The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel

by Josh Kent

  After she had run off, Violet had not got very far before Huck had caught up with her. She didn’t turn to look at him right away. She just asked him, “Why are you following me, Huck?”

  Her voice sounded scratchy and she sniffled. She didn’t slow down.

  Huck came up alongside of her. They both had to pick their feet way up high in order to get through the snow that had already piled itself up to their shins.

  Her face was wet and her eyes were bright with red around them and Huck could see that there were still tears coming down.

  “What do you want with me?” she asked him.

  “Violet,” Huck said in a soft way, “there’s nothing that I want from you. I want you to be safe. Falk does. I do. We all do. That’s what we want. You can’t run off into the snow and the dark by yourself.”

  Then there were no words for a long while, just the muted noise of the two of them stepping through the snow, and then she said, “You know I loved him. He made every stick of furniture in that house. Everything except that table that his granddad made. The house itself. You know, he built probably half the houses in Sparrow. He was a good man and I loved him.”

  “Of course you did,” Huck said, “and I loved Anna.”

  They were quiet with each other then.

  Now and again, Violet began to glance over at Huck’s face, watching his clear, green eyes searching out in front of them, looking into the snow and sticks and bushes to find a place for his wooden leg to stick. It was hard for Huck. It was hard, but he was doing it anyway. She felt something warm in her heart, but as soon as it came it went. Her husband was dead, gone, and beyond any of this now. She was sure of it, and she cried hard for him as they tramped through the snow. But even as she cried herself blind in the snow and in the dark, she couldn’t quite get her mind clean of Huck and his strong arms around her—that night those years ago—the two of them trapped and never thinking they’d see the light again. No one knew and how could anyone ever know and how could anyone ever understand? Only Violet could work it in her mind to the point that she was convinced that anyone else would have done just the same.

  The woods got darker and darker. At some point along the way, whatever little light of the moon had come blue and dim through the trees had disappeared. Whatever clouds that brought the heavy snow had darkened the sky and dropped heavier flakes, and wind came so strong that it cut through the trees and blew hard against the two. The wind was loud and cold and it forced them together.

  “This is a bad storm!” Huck shouted. “We should have stayed! You should not have run off!”

  She pushed herself against him and folded her arms into his chest as he opened his coat and wrapped her into it.

  “I am so afraid,” she said in his ear. “I am so sad and I am so afraid.”

  “We’ve made it through this before, Violet Hill. We will make it through again.”

  Huck did not stop walking. He kept the two of them moving along with his one good leg and using the peg on his other as a sticking point to keep him from slipping in the cold. It was very slow movement, but it was steady and sturdy, and Violet could feel the warmth of Huck’s chest heating her arms and his breath on her neck as they struggled together in the frozen darkness. They could not tell which direction they were going in any longer. They could not see the sky or the trees. They could not tell anything much except that they were moving.

  When they saw the little lights ahead, they did not speak, each of them hoping that they were already seeing the windows of somebody’s house on the outlying edge of Sparrow. But they knew in their hearts that they had not traveled far enough for that to be so.

  “What?” Violet whispered, her voice shaking with the cold.

  The little lights moved when Violet spoke—two little sparks that disappeared off into the darkness and then reappeared slowly, one at a time. The little lights were green and white and they blinked.

  Then they saw two more of the lights join the first two, side by side. The lights slowly moved toward Huck and Violet. Huck’s cold fingers grabbed at his shotgun and Violet stepped behind him and pulled her pistol from its holster. Huck wondered to himself how an eye could shine with its own light in such a dark wood, but he was too afraid of the right answer.

  

  From over the hill and down where Sparrow was in between the hills and alongside of the creek came the deep and hollow sound of a big wolf howling. The howl was answered from everywhere.

  Jim peered out into the hills dark with night. The moon was near full and, when the clouds parted here and there, it sharpened up all the shapes of everything. He could see the deep, dark of the woods that flowed into the valley below, the long twist of the black river, the thin patch where some road had been beaten by the years and, down there in the valley, a yellow light dancing by a crook in the creek. The church still burned. A cool wind came through the trees, and he could just make out the shapes of Violet and Huck moving along the pocket of the hill.

