The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel

by Josh Kent

  May turned her head and looked out the window with her pa. Some of the sparkling of the outside came in through the window and gave her big, round eyes a twinkle.

  Her pa looked at her face, glowing in the light.

  “May,” he said, “I think the sunshine was made just for you.”

  

  The doctor unwrapped Jim’s bandages very slowly.

  “You’re healing so quickly,” Doc Pritham said as Jim winced.

  “How does it look?”

  “Better. Your wounds are already closed.”

  The doctor did some wiping and smearing on of some other kind of stinking paste.

  “I can still feel them,” Jim said and stretched his thumb out a little. He stretched his index out and his middle.

  The doctor half smiled and looked at Jim, who was looking away and out the window. The sun was coming up.

  “When I move them,” Jim said, “I can still feel the other two. How can that be?”

  The doctor looked at Jim’s hand, but said nothing. A wolf had taken away Jim’s pinky and ring finger along with part of the hand. There was no getting it back.

  Jim’s face was fresh-shaven and the doc’s medicine burned at the back of his throat. He didn’t feel bad at all. He felt an energy inside him and maybe it came only from the medicine, but he had in him a certain hope as he watched the sun lighting up the little town outside of the doctor’s place.

  His eyes glinted as the doctor started slowly wrapping his hand.

  The sun coming in the window lit up Jim’s face, revealing the healing scars on his right cheek and the two long slashes below his left eye.

  Jim sensed the doc looking at him.

  “Lucky even that I have my eyes,” Jim said and put his left hand on the fleshy marks there under his eye.

  “You are right,” Doc Pritham said, “you are right. If you believe in this thing called luck, then you are lucky.” The doctor laughed a little, but Jim wasn’t in the mood for laughing. Whenever he drank the doctor’s medicine, it seemed like after the initial rush of feeling better, there came a time when memories kicked up in his mind. The medicine dragged his mind off to somewhere else.

  Something was bothering him now about these things that were happening in the town of Sparrow. His mind reeled back in his memory, seeking for connections. His father, his mother, Old Magic Woman. His mind opened into a place he did not like, a place that had been sealed. It was the medicine, but he couldn’t help himself.

  Jim put the cup of medicine to his lips and took another drink. “There was an old witch that killed my ma, Doc.”

  The doctor finished up and sat back in his chair, looking at Jim, his eyes suddenly kind and deep. “Yes?”

  Jim stared into the sunshine drinking the medicine. “Came right down from somewhere in the woods one night, dark and slippery. All the chickens had died just the day before, Doc, and we didn’t know why. But I think my pa knew why. They were all dead and just rotted, like they’d been dead a long time. It put the fear in my ma something awful. That old witch. She’d been comin’ around lookin’ for me, like they often do children. Turns out, my pa had been keepin’ her away with his craft and special barriers for years, which he knew how to make against her. But see, her power was growing somehow. Somehow the barriers weren’t taking like they once did. My pa started lookin’ to kill her. And to kill her, he knew he needed a special image of her. But she always kept her features and body in the darkness. One night, though, my pa tricked her by having me there in the barn like I was asleep. Had my ma out callin’ for me like I was lost.”

  The outlander swallowed and his eyes danced around the edges of the window. He went on. “This was his plan to kill her. Kill that witch. My ma was out there hollerin’ around for me like she couldn’t find me.” Jim stopped talking for a moment and lifted the cup to his lips. He tilted the cup back and it was empty. He stared into the empty cup and a desperate look came onto his face. He remembered.

  His father, Ithacus, stopped screaming her name and fell down on both his knees in the wet grass. It must have rained, because water dripped from his coat and his shirt and his hat were drenched with cold water. He was just now starting to feel his skin burn with the cold. The next thought was of his little boy. Was he still in the barn? His voice was rough as he tried to call out to James. The rain wasn’t in the sky any more and the October dawn came through the dark clouds in orange and blue over the grassy field. The barn was still in the shadows.

