The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel

by Josh Kent

Many dead were in the water

  Sky Father when he saw the terror

  Heard his children’s blood cry Father!

  He cried tears the more and flooded

  More and more with tears of sadness

  All the world was drowned in mourning

  Mourning Father for his children

  Mourning for the world beneath him

  Mourning for his little children

  Katakayish of the River.

  “Matrune did not know how long she slept, but the hole where she was grew smaller and smaller and, as much time passed, she began to see a little light. The colors in the hole changed. It was dim and dark, and then it became purple and then blue and then green and then, after that, she was able to see where she was. Deep in the rocks in a cave. And her once handsome and strong protectors were there, but they had become misshapen and hideous monsters. They stood at the cave’s entrance. They were demons. They became that way from eating all the dead fear in the darkness. Matrune saw her reflection in the black waters. Her skin was white and her hair was black. So long in the darkness, she had forgotten her own face. She had forgotten almost how to see light. She had grown and she was naked. But she saw her own face and she saw that it was beautiful. She took her protectors and stepped into the light of the new earth. The light hurt their eyes and their skin, and so they went and hid in the shade of the woods. They hid from the One who sent the terrible flood. They hid and waited for people and children to return to the earth. Lonely and hungry, they waited in the darkness and she longed for her people to return, knowing that they never would.”

  “Your grandmother is Matrune?” James, the boy sitting by the big fire, asked.

  “Yes, Matrune, daughter of the black moon,” Old Magic Woman said. “My mother was called Matishne, daughter of the black river.”

  “Your name is Matishne too?” James asked.

  “Yes,” Old Magic Woman said and smiled, “but my true name is Mate’eya’ishne’mate’rune. Which means dark fire, daughter of the river and daughter of the black moon.” She smiled and her smile was bright.

  “Why does my father call you Old Magic Woman?” James asked.

  “Because . . .” Old Magic Woman said and smiled. Her teeth white and perfectly square glimmered in the firelight, her dark eyes twinkled and crinkled. “Because, James”—she raised her voice up loud and held her hands over her head—“I am! I am Old Magic Woman!”

  As she shouted, a cool breeze passed across their faces and flapped the big fire back and forth. She laughed, her eyes locked on James’s eyes. He laughed loud and big into the pines, looking away from her eyes in shyness and then back again, laughing bigger, bolder right along with her.

  When she left him in the empty home, he was left with terror. He felt that he might have known the same terror that Matrune felt in the cave, all alone with terrible monsters eating fear. That is exactly what the loneliness felt like. His mother gone, his father disappeared, and Old Magic Woman saying to him, “You will have to pass through the world now alone, little James Falk. I cannot carry a child who will not listen to his father. I cannot teach a student who will not learn. You will have to pass through alone.”

  She said these things to him in the empty house of his parents as he cried on the floor beside the stove where his mother had made so many breakfasts while his pa sat scribbling in papers and trying to teach Jim to read. Now they would all be gone, they would all be gone.

  She said these things to him as tears fell from her own eyes and she handed him a warrior’s satchel, a woven blanket, and a pack of medicines. She said this to him and turned and stepped out the door and she did not look back in the open door, even as he called for her. Even as he screamed her name, she did not look back. She did not look back because her face was shining with tears.

  Chapter 12

  Benji Straddler’s father was standing at the door.

  The sun was rising behind him over the pines. All around him, the morning was quietly singing in orange and green, wet and new. The woods smelled good in the cold breeze.

  Benjamin Straddler’s father was dirty. In fact, that’s what they called him, Dirty Straddler. He never got clean and his skin was red and black with dirt, and his knuckles too were black with dirt, and in the cracks of his red face, black. Dirty Straddler was dirty all right, but he was strong and good, and he smelled like fire.

  “Come on, Benji!” his father hollered at him. His teeth shone like light out from his dark face. They matched his blazing, white eyes in the morning. He grabbed at his son’s hand and it disappeared in his dirty grip. The two went galloping together through the high grass, down the bank of the river, then up the river, the sun breaking through the pines here and there in sparkling spots, down past the garden full of pumpkins.

