by Josh Kent
The stranger turned. “They’ll come after you anyway.”
The stranger handed Simon the knife.
Simon took it and held it in both hands. He looked at it quietly. Every strange twist and curve of the blade brought odd, hacked bits of memory into his mind’s eye: his father’s brown hands, his mother’s coat coming over him in a snowstorm.
“What do I do?”
“You must trust me. First you must decide to trust me. Because I might tell you to do things that aren’t going to make any sense to you. Things that won’t make any sense at all.”
“I need to think about this.”
“Then go. Take the knife. You are free to go.”
“Go?” Simon asked. “Go where? My home is burned and they are sure to come for me. The outlander and the doctor will hunt me for a witch.”
Simon looked at the stranger’s kind face. Then he slid the knife into his jacket and walked out of the little hut and into the cold night.
He stood in the darkness outside of the tent and pulled the knife out of his jacket and looked at it. He listened to the wolves baying in the distance.
The air was crisp and he felt the strength in his legs and in his arms. He went to the edge of the hill next to the little valley where the stranger’s hut was. On top of the hill he saw the deeper valley below. This was not a small hill. The stranger had brought him up to the top of a tall mountain. Far below him in the valley, he could see a brown and orange thing rising from a patch of brown, a long gray string of smoke twirled up into the sky. It was the church. The church was burning.
He mumbled to himself, “This is what they wanted.”
He looked back at the stranger’s hut and saw that the big gray wolf, Fenny, had stepped out into the darkness too. It had a great, wide, hairy back and the light from inside the hut passed around it, making a moving shadow of its form. The old wolf wandered lazily through the snowy hillside and came up beside him looking down into the valley below and panting. Simon looked at the knife again. Could he? She was offering him something that he’d never dreamed to be offered. He thought of his real mother disappearing into the hands and cloaks of those evil men when he was young, and then he thought of Elsie. Hadn’t he done the same to her and worse? Hadn’t he given her over to a worse evil than even his real mother? It had been his own hand that handed her over—and now this old woman was offering him a way. A way. Before he had only wanted power, but now he felt there was something beyond power, something different, and he felt something in him shift and lean.
The sky was darkened by racing clouds. Here and again the moon would suddenly shine big and bright and round through a hole in the clouds that moved along. There were barks in the distance and then a whooping and a howl. Another long and low howl answered from the valley.
Fenny didn’t seem to mind and he didn’t answer. He looked along in the valley and then back up at Simon. Something grew warm inside of him as he looked down across the valley.
Simon was thinking that the killers had spent years trying to destroy this town, this little town of Sparrow that was miles from anywhere except the Ridges where the people that didn’t believe like the people in Sparrow went to live.
The killers had nothing to do with the folks at the Ridges as far as Simon had heard. Each time a spook had shown up, it followed just after the wolves had come down off of the mountain. It might be this very mountain here that the spook lived upon and fed on what was about until the wolves were run out of their own territory. These things were old. Many people had stopped believing in them. There were three places where Simon had read about things that were like the killers and were like these creatures that the folks called spooks or demons. One place was in the books that the killers had given him to study the evil way, one was in the scriptures, and the other was in Sparrow.
He looked back at the tent. Whether he followed the Way or wandered the forests, there would be no peace for him. He was made to live in a time of hatred and fire and slavery and men who murdered parents. He was made to live in a time when demons hunted the living. This old woman was offering him something, but who was she? She might herself be a kind of witch. But she was offering him something different.
He looked at the animal that sat neatly beside him on the cliff as more howls were answered in the valley. This wolf seemed to be studying the situation just as he was. The animal seemed thoughtful and it wasn’t snarling or growling at him. In fact, it pushed its nuzzle up under Simon’s hand and nudged his palm.
He patted Fenny’s head and Fenny butted his muzzle into Simon’s hand. He watched the smoke of the far-off church twist around and back and forth in the wind. The killers had wanted this all along, but maybe couldn’t find a way to do it themselves. Maybe they had needed help somehow from the people of Sparrow. Maybe Simon himself had somehow become trapped in this scheme. Perhaps he was never meant to survive. His mind started to put the pieces together of a very strange puzzle as he scratched the wolf’s head.
Chapter 19
As was regular in her preparations, Ruth Mosely walked backwards in a slow circle around the table sprinkling some dark powder from a pouch as she went. She mumbled to herself and looked up toward the ceiling, showing the whites of her eyes. She went this way around the little table three times. Then she got into another sack that she had on her and produced some long candles and stands and set five around on the table. She moved some chairs around, adjusting them here and there, and then she stopped all her fidgeting, went slow to her knees, and cried.
Ruth cried hard, hard enough that a wail came up from inside of her belly and out of her mouth. She couldn’t stop it. John Mosely was dead. He’d been shot in the face by the outlander whose ashes were now black and blowing in the snow and wind over the cinders of the church. But they’d killed John. Shot him in the face. She wondered if John had known before he’d crossed over that his face was gone—or if he’d only felt a heat and then . . .
