by Josh Kent
He opened the box, and there, on the flat yellow paper, was the strange handwriting. The ones who’d written the stories, the ones who’d written the stories of the coming of the great Hunter. The ones who’d seen into the future and said that he would bring the power to heal and to kill. These papers were papers that Barnhouse himself had spent years translating into the common tongue. There was no one that Vernon knew of who could speak and translate the old tongues anymore except for Barnhouse.
Powers. The Craft. The Hunter. So many thought that these were only rumors, or the leftovers from old stories, from times long, long ago.
Closing the heavy silver box, he began to think, think of the next place he might hide them, of the next town he might take his family to, of the next step in their journey so that he could keep them safe. If there was such a step.
Truthfully, Vernon didn’t believe them so much either. Except that if they weren’t true, why would there be so much danger in keeping them? If they weren’t true, then why, when his brother came by to tell him that there was a man in town who seemed to have powers, why was it that his hands had gone cold and his mind was set to whirring?
In the dark, Jim could see up ahead the thing’s good eye go wide, disappear, and then dip low.
Jim had given it a good shot in the head, but the thing kept going. It was strong.
The moon came out from behind the clouds and the forest turned a cold, bright blue between the black shafts of the crooked trees.
Jim stopped and hunched and watched. He wasn’t ready for a face-to-face fight now; he wanted to get the spook when it was tuckered out, or wait until it had stopped along somewhere thinking that it was hidden. Then he could have a chance to hit it again good with his long gun. Another deep shot of the special silver-lode in its head would make for a quick and easy end to this.
The wolves howled as the moon appeared. They sounded closer, as if they were moving in. Maybe it was the wind.
Jim saw the beast’s bristling, sharp shadow ahead in the moonlit trees. It lumbered down into a valley and came to a stop. The eye appeared, probably looking back, but now it was winking, blinking. It was turning from yellow to pink. Maybe another shot might not be necessary. Maybe he could go down and get in there and drop it with his hatchet. The special lode that Barnhouse had procured for him was doing its trick.
After that would be these wolves to deal with.
Old Magic Woman had showed Jim and his pa ways to calm and speak with the wolf she had, but he hadn’t seen a single one since then. Jim pushed around in his mind to remember. He remembered his pa speaking quietly with Old Magic Woman, the two of them sharing a pipe.
Old Magic Woman never looked old.
It was her hands and the way she moved and her voice that made her only to feel old: her deep, pure voice, her palms covered in lines, rough as dog’s paws at the ends of her floating arms.
Her face was young and brown with a wide nose. Her eyes were pure and black.
Jim couldn’t see the spook’s eyes anymore.
He waited.
The howling stopped.
At the edges of his vision, shadows began to flicker.
He could smell them now and hear them passing in the underbrush.
Knowing that these were the wolves and that somehow they had homed in on him and were packing up around him, he thought to fire his long gun to scare them off. But this gun didn’t make any noise and wasn’t going to do him any good in the close quarters of the dark woods.
He slid away his long gun and, in one motion, pulled his curving, special hatchet in the one hand and his Dracon pistol with its six barrels in the other.
The moon began to move behind the clouds, but not before Jim caught the reflection of a creek moving along just down at the bottom of the valley.
The spook couldn’t pass through water. He knew that. It would have to move along the creek, back up into the hill, or down towards Sparrow.
Jim breathed slowly and took in the hot feeling of the animals that were closing in on him. In a way, the leaves he had taken allowed him to feel the movement of the creatures. In the dark wood like this one, it didn’t matter whether he had his eyes open or closed. Around him, they made a kind of wave in his feelings, so that when groups of them moved one way or when one of them moved another, he felt a kind of tug or a push. He had to rely on his eyes, though, because these wolves were many and they meant to tear him to bits.
White spots flickered now and again as clouds passed over the moon.
Branches crackled.
One shadow, at Jim’s right side, showed its teeth.
May was lying on the little bed in the safe room at the top of the shop. She could barely hear the chatter of the men at the bar and sometimes the low, brighter sound of her pa’s voice.
Over everything, vibrating the room, she could hear the wolves howling, howling, howling.
She was glad to feel safe, though.
The last time she had ever even seen this room was back when she had to come in and clean it with her mother. The jarred tomatoes that were there then were still here now. Still jarred.
She’d never had to stay up here in the cot. She’d heard wolves howl before, when they’d come down from the mountains in the bad winter. She remembered her pa saying that he wondered why the wolves just didn’t stop up in the Ridges and eat up all the folk up there instead of coming down into Sparrow and bothering all the good folk down here.
May looked at this cot. She wondered how anyone would sleep in here. There were no windows, there were no pictures. It was just a box with a door.
The door locked from both sides.
There was a roll-up staircase leading up to it. Underneath the safe room was a big, wide hall where her pa didn’t really keep much around. There was just the wood floor now and some empty crates around. There was a book of scripture too that the former preacher had given her pa.
It was just a space. The only time he’d used it was back when John Mosely and Ruth Eaven got married—they used it to decorate the hall. It was her mother’s idea to have a flowerfall, little white bellflowers and redvines to spill out through the hole in the ceiling and wind down to the floor. Pastor Mosely stood in front of them with his little pulpit set there and the messiah’s sign on the front.