  They came up to the barn.

  “Now, here!” Dirty Straddler said, and whisked Benji up on his shoulders. “Now here! Are you comfortable up there? Look in here! Look who’s had a foal!”

  Benjamin could see in there. He could see that big, black, wild horse, Dandy. She’d had a foal for sure. The little thing looked shiny and it was being licked and licked and licked.

  Benjamin said, “Oh, my, Daddy, oh my, look at Dandy’s baby.”

  He woke up saying that now and again. He woke up in the night, sometimes with tears splotching up his vision, reaching out for the bottle he kept under the nightstand, fumbling in the dark, trying not to wake up Lane.

  Most of the time, though, she heard him.

  She would wake up when the sobbing started and listen only. That was all she could do. Once she had tried to comfort him and he had reacted violently—obviously in a sleeping state, but violently. So the sobbing would start and she would lie there listening and then the mumbling and the words came out; sometimes he said different little sayings, some of which were nonsense, but she couldn’t remember them all. Always, though, he would get up at some point, sobbing. Sometimes the sobbing led to all this coughing, but always then, scrabbling around for the bottle. The drinking and the crying.

  Finally, after he’d had enough, he would pause for a long time and she could feel his eyes on the back of her head. She could hear him open his mouth. He stretched out his hand and put it on her shoulder. “I love you, Lane,” he would say, and she would mumble something, as if she half heard in her sleep.

  “I am so sorry,” he would say and then, a few minutes later, he would pass into such a deep sleep, soundless, that she worried sometimes he would not wake up.

  He did, though. He always did wake up.

  This morning, Benjamin woke her up.

  Coming in the door, he went straight up to her.

  She was sitting in the chair, asleep, with the gun across her lap, the morning light coming through the shutters, playing in the dust around her sleeping form.

  “Lane,” he said quietly in her ear.

  She opened up her eyes and jumped.

  “You’re covered in blood!” she yelled.

  “Lane, something is happening!” he yelled.

  “Are you all right?” she yelled.

  “I’m covered in blood,” he said.

  “But are you all right?” she said, and set the gun aside and stood up. Her hair was kind of messy and her eyes were puffy, but she was beautiful to her husband just then.

  “I’m all right,” Benjamin said, “I’m all right, but something is happening. Something’s happened in the night.”

  He looked odd to her. There was a weird light in his eyes. Something that she hadn’t seen before at all, ever.

  “What is that in your eyes, Benjamin Straddler?” she asked.

  Benjamin didn’t know either, but he could feel it, and had an idea. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “but we need to keep this between us. We need to keep this between you and me. This is something for us Straddlers only, and we need to keep it just between you and me.”

  “Well, my goodness,” she said.

  “Make some coffee and some
breakfast, Lane. I need to wash all this blood off of me and then when I come back. I’ll be clean and I’ll tell you what’s happened.”

  “Well, my goodness,” she said and started the coffee right away.

  

  “This thing you saw, this thing in the night, what did it look like?” John Mosely asked Hattie Jones. John had been out in the fog looking with the men. Now they were all out in front of the church.

  “It wasn’t in the night, John Mosely, it was just now!” Hattie said and looked at his son, Samuel, who was looking around and twirling a feather. “I didn’t get really such a good look. I was only able to see it from the corner of my eye. I don’t know if I saw anything.”

  Some of the other men of the town had heard Hattie hollering and started to gather around the three of them standing there in the fog. The fog was going around them in gray ways.

  “It was something, though. I don’t know,” Hattie said, and John Mosely saw Hattie’s eyes darting back and forth, as if he was searching frantically for something in his memory. Hattie took notice that the shadowy shapes of the men were starting to gather around him. He wasn’t sure what he had seen at all. Maybe he had just been scared because of the bones and the way the wolves being around made him feel, which was scared and uneasy. Maybe when he’d used the special call with his fiddle; maybe someone just called back at him that way to make him scared and run off. Maybe it was just a tree that he’d seen in the fog and that had been blowing in the wind—just the crooked black limb of a tree sticking out there in the fog. Or was it a long, reaching, wicked arm?

