by Josh Kent
Jim looked around at Violet and the doctor.
He heard Ruth Mosely calling to the doctor from inside the house.
He looked at Violet again. “We have to find out what’s happened to your husband. Have you seen him?”
Violet looked at Jim Falk and said “No,” but she meant yes.
Chapter 14
Maybe he was alive, maybe he was dead, maybe he was both. After they burned the thing out in front of the doctor’s house, the three of them had gone to Violet’s place to see. To see if the dead and yet living Bill was in the house. Of course, he wasn’t. There were pools and smears of blood and the table was shattered and the front door was removed and splintered. No Bill.
“I’ve been seeing that spook for years,” Violet said after she’d got a little drink and sat at one of the chairs by the smashed table, the one that wasn’t broken. “Just seeing it in the woods looking at me in the night, looking at our house, looking in the window . . . The folks around here and at church and all, they had me thinking I was crazy. For a long time it didn’t seem to care about this place; it was like it was just watching.” She fingered the locket around her neck. “They had me thinking I was crazy, and I thought that maybe I was crazy and that I had started seeing things.” Her eyes began to focus on things around her—Jim standing in the busted doorway listening, the doctor looking into the other room, looking up at the ceiling and then looking back at Violet.
“Even during the blizzard, even when I saw it eating the dog and those kids . . . I rubbed my eyes and thought maybe I was seeing things. Maybe I was. Why did other people not see the same things?” She looked down at her lap and back up at Jim.
Jim pulled his little book from his belt and flipped the pages with his bandaged hand. “Violet,” he said, “Violet, you said that the Starkey baby went missing.”
Violet took a moment to come back from whatever vision was before her eyes and finally said, “That’s right.”
“How do you mean, missing?” Jim asked.
“I mean missing,” Violet said. “Elsie said that the baby went missing.”
“Missing,” Jim said and made a frown.
“Missing,” Violet said.
Jim looked at the doctor, who was looking at Violet. Violet’s head was in her hands. She was looking at the floor through her fingers. She was trying to imagine what it would be like not to be afraid, she was trying to remember when she was a girl and wasn’t afraid. She drew up images of a porch full of sunshine and her mother’s hands on her shoulders, she saw Bill laughing as she tried to saw wood, she drank hot coffee in her mind. She thought of Bill again and her heart filled up with freezing water. She rubbed her chest.
Violet squeezed her eyes and opened them again. Jim was asking her about Elsie’s baby. She looked up at Jim and said, “I don’t remember her name. Elsie came in one day after the blizzard and things had started to warm a little and she said, ‘I can’t find her.’ That was the last I saw of her. She doesn’t get out of bed anymore from what I hear. From the grief. She doesn’t want to die and she doesn’t want to live.”
Jim turned and looked out the front door and said, “That magician told me that the baby was dead, that it died from the freeze and that there was no spook.”
Jim turned to the doctor. “Have you ever been up to visit Elsie in her bed?”
“No,” the doctor said and opened his mouth a little and put his hand up to his mouth. “No, I’ve never been up to visit her.”
“How long has she been in that bed?” Jim asked.
“It’s been four years since the blizzard,” Violet said.
The doctor and Jim walked out in front of the house and began talking in low voices. Violet gathered up some of her things in a pack and, walking through her home one last time, decided in her mind that she would never return here and that she had to think of her husband as dead. For a little moment, this relieved the pressure in her chest and the cold feeling of her hands. If she could think of her husband as dead, there were other things she might attend to. She thought of Huck Marbo, with his green eyes and his pretty daughter. She thought of all the sadness that had consumed him. She touched her necklace and wondered how the stranger in the woods played into all this.
Jim was interested in this fact about the baby, so he figured he ought to go and ask the preacher, because the preacher would know about deaths.
It had taken them all the dark day to rid out whatever it had been that had appeared in the woods, whatever it was that they’d burned out in front of the doctor’s house. The whole day had been dark and now it was getting to dusk. The night was coming as dark as the day. Jim thought about the magician and the little baby missing and what had been happening.
He told the doctor to go and see Elsie Starkey and ask her once and for all about this baby and what had happened. Maybe Elsie had seen things the way Violet had and it made her crazy and lose hope. Maybe the magician, Simon, knew way more.
The preacher was having a dream. In the dream he saw a shiny black grasshopper and long blades of green, green grass. The grasshopper was bounding all around, its gold and black face twitching, its spiny, hard legs kicking. It spit dark brown, its mouth with those tiny, little arms working to spit the juice. The sunshine sparkling, a cold breeze blowing. Then there was more than just one grasshopper. All the blades of grass were the striped yellow and black bugs all clicking and whirring, rustling and fussing in the hot sun. There was a smell of burning and up ahead, as the preacher looked up and away from the ground, he could see his house and the church, like an arrow, rising up in front of a flat, gray sky. Then everything burst into fire and was covered up in dark smoke and glistening bugs.
“Thank God,” he was saying to himself in his sleep.
Once he woke up and found his wife standing over him. He was sitting up straight in a chair.
“I want to see her. I want to see my little girl,” he said. His face was moving now just as normal, his lips red. His right eye, though, still looked somehow broken with the veins. It looked as if it was dead, like a fish’s eye.
