by Josh Kent
Simon tried to get himself up, but Doc Pritham kept him down with a heavy thrust of his boot.
The doctor was looking at the house up there at the end of the path and something looked not quite right about it, but he couldn’t quite figure out what.
“Where are you running off to?” the doctor asked.
Simon smiled up at the doctor. “Doc, you gotta let me up. Something terrible’s happened.”
The doctor let him up, but grabbed him tight by his elbow on the left arm and twisted a bit. He could see a blazing fire suddenly pouring upwards from the Starkey house and he could feel that Simon did not intend to stay put.
“The killers,” Simon said in a harsh whisper and scrambled about. “The killers! Old Bendy’s Men! Like from the old stories. They’ve come and they killed my ma! Elsie!”
Doc Pritham glanced up toward the Starkey house which was crumbling into flames and smoke.
“We’ll see about this,” the doctor said and, dragging Simon by his arm, began to head up toward the house. “Who set this fire? Who set this fire, magician?”
“No!” Simon shouted. “No! Doc! No! They’ll kill us!”
“Kill us? Who’s going to kill us?”
Simon spun hard to the right, but the doctor was heavy and his hand was strong—he tightened his grip on the kid’s arm and Simon’s wiry frame buckled and he went down on one knee in pain.
“Look, Doc,” Simon was saying, glancing back down the road. Somewhere there in the mud and darkness was his leather satchel with the Book. “Doc, don’t you know what those things are?”
The doctor shoved his face into Simon’s face. “Why? Why would I know? You have some reason why I should know what these things are? Stories! Monsters from stories? You got a good reason for me to believe old spook stories, magician? Did you conjure them up? Or did you set fire to your own house? What I can believe, Simon Starkey, is that some kid is mixin’ up with some kind of false magic, expecting dark miracles from old books, and now he’s got blood on his hands and he’s finding out that all them books and symbols aren’t worth anything but a few card tricks!”
There was a poof noise and they were awash in a bright yellow glow followed by a crackling and snapping wind.
They both turned and felt the hot wind of the house fire roll over them.
“Elsie!” Simon shouted.
The flames were enormous now, reaching in a kind of column up into the night and then dwindling quickly into a smolder. Pieces of the little home flitted about and burned away here and there in a tree or landed in the soft mud still glowing red and orange embers with white tips, wide swatches of burning cloth flapped by the doctor’s head. He grabbed his hat and held it tight on.
The doctor let go of Simon then and the two men stood there staring into the big, bright fire.
In the fire, they saw the outlines of what looked to be men, five of them. The dark silhouettes stood together and then, as if noticing they had been seen, they shifted, rose from the ground, and disappeared into the smoke.
The doctor looked at Simon.
Simon looked at the doctor.
Stubble covered most of the doctor’s old face and neck. The wind blew hard and the house fire whipped the shadows around on his face.
Doc Pritham smiled a quick smile and said, “You’re scared, aren’t you? What are you scared of?”
Simon began to walk away.
The doctor looked at the house still licking flames into the night and then back at Simon. He could hear Simon picking up the pace, putting distance between the two of them.
“Simon!” the doctor called after him. “What happened? What happened to your little sister? What happened to Elsie’s baby?”
Simon turned and looked at the doctor. The house blazed up again behind the doctor. He took a few steps back toward Doc Pritham so that the doc could see his face.
Simon pointed at the house. “They came during the blizzard! You know!”
Somewhere off in the sky, Simon thought he heard a whispering voice and he noticed that the night wasn’t so dark, at least not in the road where his satchel lay with the book inside. He could see it up there in the road just behind the doctor. The doctor was keeping him from it.
“Who came?” the doctor asked.
Simon said, “Doc, you know who came. Men like us; we don’t have to pretend. Men like us; we don’t have to lie. We know what we know, Doc. Yes? Don’t we? We know what we’ve seen. We know about the darkness. And I know that you know, or that you pretty much can guess where that little girl is.”
Simon took a few more steps forward and felt a kind of heat coming at him from the bag that was over there in the mud. He saw an image in his mind of the doctor flailing and falling aside; in his mind he picked up the Book, gripped it, and as he did so, symbols floated up in black swirls. He saw a drawing of a kind of knife-fingered glove, he saw a conjuring circle sketched by a sharp pen with four triangles pointed to four directions. He felt his heart beating, beating. It was the Speaking Book that he’d been promised by the killers. It was speaking to him!
This old, fat doctor was not going to end his journey. In fact, no one could.
The doctor saw something in Simon’s eyes and he moved his hand slowly down toward his belt where his gun was holstered.
A smile drew across Simon’s face and his white teeth shone in the firelight. His voice grew louder. “The killers, Doc!” Simon laughed and raised his arms a little and took another step toward the doctor. “Isn’t that what you call them? The killers? The Sons of Nod? The sons of Cain? Yes, yes! From the mountain of the angels? They survived what the others didn’t! They survived the great flood waters! How did they do it? How did they do it?”
Simon drew his hands together like a prayer and something shifted in him, and he seemed momentarily to stumble as if a big wind blew him from behind, then his features grew dark and unseen and he rushed wildly at the doctor.