  Ithacus turned and dashed toward a patch of downed grass and found the boy shivering and pale. The boy stared up at his father, but his eyes didn’t see him. His eyes saw something terrible. Ithacus removed his long coat, which was still mostly dry inside, and wrapped his son inside. He picked up the boy in the bundle and tromped through the field as the dawn rose.

  “Sarai!” He was out of breath, but he managed a cry and held close his boy. Wandering through the dim field in the rain, holding the boy to his chest, screaming. Screaming her name.

  Ithacus’s heart and mind drowned in confusion as he carried the heavy boy home. He wanted things. Odd things, like warm honey and whisky, like a fire and a fist fight. He wanted anything that would keep him from wanting her back, and yet part of him didn’t believe she was gone. He wanted to kill the witch.

  And then he thought of the witch and deepest hatred burned in his chest and arms. He held the boy tighter and looked to his left and right and up into the air to make sure her black, shivering shadow wasn’t twisting at him from some unexpected angle. The hate made him sick. His mind moved to the barn again as his boy coughed and spat. He thought of the book and the instructions he could remember. What if it worked?

  That book, that bundle of old pages that Spencer Barnhouse had given long ago to Ithacus’s father. The book had long since been lost in the caves south of Rhymer, but he’d remembered in detail the pictures he’d memorized as a kid on how to build the flash box and how to make the special paper for catching the image. Maybe the witch thought he still had those pages; maybe that’s why she’d finally come all the way down.

  Bendy’s Men had chased him all through the swamps and caves for those pages. Then again, maybe the witch wanted to do with little James just the thing that witches do. He thought of the sketch of the flash box and the words that were penned in the black ink in a square around the drawing. What if it worked?

  He got James up in the house and got him out of the wet clothes and, after a while, into a warm bath. They looked at each other throughout the process but did not speak. Both Falks had blue eyes. Though Sarai’s eyes were brown, her son had eyes like his father’s and his father’s father’s. Ithacus looked at the boy in the washtub and saw something different from what was there. He saw the boy in Sarai’s arms. His wife’s eyes gleamed in the setting light of the sun as she too looked upon the new child.

  He was little more than a red and pink and wriggling bundle of wrinkles, but his eyes blinked and caught light under the long blond lashes. Sarai Falk held the boy out with both hands and for the first time Ithacus grabbed up that life in his arms, that life so alive.

  Sarai’s face was soft and sharp with the high cheekbones and broad, black eyes of her mother, and now her dark lips burst into a white smile of small, square teeth. “What will his name be?” she said and immediately with strong hands and arms pulled him back to her. Ithacus’s gaze leapt from her eyes to the bundle in her arms and back again.

  “James,” Ithacus said. “His name is to be called James.”

  They had waited to name him. Waited to be sure he would live.

  Sarai beamed at her boy and then reached out with her hand and traced along Ithacus’s cheek and ran her finger down the long scar that ran from his temple to his chin. “He has your eyes.”

  At this, Ithacus’s own face grew dark, the deep lines creased about his brows, and his eyes narrowed. He took a step toward his young wife holding the child and placed his hand on her back. With his other hand
he drew her head close to his and leaned her head on his shoulder, looking at the boy. The child’s eyes opened for a moment and his wide pupils rolled lazy in the center of blue irises. Sarai was right: his eyes were like his father’s, and what would those eyes see? Crooked and dark images sprung up in his mind, and Ithacus shuddered at what those young eyes might grow to see. What scenes of joy and dread might play in front of those bright and tiny eyes? Ithacus kissed his beloved’s head and walked to the edge of the fire.

  They’d been on the move for too long.

  The New Land held a kind of vicious bounty—offering as much food and shelter as danger. Too, Ithacus could feel the jitters at the crest of every hill and along the edges of every river, every stream; and at night, as his wife slept, he watched the shadows moving in the darkness.

  There was an evil in this land, an older but familiar evil that Ithacus did not expect to find here. In fact, he had expected to escape it forever when he took his young bride and what few items they could and climbed aboard that strange boat in the dark.

