by Josh Kent
He took a good drink from his flask, rolled his pack up, and then started back slow up the hill. The leaves opened up the colors a bit.
Where there had been only black and gray, now there was brown and some red, even some purples and a lemon yellow.
Then his nose opened up too. The crisp, black smell of mud and the raspberry and smoke smell of the moving wind filled up his nose. He heard now too the sleeping insects waiting, buried, for spring. Mostly, though, he could feel the jitter-trail now, heavy as wet rope, leading him through the trees.
The hill rose up and up and up, and Jim walked slowly. This served to conserve his energy as well as keep the noise down.
The two main things he was going to do today were completely out.
He marched and stopped and ran and stopped and looked through the woods and ran and stopped again.
Finally, he came up over a crest and saw it. There it was. Hunched over a log. It was an ugly, messed-up thing and Bill was right—its eyes were like egg yolks and its face was gray.
It kept using one of its mangled claws to push its drooping bottom jaw up. As if it couldn’t keep its own mouth closed for the weight of its lower jaw.
The whole beast looked built from the throw-away parts of other animals: goats, horses, fish; scales glittered under fur, antlers twisted out of its back and head, and horns sprouted from its legs and thighs.
What’s it doing scrabbling its lopper-jawed self all over that log? Lookin’ for what?
Jim hunkered down behind a lightning-cracked tree near the edge of the clearing. The wind was mercifully still so the thing might not pick him up right away, but Jim knew it was just a question of time now. When the attention came off the log its full focus would be on him.
The spook paced now, back and forth, its wet eyes staring at the log.
There must be something alive in there.
He could see the log shaking a little, and it was just wide enough for maybe a rabbit or a mole or a skunk.
And then there was a skunk, and, just like that, the wind shifted the stink his way.
“And the little skunk said, ‘Well, bless my soul,’” he mumbled.
Now up came the skunk skittering through the woods and straight past Jim. Jim looked up and the spook caught him in the eyes and held him in its pinhole pupils.
Jim heard a voice in his head. It was the low, sinister voice of the spook. “Jim Falk,” it asked, “do you want to die?”
Jim said, “No.”
The thing rambled forward shaking its massive head and wheezing, a few pincers emerging on long, black stalks from under its mane.
Jim stood and steadied himself.
It stopped by a tree and cocked its enormous head. Its jaw lolled against the ground. It froze. Its gaze fixed on him. It gathered itself. Jim watched its muscles bunching.
Jim threw his coat’s left breast open. The Dracon pistol glinted mutely in the gray forest.
The spook lunged at him, and Jim Falk drew the weapon and popped the trigger in one move.
His hand went numb with the blast, and a singing entered his ears. The flash of the weapon left red, sunny swirls on his vision, and his nose burned with the blue smell of powder smoke.
Six balls of the special silver-lode erupted from the gun and met all at once with flat, wet thuds against the spook.
One in the thing’s head below the left eye, one in the center of the chest, one in the pooch of the thing’s baggy stomach, one in its wrinkly neck, one in its left leg and one in its right.
“One says good morning and one says good night,” Jim Falk said and watched it drop dead. The eyes in the head still moved.
Jim holstered his gun and pulled his weird hatchet. He could see the silver-lode sinking away into the beast, producing gray twirls of smoke.
He leapt on its molting back and hacked full force at the muscular, convulsing neck of the spook.
Forged to the purpose, his hatchet rose and fell and stuck and sawed and rose and fell and twisted and pulled many, many times before the neck was severed enough to permit him to wrest off the head.
The forest floor was matted then with black juice and offal. Nothing would grow here in spring.
Jim used both hands and tossed the wide, ugly head to the side. The eyes, though dulled in luster, still blinked slowly and watched, the mouth yawning in despair, as Jim doused its separate body in the special burning oil and, as with flint and tinder, set it ablaze.
The smoke billowed black and thick.
Jim looked at the head and the face of the thing. It was cruel, he thought, that something so utterly pitiful, false, and evil-bent should be alive.
Then Jim wrapped up the head in a woven blanket and tied it with a cord.
He headed down the hill and, at the bottom, back toward the road. He headed for Violet and Bill’s place.
The sun washed through the white sky. It waved and flickered through the creaking black trees. It reminded him exactly of golden wheat and warmth—a time his father had dunked Jim’s hands in warm water when he was a boy and rubbed his big coarse hands over his own. “Get all the dirt off for dinner.”
Jim got a little smile then and slung the head of the thing over his left shoulder and walked onto the road as the rays of the sun disappeared back into the clouds.
Violet was out on the porch. She was up on a stepstool and trying with a rag and water to clear out the rest of a wasps’ nest that had been long abandoned, but stuffed in the corner under the roof. A little whistling could be heard coming up the road. It was an old song. Violet knew it, but she couldn’t quite place the words.
Soon she saw Jim Falk’s brown hat and gaunt frame marching up the dusty trail with a woven bag over his shoulder. Whatever was in the bag she didn’t know, but she felt a heavy chill in her heart when she saw it. Was it moving?
