded
closer, as if they were moving in. Maybe it was the wind.

Jim saw the beast’s bristling, sharp shadow ahead in
the moonlit trees. It lumbered down into a valley and came to a stop. The eye
appeared, probably looking back, but now it was winking, blinking. It was
turning from yellow to pink. Maybe another shot might not be necessary. Maybe
he could go down and get in there and drop it with his hatchet. The special
lode that Barnhouse had procured for him was doing its trick.

After that would be these wolves to deal with.

Old Magic Woman had showed Jim and his pa ways to calm
and speak with the wolf she had, but he hadn’t seen a single one since then.
Jim pushed around in his mind to remember. He remembered his pa speaking quietly
with Old Magic Woman, the two of them sharing a pipe.

Old Magic Woman never looked old.

It was her hands and the way she moved and her voice
that made her only to feel old: her deep, pure voice, her palms covered in
lines, rough as dog’s paws at the ends of her floating arms.

Her face was young and brown with a wide nose. Her eyes
were pure and black.

Jim couldn’t see the spook’s eyes anymore.

He waited.

The howling stopped.

At the edges of his vision, shadows began to
flicker.

He could smell them now and hear them passing in the
underbrush.

Knowing that these were the wolves and that somehow they
had homed in on him and were packing up around him, he thought to fire his long
gun to scare them off. But this gun didn’t make any noise and wasn’t going to
do him any good in the close quarters of the dark woods.

He slid away his long gun and, in one motion, pulled
his curving, special hatchet in the one hand and his Dracon pistol with its six
barrels in the other.

The moon began to move behind the clouds, but not before
Jim caught the reflection of a creek moving along just down at the bottom of the
valley.

The spook couldn’t pass through water. He knew that.
It would have to move along the creek, back up into the hill, or down towards Sparrow.

Jim breathed slowly and took in the hot feeling of the
animals that were closing in on him. In a way, the leaves he had taken allowed
him to feel the movement of the creatures. In the dark wood like this one, it
didn’t matter whether he had his eyes open or closed. Around him, they made a
kind of wave in his feelings, so that when groups of them moved one way or when
one of them moved another, he felt a kind of tug or a push. He had to rely on
his eyes, though, because these wolves were many and they meant to tear him to
bits.

White spots flickered now and again as clouds passed
over the moon.

Branches crackled.

One shadow, at Jim’s right side, showed its teeth.



May was lying on the little bed in the safe room at the
top of the shop. She could barely hear the chatter of the men at the bar and
sometimes the low, brighter sound of her pa’s voice.

Over everything, vibrating the room, she could hear the
wolves howling, howling, howling.

She was glad to feel safe, though.

The last time she had ever even seen this room was back
when she had to come in and clean it with her mother. The jarred tomatoes that
were there then were still here now. Still jarred.

She’d never had to stay up here in the cot. She’d heard
wolves howl before, when they’d come down from the mountains in the bad winter.
She remembered her pa saying that he wondered why the wolves just didn’t stop
up in the Ridges and eat up all the folk up there instead of coming down into
Sparrow and bothering all the good folk down here.

May looked at this cot. She wondered how anyone would
sleep in here. There were no windows, there were no pictures. It was just a box
with a door.

The door locked from both sides.

There was a roll-up staircase leading up to it. Underneath
the safe room was a big, wide hall where her pa didn’t really keep much around.
There was just the wood floor now and some empty crates around. There was a
book of scripture too that the former preacher had given her pa.

It was just a space. The only time he’d used it was
back when John Mosely and Ruth Eaven got married—they used it to decorate the
hall. It was her mother’s idea to have a flowerfall, little white bellflowers
and redvines to spill out through the hole in the ceiling and wind down to the floor.
Pastor Mosely stood in front of them with his little pulpit set there and the
messiah’s sign on the front.

Ruth looked old enough to be John’s mother just about.
She did look pretty, though. That was three whole years ago now. But God’s ways
is God’s ways and they are united.

That’s what her pa would say.

She tightened the sheet around her as the wind kicked
up now, blowing around the shop. She heard the chicken man’s horse whinny
outside the shop. Somewhere the wind blew open a shutter with a clack. She
didn’t like being in here at all. What if something happened? What if something
sneaked in here with her? Like that thing, that spook that Jim said he saw out
on the road. What if that thing was real like he said and that it was from the
Evil One like he said? Couldn’t a thing like that just come slithering in
through the cracks in the ceiling? Couldn’t a thing of the Evil One just move
like a mist?

Jim sensed movement on every side and the shadow in front of
him growled and bared its teeth and bowed its head.

This was the thing: his mind was stuck on Old Magic Woman’s
wolf, Fenyra—“Fennie” as Jim called him, the trickster chief, the friend of his
father, the friend of the people.

These wolves tonight were not like Fennie at all. They
had a poisoned way about them. They were gnarled and scared things.