She sobbed again, but started to get to her feet. In her mind, she cursed the day she’d made the pact. She’d paid along the way for her power. Paid in shades and forms that she’d pushed down inside her mind never again to be uncovered, but the life of her husband John Mosely was a heavy toll. It hurt her heart, surely, but it might also hurt her plans. It hurt the truth that she stood for, but at the same time, too, it might help her. This brother of his, Vernon the preacher, had got himself tangled up somehow in the business of talking to known witches, like Wylene.
Ruth’s eyes went into a dark squint. Somehow that Wylene, the one they’d called another name long ago, the one who’d somehow crawled up from the beforetimes, had regained her strength.
In the ultimate scheme, tying in the preacher of the Way with a known witch would serve her well. It would serve her well and Varney Mull would hear of it today. The two of them had shut Wylene away, shut her down with the Wastrel, and she didn’t know how it was that the creature had escaped the powerful spell. The turnkey, which was the witch’s thumb, had come up missing, and she was sure it had something to do with that Jim Falk. She thought about that man for a moment, that outlander, his strange blue eyes, the packs and satchels around him, the beat-up hat. She recognized the feel of him from tales of old.
Even though the killers and others, like Varney Mull, had spent ages removing the bloodlines from the earth, there were always rumors that there would be another, another like the first, and that he would come again and again until his stories were remembered as true. She shuddered and cleared her head. Varney Mull was coming with his men, if they were men. Even if, as she thought, this James Falk was one of these ancient hunters, it was over now anyway and Varney Mull would pay her handsomely for her deeds, in money or powers or both. Falk had been burned to ashes along with his witch prey and a preacher and the rest of that troublesome lot that had formed up around him.
Ruth mumbled some quick and strange words to herself and stood up and started lighting the candles. Soon after the room was washed
in the yellow light, the knocks came at the wood door to the cellar.
Then they came, creaking down the narrow stairs. One by one the faces came out of the dark opening of the stairwell into the candlelight. Down came the faces to sit around the table and the candles, each face solemn, the eyes half closed and twinkling in the candle flames. Men and women of Sparrow, some from the Ridges, but not many. Not many yet. Just enough to fill this little dark room.
Why the men and women of River’s End resisted, Ruth couldn’t say. She held her body tight, preventing the shudder she felt as she saw the faces of her brothers being swallowed up in the dark maw of the thing Varney sent. The Waycraft. Those two words poisoned her mind. The simple people who followed the Waycraft and its supposed healing power, its kind-hearted magic, its total lies. Her brothers were among the folk that believed. Even when the beasts came, they couldn’t summon the wisdom to see through the falseness of old stories and join her cause. They resisted and they died.
She and John had discovered this room the day after they’d put their stuff about in the little house. There had been an odd, dark-smelling smell, and Ruth and John came down to see what it was and to try to clean it out. The place hadn’t been put to any kind of use in a long time, though, maybe years, maybe more than years. There were worms and fat trap spiders that must have been feeding on thick beetles in the spring and summer and spent their lives in some strange, frozen wakefulness through the winters. The black, scurrying bodies were quick out of the holes, but Ruth was quicker and her heels came down again and again to smash them—her own eyes darting in the cellar, John hollering now and again as another black shadow would shoot along the edge of his vision.
No more of them, though. And no more of him. Ruth and John had cleaned this space out good and put in a table and shelves, had packed the dirt hard in places and dug away other walls until they hit the bare side of a rock wall that must have been the original walls of the cellar. That had got them digging and digging until they were able to find three walls, or what was left of them. The fourth wall they could not get to, at least where they thought it was, because the dirt had got too hard on that end.
Now the faces hovered in the candlelight around the little table and Ruth put her hands on the table and the others put their hands on the table so that all the hands touched one another but didn’t overlap and didn’t touch the candles. Each of the faces with eyes down-turned seemed so solemn and so still that they might have been sleeping. Ruth took a small breath and started reciting the words that the killers taught her.
The men and women who were with her joined in the dark, chanting the deep song with its terrible words. Soon they were joined by voices. Not voices from within the dank cellar, but voices from outside, the voices of the wolves in the mountains. The baying of the wolves.
Jim felt the jitters.
He crouched down in the dark woods and, real slow, wrapped the ugly book back up and hid it somewhere in his long coat. Then he got out his strange ax.
Jim squinted his eyes in the moonlight. The witch at the edge of the cave whispered to him again, but he gave no answer. Doubtless, she’d picked up on what Jim had picked up on. Now he could see movements coming along the path up the hillside. Jim gripped his ax in his left hand. His right still wrapped in the bandages. He could see the wicked heads move off the path and shift from tree to tree. He wished for Leaves to help him see in the dark. Too, he wished for his fingers back.
The killers moved across the hillside with their desperate way of running and leaping crookedly into moon-shade, flicking their gangly bodies from tree to tree, whipping thin shadows along the snow. They were close to Jim fast and his heart thumped too hard. Without those Leaves, he couldn’t stay as calm as he needed and he couldn’t get his mind as blank as normal. They could hear his thoughts, or something of them, for sure, and that’s how they moved right at him.