She was about to run down to meet him when she saw him, but the sight of that sack kept her back. She stood on the porch as a sudden, harsh wind picked up her orange hair and whipped it out of its bun and blew over her water bucket.
“Hoo-wee! Wind’s pickin’ up!” Jim called through the sudden gale. “Gonna be a bad storm tonight! Gonna get cold! I killed your spook!”
He was at the porch now. Standing there, he looked shorter than her and he tilted his head to look up at her. It was then the wind gusted up again and caught his hat and floated it out into the road.
She smiled then as he scrambled after his hat in the wind—first left, then right, trying to catch his hat, then back up the road, then back down. At one point, the hat spun right in front of him as if an invisible man was twirling it on an invisible cane.
This got Violet to laughing and when she laughed she really cackled loud, which brought Bill out from the back somewhere where he had been working.
He didn’t see much that was funny. By the time he got there, Jim had got his hat back on his head.
Jim smiled a little and licked his lips and looked around and hefted the sack from off his shoulder and onto their little front yard. The grass was all dead here.
“Well, you folks don’t need worry anymore. I killed your spook, and here’s its head in my woven sack.”
He raised the sack, but the couple just stood there.
He raised it again and pointed back toward the woods.
Jim didn’t know what to say next, so he said, “As for any kind of a fee, I am going to waive it on account of I guess I expected this hunt to take almost a month and be hiking in snowy woods next week or two. Since I did none of those, I just figure a good meal and a night’s rest before I head on my way will be payment enough.”
Violet smiled wide, but Bill’s eyes were fixated on the woven sack. It was of checkered cloth, red and black and yellow and blue. It was also seeped with a blackish, oily blood.
“Mr. Falk,” Bill said, “I would like to see this thing’s dead head as proof.”
Jim looked at Bill and then looked at Violet. The wind grew still and now
the shadows of evening crept in on the edges. Jim looked down at the sack in the dwindling light and said, “It may be best for Violet to go inside, then.”
“What will you do with it?” Violet asked quick as though she didn’t mean to.
“Do?” Jim kicked it a little. “You do the same thing to all of them. You burn them and scatter the ashes in running water.”
“You do all that later.” Bill took a step toward the bundle. “Violet, you go on up inside.”
Violet looked at the two men who were looking at each other. Then she went up the steps, over the porch and into the house. She closed the door and stood right behind it with her back to it, turning her green eyes toward the door as if she might see through it.
Jim hunkered down and flipped open the blanket. Inside was the severed head of a pony.
Bill Hill winced and jerked his head.
Jim’s eyes darted over the stinking pony head, searching for the ugly face he had seen in the woods. Where was the great maw and the yellow-yolk eyes with the black pinhole pupils? Where was the grisly neck that had taken thirteen hatchet swings?
Bill said, “What the hell is this? Some kind of trick?”
Jim mouthed something.
“What? What did you say?” Bill asked again. A power, an angry power was growing in Bill’s voice and throat.
Jim could suddenly feel how close he was standing and saw Bill’s fists clench and tighten.
Jim mumbled again.
“I suppose you come up around here to play parlor tricks for me and my Violet.” The anger burned in Bill’s every word now. He stepped in toward Jim and stared him straight in the eye, nose to nose.
Bill’s voice got low to a whisper. “My wife . . .” He put his hand on the back of Jim’s head and pulled his ear closer to his mouth, and whispered now, even hoarser, even lower. “My wife can’t sleep. She’s going crazy with fear. She has night terrors. She cuts the sheets with her toenails trying to run from this thing in her sleep. Sometimes she mistakes her own husband in the night for the beast, and curses me in God’s name . . .” His voice had become a rasp; his clutch on the back of Jim’s head was desperate now.
“Stranger,” Jim said calm and clear, “I don’t know you and I don’t know your Violet, and I don’t know why I would play such a trick, unless I was charging you money and planned to run off with your money. Which I am not and do not. Now, if you would, please let go my neck.”
Bill did let go and Jim said, “The tricks of the Evil One are not new to me, nor to anyone who was schooled in the ways as I was.” He walked in a slow circle around the pony head. “Sometimes the Evil One, by means of a metamorphosis, will transform one of his fiends into a fair form in order to . . .”
He stopped and looked at Bill and then he rolled the pony’s head from the blanket. “What I killed in the woods was not a pony, Bill. But the Evil One has made a mockery of my good deed.”
Bill looked Jim Falk over. Jim looked fine and honest, but Bill sensed something wasn’t right. The Evil One? Did he mean the Evil One? He thought of Violet, his beautiful Violet.
“Leave,” Bill said, “Leave Sparrow and don’t come back. If you come back I will kill you dead. My wife has no one to turn to now.”
With that, Bill Hill walked back up in his house, leaving Jim Falk with a checkered blanket and a pony head.
Chapter 5
Bill paused inside the door and looked back out to see what Jim Falk was doing out there. Violet was standing with her back to him.
Jim was wrapping up the dead head.
Bill was looking. He was looking and then his belly got ill. Looking at the pony head, watching Jim roll it back up into the woven blanket, he started to turn away and shut the door. But just then, did he see the eyes move? Did they? Did they roll around in the head and look right up at him? Did they turn yellow?
