The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel (3 page)

He shut the door behind him and went in quietly. He walked
down the hall before he removed his coat and looked in Emily’s room. She was
asleep, curled under the blanket with a serious look on her face. He closed her
door.

Sitting down at his desk and lighting the oil lamp, Spencer
walked to his fireplace and poured another glass of whisky and poked around in
the fire. He paced, turned back to the fireplace, and, reaching out at an odd
spot on the right-hand side, wiggled a stone and pulled it. He set the loose
stone on the mantelpiece and reached into the wall. From the wall, he produced
a black tin box.

He sat at the table and pulled several rolled scrolls
and a black, leather-bound codex from the tin box. Picking up a quill pen and
putting it in his mouth, he got out an even smaller black book.

With the quill pen, he wrote:

Jim took these things to kill
the killers

The whole lot of specials

The whole lot of simples

The Dracon pepperbox and slugs

The hex-hatchet of his father’s
making

The leaves

The Longshooter (disassembled)

Other books and papers which
I have not yet accounted for

Maps of the southern river
lands

He walked in.

Bill took a look at him and figured who he was from the
looks of him. He’d wished his wife would have not told him many, many things.

Bill nodded and adjusted his belt around his waist and
said, “Well, she says there’s a spook in back a them woods.”

“Where at?” he said.

“Up, way up there,” Bill said, “and he comes down.”

The room in Bill’s house was cold and brown. The sky
coming in the windows was white.

“When do you see him?” he asked.

“He’s got a long, gray face, yellow eyes, like egg yolks.”
Bill said. “I dunno, he comes down at different times.”

Bill’s wife came in. “Oh, my . . .”

She looked at the strange man in the hat, and her mouth
moved as if to say something, but then she said, “We have company. You should
tell me when we’ve got company. We have coffee.”

“Ma’am,” he said and glanced at her quickly, but didn’t
look at her, and then turned back to her husband. “I’m Jim Falk. I’m here to
talk about the spook.”

“Well,” she said and looked quickly at Bill, “you
tell ’em. I’ll just get you some hot coffee.”

“I’m tellin’ him,” Bill said.

She went off. She was pretty, with red hair and high
cheeks, and she was younger than her husband. Jim Falk didn’t look at
her, but he wasn’t sure that he had to look at her to
see her. It must be her.

Jim said, “This spook—he comes down in winter or in summer?”
Then Bill looked at Jim and opened his eyes a little wider, but not very much,
and he pointed at the wood chairs and his square table in the room. Jim saw
that Bill’s fingers were crooked from work with busted knuckles.

They sat. There was a book with a leather binding on
the table and a couple of candles. The candles were dirty. The book was a book of
the scriptures.

Bill went on, looking at the candles and the table. “He
comes down every season, I suppose, maybe once a season, maybe more, but there’s
no certain time.”

“When does he come?”

“He comes at night in summer.”

“In fall?”

“In the fall he comes at night, and in the spring.”

“In the spring he comes at night too?”

Bill nodded, but looked at the backs of his hands and
not at Jim.

“What about in the winter?”

“In the winter he comes at night. He came during the
bad blizzard, and it seemed like he came twice that winter and came during the day.”

She brought out two white cups of dark, hot coffee. She
set them down in front of Bill and Jim and then leaned in the doorway listening.

“Twice in the winter?” Jim continued.

“Yes. That’s how I remember it. Violet?”

“Yes, Bill?”

“Tell Jim Falk what you said when the spook came down
out the woods during that bad winter.”

“Well,” she started. She moved around, recrossed her
arms, and stared at her feet in black shoes on the wood floor. “That winter was
a bad one. That winter was about four years ago, and when that spook came down outta
them woods, well . . .” She talked as if she was bored, arranging herself against
the door frame. “Well, that’s when the baby Starkey went missing
. . .
and I think that spook got hold of that
little baby.”

“For what?” Jim asked.

She blinked and looked at Jim sort of sideways and squinted,
whispering, “I think that particular spook’s a baby eater.”

Jim Falk looked at her. There she was. She leaned on
the doorway with her pointy shoulders and her ruddy hair. Jim saw no lie in her
eyes, but he caught something else there, playing. It was like a jewel or a sparkling
thing. Jim looked away.
He wondered if somehow
or another she knew—if she knew that he had seen her, or someone that looked
like her, in his mind.