“I want to see her,” he said again.
Aline sighed and thought of her daughter. She remembered times not too long ago when the three of them sat around the table laughing and singing the old songs.
She helped him up. His mind was so fuzzy that all he really could feel was the deep, inside feeling of the urge to see his daughter—her face would tell him that everything was all right. Though somewhere in his head was the vaguest idea that she was in danger.
“Thank God,” he said again, not sure why. His wife helped him up and helped him shuffle through the narrow hallway over to his daughter’s little room.
He stood there for a while watching his daughter, Merla, sleep, her breath moving in and out. He didn’t want to wake her. She had slept all through the whole night. His wife told him that she slept through all the commotion at the church.
He sat down on the little stool there beside her bed. He was so tired.
His eyes flickered and he wondered where his wife had gotten off to. He must have dozed on the stool. The room seemed so dark suddenly and the window even seemed to grow darker than the rest of the room. For a moment his heart started up fast and the blood rushed to his head.
He could hear his wife, though. She must be off in the kitchen. He could hear her clinking around in there. It calmed him. He realized that he didn’t know what to tell her. Where had he been? He pushed around in his mind for a memory of anything, and nothing came. His body felt warm and there was a fuzzy, bubbly quality to everything he was seeing in front of him: his daughter’s breathing, slow in, slow out; the blue and purples of the room around him growing and swaying as Merla breathed.
He suddenly remembered that a blade had been inserted into his shoulder and that the outlander had made off with his arm. But he had his arm.
He looked at his daughter. There she was, her chubby face with her mouth open sleeping, with her
dark curls splashed out around her head on the pillow. He wanted to reach out and touch her curls, but he didn’t want to wake her.
He remembered something of his arm being wrenched away from the shoulder and looked down into his lap. There, across his belly, was something that looked very much like his arm in his sleeve. At the end of it was what must be his own hand in a black glove. Pinned to the glove was a piece of paper with writing on it.
He picked up the paper with his good hand and read it. The paper read: “Do not touch or move the arm. Give medicine according to instructions in bag. Say your prayers.”
The preacher’s mind spun and there was a metal taste in his mouth.
His wife appeared in the doorway.
“Come on,” she said, “I’ve let you look now. Come on, let’s get you in your chair. I don’t like it. It’s what the doctor said to do. The doctor said so. We might as well do it.”
“The chair?” Vernon asked and looked around, suddenly wondering why he was in his daughter’s room. His throat was scratchy, his memories flushed away, but his voice sounded clear and deep to him. The sound of his own voice made him smile in the darkness.
His wife helped him into the next room and into his chair in front of the fireplace. She sat him down in the chair and got him comfortable.
She took the paper he was holding in his right hand and very gently pinned it back on the gloved hand that rested on his lap.
Vernon stared at the yellow and white and blue flames curling and flickering in the fireplace. Then he looked at the brick—the brick behind which he had hidden away the writings. As soon as he could, he would copy them again and again. He would spread the words when he could write again. But his arm, his arm, his arm . . .
As his eyes closed, the light continued to dance and it became the wings of grasshoppers, a thousand-thousand grasshoppers glittering and buzzing fatly through a smoky field. The sun was setting.
Jim didn’t waste any time crossing the little town to get to Vernon Mosely’s house. It was getting dark.
The house was around back behind the church. The preacher’s wife was at the door when he knocked and she looked him over.
“John Mosely says you saved my husband’s life, stranger,” she said, “but that means nothing to me. I don’t like you. Neither does John. Neither do most of the folk around here. They say you saved him with magic. We don’t do magic down here in Sparrow.” Her face was serious and blank.
Jim didn’t say anything.
“He’s in there,” she said quietly and pointed to a room where a fire was going. “Don’t you try anything.”
Just off in the room, the preacher snored, his arm pinned to his shirt exactly the way the doctor had described, note and all.
Jim sat in the other chair and got out his little book and thumbed through the papers. His memory was terrible right now. If he didn’t chew the leaves, his mind got scrambled. He was low: only a few small ones left, and they were turning brown. Sometimes his memory would come sharp and quick, but mostly it was wandering. Sometimes the wandering was good, as if an invisible shepherd was out there in front of the thoughts, drawing them along. Something seemed at times to be leading him through his own mind, as if there was something else inside him besides himself. He trusted it. He had learned to trust it, even if it provided more questions rather than answers. It was a bad situation. If he chewed the leaves, the shepherd wouldn’t come at all, but if he didn’t chew them, he had to rely almost completely on his little book as his own memory.
The preacher, Vernon Mosely, opened his eyes, and they fluttered for a moment and then landed on Jim. The minister’s plump face almost turned up in a smile, but then fell into a heaviness; his eyes turned away from Jim and, glinting, looked deep into the fire.
Nothing was said between the two of them for a long while. Jim fiddled around in his little book.
The preacher coughed and then he said, “She let you in?”
“Your wife doesn’t like me,” Jim said.