The moon came out from behind the clouds and the forest
flickered alive with the pale stars of the wolves’ shining eyes. The eyes
roamed through the forest, twinkling, hollow, and mean, until the clouds hid
the moon again. The animals yipped one to the other and crooned low in the flickering
darkness of the trees. The clouds were moving fast and the wind suddenly blew
all cold. Jim turned and turned in a circle. A storm was coming.

The pack was closing in.

Jim knew what to do and held up his Dracon pepperbox
pistol.

Maybe, maybe if he could blast it once into the air,
the report alone would send them all bounding back into the shadowy hills.

The woods went dark and the eyes disappeared. A big wind
blew the trees.

The shadow leapt at him. Snarling with wild strength,
it clamped on his right arm. Jim’s skin tore like cheese under the teeth and
his gun dropped into the dirt when his hand came open with the pain. His blood
ran hot and sopped the sleeve of his coat.

He fell. He fell down into the dirt and grass, he felt
their rank bodies sliding underneath and about him.

Another wolf was at his left ankle, tearing with vicious
power at his boot. Then another pulled at the long flap of his jacket, trying
to drag him back into the brush.

He knew that they were waiting. They were all were waiting
for this moment. He was on his back. The clouds raced across the sky and the
woods lit blue. The hot breath and blank, round moon eyes whirled around him.

He could hear the cloth of his jacket ripping and feel
a kind of bumping at his side. He thought he saw his Dracon pistol glint somewhere
in the wet weeds. The ragged paws of the beasts ripped at his forehead.

He focused on the moon. Bright as it was, its clear surface
was split by gray clouds. Then it disappeared.

He felt teeth puncture and shake at his left boot, and
he gathered all his strength into his good left arm with the curving hatchet in
his hand.

The clouds burst and the forest was rushed with the sound
of the rain.

Jim muttered as fresh, dark rain spilled onto his face.
His eyes became clear and bright. “I didn’t come to Sparrow to be killed by you
crooked dogs!”

He gripped his hatchet with his left hand and swung.
The hatchet arced and connected full with a wolf’s snout. Jim was no kind of kidder
when it came to keeping his weapons sharp. The wolf lost its whole nose and
fangs from the swipe and let go, bucking wildly backward and mewling into the
darkness.

Jim choked when he heard the wolf’s gargled breathing.
Even though they tore at him to kill him, his memory of Fennie swelled. There
was no spit for him to swallow.

He chopped hard then at his right. The back haft of his
hatchet cracked the skull of a wolf that was ripping at his right forearm.

That one yipped out then and let go.

Jim tried to get up and slid a bit on the soaking floor
of the wood. He wondered if he lay in rain or in his own blood or in the blood
of the wolves, and figured probably all three. A picture flashed in his mind
that he had seen in one of Barnhouse’s books: it was a scratchy drawing of a
man with a wolf head holding a hatchet. There were words underneath the drawing:
“Vryka had turned.”

He tried again to get up and he was able to half stand
now.

The woods got murky and he thought he might have seen
the wolves running off, but others, many others stayed. They were staying, waiting.
Why weren’t they killing him? He saw some snouts go up into the air as if they
suddenly had a scent, even in all the rain.

Jim’s right arm felt flat and ached. He tried to
move it.

In the gray and blue light, blood rolled from his fingertips
and mingled in the black water. But his hand only shook.

The woods around him faded in and out. A huge wind blew
the treetops. The sky went dark. Thunder rolled. The rains poured on. The wolves
looked as if they were traveling around him in a circle, a spinning circle,
that soon was one long wolf with a thousand hollow-lit eyes.

He couldn’t feel his right arm. He felt around for himself.
He grabbed his belt with his left hand; he couldn’t feel it. His hatchet seemed
to float in front of his face.

Heaviness came to him.

He staggered and tumbled back to the ground again and
thought about May Marbo. Her teeth were white and then crooked, like warm ivory
vines. He felt he could remember her from somewhere else—if he could only reach
out to her. She was right there, holding his pistol out to him.

He struggled just enough to sit up again, and then he
half stood. He was going to make it. If he could just get at his pistol . . .
Through the blurring rain and the wind, he thought he saw May holding it up to
him in the rain.

Then it happened. A wolf, he thought, leapt from behind
him and took his neck in its maw. As he flipped, he saw the wolf that had come
for him. He was certain that around each of its silver eyes he saw other eyes,
so that the wolf’s face had four eyes on each side of its head and that from
its fanged mouth extended something that looked like flexing spines.

He saw May turn with a wide mouth, covering her eyes
as this monster wolf dropped him to the ground and, as the forest faded from his
vision, May faded too. The sky became the trees. His head banged on a rock. The
raging of the wolf at his neck became quiet now, a tickling stream in his ears.

He saw another shape then. A hulking form passed onto
the trail, waving its thick arms. It lurched from the corner of his vision.

There was a flash and a noise like a thunder-crack.

He was wet with his own blood as the giant wolf leapt
over him, wildly dashing away. The figure leaned over him.

The night faded out.