“That’s right,” her husband said, “that’s right.” He
picked up his cup with a clink and blew off the steam. “A baby eater.”

Jim Falk flipped open a little leather book to a blank
page. Bill Hill watched the pages of black symbols go by, words he didn’t recognize.
Violet shifted again.

Jim asked, “Who is the baby Starkey?” and got out a little
black stick that looked a little oily.

Violet said right away, “That was Dan and Elsie Starkey’s
baby. Their real baby together. They lived up the road.” She sneezed a short
sneeze and looked at her husband. He looked down at his coffee.

“That’s been a few years back now,” she said, pulling
a small rag from somewhere in her shirt and wiping her nose. “Dan’s moved on.”

“That’s right,” Bill said. “Dan’s supposed to have
moved up north somewhere and Elsie lives with her other boy now, that Simon. It
ain’t right by the scriptures, him leavin’ her alone like that, just walking
away from her, leavin’ her with that boy. That boy, Simon, he takes care of
her, they say I guess on account of she’s been sick.”

“Except he ain’t her boy,” Violet said and went back
fast into the kitchen.

Bill looked at Jim and watched him write things in the
book with the oily stick. He shook his head and said low, “That boy’s not from
around here. He’s from some other place across the sea or some such place. Like
them people
from the Far East that they took
out west to make ’em build the towns in the West. Them Starkeys raised him up
from young. Guess they found him all alone.”

“You mean
you think he’s
from the Far East?”

“A foreigner of some kind. Maybe a one from the Far East.”

Jim drank some coffee. Violet was off in the kitchen
making noise, and the wind was blowing against the little house.

They drank some more coffee. Jim closed his writing book
and looked around the little house. It wasn’t too different from the one he
grew up in. A wood-burning stove in the kitchen filled it with that fire and coffee
smell he remembered from times long ago. He didn’t want to think about that.
Jim glanced at the stack of firewood in the corner.

“These woods are the woods the spook appears in right
here in back of your house?” Jim finally asked.

“Yes,” Bill said. “Yessir.”



At the bar down in Sparrow, they were drinking beer—Hattie
Jones, Benjamin Straddler, and Simon.

Simon, the Starkey boy, was telling them about a trick
with cards. The trick was called the moving hole. Hattie was laughing at the
idea, and beer was jiggling out of his mug.

Hattie said, “I need me one o’ those, a moving hole.”
He looked down at the little boy, who was playing with some papers on the floor
by his stool. “Show us!”

Simon did the trick, and everyone was taken aback. He
punched a hole in an ace of spades with a knife. Then he took the hole out of
the ace and put the hole in his hand. He held up his hand and showed the hole
all the way through. Then he took the hole from the middle of his hand and moved
it to the king of hearts. He showed the ace again. It was okay. He showed his
hand again. No hole.

Hattie Jones just about swallowed his pipe.

Benjamin Straddler was too serious to smile, but he said,
“That is some trick.”

Then, Jim Falk came in the front door.

Everybody looked at him for a second or two, but he looked
honest and plain enough. They looked back at their beers and their friends, but
they listened close in a sideways way.

Huck Marbo was the owner of this bar, and he had one
leg and one daughter. Many years and many trials were upon his brow, but his smile
was still bright and quick because of his daughter. May ran the table service for
Huck, and though she was not generally thought of as pretty, she had a brighter,
bigger smile than her father and her simple hands were quick to service.

Jim Falk came and sat down at a table by the window,
and Huck nodded for May to serve him.

Jim felt good to sit down. All that afternoon, after
talking to Violet and Bill Hill, he had gone tramping in the woods. A gray light
was on everything, a fog. The sky was white and cold and the trees stuck out
over the loam black as hairs. Everything was dim and solid. The woods got colder
and harder to see as he went up the mountain. His black boots crackled on the
leaves.

Even though the fog was thick, he focused his eyes on
everything, and that wore him out. His mind and eyes got tired, but the pictures
might stay forever—or at least if he couldn’t see them in his mind’s eye when
he was awake, when he slept tonight the dreams might show him the details.
Maybe he would see something he didn’t see. It happened.

“We have beer and whisky and coffee,” May said and looked
at the table when Jim looked up at her face. She didn’t talk loud either.

“Beer,” Jim said and meant it.

He looked past her and out the window. The night was
black. It made him think. His mind rushed through the forest. There was a funny
thing about this one tree that started fiddling in his head. There was some wiry
shape, writhing. It faded out.