Ruth looked old enough to be John’s mother just about. She did look pretty, though. That was three whole years ago now. But God’s ways is God’s ways and they are united.
That’s what her pa would say.
She tightened the sheet around her as the wind kicked up now, blowing around the shop. She heard the chicken man’s horse whinny outside the shop. Somewhere the wind blew open a shutter with a clack. She didn’t like being in here at all. What if something happened? What if something sneaked in here with her? Like that thing, that spook that Jim said he saw out on the road. What if that thing was real like he said and that it was from the Evil One like he said? Couldn’t a thing like that just come slithering in through the cracks in the ceiling? Couldn’t a thing of the Evil One just move like a mist?
Chapter 8
Jim sensed movement on every side and the shadow in front of him growled and bared its teeth and bowed its head.
This was the thing: his mind was stuck on Old Magic Woman’s wolf, Fenyra—“Fennie” as Jim called him, the trickster chief, the friend of his father, the friend of the people.
These wolves tonight were not like Fennie at all. They had a poisoned way about them. They were gnarled and scared things.
The moon came out from behind the clouds and the forest flickered alive with the pale stars of the wolves’ shining eyes. The eyes roamed through the forest, twinkling, hollow, and mean, until the clouds hid the moon again. The animals yipped one to the other and crooned low in the flickering darkness of the trees. The clouds were moving fast and the wind suddenly blew all cold. Jim turned and turned in a circle. A storm was coming.
The pack was
closing in.
Jim knew what to do and held up his Dracon pepperbox pistol.
Maybe, maybe if he could blast it once into the air, the report alone would send them all bounding back into the shadowy hills.
The woods went dark and the eyes disappeared. A big wind blew the trees.
The shadow leapt at him. Snarling with wild strength, it clamped on his right arm. Jim’s skin tore like cheese under the teeth and his gun dropped into the dirt when his hand came open with the pain. His blood ran hot and sopped the sleeve of his coat.
He fell. He fell down into the dirt and grass, he felt their rank bodies sliding underneath and about him.
Another wolf was at his left ankle, tearing with vicious power at his boot. Then another pulled at the long flap of his jacket, trying to drag him back into the brush.
He knew that they were waiting. They were all were waiting for this moment. He was on his back. The clouds raced across the sky and the woods lit blue. The hot breath and blank, round moon eyes whirled around him.
He could hear the cloth of his jacket ripping and feel a kind of bumping at his side. He thought he saw his Dracon pistol glint somewhere in the wet weeds. The ragged paws of the beasts ripped at his forehead.
He focused on the moon. Bright as it was, its clear surface was split by gray clouds. Then it disappeared.
He felt teeth puncture and shake at his left boot, and he gathered all his strength into his good left arm with the curving hatchet in his hand.
The clouds burst and the forest was rushed with the sound of the rain.
Jim muttered as fresh, dark rain spilled onto his face. His eyes became clear and bright. “I didn’t come to Sparrow to be killed by you crooked dogs!”
He gripped his hatchet with his left hand and swung. The hatchet arced and connected full with a wolf’s snout. Jim was no kind of kidder when it came to keeping his weapons sharp. The wolf lost its whole nose and fangs from the swipe and let go, bucking wildly backward and mewling into the darkness.
Jim choked when he heard the wolf’s gargled breathing. Even though they tore at him to kill him, his memory of Fennie swelled. There was no spit for him to swallow.
He chopped hard then at his right. The back haft of his hatchet cracked the skull of a wolf that was ripping at his right forearm.
That one yipped out then and let go.
Jim tried to get up and slid a bit on the soaking floor of the wood. He wondered if he lay in rain or in his own blood or in the blood of the wolves, and figured probably all three. A picture flashed in his mind that he had seen in one of Barnhouse’s books: it was a scratchy drawing of a man with a wolf head holding a hatchet. There were words underneath the drawing: “Vryka had turned.”
He tried again to get up and he was able to half stand now.
The woods got murky and he thought he might have seen the wolves running off, but others, many others stayed. They were staying, waiting. Why weren’t they killing him? He saw some snouts go up into the air as if they suddenly had a scent, even in all the rain.
Jim’s right arm felt flat and ached. He tried to move it.
In the gray and blue light, blood rolled from his fingertips and mingled in the black water. But his hand only shook.
The woods around him faded in and out. A huge wind blew the treetops. The sky went dark. Thunder rolled. The rains poured on. The wolves looked as if they were traveling around him in a circle, a spinning circle, that soon was one long wolf with a thousand hollow-lit eyes.
He couldn’t feel his right arm. He felt around for himself. He grabbed his belt with his left hand; he couldn’t feel it. His hatchet seemed to float in front of his face.
Heaviness came to him.
He staggered and tumbled back to the ground again and thought about May Marbo. Her teeth were white and then crooked, like warm ivory vines. He felt he could remember her from somewhere else—if he could only reach out to her. She was right there, holding his pistol out to him.
