by Josh Kent
“The wolves, preacher,” the Doc kept going, “the wolves are coming down off of the hill and looking for food near this town. Which shows to me that there is a shortage of prey in the hills. They’re starving and they are coming down out of the hills to feed. They will return.” Doc Pritham folded his hands together as if he were praying and brought them up under his nose as he spoke calmly. “Knowing the cannibal nature of the wolf, they’re now likely feeding on those of their pack which Mr. Straddler killed with his gun. Then maybe they may eat the horse and then maybe they eat the chickens, and then, maybe . . .”—he frowned at the fact—“they will return in time.”
Bill Hill was breathing quietly now. It was getting dark outside and the church inside started getting dark too. They were both looking at Bill’s face now and they could see a little color coming back to it.
“The wolves came down from the hills back when the blizzard hit too. That’s when all those things happened. That’s when Brother Taylor froze and when all the other things happened too, before you were here,” Vernon said.
“If the wolf is hungry, it will come back. As I said, the dead wolves and maybe the chickens will feed them for a time, yes. But they will be back. Other animals will come too. Bears. Others . . .”
“Others?”
The doc stood up and stretched his legs out. He was bothered. He patted his pants and straightened his jacket. He thought of the wounds on Bill’s back. He picked his hat up off the floor and beat it on his leg. The wolves hadn’t gone for Bill’s neck. It’s not like a wolf. His face was wide and healthy and his eyes were light blue, almost bright-looking as he said, “I’m having a pipe. I will be just outside the door. If he wakes, call me.” He put on his hat, “I will be just a short time.”
Doc Pritham got outside and closed the door to the church behind him. He looked out through the little town. Nobody was out. All the doors were closed up and smoke was coming out of the chimneys. The tracks were around still in the mud. The dusk was coming in gray and windy. He packed his pipe. Then he lit it up with a match and a few puffs. His serious face lit up in the darkening evening. Red and yellow flickered in his eyes as the smoke floated away into the air.
He said, “Others,” and looked around, squinting. He thought of the church and man lying there in a coma. He thought of the long, puncturing wounds on Bill’s back—wounds that were not made by any wolf. He looked at the coals in his pipe and watched as the wind passed over the bowl and made them glow all the brighter.
Down by the creek, Hattie Jones and little Samuel were standing beside each other.
Hattie Jones didn’t like taking his son around to look for dead people, but he did it anyway. He knew that he was a good man for taking care of this little one whose parents died in the big freeze, he knew he was a good man for playing the fiddle over at Huck’s and letting the men of Sparrow smile and clunk around dancing just for a little while, he knew he was a good man for never taking a wife and never cheating at cards, he knew he was a good man. He wondered why such evil things could befall a town where such a good man was. It wasn’t just him, though, there were other good men and women in Sparrow. Brother Taylor was a preacher and he froze to death. Only God and the angels know what happened to that little baby, Starkey. He looked down at this little boy, whose eyes were wide and darting, whose smile went on and on. It made Hattie smile too, but only a quick, grubby smile that he wiped from his mouth, and then he took off his hat and scratched his head and then put his hat back on.
Hattie and Samuel kept on staring. The creek was getting rough as the wind was coming down through the little hollow. The trees were all dead and winding around everything.
“That’s blood there,” Hattie said. “And there’s blood there and some there. Them cowards up in the town are going to run hither and thither and have all kinds of conversations and philosophies. In the meantime, an old man with a fiddle and a boy with his drawings can clear out the Evil One!”
He barked a laugh and clapped Samuel on the back.
They were staring at a pile of white on the ground in front of them.
“Sticks?” Samuel said.
“They’re not sticks, Sam.” Hattie said. “Them’s bones.”
Hattie got hunkered down close and looked good at the bones. “They’re white,” he said finally. “These are the horse’s white bones.” Hattie got back up and reached in his sack and grabbed his whisky and took a long, meaningful drink from the brown bottle and looked around and snorted and spit, adjusting his pants. It was getting dark.
He looked back up at the town and looked at Samuel who was just standing there staring at the pile of white bones in the muddy bank.
“Lord,” he said and hunkered back down, “there’s no head around here. These are just the bones and there’s no head.”
Then a feeling came over Hattie. It was deep and it was no good. It shivered him all over and came crawling up his neck. It was like something was looking at him. He got out his fiddle from out of his bag. He hadn’t tried this in a long time and was scared of the results, but he was more scared of not knowing than he was afraid. He put the bow to his fiddle and whined out a long low peal into the woods.
Nothing happened at first, but then the birds, which he hadn’t noticed chirping before, immediately stopped.
He looked at Samuel and then walked in a slow circle around Samuel and around the horse’s bones looking into the dense woods.
He put his bow to the strings again and pulled another note that started low and rose and rose and, this time, at the highest pitch, he scraped his bow across loud three times.
Then, from the woods he heard a noise that raised his hairs. It sounded a bit like a man, but it wasn’t a man, and it sounded a bit like a wolf, but it wasn’t a wolf, it sounded like something that wasn’t a person that was in pain and was asking why.