  “I don’t know,” he said again, “but more than the look of whatever that thing was, there was this feel of it. The feeling that comes . . .” The men pushed in closer to listen to his words as he said, “The feeling that comes when you’re around something like that.”

  The men froze. John Mosely froze too, and in his mind a mist was forming into shapes. Pieces of a strange puzzle were coming together in the mist in his mind. The fog opened up just enough to see the front of the church. The steps were empty, the little windows were closed. He thought of Ruth and the things she had told him, all the things she had told him about what would start to happen if Sparrow let outlanders in.

  “The feeling,” Hattie continued, looking the men in each of their eyes, one at a time so that he could see for sure that each of the men was looking at him. He moved backward toward the steps. “The feeling that you get when something wants to kill you and drag you down into Hell.”

  The men mumbled.

  Someone whispered, “‘Into Hell,’ he said.”

  At this, something happened in John Mosely’s head. He caught a flash, a picture, a vision in his mind of a man—the man that Benjamin Straddler had described to Ruth, whatever he said his name was, Jim Falk, the outlander. The one who’d been doing the tricks at Huck’s with Simon—he stood there in John’s mind against the dark night sky. John’s mind blurred the memory of Falk with imagination. A tall, pointed hat like a witch’s with its wide, black brim. In John’s mind, Jim had a moldy armor laid upon him, fearsome with shining spikes and strange symbols etched in red on its mottled surface. In one hand he hefted a heavy double-ax for executing the victims, in the other a leather-woven lead for the Thing in the Night, a knife-mouthed monster, a lizard and a wolf at the same time, breathing its poison-hot breath, ready to swallow him up. Ready to drag.

  John Mosely grabbed Hattie by the shoulders. “The outlander!” he whispered, but very loud, right in Hattie’s face.

  John’s eyes popped wide open and he looked over Hattie’s shoulder at the mumbling men. “The outlander’s brought the beast! Benjamin Straddler knew it! My wife knew it. He told us, Benjamin told us! He came and warned my wife last night!”

  John’s skinny frame was tittering around, still holding Hattie by the shoulders. “The outlander’s brought this beast and it means to kill us all! I told you, I told you those from outside would bring nothing but evil! We’ve got to keep these people out of our town and out of the church!”

  He stopped yelling and looked at Hattie Jones. He swallowed hard with this new fear and conviction he had found. “And it’s like you said, Hattie, they’ve come to kill us all and to drag us into Hell.”

  

  It was night. Most of the people in town were still inside the little church. Some of them had gone home, but a lot had stayed up at the church because of the goings-on. They stayed around to talk it out. The doctor had got Bill Hill all comfortable with whatever he’d got in those little bottles, and then he left. Some of the folk were frowning and talking fast and quiet about the doctor being allowed to bring such things into a place of worship. Others were standing near Bill saying prayers. There were plenty of folk about, but not Violet. Violet was not there; she had gone home to rest.

  Doc Pritham wondered about that. But he had to get on with things and leave these people to take care of Bill Hill. With the outlander being attacked and the chicken man disappearing and now Bill Hill, the preacher had gone to look for answers and the doctor needed some too. Doc Pritham was not sure that he wanted to know the answers because he was afraid that he already knew the answers.

  Now, Doc Pritham was sitting in his office drinking some liquor with Jim Falk. There was a big bunch of candles on the table in the middle of them. Their faces were tired and serious in the flickering light. Falk had gone from Huck’s when May had given him the last of the medicine. He wanted more medicine. He was healing fast.

  The doc looked at Jim’s eyes and felt his pulse. “It’s fast, the medicine is fast, but you’re healing very fast.”