Bill swallowed hard and shut the door. He looked at the back of his wife’s head, the way her red hair draped down her neck and back. He remembered that once she had been young and that her smile had been bright and that she danced with her arms linked with the others girls in a circle. He remembered that there had once been a laughter that came out of her that made his own hard face brighten, that made him think of clear skies and good wine.
He looked around at his home: that wood table his pa made, the book of scriptures, the dirty candles.
Maybe he didn’t see those pony-head eyes looking at him. He shook it off and pinched between his eyebrows together with his thumb and forefinger, as though he could squeeze a better vision by that. He looked again around his front room: that little table and chairs and the hard, brown wood of the floor.
When he looked up, Violet was gone. He heard Violet shuffling around in the bedroom off to the side and the wind blow against the side of the house.
“Nahhh,” he said aloud and went back in his bedroom to talk to his wife.
She was in there changing the sheets on the bed and she had a look in her eyes that he hadn’t seen in some time.
“Where’s Mr. Falk, gone off so soon?” Violet said when he walked in. She was looking at the bed.
“He’s getting to his stuff. He’s all done now,” Bill said and looked away from her. Out the window of the bedroom he could see the worn-out side of the back house.
“He got the spook, Violet.” Bill said.
He looked at her and saw right away that she wasn’t sure she believed that.
“What did it look like?”
“Violet, I don’t want to say.” Bill wanted this to be the end of it.
She finished up the pillow and looked back up at him.
Her eyes were hungry for specifics. “And then will he burn the head?”
Bill leaned up against the wall by the window. “I suppose he’ll take it off somewhere and scatter its ashes in the water as he said. Maybe he’ll take the old path down the creek to the river and do it there. I don’t know. Tonight, maybe. All’s important now is that you don’t need to worry anymore.”
She patted the pillow.
Some of the settled hardness lifted from her pretty face, and she walked toward him and squeezed him close with thin arms. “I knew it would work,” she said. “I was scared at first what Vernon and Ruth and all the others would think if we had around a man like Jim, but now . . .”
She let go of her husband and went over and sat down on the bed, looking out the window and then up at the ceiling. “Now, whether they believe me or not, we know what we saw and what he killed and now it’s over. Whether they ever believe us or not, now we can know.”
She stared at the window. “Those whispers and those things I saw in the snow.”
Bill stepped in front of the window.
She stood a moment with her hands in fists at her sides and then swallowed and ran to him and kissed his balding head and then his mouth, hard.
She kissed him again and again and again.
Bill didn’t kiss back.
Outside, Jim was finishing up.
He knew what he had to do, but he had no idea what to do; but he had to do something.
He wrapped up the head again and looked at the blanket. He looked at the colors on the blanket and thought of long, long ago. He thought of his father talking with the old woman. He remembered the fire and the dancing men of the river tribe. He was getting bothered and he reached into his pocket and grabbed his little book. He flipped about in it and looked for something, glancing back at the blanket that was still sopping with the gross blood of the spook or the pony head.
The thing about it was that he didn’t know for sure now if he had killed the spook and killed the spook right. He paged furiously through his notes.
Never before had he seen one of these metamorphoses. He talked about them because he heard his pa talk about them at Old Magic Woman’s tent. He’d also read parts of it from a book that his pa had showed him—a book that Barnhouse didn’t have.
Also, there was another thought. He ha
dn’t taken too many of the leaves over time, had he? Old Magic Woman said you could eat too many leaves and that they might have some permanent effect of memory loss. Or the leaves might get too potent and burn your mind up in an instant.
“Them leaves’ll help you out as soon as they mess ya up,” his pa said to him around the fire one night. “Now you take one now, and you sit here with me, and I’m gonna take one, and we’re gonna sit here together, and when the world starts changin’ around you, you just sit tight. Keep still and then there’s no problem. That’s the key. Keep still.”
He tried. He tried to keep still.
Old Magic Woman, though, after that, she tried to teach him the art of growing the plants just right and making it so that they didn’t get too powerful, and told him when to pick ’em so that they didn’t turn to poison. But he didn’t listen well and he couldn’t recall any of that anymore. And she was gone.
He relied on Barnhouse now. But those sources were back up north. The decision was that he would go on out alone.
But hold on. Jim was sure he hadn’t got too many leaves in him that day to believe that a pony was a spook. And besides all that, the pretty Marbo girl, May, she said there were no more horses around. So why would there be any ponies at all?
That thought stopped him for a second. No horses. Somewhere in his mind he remembered a story that Old Magic Woman had told him. A story of a great warrior who had been killed by the horse people and because of how he died, the people in the village no longer were able to keep horses. It was hard to remember. He tried remembering too, another story of a baby born of the Evil One with horse’s hooves and a tail . . . he couldn’t remember.
He hadn’t a lot of time, though. He moved to the back house to snatch up his gear. He got the feeling that Bill Hill’s rifle snout might come poking out of one of the windows and drop him like a duck. He resumed his urgency.
