The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel

by Josh Kent

  For a moment the doctor thought it was all over. Falk nodded and was still. Then Falk’s head jumped up and started talking again. “I kept my eyes closed tight, but she was there and I could feel her black eyes moving over my body. I could see her face in my mind. A wrinkled, white mask with shining black eyes and sharp, broken teeth. My pa was hiding and flashed a powder trap on her that caught her image on a special plate . . . but she grabbed me in her raggedy hands and stole me up toward that high window. It banged my head against the ladder and I went out. Just like when the wolves got me in the woods, Doc. Just like when I ran from the fire. Just like when I ran from Kitaman. Just the same as that night.”

  Falk reached out with his left hand without looking and, picking up the small cup, drank the rest of the whisky. His eyes came back from that faraway place where they were and focused again on the doctor.

  The doctor saw it then in Falk’s eyes. He saw the light. It almost appeared as if far back in Falk’s head somewhere there was a tiny sky and in that tiny sky there were stars, stars like when the lake is still and the night is black and the stars are strewn across the blackness. It twinkled there and disappeared as if it had never been and Falk yawned, not seeming to take any notice of anything but that he was tired and wounded. Made it seem certain the light had never been.

  The doctor opened his mouth. “What was that outside the church, Falk?”

  Jim looked down into his cup. “I wonder if it matters. Does it matter if we know? If it is evil, if it’s the evil we think it is. Maybe there is nothing to be done. Maybe we can’t stop it. How can we stop it? What did you see, Doc? Did you see a monster? Did you see evil? If you did, if it is that evil, do you really think we can stop it? A doctor and a drunk ghost-killer?” Jim asked, turning his face back toward the window and the sunlight. “I’ve been running so long.”

  The doctor stood and, rubbing his chin, walked to the window and looked out the window with Jim Falk. In the doctor’s little yard frost was over everything, the grass, the mud. The sun was bright and yellow and the sky was almost blue for the first time in a while. The sun sparkled in the frost on the grass and brown mud.

  The doctor and the outlander looked at the morning together. Neither of them talked. Even as the pink sun slowly lighted the sky and the birds twittered in the cold air as though spring had come early, no words. No words for a long time, just the sun growing orange and melting the silver frost on the window.

  The doctor grunted uneasily. He turned away from the window and reached into his front pocket for his pipe. He got it out and packed it with tobacco and lit it and started smoking it.

  Chapter 13

  Benjamin rubbed the soap chunk furiously over his hands. Lane was making hot water on the stove to bring to him.

  Though the night had been cold and strange and lonely, her husband had come back with something different. Something there was different about him, but she couldn’t quite know or say what it was. There was an energy to him that wasn’t there before and she could see it in his eyes and it felt like an energy that was good.

  She watched him now with his shirt off in the sink working hard to get the blood off. His massive frame and white skin with freckles all over was charged with effort. He looked like a large boy suddenly to her, and was he smiling? He turned and looked at her and there was a wonder of sorts in his eyes. She brought the pot and poured the warmed water into the basin where he worked the blood off his skin.

  “The outlander,” he said. “The outlander was in the woods and the wolves had him. It was exactly like what happened to Dirty, it was exactly like what happened to my pa.”

  She handed him a fresh shirt and he put it on.

  He turned to her and she sat down in front of him on the chair.

  He started talking and waving his arms as he talked.

