by Josh Kent
“Why did you come here, Doc? Why did you come to Sparrow?”
He heaved again, and this time the doctor’s frame came up and Jim meant to drag the corpse off and up the hill to find a suitable grave, but he heard a voice.
“Wait,” the doctor said and feebly reached out and put his torn-up hand on Jim Falk’s shoulder. Jim stopped and knelt down with the doc over his knee.
For a little moment the doctor passed his eyes back and forth between Jim’s face and the shadowy trees above.
“What is it, Doc?”
The doctor motioned with his hand to Jim and pointed to the heavy bag Jim had just put on. Jim handed it to him. The doctor reached into the satchel and removed a large square object that was wrapped in a cloth. He handed it to Jim.
“What’s this, Doctor?” Jim flipped it over in his hands and the cloth wrapping came off and showed Simon’s book.
“Witchwords?” Jim said.
The doctor’s bushy eyebrows came together. “I couldn’t open it. The Starkey kid, Simon. He dropped it in the mud before. It’s his bag. I picked it up.”
“Did you open it up? Did you try to read it?” Jim’s blue eyes flashed in the moonlight.
The doctor said nothing. He coughed and blood came out. Jim wiped it away. Then Jim wrapped the book back up fast and dropped it back in the satchel and quickly pulled out the doctor’s bag.
“What can I use in here?” Jim asked and began fumbling around in the bottles.
The doctor reached out and grabbed Jim’s arm. “I’m past all that. I’m past all that, outlander.”
“You’re not. Show me what to do, old man! Show me what to do!” Jim was nearly yelling at him.
The doctor was calm. The thing that grabbed his chest was powerful and its hands were hot like fire against his skin. The wound, he knew, was so deep that it was bleeding inside and out. There was nothing Jim could do, but the doctor said, “Get the blue bottle with the square stopper and give me that.”
Jim did so immediately, and the doctor drank. Jim grabbed a long, wide bandage and began pressing it onto the doctor’s chest.
“What did you see in the pages? Did anything happen?” Jim asked quick.
They could hear again the wolves howling somewhere in the night.
The doctor looked at Jim and said, “Scribbles, shapes, nothing. There was nothing. It looked like a book full of spirals and blotches. But it gave me a chill when I opened it.”
“You saw no words or pictures?” Jim asked. He pressed the bandages into the doctor’s chest. There was too much blood.
“Words? No words.”
“Good,” Jim said, and the doctor looked at him with eyes wide and his mouth half parted and Jim took in a short breath. “You don’t know what it is, do you, Doctor?”
The doctor coughed, “No.”
“This is a very old thing, Doctor. A book of Witchwords and it must be destroyed. That you looked inside is bad enough. We’ll have to destroy it soon as we can.”
The doctor’s eyes were wide. He thought about Simon. He thought about Simon’s strange card trick—the moving hole.
“Jim, when you go back to the others, I don’t want you to hide anymore. The time for hiding and for fear is over.”
“Fear?” Jim asked and kept the bandage tight over the doctor’s heart.
“Can you read that book, Falk?” the doctor suddenly asked.
“No one should read a book such as this,” Jim said angrily. “It must be prepared and burned up.”
Jim could feel that the doctor wasn’t breathing right, but whatever medicine Jim had given him had brightened the doctor’s voice a little.
“Jim, those people back in Sparrow will need you. May Marbo, the Straddlers, all of them. They need you.”
“Doc, we’re not going to get out of this without you. What will we do without the medicine? Without the healing ways?”
The doctor didn’t answer. His eyes were open, but he did not see anymore.
Jim was telling the preacher about the evil book. “There’s words you must say over it, Preacher, to bind it. Certain words. Then burned and washed away in a river or a creek. That’s all. My father had gotten rid of books like this before. It takes some doing to get it gone.”
“Doing?”