  The doctor and Jim headed down the hillside. The doctor walked behind him whispering, “Why did you come here? Why did you talk like that to us? That woman, Violet, she says that she called you?”

  Jim turned a little toward him. “Doc, you know me in some way. You have an idea of who I am and why I am here. I can hear it in your voice and see it in your eyes. How is it that you know me?”

  “Tales,” the doctor said, and even though they were in the dark, in the night, and wolves prowled, he smiled a little. “Tales that folks tell all over. I haven’t always been a doctor just in Sparrow, you know.”

  “Tales?” Jim asked.

  “Well,” the doctor said and tried to look over at Jim. The snow and the darkness covered Jim’s figure and whirled around him; the moonlight only cut dimly here and there the shape of the outlander against the drifting gray. “I can’t tell from the stories who they are about exactly. Someone who fits you, though. Maybe they are about you, maybe they are about your father.” He watched Jim’s eyes and face for a reaction, but there was none. “Maybe the stories—they’re about your grandfather’s grandfather. Who can tell? Maybe the stories are about all of you at once.”

  The doctor crunched along in the snow, lifting his big legs and moving his arms this way and that to keep his balance. “Some of the stories are pretty interesting: shadowmen, tree spirits . . . witches.”

  The clouds broke and the moon shown down across the hills. The snow was already so deep. It was up to their knees, but it really didn’t seem as if it had snowed enough for the snow to be that deep already. They came down where there was a little offshoot of Sparrow Creek, and now could see Violet Hill and Huck Marbo tramping through heavy snow out ahead of them. Violet and Huck were leaving a messy trail behind them, enough for anyone to follow, but it was being filled in fast.

  Jim called out to them, but they didn’t stop or even turn and wave. Could they not hear him? He yelled at them a few times, but they didn’t do anything to show that they could hear.

  Then, Huck and Violet pointed and gestured with each other and moved into a darker set of trees and could no longer be seen from where the doctor and Jim were.

  “We better hurry,” Jim said. “Maybe the wind is taking our voices away.”

  Jim looked at the doctor. The doctor looked back at him and asked again, “Why did you come here, James Falk?”

  Jim’s face was blank for a moment. The shadows of the night seemed to rush in and cover his face so that only the tiny sparks of his eyes twinkled in the dark patch under his beat-up hat. Then he tilted his head just a bit to the left so the moonlight came in under the brim and gave a blue light to his sharp features and he said, “I saw a darkness in my mind—a darkness of the same shade as what took away my father. It was there, moving in my vision.” Jim looked forward, indicating Huck and Violet up ahead. “The Hill woman, Violet, she was in the dream too. Or at least a figure that looked like Violet. I would wake from the visions and feel in my bones a direction and so I woul
d move. When I slept, more dreams. I dreamed all along the way to Sparrow, but I can’t remember anymore. I knew evil awaited me here and that this path would lead to my father. More than that, I couldn’t know.”

  The closer that they got to the grove of dark trees, the louder the noise of the wind was, but there was no wind where they were.

  “Did dreams lead you along a path to Hopestill as well?”

  Jim recoiled and stopped. The two were close together in the deep snow.

  “Pritham,” Jim said under his breath, “what are you at?”

  Doc Pritham didn’t move. His lips barely moved, his body didn’t move, but he said, “Well, I ain’t sent for you if that’s what you’re thinkin’.”

  “I know you’re not sent for me, elsewise you would’ve poisoned me in your little doctor house with potions. Now tell me what your business is, Pritham. There’s other kinds of business to be had. Especially from those up north. Those who are working with Varney Mull.”