  “I went up after I was at Huck’s; they had me deep into the telling of that story of my father.” Benjamin Straddler looked down, a frown growing under his nose. “They wanted to hear it. I didn’t want to tell it, Lane, but they wanted to hear it, Simon wanted me to tell it again, so I told it. When them wolves were howling and everything was going on, I grabbed up my gun and ran out the front door. There was howling coming from everywhere. I ran out. I ran out with my gun and just ran everywhere. I wasn’t sure where I was going. I ran around everywhere and wound up in the woods with the wolves and the outlander. There were so many, though. More than I’ve ever seen before. Something different about them. The smell. There was a smell, it was awful. I can’t hardly believe now when I think about it that it’s possible for there to be so many wolves up in them woods. And they just kept coming. I was going to shoot, but I didn’t know where to shoot, and if I shot, then I’d have to reload soon enough and what if one jumped on me? There were so many! Soon enough, though, I was up on a path and I saw his body. I saw his body lying there in the mud in the path and I could see the wolves that were tearing at it and so I fired, but I fired up into the air and all around. There were some wolves on him, but I didn’t want to hit him.”

  He sat down at the table because he had to. He touched Lane’s arm and then let go and started stuttering and looked at her and looked back at the table with his arms spread out, looking into the table as if it was a mirror. A tear came straight down his left cheek and hit the table.

  “I guess I scared them off. I scared those wolves off.”

  She reached across the table and put her little, white hands on top of his big, red hands.

  “Lane,” he whispered her name, “when I walked up to the body”—he shook his head and squeezed his eyes closed and opened them again—“I saw the face.”

  He was looking directly at something that wasn’t there. He went blank and far away and another tear came.

  Lane patted his hand. Her eyes were wide and expecting and looking seriously at her husband.

  She saw his hard wrinkles softening, a gleam rising up in his eyes.

  “What is it? What happened?” she asked.

  Benjamin’s mouth opened. “My father,” he said. “It was my father.”

  Lane didn’t know what to do. She squeezed his hands tight with hers. Some birds chirped outside in the rising sun.

  “Your father?” she finally asked and then pressed her lips together.

  “That’s why I picked him up. I picked him up and slung him on my back because he was my father.” Here Benjamin paused again and his eyes moved from the wood of the table to meet his wife’s gaze. Her mouth was shut tight. Her eyes were watery with the effort of holding back.

  “But I looked at his face, Lane. I looked at his face.” He put his hand out into the air over the table between them and patted it a bit. “I touched his face and it was my father. It was old Dirty Straddler laying there in the mud. I picked him up and slung him over my shoulder and ran him back down to Huck’s because I couldn’t believe it. The whole way I was yelling at him that I had him and that it was going to be okay. I don’t know how exactly I believed it, but I believed it because it was real. And I ran into town. Ran through the fog and got him back and banged on Huck’s door and he opened it and everyone’s gone and May is locked away still and there’s some kind of commotion out in the fog. I sling the body out onto one of the long tables. Huck is yelling at me, ‘Not in here!’ ‘Don’t bring him in here!’ and I laid into Huck something awful with curses out of my mouth and filth that I have never heard before.”

  Benjamin put his head down on the table.

  “When I looked at his face, Lane. It wasn’t my father at all.”

  Lane was about to speak when Benjamin said, “It was Jim Falk. It was the outlander.”

  

  The journey down from Hopestill had not allowed Jim Falk much sleep. Some days he was sure that he had found a way to sleep and run at the same time. Other times, he ate the Leaves so he could see in the dark and for the extra bursts of energy they gave him to run on through the night.

  They were after him, though, he was
sure of it. Whoever they were. They were coming.

  Barnhouse had not known enough yet to explain it all to him, but he had explained enough of it. Barnhouse was good at keeping secrets, but he said, “These men are not from around here, they’re cruel men and they’re good at finding out secrets.”

  Sometimes he thought he saw them through the trees, their hats distinct and square among the moving black branches. Sometimes he swore he heard the dogs barking over the horizon. Sometimes the pounding of his feet and the thumping of his heart in his chest were the only noises on the earth. The days came shorter and the nights cooled and stilled. The frost came onto the mountains. Still he ran. He thought of his father and of his mother. He thought of Spencer Barnhouse and his hidden books and papers. He wished for a clear path.