“Preacher, you could tear this book to shreds and throw some of the pieces in Sparrow creek and some of the pieces off the mountain. Those little bits would find each other and rebind to the binding. There’s a certain way to rid the evil out of the book, and it appears that I’m the only one who knows how around here. Others who once may have known are absent from our company.”
The preacher didn’t understand exactly what Jim meant. He looked at his hand and his arm, which Jim and the doctor had restored to his body. He thought again of that night when the witch had showed him the terrible thing on the other side of the darkness. She was young now and Jim was telling everyone that she wasn’t what she appeared to be. Then his mind went to his sister-in-law.
Jim looked back toward the preacher, who was standing there looking scared, this way and that. Jim whispered to him, “Preacher, I know this time is hard for you. We’re all sorry for the loss of your brother. We can’t know why things happened the way they did. We need to know about his wife, though. We need to know about Ruth Mosely.”
Vernon stepped toward Jim, quietly, wanting not to awaken anyone and looking cautiously toward the witch, who seemed not to hear them. He was still wringing his hands together. He said, “Some men that had gone out into the mountains for game had found her and brought her back. Just alone out there, coming down a steep mountain way with a hungry horse. She told us many had died. She told us that it was a sickness come and killed her two brothers and everyone else. She was all there was left, as she told it, and warned the men against going up any farther along that way on account of a sickness that was in the water. She warned them against drinking the water. We took her in, even though people thought we ought not. My brother, John, he took to taking care of her because she was skinny and seemed like she might be sick herself. We kept her off from the rest of the people a long while. Only John would go see her and take care of her.” When he spoke the name of his brother, the preacher paused and his eyes wiggled and got wet. He swallowed and looked down, rubbing his eyes with his right hand, took a deep breath and continued on. “I guess that’s when him and Ruth became fond of each other.”
“A village up in the mountains?” Jim asked.
“Yes. The name I don’t remember, River Den or River Top, something like that, but the men knew about it. The men that brought her in were familiar with the name of the town.”
“River’s End? I’ve heard of that. There was a terrible sickness up there. She was the only one who lived? Is that what she said?”
“That’s the way she told it. You could see it in her eyes at the time that she’d seen something terrible and she’d near starved to death. She looked it.”
“You know nothing more than that?” Jim asked.
The preacher shook his head, but didn’t look at Jim. His hand curled into a little fist and he shuffled his feet and then looked at Jim. “It doesn’t make sense to me,” the preacher said. “It doesn’t make sense at all for my brother’s wife to turn against the teachings like that and for her to turn against me. There’s something in me that tells me”—the preacher again had to pause and take a deep breath—“something says that she might of even used some kind of power over my wife. My little brother. I don’t know, I really don’t know. I just can’t make any sense of it.”
Jim reached out and tried to put his hand on the preacher’s shoulder, but the preacher backed away.
“I don’t know why or how that witch saved us. I don’t know why you killed my brother.” He started to cry.
“Preacher,” Jim said, “there are things at work here that are greater than all of us.”
“I know that you’re right,” the preacher said. “It may b
e those papers. Those writings that they’re after. I fear that it is. I fear that somehow, this whole time, Ruth has been seeking them out. Not only Ruth, but that somehow the wolves, the creatures that Violet Hill saw, all these things, somehow they’ve been trying to get at me, at these things, and now I am so afraid for my wife and my little daughter! They’re in danger, Falk!”
Jim reached out again, and this time he succeeded in patting Vernon Mosely a little on the back. Vernon looked toward the front of the cave and drew a quick breath. Wylene had moved while they were talking and was now standing on the opposite side, crouched down strangely and looking at her arms.
Jim turned to see what the preacher was looking at and then turned back, still whispering to the preacher. “She’s not a witch. She can’t be, although, as you know, the fiends can take on many forms.”
“You’ve said that, but it’s hard to take—fangs . . . claws . . .” the preacher asked.
“A witch would not have helped us. A witch would not have saved May Marbo from a wolf. A witch would have torn her bones out and drank up her blood,” Jim said and looked at the preacher and then toward Wylene who ignored them.