“Samuel, stay close and don’t look back! There’s a devil down here! We gotta get!”
Hattie grabbed Sam’s arm and whipped the both of them up the bank and up they went, both thumping their feet against the ground at the same time, up the path back to town.
Chapter 10
Simon Starkey could never sleep very well. His nights, even the nights after he’d had too much whisky over at Huck’s, were long, fitful, and full of nightmares. Nightmares of his little sister, nightmares about his real parents, nightmare about the killers.
He moved in and out of his mother’s room, always scared that he would find them in there. Sometimes he could see on her the blotches where they had been feeding. Other times he told himself that they were caused by his mother’s illness. He had often wanted to call on that doctor, Doc Pritham, to come and tend to her, but he feared that almost as much as he feared seeing them in her little room.
Too, he could tell that, at least as of late, ever since that outlander showed up in town, someone had been watching him. He didn’t know who, but sometimes in the night he would see a shadow moving this way and that among the trees outside his little house. He would poke at the fire and drink and doze and stare. He thought he would have the strength to fight them off when they came for her. He thumbed through the grimy pages of the black book, hoping he could read the words, hoping he would find something inside those pages that would open up the power to him, hoping that somehow this dark practice would give him the power or the right spells he needed to overcome them. But he would fall into a deep sleep and awake to find that they had been there without his knowledge. Sometimes he would wake up and find himself seated by the fire, when he’d last remembered that he had leaned up against her door. Or he would wake up to find that much of his furniture had been knocked around or someone had put the fire out with dirt in the middle of the night. He’d found one morning that someone had come in the night and wrapped black hairs around all his fingers.
He knew they would come for her one day.
This night, Simon stood on his porch and stared into the patch of woods that was
just across the muddy road that leads up from Sparrow to his home. He was sure that he’d seen someone move back and forth between those two big trees that were just across the way. With the moonlight coming through the clouds and the woods, it was hard to tell what was a branch and what was an arm, what was a clump of leaves and what was a hunched figure. He squinted and bobbed his head up and down and looked into the dark. Much time passed and the moon traveled across the night, but he didn’t see any more motion that he could discern apart from the wind blowing the trees in the dark.
He sat on the rocking chair and thought of smoking and was turning to head in to get his paper and tobacco when he saw it again, as if all this time it had been waiting for him to turn away.
“Who’s there?” he called into the night. Nothing happened.
He stepped down from his porch and looked and looked. Just there, he thought he saw a figure, a hooded figure standing beside a tree.
“I see you,” he said. “Who are you? What do you want?”
A whisper came to him. It wasn’t a whisper that he heard, though. It was a whisper in his head. The voice was not unpleasant. In fact, it was almost soothing. The voice of a kind old woman.
“The preacher will come,” the voice said, “and you must give him the token.”
“Who are you?” he called again. He was frightened even though he felt no threat from whoever was there.
“You must give him the witch’s thumb,” the voice said.
An image appeared in Simon’s mind. He saw Ruth Mosely passing something between her hands. The witch? A thumb? The preacher?
He knew of the witch. He’d heard of the witch. Never seen her, but knew that she lurked in the dark woods. He knew that there was something in her that was against even the killers, but that she was not to be trifled with and that she was indeed very, very old.
“Who are you? Are you the witch?” he asked and looked through the darkness to the edge of the woods. Whoever was standing there had noticed that he’d noticed and now the figure stood next to a large tree, almost to the edge of the muddy road. It was tall and shrouded in a hood, but nothing about it felt menacing.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. It occurred to him that whoever was standing there wanted to help him somehow, that he was being pointed to something. This was not one of the killers; this was not one of Old Bendy’s Men. But who?
“You must give the preacher the witch’s thumb,” it said again.
Suddenly Simon was waking up on the rocking chair and the moon was coming up and out from behind the clouds, casting long shadows of trees over the muddy road. There, where he was sure the hooded figure had been, was a bent, young tree whose leaves had turned brown but not fallen, so that a clump of them appeared to be something like a figure in a hood, leaning against that other tree.
He would not fall asleep again that night, but instead he went back inside and stoked up the hot fire and stared into the bright flames. A witch’s thumb?
The preacher was in the dark. The moon was moving in and out of the clouds, but the preacher was still in the dark.
What did that doctor really mean? Mixing elixirs and talking about weird wounds.
Though there was something to what that doctor said. There was a weighty kind of light in the doctor’s eyes when he said, “There are certain mysterious diseases too that can be caused by the bite of a wolf. And some of us are more susceptible than others.” Then, “I’ll watch him. Huck Marbo and his daughter are watching the other.”
The other. That outlander who came in, Falk. The one with the supposed “powers” that his brother had come to him about. There was another here in Sparrow with supposed powers. So the preacher left the doctor at the church to watch over the sickened and broken body of Bill Hill, while the preacher went into the dark.