  Now he rested under the sun and the pines around him. It was cold and winds blew harshly in the tops of the trees, telling him that snow was coming. He didn’t build a fire for fear of them, but he had found a warmer patch where the sun was gazing through the canopy. He brought out a piece of stale bread and ate it. He drank warm whisky from his flask, and as the sweet metal taste of it hit his throat, he felt alone. Maybe thankfully he was alone, maybe something else had drawn them away. Something in his head told him that they would find the trail again, though.

  He felt at his new weapons in his pack and wondered if it would be worth it all. He wondered if there really was any way to rid out these things that had come to the land. He wondered if he hadn’t lost his mind long ago when his mother died and his father was dragged into darkness. Maybe he was just crazy. Maybe the things that happened were just a group of things that had happened all at once and terribly and his mind had no other way to put them together. Maybe the dreams of the red-haired woman and the dark figure and the little town with the arrow-shaped church were the visions of a madman. They were his visions, though, so he had little choice.

  The sun came in on him and he ate and breathed. He thought of his father. He thought of his mother. He thought of the dead face of the witch and the thing that had grabbed his pa.

  He saw his father disappearing into that black space . . . the hideous arm reaching out, the evil hand clutching his father’s head.

  He groaned as his mind took him back to that place. The memory, when it came, clouded out all his other senses. The smell of the rain and dirt in the grass, the sick smell of the witch’s decayed body on the fire spit. Those creatures turning the spit and whatever they were saying to one another, and then, that blackness, the hole—disgust came over him in waves like a heat.

  Jim saw the wicked hand with curling black veins clutching the back of his father’s head. Ithacus’s eyes were wide, his mouth open, but he did not look at his son. He looked up, up as if he had been praying. He did not speak or cry out. He waved his arms wildly around him, grasping for his hatchet. He grabbed it and threw it, but toward Jim. Then he was gone into the hole and then the hole was gone. It didn’t shrink, it didn’t disappear in a puff of black smoke. It was just gone. Gone as if it had never been there before, and so was Jim’s father, only the strange hatchet lay on the ground.

  Ithacus had brought James along and he was sure that the two of them would at long last be rid of this witch. Jim wished they had not gone. Jim wished he could have been brave.

  “Boy,” his father said to him, “we must do this thing. We must. The witch must die. The hatchet trick may not have been enough to kill her.”

  He handed his son a silver pistol. “You point this end, see? And if she comes at you, you point this end at her face, right at her face, it has to be at her face. Do you understand?”

  His son nodded.

  How his father knew what way to go through the dark woods; James did not know. He held the heavy pistol and followed.

  Soon they were crouching at the edge of a hill. There was a sickly sweet and pungent roasting smell in the air and a fire smoked and lit the clearing below them. His pa said something to him that made his skin cold. “Old Bendy’s Men.”

  It was just a few of them, but they were there.

  “Look, look!” he said. “They’re burning up the witch and eating her! They haven’t noticed us. They’re so consumed.”

  James did not want to look. He heard crunching and chattering.

  “They must be weak because she is dead, they’re trying to eat up her powers.”

  James did not want to look.

  His father pulled the hatchet. “There are only two of them. Remember, aim right at their faces, right between their eyes. Don’t be afraid of them, just breathe deep and aim between their eyes. Right where the nose should be. Do not be afraid of them.”

  Suddenly his father was rushing at the fire, but James was frozen.

  He whispered, “Pa, no, I can’t.”

  “Shoot!” his father was yelling now. “Shoot them!”

  When James stood up, he saw the black hole, he saw the hand pulling his father in, tossing the hatchet.

  Jim Falk hated the memory and sometimes hated his father too: why would he take his little boy to do something so terrible, so dangerous? But deep down, he knew his father only wanted Jim to become who he was meant to be.