  The doctor puffed at the pipe that stuck out of his mouth and said, “So you’ve heard of him too. Look, Falk, just a few days before you got in to Sparrow, a young man called William Wade came through here down from Hopestill. Not because he was looking for you, Jim Falk, but because I’d ordered a batch of healing herbs and some other ointments and such a few weeks prior. Wade’s a runner for me and for someone I think you know. He brings me things from about for a wage. He moves around, but he’d been stayin’ up a while in Hopestill. He said there’d been some kind of trouble up there that had to do with a witch man who’d stolen weapons from a ship and had poisoned a man called Spencer Barnhouse.”

  “Doc,” Jim whispered, “do you think I did this thing? Do you think that I am, as you say, a witch man? You think I killed Barnhouse? Or do you think I’m some fiend? Why’d you patch my hand then, why give me medicine and help me live?”

  Pritham sighed and smiled some. “Other tales. Other tales that rang truer than those. Wade said that he’d also heard around the edges and in the public houses that the culprit, the one they called a witch, was a man who was on the run and it wasn’t the right man. That they’d pinned a queer murder on an outlander so someone in a high place might go free. More than tales, though, Falk, I just had a feeling about you.”

  “Barnhouse was poisoned?” Jim asked and turned and looked back out over the valley and down toward the little flickering flame that must be the church in Sparrow.

  “It’s what Wade told me.”

  “William Wade. I have not met him, but I’d seen his name enough times on Barnhouse’s books. They’re after me, Doc, sure, but they’re after us all,” Jim said. “Whatever story comes along with them will only add fuel to that Ruth Mosely’s fire.”

  They started moving again toward where they thought Violet and Huck had gone off to. It was hard to tell. It looked as if down where they went everything was dark now and a wind was starting in the trees.

  “Spencer Barnhouse is a good man. I don’t know why anyone would want anything evil to befall that man,” the doctor said.

  Jim nodded. He thought of the man who had helped him so often, the man who had helped his pa, who had saved so much of what his pa had worked so hard for. He thought too of Barnhouse’s little girl, of Emily, and wondered if Barnhouse had been murdered, what would become of her.

  “What do you know of this Ruth Mosely?” Jim asked the doctor.

  “Little,” the doctor said. “She’s from the North, though, that I know.”

  Jim turned to the doctor. “The witch said that Ruth Mosely put a bind on her. It was true, Doc. True that she was bound and weakened to near death. An old spell, the spell of the Witch’s Thumb, or some call it the Wastrel.”

  The doctor rubbed his chin. “The Wastrel? Ain’t that a twist.”

  The doctor glanced away and back over his shoulder toward the cave. “The preacher will know more about Ruth Mosely.”

  Up ahead of them, there was noise now and they stopped. The trees in the little dip of the woods where Violet and Huck had headed off to were bending with such a force it looked as if someone was pulling on them.

  “Is that wind?” the doctor asked, and then darkness moved over them. Whatever sky or moonlight had been lighting the woods disappeared, and snow rushed down from the sky and all about them.

  “We’re going to lose them in this!” Jim heard himself shouting at the blurred form of the doctor standing there. They were in a clearing, and so Jim figured maybe there was some more cover in and under the trees. “Let’s get in there and find them!”

  Jim grabbed hold of the doctor and started pulling him along with him. They had to take great big steps to get through the deepening snow. There was another noise that came from all around them. Jim knew that it wasn’t the wind.

  “Wolves?” the doctor shouted the question. “More wolves?”

  “Let’s hope that’s all!” Jim yelled back.

  They moved into the deep, cold darkness of the trees. Here there was no moonlight and there was only noise around them, the noise of the wind whipping this way and that. There might be shapes moving, but whether it was Huck and Violet, wolves, killers, or trees moving about them, neither of them could tell.

  Jim started shouting at the doctor: “Go back! Go back to the cave! It’s too much here! It’s too dark!”

  He was shouting and pulling on the doctor’s coat, and then the coat went limp and came off in his hand. He felt something heavy brush against his face, but whether it was the doctor moving off into the wind, or a tree limb, or something else, he couldn’t tell. How he wished he hadn’t taken too many of leaves now: the power of them would have helped him to see in the torrent of darkness that swarmed at him now.