The preacher adjusted himself in his chair a moment and looked back and forth from the stranger to the fire and back a few times. All kinds of worries were crossing over his face, and his fingers fidgeted on the note that was pinned to his once missing arm. He wasn’t sure. This stranger, this outlander, had been the one who had removed and run off with this arm of his, but exactly why that was, and exactly what this strange man who claimed powers and carried a mysterious satchel and a book with writing in it, a man who made known in public that he was some kind of ridder of spirits, what this man was, the preacher didn’t exactly know. He looked at the stranger’s face. The man looked honest. Honest and good. His eyes, though hard, were kind, and there was something about the way he sat there that made the preacher feel certain that he meant no harm. Then again, that was what was to be feared.
The stranger was staring at him with wide, kind eyes. The preacher’s mind started flashing and humming with all the events that had taken place, and suddenly, without meaning for it, the truth started coming out of his mouth and the stranger began scribbling in his little book.
“I’ve been to see the witch,” the preacher said quietly, his eyes opening wide. “I’ve been to see the witch, Wylene, on the hill. The magician, Simon, he’s the one helped me to find her. He gave me the token in a box. If you don’t use it, you can’t find the witch’s place.”
The preacher gave a long pause and then said, “I won’t kill her.”
Jim looked up from his book. “A witch, you say?”
The preacher continued: “I know the writings. I know what they say and I know what the people in the North are doing with them, but I won’t do it. We’re not the appointed judges of it, and I won’t do it. I told her so. I told her that I wouldn’t let her be brought to any harm, but that she had to show me, she had to help me.”
Jim wanted to tell the preacher what he knew, but he wasn’t at all sure if he should. What he knew was that if the preacher had been to see a real witch, he would have never returned. Witches were straight from the Evil One’s world; there was never a human being that was helped by a witch, not a true witch.
The preacher’s upper lip trembled a bit. “She showed me. She showed me the Evil One and told me things that I can’t say and can’t rightly remember.” The preacher looked at Jim dead in the eye. “You see, at first I thought that maybe you had brought these things about. I figured maybe you was some kind of a witch-man, or maybe even a demon of some sort, or a conjurer, no. Then, too, I thought maybe it had been Simon all along. No. And that Violet Hill woman, she called you here by some power, but maybe that was a power outside her power, and that doesn’t make her a witch. She wanted to do what was right. Somehow she had heard of you. Someone told her about you. A stranger in the woods told her about you and she could call you by visions. This is what the witch, Wylene, told me.”
Jim Falk looked back into the preacher’s eyes. He saw fear. But when he looked deeper, he saw there a conviction, and deeper than that, something solid and unchangeable seeming.
“Preacher,” Jim said, “what do you think is happening here? This Evil One, as you call it. What is happening here? Tell me about this witch of Sparrow Creek.”
Vernon Mosely looked back at the fire. “This evil, it’s not the witch. She might not be a witch exactly, I don’t think. She’s just an old woman. She showed me. We are all in danger of death,” he said. “They’ve been here a long time and they’ve had no reason to come out. They’ve been hiding in the hollows and in the forest. Sleeping. Waiting. Now they’re awake. They woke up. They’re coming around now because they’re looking for something . . . maybe you or maybe me. Do you know what I am talking about?”
Jim knew. “I believe I know,” he said. “They’re after the ones who know the Waycraft and the writings. You know about the writings?”
“The Waycraft?” The preacher asked, but had heard clearly what the outlander was saying. He wondered what this stranger could know abo
ut it. He felt a bit of relief that someone else might know, but he also felt more fear.
“The Waycraft,” Jim replied. “The writings.”
The preacher’s mouth dropped open and then shut. He said, “Some were not lost. Some have been found.” And he couldn’t help it, but he glanced toward the mantel of his fireplace and Jim followed his eyes.
They looked at each other for a moment and Jim looked back at the bricks behind the fireplace.
Jim raised his eyebrows and then he stood up and walked toward the mantel. “This witch, Wylene, how did she show you this?”
The preacher said, “Through her. She said she did nothing, but everything was shown through her. She said she was hollow.”
“Hollow?” Jim asked and pointed to the mantel.
The preacher choked a little. “That’s what she said.”
Jim looked at the preacher in the little room. The fire in the fireplace lit up his body sitting there on the chair, all wrapped up in blankets. The note that the doctor had pinned to his arm was still pinned to his arm. The preacher was afraid. It was clear to Jim that whatever it was this witch had shown him had put a fear on the preacher awful.
Jim walked over to the fireplace and looked at everything that was over there. There wasn’t much—a couple of candles and a dusty vase with no flowers in it. His eyes ran along the mantel and came to the one brick where the preacher had glanced. There was nothing different about it. It looked like all the others.
He reached out and plucked at it. Behind him the preacher drew in a deep breath. “Falk, Falk.”
“What is this, preacher?” Jim whispered and removed the brick and then pulled the silver metal box from the hole. He opened it.
Inside were some old papers with writing on them, black ink on yellowing papers. The handwriting was different, by different people on different papers, and one was a little book not unlike his own. Jim read over some of the papers in the firelight. He read them more, he recognized a phrase “while you were in your blood,” a sketch of a man coming out of a cave, and then a picture of a woman with wings holding a flaming sword on a mountainside.