  He got out his whisky and drunk deep. He counted his leaves and put them back. He opened his rifle case and glanced it over. He took another drink. Wherever this rifle had been made, it was one of the lightest long guns he’d ever seen and it was a deep blue and black. It reminded him something of a fish in murky water. There was something like a dragon on the handle, tiny with its mouth curled toward the muzzle. The blues and blacks of the rifle looked to change so that it hid from the sunlight through the trees and even in his hand, when he turned it this way and that, it would not reflect the light. These men in Hopestill, that Barnhouse had taken the weapons from whoever they were, they were stocking up special weapons and other things for a reason. Where were they coming from? He didn’t know why, but he knew that it could not be for good. He shined his father’s hatchet and put it back in his belt. He took a bit more whisky.

  He thought of his father’s face.

  “Trouble in all shapes and shades,” he mumbled, reciting the old words he had often heard his father say. “Trouble in all shapes and shades,” he said again to the woods around him and rolled up his gear sack, getting ready to move again. If he moved just right, if he ran fast enough, maybe he could leave the memories behind him.

  But suddenly, pain was on him.

  He bent down on one knee. He squeezed his temple with his right hand and blood ran from his left nostril and over his lips. This happened sometimes before a vision came. He got dizzy and came down on all fours. The world around him faded away. The sunlight faded, the trees faded, his gearsack faded away.

  He saw the little town again—the little town nestled on the creek. He saw the woman’s red hair, like vines, flickering and winding around her face. Behind her was a shadow with glimmering eyes and a shape behind her, a dark shadow shimmering and making the woman speak. There was something so familiar about the shadow, yet it was a sinister thing.

  Then the church appeared. It was in the shape of an arrow, pointing straight to the sky. It was gold and then it was black and then it was the shape of a sparrow and then it was gone.

  When he woke up, it was night. The woods were dark and in the distance he could hear something crunching through the woods and leaves. What it was he couldn’t quite make out. Maybe a bear, a dog? His mind was cloudy, overlapping with the visions and the world around him. He wasn’t sure if the visions were over yet or if the real world had been given a chance to come back. What was the difference? Would it make a difference if he knew? Sometimes he didn’t know if there was a difference at all between the real world around him and the world of the other side, where the visions came from. Maybe that was where his father went. Old Magic Woman might call it the realm of Kitaman. Spencer Barnhouse called it the Wyddershins. His father might have called it a splitway. Jim didn’t know about any of that.r />
  Jim knew the world only as it came to him; the pain in his head and the world came to him split in two.

  His flask was nearly empty. He had to get somewhere soon. He knew he had to go to this little town, this little town called Sparrow. He also knew that something was coming toward him through the woods. He picked up his bag and he ran into the shadows and trees. He ran on through the night and he never looked back.

  

  No one could see her face, but she was talking clearly and quietly and they all leaned their faces and ears toward her. There were just a few of them in the little room, but there were enough of them. She made it clear, as she always did, that no one could know. No one could know about the meeting; if it was your first time, you had to go off with one of the others and take a special oath.

  After she said these things, she lit a candle and her pointed face appeared over it. The few that were there brought their faces into the light, and one by one they each looked one another straight in the eye and nodding heads.

  Ruth Mosely set the candle down on the little round table in the middle of the room, and the few that were with her took their seats.

  She spoke softly but surely. “A few nights ago, Benjamin Straddler came to our home and told us of the arrival of this James Falk. He told me that James Falk had come here looking to ‘kill a spook’ and that this man claimed to be what the River People call a ‘ghost-killer’ and that he had powers. Those of you who are with me tonight, who were with me last night when Bill Hill’s dead body came to life”—she swallowed—“those of you who saw the face of the thing in the window, you are the ones who can make testimony.”

  A man with a brown hat on, his face in the shadows, said, “Bill Hill died. He was dead and there was an awful stink. Then the thing in the night, it came and somehow made Bill’s body start to talk. We all heard it. We couldn’t understand it. It was like a bunch of nonsense. But one thing we could understand is the name it kept saying, it kept saying ‘Do not answer, Faaalk.’”