May put a cloth on his head. His skin looked soft and
white and there was a fever running in him fierce.

“Make sure to keep those bands tight and don’t let him
move his arms,” Doc Pritham said. “He may wake up soon. When he does, come and
get me immediately.”

Doc Pritham stood. May looked at his old face and his
transparent blue eyes. He talked with some kind of heavy accent from the North,
but May could understand him very well. In fact, most people could understand
him fine; some people just pretended not to.

She nodded.

“This collar he wears around his neck—I am not sure where
he found such a thing,” the doctor said and pointed at it. “This is what saved
his life. Otherwise, crunch! The wolf would have had his neck and his head
would have come right off.” The doctor coughed and looked at May’s face. “I’m
sorry.”

May shivered, but the doctor was right. He had removed
the strangely ornamented leathern collar and breastplate from off of Jim and
hung it on the wall near the chest of drawers. There, in the neckpiece, and all
about the shoulders of it, were the puncturing and tearing marks left by canine
teeth bearing down into it. Here and there too, were marks that looked to be
made by knives or razors slashing at his neck and chest.

May looked at Jim’s face. He looked at peace. Here and
there, long red scratches zagged and flecked. His face was square and thin and
handsome, and May did not notice this, but as she was looking at him her body
had begun to lean forward and closer as she inspected him.

Huck came in and looked at Jim Falk and looked at May.

“Doc,” he said, “I don’t like this. I don’t like this
outlander being laid up here at my place of business. What if he dies?”

May turned away from the convalescing stranger and looked
at her pa with raised eyebrows.

The doctor closed his bag. “I have given your daughter
specific instructions and bandages. This man appears to have some fever from
the wolf bites and the scratches. He also has lost a good deal of his own
precious blood. He will be weak for some number of days. He may never regain
full use of his right arm. His fever, if not kept in check, could bring on a
delirium; but, with proper care and attention, he will not die. I will come by
often, but he should not be moved and I cannot have him in my home right now.”

Huck looked at the doctor and frowned. He looked at May,
who was wringing the wet cloth in a basin. He looked out the window. It was
gray. The chicken man’s cart was out there—busted, horseless, chickenless.

The doctor put on his hat and said, “He should not be
moved.”

He tipped his hat to May and turned his back to them
to leave.

He said without turning around, “I’m expecting another
shipment of medicines shortly. More that might help this stranger. If he wakes
up, come and get me straightaway. There are diseases of the blood and of the
mind and spirit that can be caused by the bite of a wild animal. Especially the
wolf. Come and get me straightaway should he wake.”

The doctor left.

May looked at her father. He was incredibly unhappy.
He walked over and watched the doctor go out through the front of the shop. Then
he closed the door to the safe room where they were.

“This used to be where your mother napped after dinner,”
he said.

“He’ll wake up soon and we’ll get him on out of here,
Pa,” May said and stepped toward him. She could see in his eyes that deep green
ring growing ever deeper. He was thinking heavy thoughts.

“May,” he said and moved toward her, placing his big
hand on her little shoulder, “I don’t know what you heard or saw last night. I don’t
know what all I heard or saw last night exactly either. But from what I can
tell . . . from what I can tell, there’s a chance that, well, I think I might
be wrong about this here outlander, Jim Falk. I don’t know, May. I don’t know
for sure, but things in my mind are starting to change, and I don’t know for
sure.”

Big tears were dropping out of May’s eyes now and her
head was down. The sound of wolves raised up the worst and darkest of her mind.
What she had heard last night had shaken her up. Her face grew pale. While she
couldn’t remember exactly everything she had heard, her mind turned the words
into pictures, wicked things, spiders, spooks, witches, and wolves swirling
about in the snowy tornado of her mind.

She said, “Stop it, Pa. Stop it. I don’t like it when
you talk like this. I don’t like you being in a way where you can’t make up
your mind. What is it that you don’t know?”

“What did you hear?” he asked, lifting her chin up so
he could see her eyes.

“Pa, I don’t know exactly. Noise. Noises. I heard a lot
of noises.” May didn’t want to say. “I don’t want to say,” she said.

“You heard noises,” he said low, “and you heard all that
filth coming out of Benjamin Straddler’s mouth. And all that talk about spooks
and the Evil One and all that.”

May looked at her feet and thought about what Jim Falk
had told her as they walked along the path. She saw a dark, sparkling shape in
the corner of her mind.

“Well, Benjamin Straddler is a sick man, and he isn’t
right in the head. He’s the one you need to stay away from, May. He’s got something
awful in him.”

May wiped her face and her nose. “Benjamin brought him
back, though.”

There was a quiet moment between the two of them.

From the little room, they could hear Jim’s breathing
coming steadier and deeper now. The town of Sparrow was very, very quiet
outside.

“Pa,” May whispered, “do you think that Benjamin really
did all those things? Do you think he ate a wolf alive like he said?”

“I believe that he did, May,” Huck said. “I believe that
he did.”