The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (23 page)

He stood up and for a moment held the hideous face with
the horns twisting out at either side and the black tubes drooping. Then he
walked a few paces from the body and dropped the head on a big rock. He made quick
with a flagon from his pouch and began dousing the head.

Violet tried to stand, but she was too dizzy.

The thing’s head was soon engulfed in a green ball of
flames pouring oily smoke into the air, its eyes rolling.

The doctor was reeling, but he moved to his duties and,
pulling a container from his own pouch, began dousing the separate body. The
outlander joined him and in no time the sky was dark with the burning of the
monster. Noises came from the thing’s diminishing corpse, ugly sounds like the
whispering of many people in pain and sorrow. As the burning continued, the whispering
began to sound like faraway cries.

They all looked at one another.

Violet made an effort and was able to get up on her feet
and soon found herself standing with the two men watching the flames. The strange,
sad cries at once grew more desperate and terrible than before, so that
standing there, the three of them felt that maybe they should put the flames
out. The sounds of suffering were unbearable and now they could hear distinctly
individual cries, voices, women, boys, men . . . so that as the smoke
continued, any sense of comfort or victory or accomplishment in bringing the
thing to its demise was completely removed from them. Only left with the three
was the stark, empty feeling that they were powerless, and that thousands were
suffering at the will of something impossibly terrible.

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.

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.”