“Hmph,” the preacher said.
“This Wylene, Daughter of Earth and Sky, whatever her name is and whatever it is that she might be, she doesn’t cast spells like a witch. She doesn’t give out curses. She doesn’t use the Witchwords.” When Jim said “Witchwords,” the preacher raised an eyebrow and took a sidelong glance at Jim. “She’s not decrepit, or decayed. Her body isn’t beat down with the Evil One’s emptiness . . . the way a witch’s body would be. And I was able to restore her from a curse. Do you see? She herself had a curse put on her that she herself was not able to undo. She claims it was the Mosely woman that did that.” Jim paused and fiddled with something in his jacket pocket then said, “She’s got a strange look about her, a look akin to how the killers look, but she’s not exactly a killer neither. She said she’s from different things, two different parents. And, as far as I can see, she’s not in league. There’s no pact or covenant made between her and the Evil One. As far as I can see. Of course, my way of seeing doesn’t always see all the way.”
“You just have a good feeling about her.”
“I suppose so. But it’s more than that.”
“I am familiar with the scriptures, Jim Falk, and I do believe that I do know what you’re referring to.”
“If what Wylene says is true about this Ruth Mosely, and that Ruth Mosely is the witch at Sparrow Creek, then Ruth may be the one who has called these wolves and she may be in communication with the killers up here in the woods. They’ve burned the church down toward whatever purposes they’re bent to do. Next, they may mean to have these wolves to rid out what’s left of any of the good folk of Sparrow. If that is the case, which very well may be, then there are only a few who are left that can defend against these creatures in the town, and it would be up to us to prevent her from achieving her end.”
“I’m not sure, Falk. I’m not sure. You healed me, but my brother is dead now. What is my sister-in-law doing? What is Ruth Mosely doing here in Sparrow?” the preacher asked Jim and rubbed his hands together. He looked over at the fire and at May Marbo, who was sleeping there. He did not want to wake her up. Huck and Violet were curled up one on the other and their eyes were closed too, but he didn’t think they were asleep. What would May think when she woke to find the doctor was gone?
He glanced at the witch at the front of the cave looking out into the night and thought of his sister-in-law again. Thought of her past.
He asked Jim a second time, “What is Ruth Mosely doing in Sparrow?”
“Preacher, whatever questions you have for Ruth, and whatever you need to talk to the preacher about, you don’t speak a word of this book to anyone. Now I’m going off to make quick work of it. I’ll be back.”
Now Jim was alone with this book in the moonlight and trees. He looked at the wrapped-up book in the woven blanket. Somewhere along the way, the doctor had got himself one of these woven blankets, almost just the same as he’d got from Old Magic Woman a long time ago. Jim hunkered down by a tree and looked out into the dark woods. Just for a moment he thought he could see something like a mist moving out there in the woods, but he squinted and saw it no longer. He glanced over his shoulder and back up the side of the hill to see if he could see the front of the cave. He couldn’t. Here, in his hands, he held one of those old books, those books that contained the Witchwords.
Ithacus had taught him to read these words. His pa could write in them when he needed to, which wasn’t often.
“How’d you learn those words, Pa?”
His pa would say nothing.
There was only a single time that Jim could remember his father ever having need of using the words. It was a strange issue of something that had got caught in John Goodwater’s barn. Ithacus knew Ways that Jim never got to learn from him before he disappeared. His pa could fashion special wood boxes or boxes of metal to trap certain kinds of things in, but it was so seldom that he had to do it and Jim wasn’t sure that the craft for making these things was something he would ever have to learn. But that time, when John Goodwater had that thing down in his barn, Jim’s pa had to take one of those special boxes and write Witchwords all around the outside of it.
After the deed was done, Goodwater always brought around food and lots of it, but his pa had been sick for months and his hands had taken on a kind of gray color and the fingernails turned black. It wasn’t too different from the way the preacher’s hand and arm had looked before they had restored it to him.