  Yet here they had found, high in a cliff bank, this winding cave that held no animal’s lair and no stench of death, and that would serve well, if only for a short time. Until he had time to get what he needed to build a place and get some animals and do some planting.

  From the little mouth of the cave Ithacus could see up and down the river, and there was only one path that lead up to the opening of their cave. Over and behind them were nests and coils of a thick and almost impenetrable thorned vine, and among them were thorn-covered trees, the likes of which Ithacus had only visioned in tales and bad dreams, yet there they were. Tall and mean-looking with hard, barbed leaves, an animal or man who dashed into those trees for cover would sooner bleed to death than escape a pursuer. It was a fit spot for safety.

  So here they had come to rest and here this boy had been born in the deeps of the cave. Perhaps this would be where they would make a new home, but only time would tell.

  Already the cold October winds moved the pines along the long and muddy river. Already the leaves of other trees began turning to gold and red. While out past the thorns and brambles, Ithacus hunted in the rich forest behind the ridge and brought home rabbits, deer, and many small, cold fish which he prepared special and which gave Sarai and the baby strength. They drank the bright water from the streams that rolled down the mountainside, and Sarai and Ithacus told stories of their parents and the old country, and they laughed in the warm sun at the cave’s mouth and the baby laughed too.

  Sometimes shadows crept to the river’s edge—the long, lean, odd shadows of living things, maybe mountain cats, maybe wolves, but they were soundless. Ithacus and Sarai kept the fire back away from the mouth of their cave, but still the smoke rolled into the sky, and sometimes at night Ithacus would watch the gliding shadows at the water’s edge. At times they were fast and liquid-like and seemed to rise up into the pines, but other times they hulked and paced at the water’s edge. Stopping and unmoving they seemed to be feeling through the dark, or looking, looking through the dark for Ithacus and his woman and the baby. Sometimes Ithacus thought he saw long, thin shadows, like snakes, twisting from the wood’s edge and toward the cave, but when he looked again they were gone.

  Ithacus knew that if these were what he feared—and were not men, or cats, or wolves—it would mean they were something darker. Darker things than he expected to find in the New Land. It also meant that these shades and shadows could not cross over the water and would have to find and wind some other way along the water’s edge until they came to an end to the river, a bridge or fallen tree, or some other place that was strange and would let them pass over.

  He grimaced at the thought of that darker power giving them a way to cross and letting them come slinking up the Ridges to the cave. Even along the pass where he could see, he stayed up nights dreading that the shadows would come and that they would have teeth.

  But for a long time the shadows did not come.

  The shadows did not come for a long time, and the boy grew strong and wild and his mother taught him well the ways she knew.

  Ithacus woke up from his dream of the old days. The memories passed out of his mind, a warmth giving way to a cold wind. She was gone. Sarai was gone.

  Neither James nor his father knew how much time had passed. It seemed to them that the sun was moving in a different way. At times the light would dim through the windows and darken until both were sure that the night had fallen; and yet, through glittering tears, they would watch as their little house lightened again. Too, the hard rain of last night had changed to a strange dust of snow that came even when the sun shone and blues broke through the gray clouds until time seemed mixed and the day or night no longer mattered. The boy didn’t get out of the warm water of the tub for a long time. His father would wake from a heavy sleep now and again and put wood in the stove and get the water boiling and pour it into the tub.

  Later, James’s mind might stab at him with the memories of the witch. If it hadn’t been for this plan, his mother would have lived. If it hadn’t been for him, for his wretched father.

  But then, his mind immediately removed itself from those thoughts as if the thoughts were flame and he would sink into sleep and younger memories.

  It wasn’t enough that the little pig had learned its way out of the pen, but it would stick its nose in the air now and buck its snout, laughing. James ran in the mist. Again and again he heard the wet drumming of the little pig’s feet going along this way and that, and he turned again this way and again that way to follow. His own bare feet slapped hard the cold mud. He couldn’t see it, but it was out there.