The crack of the doctor’s pistol stopped Simon and he fell down in the cold mud. The doctor walked up to him and saw him sputtering and twisting there on his back. He gave him another round in the head to stop the pain.
“No friend of the Evil One,” the doctor said, “is a friend of mine.”
The doctor left Simon’s body lying there in the mud in the night. By the light of the burning house, he could see where the magician’s bag was plopped in the mud just down the path. He went and got the bag and closed it with the Book inside and took it with him. He didn’t know what was in it, but he took it anyway. He headed back to find Jim and Violet.
Wylene, who was called by some a witch, and who was called Wylene by the people of Sparrow, lay in her broken cot in the center of the abandoned shed she called home. The darkness of night was disappearing, and gray and blue morning light seeped in through the slats. Long ago, her sense of smell had disappeared too, but somewhere back in her head the tiniest curl of a scent rolled up from her memory—the steely smell of frosted glass, the pines scratching the roof.
She placed her old hands in front of her face, studying her palms. The swirls and crisscrossed tattoos, the winged and arrow-ended circles and staffs—it was no longer possible to tell anymore which lines were drawn at birth and which had been stitched with ink and needle. She traced for a moment, with the index finger of her left hand, the nub where her right thumb once was. She remembered the woman who had taken it from her.
The pointed chin and thin lips were all she could see under the dark hood. They came in the night. Wylene rolled herself into a ball on her cot with the memory; the soft, serrated edges of the scars on her back tickled against her robes.
“You can’t hide now,” the woman’s voice whispered harshly in her ear. “We’ll hold you until they come for you and then we’ll burn the whole lot of you. None of you will escape.”
The figures in the square hoods behind her stood quietly by with whips and hatchets, the cloth hoods moving in and out with their breathing.
Wylene endured and was left naked and twisted on the dirt floor of this shed.
All these years, she’d wanted away. She’d wanted freedom and to run in the night again—to run free and not in fear. She wanted to be free again, but she’d not wanted revenge. These folks, scurrying through the night with their hoods and hatchets, their scriptures tucked away in a satchel, they simply did not know. How could they? They were animals who’d encountered a fire—standing, staring, or perhaps nestling close to get warm, none of them knowing where the fire came from, its power, its potential. The people of this world did not know that there were lightless fires that could freeze, and they certainly did not understand that mercy and goodness could come from strange faces with black eyes.
No, she’d never wanted revenge on these poor animals who could only be guided by fear, but freedom from their cruelty, yes. That would be enough.
As the morning light filled up the house, Wylene stood and walked to the back wall of the cabin, winding tight her black and gray wraps around her. She put her hands as close to the light as she could, but the spell with which the woman held her caused even the edges of the light to sting and bring smoke from her skin. She turned and shuffled back and lay in the small, dirty cot to sleep away the light.
She woke abruptly to see a long shadow fall onto the western wall of her cabin. Squinting into the light of the open door, she saw the outline form of the outlander with his long coat and beat-up hat. His hands held the little black box that the preacher had brought with him. Inside was her thumb. She shuddered. He had come in the day. Come at a time when he was here either to dispatch her for good or to force her through pain to a revelation. But men like this? She opened a black eye and peered at him. Men like this. She could see the green mist that shimmered around his body: he was a man of the Waycraft. If he thought she was a witch, a true witch, he would drag her into the light and she would burst into flame and die. She would not panic, though. These men were often weaker and more confused than their brashness projected; they were often fallen, too taken to drink and whoring, and their minds were often clouded and confused.
The witch unrolled the fabrics from her cowl and stood up like a black ghost. She pulled the dark veils over her face to protect her eyes from the pouring light that came from behind the outlander. To the outlander now, she appeared as only a black shape in the dark of the shed.
“Old woman,” he said being cautious and formal, “stay at your bed.”
“What do you want, outlander? Why have you disturbed an old woman’s rest?” she hissed.
Jim took a step forward and, seeming to realize her discomfort with the light, used his foot to clap the door shut behind him.
Wylene did not relax.
He set the box down on a disintegrated stove.
“Old woman, the preacher told me that you were hollow,” Jim said and raised an eyebrow. “I have not come here to rid you out.”
The old woman didn’t move.
“I have the power,” Jim said, “to restore your hand.”
The old woman didn’t move.
“What is it that you want, James Falk?” she asked, a puff of her cold breath escaping from behind the dark veil she wore.
“You know that the old evil has awakened in the land,” Jim said, trying to see her face behind the cloth.
She was quiet.
“I know that it was not your doing. I know that you have not brought this about.”
“And what would you, child, know of such things?” she asked.
Jim didn’t smile. “I was raised by the one they call the grandmother of the woods. Do you know her?”
Wylene’s clawed fingers went limp when she heard the name. A heavy motion of some sort passed from her hips to her head, and she had to move her feet to stay standing.
Jim edged closer and closer to the dark figure standing near the cot.
“Woman, some think that you are a witch, but I know witches and you are not one,” Jim said, and now knelt on one knee so that he could try to look behind the veil, directly at her face. “These powers that have awakened are stronger than I can face alone. You know what I am talking about. They are hiding some way. I cannot feel them as I once was able, or see where they’ve gone off to. They are too much in the darkness for my eyes. But maybe not for yours.”