Jim unwrapped the book. However much or little the old doctor knew of Waycraft, he’d known enough or been told enough to keep the book wrapped up in an old magic blanket.
“The weave,” Old Magic Woman told him, “the weave shuts out the shadows. Or shuts them in.”
Jim kept a small collection of woven blankets of this type in his satchel and one he always carried slung over his shoulder, and a group of them were sown into the lining of his jacket. Old Magic Woman spent much time weaving. Some of the older blankets he had come to have a strange feeling about when he held them, like a noiseless humming about the fabric. This one that held Simon’s book had that same feel about it. It was old.
He wished he could ask Old Magic Woman about the blanket. He wished he could ask his pa what to do. They were gone now. Faded into the forests.
“It is one thing,” Old Magic Woman said to him back then, “it is one thing to know the trees, the forests, and the mosses, to know when the bees honey, and how to make the Leaves in warm darkness. It is another thing to know the Way and it is yet another to walk the Way.”
In his memory, Jim watched her wading in the sparkling stream. The water moved around her robes and carried them here and there, the sun shining on her dark eyelashes, the old skin of her hands dipping here and there at a fish, maybe. They had been out in the water all morning, fishing like that. Catching nothing, but talking.
Jim looked away from his memory and down at the unwrapped book that was now starting to catch flakes of snow. Over the years there had been times when his mind had turned over learning the things contained in one of these books and how his pa had come to be able to read the words inside.
The leather of the cover was thick and felt somehow smoother than it should. Jim shuddered to think what hide covered the book. Wild carvings and scratches covered the surface, as if some kid had tried to draw monsters on it. Mean, horned faces bunched together and overlapping, hooves, fangs, and lizard tails. None of the faces were as ugly or awful as those real faces—like the one he and the doctor saw outside the church that night.
Jim wondered if maybe he too could read the Witchwords the way his pa could. The doctor had said that he’d only seen scribbles. But Jim knew since he was young that there was something about him having a knack for the Waycraft and other things that others didn’t have. Maybe his own pa never had to learn to read the Witch
words because he’d always known how. Maybe Jim could open up this book and get the secrets. Maybe the secrets would help him rid the land of whatever was left of the killers.
Chapter 18
“It’s gone quiet,” Benjamin Straddler said.
“Quiet, sure. But them wolves only get quiet when they’re busy,” Hattie Jones said. Hattie Jones sat there in Huck’s place, which was empty except for Hattie Jones, Benjamin Straddler, and Samuel, who sat in a corner poking at the floor.
“Seems to me like there’s been some kind of a noise going off in my head starting around about the time that that outlander showed up.” Benjamin Straddler took a sip of strong coffee from his little mug.
Hattie got up from the bar stool and went over to the fireplace in the wall and messed around in there for a while with the wood and embers. Soon the fire was crackling again. Benjamin started thinking about the church and how he and Lane had looked at it burning out their window and seen the form of Ruth passing here and there in the smoke. Sparrow was very quiet now, though.
“That dang church is still on fire. Little church like that shouldn’t burn so long. And with all that snow coming down? Way I figure is, we’ll have another blizzard here and all kinds of trouble and death.”
Hattie came away from the fire and glanced at Samuel over in the corner and then came back and sat on a stool by Benjamin and took a swig of the hot coffee.
“In terms of supplies,” Benjamin said and glanced around, “what do you think we’ll need?”
“Well, you might as well leave it here, unless you’re planning to take it all for yourself. And you won’t need to worry about an old man like me. No, sir. Samuel and I are fixin’ to move outta here for good.”
“Where you going to move to?”
“We’re fixin’ to head somewhere, south, maybe north, but maybe west, but probably most likely south. We’re through with winters and spooks.”
Benjamin took another drink of the coffee and said, “Medicine, bandages, ropes, candles, shovels. If we’re going to be digging through the snow, we’re going to need shovels. There’s probably a whole set of other things around here.”