  Soon he heard his pa holler from in back of him somewhere. His pa was mad. James wanted to train up the little pig; he’d seen its own special pig smarts and liked how it laughed at its own smarts, jutting its little face up in the air, proud and looking around.

  An open patch in the fog appeared and he could see the fresh little hoofmarks dug in the mud, skittering off one way or the other. This went on, zig and zag, his pa hollering, the tiny thumping of the hooves, the fog swirling and clearing with the sunshine.

  James stopped short, his head pounding, his feet burning with the cold mud. He listened. He closed his eyes and listened. No noise. No hooves. With his eyes still closed, he tilted just a bit to his left and then burst, disappearing into a heavier patch of the fog. Emerging with the squealing, kicking piglet. Laughing with little Eli in his bare arms.

  And then he woke in the warm tub in the strange weather. His father was standing by the stove, looking out the front window out toward the barn.

  “James,” he whispered, “get your clothes on and go feed the pigs.”

  Hot tears came from the boy’s eyes, but he splashed water in his face to hide them and clambered out of the basin and headed to his room. Pulling on his pants, he heard the front door open and shut and knew that his pa had walked out into the strange weather to see about the witch trap.

  James came into the hay barn to find his pa standing at one end with the weapon. He’d only caught sight of the ax once before. The strange ax with its shining, waved blade and curved and heavy handle. His pa stood with his head down. There were candles lit on a path in the dirt all along to a post in the center of the barn. There on the post was a pale square of paper. Upon the pale square of paper was burned the image of the witch. The face on the square was even more hideous than what James had imagined as he lay there with the thing breathing over him. What made it so terrible was that the real face of the witch was a person’s face. It was a dead face and filled with broken shards of teeth, slashed with cuts, bruised, the eyes even seeming to be squeezing from the sockets. The thought that there could be any life in that face was what made him sick. Anything that looked like that ought to be dead, but there was no mercy in the Devil’s Way.

  “If you’re not going to feed the pigs,” his pa said, “stand away.”

  He did as his pa took a deep breath an
d then a deeper one and then his pa’s body seemed to go limp as if he were about to fall over. Without warning his pa’s arm whirled, the post thudded, and the silver blade rang as it marked deep in the post and right through the wicked image with a whistle. The candles blew out and off somewhere in the strange weather of the morning a howl went up that pitched into a wail and then into a screech that made the hairs on James’s neck rise up. His pa looked toward the barn doors and then back at the post.

  The picture was bleeding.

  

  The doctor was sitting there looking at him and when he saw the medicine was all gone and that Jim had stopped talking he said, “Falk, I can’t give you any more of that medicine until tomorrow.”

  Jim frowned.

  “It’ll poison your blood permanent,” the doctor completed.

  “It doesn’t matter. She’s dead. There’s no getting her back.”

  “I suppose not,” the doctor said.

  “If I can’t have any more medicine, give me some whisky.”

  The doctor nodded and, getting up, clinked around for a few seconds and then returned with a little mug of sweet-smelling whisky and put it in Jim’s left hand.

  Jim sipped it and coughed a bit and said, “That creature, that thing, the witch, whatever she was . . .” He turned and looked at the doctor. “There I was, lying in the hay, my eyes shut, and that thing came slinking in by way of the high window and she came right down close to my face. Like a spider, Doc.”

  He looked up at the doctor’s eyes. “She eased herself down through the air like that.” He made the motion with his good hand, the hand floating down. “And only the devil knows how.”

  Jim drew in a deep draught of air and looked back out the window. “I kept quiet like I was sleeping, but I could feel her there. I could smell her cold, terrible breath. I wonder. I think sometimes I wasn’t convincing enough. Why did she leave? Why did she go after my mother?”

  Doc Pritham watched him close to make sure his eyes stayed alert and his face didn’t turn blue. This was a side-effect of this treatment, memories and truths sometimes uncontrollable rolling out of the patient. He could see Falk’s eyes were fading in and out of here and now and were floating off somewhere else. Falk’s eyes would roll and then close and then open and roll again.