  “Doc!” he shouted, but the wind was harsh and took away his words.

  He fumbled around until he got his footing, the wind knocking him this way and that. He pulled his hatchet and looked around squinting and whirling in the wind.

  He started to make out some light, but he couldn’t tell what was making the light. It looked as if stars moving in the darkness.

  Then it was upon him. The jagged fingers were cold and hard and scraped at the skin of his throat. Its face was in his face, the crooked, smashed-looking face. These creatures were somehow using the bodies of dead men. Whatever was inside the mouth, those long worms that reached out, wrapped themselves around his neck. He wondered if the doctor had met a similar fate. Jim chopped upward with his father’s ax, slicing the black worms and breaking the jaw of the thing. It slipped away from him almost immediately, shrieking into the blackness and wind.

  The doctor saw the wild shape of Violet’s hair whirling up around her in the wind and the blue light of the moon through the snow and made his way toward her. He figured that must be Huck standing by her, each of them holding onto the other. Then something else moved—a dark, dark shadow that jumped into the way. It started toward Huck and Violet, but the doctor drew and blasted straight at it.

  At once he tripped and fell into deep snow and tasted his own blood as the wounds on his face and neck bled hot and then began to freeze closed. Something underneath him wriggled, and he found that he was holding onto a thin frame. There was a flash and a pistol thump, but not his own. He felt hot blood again on his fingers, but it was not his own. There was more shrieking, and something grasped his ankle in the dark. He felt those claws punch into his muscle and brought his hatchet down in that direction, connecting it with a crunch.

  The wind slowed and then was gone. He could hear breathing and panting and someone saying, “Violet, Violet.”

  “Who’s there?” the doctor shouted hoarsely.

  “This is Jim Falk! Who’s there?”

  The doctor tried to answer Jim, but suddenly felt no strength in himself. He thought he could feel heat sliding out of his body.

  “Huck Marbo!” Huck shouted, answering the doctor and Jim. “I’ve got Violet, she’s okay. I think she’s hurt, but she’s okay.”

  The tree
s went calm and moonlight filtered again through the pines. Jim could see now Huck Marbo leaning over Violet and Violet was holding her gun and there was a dead killer on the ground beside them and another below Jim with a smashed head. But there was another lump in the middle. The doctor.

  Jim ran, pushing his legs through the deep snow. He grabbed the doctor and rolled him over, but the doctor’s face was stone, his eyes fixed on something far, far away. His neck was severed and his chest and arms had been clawed to tatters.

  Jim looked this way and that, looking to see if any more killers remained in the clearing.

  “We need to get back to the cave!” he shouted to Violet and to Huck. “It’s not safe here and it’s not safe to go back to Sparrow.”

  He looked at the good doctor’s face. “Why did you come here, Doctor? Of all the places, of all the towns here in the South. Why did you have to come here?”

  Around them, they could hear wolves howling.

  “Get on!” Jim yelled at Huck and Violet now. “Get yourselves back up in there! Hurry, run! They’re coming!”

  Violet and Huck did not need to be told again. They started moving back toward the cave, up the hill. They looked over at Jim attending to the doctor’s body, and Violet tucked her face into Huck’s shoulder.

  “Doc,” Jim said to the doctor’s body, “I am so sorry, Doc. I didn’t mean for you to get into all this.”

  Jim grabbed the doctor’s pack and slung it over his shoulder. Then he noticed that the doctor had another pack. It didn’t look like a pack that the doctor would have. It was heavy. He put that over his shoulder too. When he did, he felt weak.

  Then he tried to lift the doctor’s body and couldn’t. He heard the wolves bawling here and there around in the trees. Jim thought of what the doctor had said about Barnhouse again. Was it going to be that whoever he came into contact with would eventually find some evil end? His mother? His father? Bill Hill? The chicken man? He looked at the doctor’s face in the moonlight. The doctor didn’t look afraid. He wondered if somewhere the doctor’s wife or children or even the doctor’s parents might be waiting and wondering.