The preacher rolled it all around in his head; he remained in the dark. Maybe the outlander had brought these things with him. Sparrow didn’t make much time for outlanders, but in recent years they had let Doc Pritham come along and make his stay. It was a slow realization and a sad one to reconcile when simples and elixirs looked to do more work than prayer. Some had lost faith altogether, others went to live up in the Ridges with those who’d left Sparrow since before him. Importantly, they’d accepted the whole lot of the Moselys when he’d come with his wife and daughter and brother and sister-in-law down from Miriam.
In the end, maybe Pater Mingus and Gunny Foder had been right to get their folk on out of Sparrow and move half the town up to the Ridges. Maybe. He’d heard through the wind and rumors that many had died in the Ridges soon after the move on account of a skin blight.
Throughout all this, the preacher wondered about his fireplace, about the brick that moved and the metal box that contained the parchment upon which the secret writings were written.
Soon, though, he was close enough to the house he was headed toward. He could see something of it through the trees—the roof and a long curl of white smoke reaching into the purple night.
The evening had finally rolled itself down into a wary kind of stillness. Sparrow was closed up, but not sleeping. He pushed his scriptures to his chest. The trees were thick on the side of the path. As he was rounding a corner, the wind blew and the timbers creaked.
He stopped and turned.
“Who is it?” he whispered into the trees.
No answer, but the preacher was suddenly inspired to speed it up. He sped it up, ambling along the path now with his shoulders bent forward, pressing toward the dull orange light at the path’s end ahead.
This light was coming through the latches in the windows there at the Starkeys’. It flickered bright for a minute, and the sputtering curl of white smoke coming from the chimney went dark and gray.
Someone was poking up the fire.
It was late and the clouds were still trailing across the purple sky and the moon was still pretty full. He looked back down the path toward Sparrow; maybe he should head back. Patches of green light grew here and there in the town, opened up in broken patches. The wind whirled. He turned back toward the house.
Maybe Elsie Starkey was up to stoke the fire and keep the little house warm on this night, if she was even well enough to do things like that. He hadn’t seen her since the blizzard.
He would stop by and assure her that all was well. Tell her he wished he’d come to visit sooner, laugh with her over how long it had been. He would tell her that good men were watching over the town tonight. He would tell her all those things if she were the one poking the fire, but Vernon couldn’t shake the feeling that things weren’t all that well, especially with Elsie. There was something sickly and strange about the fire in the house; there was something hunched and crooked about the house. The shadows and lights that came from the windows and cracks in the home looked too long and too alive.
The other one who was rumored to be with powers—that magician, Simon Starkey—was in there, waiting for him. How could he know? How can men know the hearts of other men?
This was not the way.
He stopped in his tracks and dropped his hands to his side. The scriptures in his right hand dropped to the mud, and he bent immediately and snatched them up.
The latched window ahead seemed to open a little wider.
Vernon Mosely stayed on his knee and started to pray. He said a quick prayer and stood back up, turning to leave.
He took three steps.
“Preacher?”
Vernon turned and saw that Simon had the shutters open and was looking out at him. The fireplace behind him was going and his head and shoulders showed black and orange.
“Preach! I heard they couldn’t find the chicken man, Preach.”
Vernon’s mouth turned down tight on both sides, and his eyes squeezed shut.
His heart throbbed in his chest. “That’s right,” he said.
“What are you doing out there, Preach?” Simon called. “It’s not safe being out there.”
; Vernon said nothing back and didn’t move at all; he wondered what he was doing out there himself. Somewhere, between Simon and the wind, Vernon thought he could hear something else. Someone else was close by. Someone was whispering in the dark.
Vernon opened his eyes and rolled them slow left and then back to the right.
“It’s cold and dark, Preach,” Simon said again. “You should come inside.”
Vernon heard for sure now. His gone ears could still hear, and this time he heard for sure. Somewhere over on his left, just beyond the edge of his vision, right there, right there in the shadow.
His feet came suddenly alive and moved him straight to the Starkeys’ door and right up inside. The door snapped and clicked shut behind him.
It was warm in here.
Simon was behind him at the door, fooling with the lock. Vernon actually felt a bit relieved and somehow welcome.
The Starkey place was simple. He remembered a bit of Dan. Dan had been a very good man to come with Elsie to church, though they couldn’t seem to get their “son” to come along. Dan didn’t really talk much. He was simple and he worked hard. Sometimes he worked with Bill Hill, but he mostly kept to himself and would clear out trees and keep up the roofs in town and some other things. Vernon looked about this simple man’s home and saw where Dan’s winter coat still hung by the fire. He squinted a bit.
“Shhhh!” a voice came from the bedroom.
Simon appeared wearing a robe, whispering, “Mama’s sleeping. You don’t need to wake her.”
It was more than warm in there suddenly. It was hot.
Simon’s face had a sheen on it.
“Staying warm tonight?” Vernon asked pleasantly.
“I never much liked the cold, Preach. Try to keep your voice down. We don’t need to wake Mama.”
“Yes. Right. Sorry,” Vernon said low.
There was a wood table here and three chairs. The fire kept a steady heat and flickering light in the room.