He struggled just enough to sit up again, and then he half stood. He was going to make it. If he could just get at his pistol . . . Through the blurring rain and the wind, he thought he saw May holding it up to him in the rain.
Then it happened. A wolf, he thought, leapt from behind him and took his neck in its maw. As he flipped, he saw the wolf that had come for him. He was certain that around each of its silver eyes he saw other eyes, so that the wolf’s face had four eyes on each side of its head and that from its fanged mouth extended something that looked like flexing spines.
He saw May turn with a wide mouth, covering her eyes as this monster wolf dropped him to the ground and, as the forest faded from his vision, May faded too. The sky became the trees. His head banged on a rock. The raging of the wolf at his neck became quiet now, a tickling stream in his ears.
He saw another shape then. A hulking form passed onto the trail, waving its thick arms. It lurched from the corner of his vision.
There was a flash and a noise like a thunder-crack.
He was wet with his own blood as the giant wolf leapt over him, wildly dashing away. The figure leaned over him.
The night faded out.
May put a cloth on his head. His skin looked soft and white and there was a fever running in him fierce.
“Make sure to keep those bands tight and don’t let him move his arms,” Doc Pritham said. “He may wake up soon. When he does, come and get me immediately.”
Doc Pritham stood. May looked at his old face and his transparent blue eyes. He talked with some kind of heavy accent from the North, but May could understand him very well. In fact, most people could understand him fine; some people just pretended not to.
She nodded.
“This collar he wears around his neck—I am not sure where he found such a thing,” the doctor said and pointed at it. “This is what saved his life. Otherwise, crunch! The wolf would have had his neck and his head would have come right off.” The doctor coughed and looked at May’s face. “I’m sorry.”
May shivered, but the doctor was right. He had removed the strangely ornamented leathern collar and breastplate from off of Jim and hung it on the wall near the chest of drawers. There, in the neckpiece, and all about the shoulders of it, were the puncturing and tearing marks left by canine teeth bearing down into it. Here and there too, were marks that looked to be made by knives or razors slashing at his neck and chest.
May looked at Jim’s face. He looked at peace. Here and there, long red scratches zagged and flecked. His face was square and thin and handsome, and May did not notice this, but as she was looking at him her body had begun to lean forward and closer as she inspected him.
Huck came in and looked at Jim Falk and looked at May.
“Doc,” he said, “I don’t like this. I don’t like this outlander being laid up here at my place of business. What if he dies?”
May turned away from the convalescing stranger and looked at her pa with raised eyebrows.
The doctor closed his bag. “I have given your daughter specific instructions and bandages. This man appears to have some fever from the wolf bites and the scratches. He also has lost a good deal of his own precious blood. He will be weak for some number of days. He may never regain full use of his right arm. His fever, if not kept in check, could bring on a delirium; but, with proper care and attention, he will not die. I will come by often, but he should not be moved and I cannot have him in my home right now.”
Huck looked at the doctor and frowned. He looked at May, who was wringing the wet cloth in a basin. He looked out the window. It was gray. The chicken man’s cart was out there—busted, horseless, chickenless.
The doctor put on his hat and said, “He should not be moved.”
He tipped his hat to May and turned his back to them to leave.
He said without turning around, “I’m expecting another shipment of medicines shortly. More that might help this stranger. If he wakes up, come and get me straightaway. There are disease
s of the blood and of the mind and spirit that can be caused by the bite of a wild animal. Especially the wolf. Come and get me straightaway should he wake.”
The doctor left.
May looked at her father. He was incredibly unhappy. He walked over and watched the doctor go out through the front of the shop. Then he closed the door to the safe room where they were.
“This used to be where your mother napped after dinner,” he said.
“He’ll wake up soon and we’ll get him on out of here, Pa,” May said and stepped toward him. She could see in his eyes that deep green ring growing ever deeper. He was thinking heavy thoughts.
“May,” he said and moved toward her, placing his big hand on her little shoulder, “I don’t know what you heard or saw last night. I don’t know what all I heard or saw last night exactly either. But from what I can tell . . . from what I can tell, there’s a chance that, well, I think I might be wrong about this here outlander, Jim Falk. I don’t know, May. I don’t know for sure, but things in my mind are starting to change, and I don’t know for sure.”
Big tears were dropping out of May’s eyes now and her head was down. The sound of wolves raised up the worst and darkest of her mind. What she had heard last night had shaken her up. Her face grew pale. While she couldn’t remember exactly everything she had heard, her mind turned the words into pictures, wicked things, spiders, spooks, witches, and wolves swirling about in the snowy tornado of her mind.
She said, “Stop it, Pa. Stop it. I don’t like it when you talk like this. I don’t like you being in a way where you can’t make up your mind. What is it that you don’t know?”
“What did you hear?” he asked, lifting her chin up so he could see her eyes.
“Pa, I don’t know exactly. Noise. Noises. I heard a lot of noises.” May didn’t want to say. “I don’t want to say,” she said.
“You heard noises,” he said low, “and you heard all that filth coming out of Benjamin Straddler’s mouth. And all that talk about spooks and the Evil One and all that.”