The witch’s body slumped under the robes, and she turned her head away. “They will kill me,” her voice croaked. “The rest of them are not like you. The others here in Sparrow. They are not what they seem either. They bound me here by way of some dark power that they do not know, but they will kill me as soon as the time comes—when the powers have grown full and their master comes from the North.”
She sat back down on the edge of the little bed, searching in her mind for the reason for the feeling that she felt now, so foreign and heavy, and yet it felt like a cool water tingling and bubbling in her chest. She recalled suddenly finding a rabbit’s den and the tiny ones bounding this way and that, and then she remembered this feeling. It was hope.
“No, old woman,” Jim said. “They will not kill you, because I will not let them.”
Jim stood and brought the box and set it in her lap. Kneeling in front of her now, Jim said, “I know the difference. Evil is evil only. You can’t make it into good. You are not those things that you see, those visions, those voices. You are different somehow from those things, aren’t you? You are hollow. Just as I am.”
Jim opened the box in her lap and from it he drew the crooked piece of decayed flesh and bone.
“Give me your hand,” Jim said.
“They will kill me,” she said, but she almost sobbed with joy.
“No harm will come to you,” Jim said strong and gruff. “They do not know evil. They cannot discern it because it has nearly consumed them.”
From somewhere beneath the dark folds of cloth came the witch’s wrinkled, tattooed, and thumbless right hand.
Jim united the thumb with the stump and covered it with his own two hands, his right still wrapped in the white bandages. Jim bowed his head over his hands and a stillness filled the little shed, then a cooling wind blew in through the cracks and Jim could smell the burning fire of the healing taking place as a pale gold light lit his face.
The witch felt a feeling in her hand, something like a tiny animal suddenly squirming and hot—and then the warmth of water cascaded over her whole body and behind her veil her eyes felt wet and there was a sudden moistness in her nostrils. She could smell something burning, and the light of the sun in the cracks of the cabin warmed and defined itself. Her muscles became lithe and itching, not just in her hand, in her whole self.
Jim stood back as she stood up and dropped back her hood and veil. Her black hair rolled in heavy curls from under her cowl, her face pale and sharp as a half-moon, the carved cheeks over pale, full lips.
Jim mumbled for the woman was young and beautiful.
Her eyes, though, were still without whites, black as oil in the sun and sparkling with dark rainbows.
The talons of her restored hands stuck out from her black sleeves. She stared at them momentarily and then stepped lightly to the boarded window. She tugged at the boards and allowed a wide blaze of green-tinted sunlight to fall on her hands and face. She curled and stretched her white, sharp-tipped fingers in the light, and they appeared beautiful and white and wicked.
She warmed her face in the light and then she smiled, revealing her perfectly sharp teeth.
She turned and her black eyes met Jim’s blue eyes. In a clear low voice she said, “Old Bendy’s Men they are. They must and can be lured. If we are to destroy them, we must draw them out from beyond the veil so that they might be burned. We can draw them out with a fresh corpse.”
“The Starkey boy’s been shot,” Jim said.
“The magician?” she asked.
“The doctor’s shot him. He’s dead in the mud not far from here.”
“They’ll come in the night before dawn; we must move qu
ickly,” Wylene said and dropped the heavy outer portion of her black cloak to the ground, beneath which was a very thick black cape.
Jim and Wylene stepped out of the house and headed through the woods. Behind them a wind blew through the trees and the house quietly collapsed and slowly swirled away into a dusty wind and was no more.
As Jim looked at her and thought about what the preacher said—that she was hollow—a notion came to him. She was going to help him. She was going to help him rid out this evil. Whatever powers she had, without even blinking, she had already given him a key to drawing these creatures into the open so that he, so that they could finish them. Jim felt a strange warmth in his chest and recognized it as hope.
Wylene smiled at the sound of the little house collapsing, her sharp teeth glinting in the morning sun, but she did not turn back to look.
As they walked along, a cold wind blew through the tops of the trees and Wylene took a deep breath of the air and felt in her breath the tiny sparks of ice that meant snow was coming.
Jim came to the edge of the woods and looked down on the town. Snow was coming now, and it was dancing here and there in sunlight and clouds. Wylene had stepped into the trees behind him and he could not see her at all. He motioned for her to stay behind. Looking around and not wanting to whisper for her, he was pretty sure she was the shadow that looked a little too tall over by the crooked tree on the bank.
It was risky to bring her across through the open part of town and down around the bend to the doctor’s place. It was risky for sure, but they were running out of time. Whatever the thing was that they’d killed out in front of the doctor’s place, it was different from the others and it was stronger. It was stronger and stranger than anything that he’d ever seen. The other thing about the thing was that he couldn’t shake the idea that it looked just like Kitaman. How could it be? It was one thing to understand that demons and spooks and witches were coming out of the woods, but it was another thing to consider that these old tales told by the old people of the woods and rivers were true too. It was too much to think about, and they were running out of time. But she was here now. This strange woman who was a witch or not a witch.