  Then he sat down and started fooling around with his pipe stem. He was rolling around the events of the past few days in his mind. It was coming together pretty well, but he didn’t like what was shaping up. What was shaping up was dark and like a bad prophecy coming into being.

  “Most of the people are staying up at the church right now, waiting for the preacher to come back with some kind of answers,” the doctor said.

  Jim had his right hand on the table near the candles. It was completely wrapped up in a bandage. There was no blood seeping through. Underneath the bandage, he could feel his hand. It felt as if it was humming. It seemed as though the doctor’s medicine was working. His body felt warm and supple, too. He was looking at his bandaged hand and then back up at the doctor. He was thinking about the church and thinking about the medicine that the doctor had given him. “It might help, being in the church might help,” he said and took a drink from his cloudy tumbler. “It might not.” Jim fiddled a bit with the bandage. “Where’s the preacher gone off to?”

  Doc Pritham said, “He’s gone off somewhere. He has an idea about a way to find the truth.”

  “The truth?” Jim asked.

  The doctor made a grunting noise and banged the bowl of his pipe on the table.

  Jim Falk said, “Doc, we’re going to have to help each other.”

  The doctor said, “I know.” He turned up his pipe and got some good tobacco and started putting it in. “These people—these people here in Sparrow. They have good hearts and some of them have good minds to go with the hearts. More than this, though, the people have fear. Too much fear. Even among themselves.”

  Jim took another drink. He watched the doctor for a while. The doctor had white hair and big eyebrows. His face was wide and strong, and his mind was strong and his eyes were clear. Jim said, “That cure I took. The medicine. It was a special from the Old Way. Can I have some more?”

  The doctor puffed his pipe and frowned.

  “Doc, my father and my old grandmother, they taught me the Old Ways, the Waycraft, the Path. . . . I can take more medicine. I can handle it. I’ve been taking these medicines since I was a boy. It won’t harm me the way it might someone else.”

  The doctor took a long pull on his pipe and for a little while he sat with his face in a rectangle cloud of blue smoke. The candle fire did some licking away of the smoke, a
nd from behind the cloud Jim could see the doctor’s eyes twinkle a bit. The doctor took a little drink then and put it down again and smiled. He was looking at Jim right in the eye now.

  A little smile grew on the doctor’s face underneath his fat nose. “Jim Falk, what exactly is the thing that has brought you here?” he asked him.

  Jim Falk looked across the table at the doctor and said directly, “It wasn’t a certain anything as such. It was something, though.” He took a sigh and his hand lifted up and waved in a dismissing way. “I was called to come here in dreams by the woman Violet Hill. She called me here by vision.”

  The doctor puffed again. “Well, Falk, you are right, of course. About the cure that I gave you, the medicine—and there is something else that I know.” He set down his pipe. “I know that a man such as you, such as you are, does not come along a certain way for the simple reason of a vision. If you have visions, you must have them all the time and you can’t follow each and every one to its thread’s end.”

  The doctor raised his left hand and made a motion with it. “Perhaps you do. Perhaps a man such as you are does such a thing. Wanders around, this way and that, following every breeze, chasing every notion. Perhaps.” The doctor paused a moment and put his long-fingered hands together as if in prayer and brought them to his lips under his nose. “But I know. In your mind, in the way that your mind likely works, I know that there are many such visions that come to you and how you use a way of finding the path to take. You should, at least, know a way to find the right path among the paths. But I see you, Mr. Jim Falk, and I see into your eyes and I see that your paths are twisted by the darkness.”

  Jim’s face, which had looked pale and worn, hardened, and suddenly a fierce light glowed in his eyes. He was concentrating on what the doctor was saying. The doctor said two things that were a kind of code among men and women who knew of the Old Ways, the “paths” and “darkness.” These were pulled out of the pages that Barnhouse had translated and the writings that were lost and his father’s journals.

  Jim opened his lips to say something. Just then a great wind blew at the side of the house, in through the open windows, and the candles smoked out. There was a noise following the wind—screaming and hollering. People were wailing and crying out for help.