Jim was sure they would be on him. Quietly he unscrewed his little silver flask and drained it down his throat. His nerves weren’t trained enough without the Leaves to keep his hands steady when the jitters were strong as they were now. When the warmth of the whisky spread through his body, the thing hit him hard from his right side and sent him toppling downhill through the brambles so hard and so fast that he was sure that he’d left part of his nose and an ear up at the top of the hillside.
When he stopped, the thing came crashing against him, but his left hand was quick with the curved ax blade and it struck deep and sure across the wilted face of the killer. Yowling and flailing backward now, Jim changed the direction of his ax and cracked the backside of the ax against its jaw and felt it crush upwards into the killer’s face. Jim stomped down hard on its chest, forcing it back into the brambles. He got it down and stomped its head into the tangled thorns. Then, panting, he drove the spike-staved ax handle into its throat and it gurgled.
Another shadow shot past him toward the cave entrance. But before he pursued, he doused the flailing body with oil and struck the tinder. The oily blaze gave out a thick smoke. Jim scrambled through the thorny bushes and caught the other one just as it dived out of the trees and toward the cave, but it whirled about and scampered out of his reach.
It was then that Wylene stepped from the mouth of the cave and into the moonlit patch of snowy rocks. The three of them stood in the clearing.
The killer heaved and stared at the witch, Wylene.
The moonlight came bright across the clearing and, where the killer’s features were caught in the light, they looked man enough. Here and there, though, its body bled into twisted, sharp forms in the shadows. From behind, Jim saw only the thing’s shadow shape, its jagged claws and twisted wings and pointed ears. Wylene only saw something of a wild man blinking at her in the moonlight.
It stepped toward her and spoke.
“What are you?” it said.
It might have said something more, but Wylene raised her arms in front of her in a crooked way and pointed her sharp fingers and thumbs toward the killer. She stomped with one leg forward, and the killer got shaky.
Wylene whispered to the thing, “Go back into the Wydder.”
Had Jim heard her right? The Wydder?
Noiselessly, the thing shriveled into the middle of the air—a tattered, black rag, stuffed into a tiny floating hole. Jim’s eyes flashed from where the thing was to Wylene’s eyes. Wylene’s mouth was open almost as if what she just did shocked her the way it shocked Jim. But it wasn’t fear that was in Falk’s eyes; it was hope. In that moment he saw that there was one who could open that door for him. If this Wylene-who-was-not-a-witch could send these creatures to the other side, then maybe, just maybe, she could bring things back through. Elseways, maybe she could send him through to find his father.
Huck Marbo stepped into the clearing and the preacher was behind him and Violet came out pointing her gun this way and that. May stayed at the edge of the cave.
All of them were hungry. All of them wanted to sleep. All of them wondered what would become of the town they lived in and the homes they once knew.
May said, “We’re hungry, Jim Falk.” She was looking around this way and that. She was counting heads.
Jim looked at Wylene, who’d sunken herself backward into the dark rocks at the edge of the cave.
They hadn’t noticed or they hadn’t seen or they didn’t care to say. No one but Jim appeared to have seen what Wylene did to the killer. Jim scratched his chin and looked at May.
“Hungry?” he asked and smiled a bit. “You’d think you’d be happy just to be alive. There’s a little bread. I’ve got some. Early in the morning, maybe the preacher and I will go down to the other end of the creek and bring us in some fish.” Jim took a glance at May and then over to the preacher, who was just sitting in the cave blinking and looking about as if he were looking for someone. “Once we eat in the morning, that will be the time to make decisions.”
“Decisions?” Violet asked.
“On who st
ays and who goes,” Jim said, “and who goes back to Sparrow to take it back.”
Jim fiddled around in his sack and drew them into the cave. He started handing out the pieces of hard bread. Small pieces.
“Back?” the preacher asked, gnawing on the chewy chunk Jim gave him. “What do you mean, take back Sparrow?”
“Way I figure it,” Jim said, “your dead brother’s wife’s fixin’ to take hold of Sparrow as a stronghold for the Evil One. Somehow she got hold of a good family and now she’s in league. She’s gonna take the town and make it into whatever she wants, or perhaps what another is telling her to make it. This is just as long as the killers don’t come and take her sooner. That’s what I can figure. That’s why they’re comin’ around here.”
Wylene did not eat any bread. She looked at Jim, though. She wanted to tell him something.
“What did you do?” Jim stepped a few steps in the dark toward Wylene.
All the rest of them were in the cave entrance looking out. May Marbo was standing a little more in front of the rest of them, and Violet had her hands on May’s shoulders as if she was trying to keep her from running out into the middle of the field where strange men, probably demons, had just killed the doctor. Huck stood behind Violet with one hand on Violet’s shoulder and his other hand holding his shotgun. The preacher was standing there with his arms crossed. His mind was full of questions.
“What did you just do? How did you do that?” Jim asked her again.
“I came into the world with the power to open and close doors into the splitways.” Wylene said and then slowly dropped to one knee. “It makes me tired, though.”
“You can open the holes?”
“Yes.”
“Where do they go?”
“The otherside. There are only so many ways to open them and only so much you can do.”