The bar came back in his vision. It was a nice place;
maybe it was even pretty. It wasn’t exactly a bar either. Jim Falk had stopped
in many such places. Small settlements like this one usually had some spot that
doubled or tripled as a store and a bar and whatever else. Some of them even
had pianos. This one did not have a piano. There were some oil lamps, candles,
and even a picture on the wall of a boat going down a river. There were other
things that they were selling—rope, nails, mallets, marked bottles, and other
such things on shelves.

He saw this Simon Starkey kid, from the Far East (so
Bill Hill supposed), doing card tricks for the men with hats and red faces. Then
they laughed, and the kid from the Far East made a noise like a bird and flittered
his hands around. Then they all laughed again and started to play poker for
money.

Just as the game started, Hattie Jones tapped his fiddle-bow
four times on the wood table. His pipe blew smoke as a song began whining out
of the fiddle, and a little boy with wide eyes stood up beside him and hummed
exactly what the fiddle whined.

Hattie sang a song. His voice was cracked and old, and
it made Jim think of the sounds of cold birds in the mud. The little boy stood
up and started singing with him.

Old them woods was, shiver, shiver

Filled her boots with snow
and silver

Shiver, shiver! Shiver,
shiver!

Little darling by the river.

Jim took a drink of beer and smiled while the mug covered
his mouth, but stopped smiling when he put the beer down.

Jim could never remember all the words to that song because
for some reason he had started to focus in on this Simon Starkey, but the song
was something about a lost little girl in the snow who was loved by the
fairies. He wanted to write it down, but he didn’t.

It was this Simon fellow who had got all Jim’s focus.
When he was over at the Hills’ earlier, Violet was saying some things about this
kid, Simon.

“He was raised up by them from a little baby, is what
they said,” she had said from in the kitchen.

“Violet,” Bill said, “you open up that window if you’re
gonna be smokin’.”

The kitchen window squealed and there was a pause as
she tinkered with something. She continued, “They came here with the baby, but that
boy was full-grown sixteen years.”

“That’s right,” Bill said and pushed away his coffee
cup a little.

“He spoke perfect too, just like me or you or Bill, remember?
Even better than some around here speaks their own,” she called in.

Bill said, “Most foreigners have an accented speech.”
And he eyed Jim with a half-squinted eye.

Jim gave a quick nod and called in to Violet, “Violet,
this is very good coffee, thank you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Falk,” she said and came back in the
room with a smile and looking a little flushed and fiddling with her necklace.

Jim Falk gazed at her and then back at Bill. Bill was
staring out the window at a fog rolling in from the woods. Since Bill’s eyes
were looking out the window, Jim took a second glance at Violet Hill. She was
looking right back.

“How you get such a thick fog when it’s cold out like
this?” Bill said, and Jim looked out the window fast.

Violet’s green eyes drew Jim back to her. “Dan, who was
married to Elsie—he moved outta here about four or five years ago now, I guess,
whenever that spring was right after the real bad winter and the awful snow.”
Violet swallowed, put her left hand to her throat, fiddled with a silver chain,
and then went on. “Elsie’s older than me. They come up here from some river
town. They used to talk about that big river that comes down from the town they
were in, River Top, River Den, River something.” She squeezed her eyes real
hard as if that might help her remember. “See, Mr. Falk, Elsie might be older
than me, but she’s still young, and that Simon boy isn’t at a right age, where
they . . .” She wagged her finger at the empty coffee cups and raised up her
eyebrows.

Bill said, “Yes, we’re done.”

“The right age?” Jim said, watching her hands take the
cups.

Violet looked him straight in the eye, and he saw again
that strange, moving jewel behind there. This time it slithered. “Well, I just
mean that he ain’t the right age to be really raised by her. Since Dan’s gone,
gone who knows where, she and that foreign boy that ain’t her boy have been
shacked up in that house, if you catch my meaning.”



“Hey! You! Stranger!” Simon yelled over Hattie’s wiry
fiddling.

The little boy who had been singing there along with
Hattie stopped singing suddenly and started working at drawing pictures with ink
and a feather on some yellow papers. He was working hard.

Jim had been staring at Benjamin Straddler’s hat and
had faded out. It happened when he was thinking.

“Hey! Stranger!” Simon stood up now. He was a strange-looking
kid for sure and he was strong, had strong arms. His eyes had an uncomfortable
effect on Jim. “You wanna play?”