by Josh Kent
The preacher’s face lightened and turned its usual pink and the swelling eye and right side of his face deflated and settled to a gray and yellow bruise. He opened his eyes and a light came into his eyes and he looked around the room blinking.
“Thank God,” Vernon said and he looked at the outlander who held the twisted arm in his hand.
Tears came from both the preacher’s eyes, and John Mosely got up and pushed past the outlander. Jim looked at Ruth and caught a strange look in her eye, a flutter that she was disappointed at her brother-in-law’s recovery. She looked at Falk and scowled.
Jim shrank quietly out of the room with the thing that used to be a preacher’s arm.
The doctor was at the other side of Vernon with a cool cloth dabbing his face.
Ruth was still in the corner, still scowling.
John Mosely grabbed his brother’s head and kissed it.
“He’ll need rest,” the doctor said. “He will live, but he will need rest.”
“How did you?” John asked.
The doctor looked at John and then at Ruth. “Prayer and medicine.”
“Ruth,” Vernon said and looked up at her grimacing face, “Ruth, my arm. My arm. My arm.” He began to sob now.
The doctor laid him back, and the preacher almost at once stopped sobbing and fell into a sound sleep.
After a few moments of looking at his brother sleep, John said to the doctor in a whisper, “What is that witch-man doing here?”
He motioned toward the main area where he had seen the outlander go.
The doctor did nothing to answer. Doc Pritham grabbed the long blade that he had and took it into the other room. The door was closed and the outlander was not around.
Ruth came out into the main area. The doctor and her husband followed close behind her.
The doctor was wiping the long blade with a cloth he had dipped in something clear and pungent. Ruth stood there. John stood there too, watching the doctor and looking around the room to see if the outlander was hiding anywhere in the room. Maybe he was hiding in the corner. Maybe he knew a trick where he could hide in plain sight. There were many things that a man in league with the Evil One would be able to know how to do. What all they were, who knew?
The doctor lit a match and touched it to the dripping blade. A bright flash of blue fire shot up the side of the long blade, and a flame jumped from its tip and hung in the air above the blade, twisted and vanished.
“What is that you’re doing?” Ruth asked the doctor slowly, her eyes narrowed now, her courage had come back to her.
John Mosely said, “The outlander. Where’s he gone? What was he doing here?”
“Yes,” Ruth Mosely asked. “What was he doing here?”
John added in with a shaking voice, “And what about my brother? What about my brother’s arm?”
The doctor slipped the long, weird knife into a black pouch. He then turned toward them and looked them both in the face.
Ruth was getting angrier every time the doctor didn’t answer a question. Her arms came up and crossed, her shoulders came up closer to her long ears, and her chin came forward more and more. She took a slow step toward the doctor and her voice came out in a low pitch. “I am sure the people of Sparrow would be very interested to know that somehow you are involved with this Jim Falk. Prayers and medicine? Prayers and medicine? That would be a very interesting thing for them to hear about. They also might be interested to know that you have an old book on your person, an old book with strange writing in it. Don’t you? Don’t you have something like that around here? Wouldn’t that be an interesting thing for them to know?”
The doctor’s back was to her. His eyes went wide, but then he turned, smiled at her, and reached into his pocket and got his pipe. He turned around and pulled out a chair from the table. He turned around and looked at them both and smiled. He turned back around toward the table and pulled another chair away from the table and turned it a little bit toward John. Then he went around to the far side of the table and pulled out a chair for himself and sat down and began packing his pipe with tobacco.
“Please,” he said, “please, won’t you sit down. We have a lot of things to talk about, I think. Why don’t you sit down and we’ll talk about this?”
The two made glances at each other.
“Please,” the doctor said in a very calm voice, and his match came to his bowl and he puffed blue clouds of smoke, “please, won’t you sit down and we’ll have a talk about prayers and medicine and old books.”
The two moved forward slowly and each, in their own time, sat down, never taking their eyes for a moment off the doctor’s wrinkled, mysterious face.
The farther up she went, the uglier the trees got, thorn-covered, twisted, and cracked. Violet was thirsty; her mouth was completely parched. Time and again she would drop beside one of the gray trees and pick up a batch of wet leaves and suck on them, getting any moisture she could. Then she would spit the leaves out and wipe her mouth. Her eyes were tired and she couldn’t focus on much.
The sun was going down in the west. The trees made long shadows. Where was the stranger? The stranger that had given her the powder.
The morning had been beautiful. The sun’s light had melted some of the ice and warmed the little streams that ran in the back of her home on the hill, but she found no comfort in that. She had to keep going.
She couldn’t return to her home now because he was there. Whatever it was that he was, he was there now. If she could just find the stranger, again. She fingered the necklace with the tiny vial inside.
Bill had come home in the middle of the night.
At first, she thought that maybe she’d taken too much of the powder she’d been taking and that she was having a dream of some sort that was mixing with the wind that had been swirling around her home in the dark. She couldn’t keep the fire lit because the force of the wind had somehow forced itself right down the chimney, and each time she would start up the fire it was almost as if a giant person were standing over her home and blowing cold breath down into the chimney to put out her fire.
She was cold and the wind was blowing and there was nothing for her to do but mix an extra portion of her powder over the stove fire and drink it down and crawl into her bed. She had the covers pulled all around her as the wind banged and clapped around the house. She could hear too that the door of the back house where the outlander had been staying had blown open and was now banging and banging in the night.
She wrapped the covers around her even tighter as she began to drift off. She could see Huck’s round face close to hers—feel his warm breath on her cheek. She could feel his strong hand take a hold of her shoulder. Her mind reeled backward to the days following the big blizzard. It had been such a terrible time, but had also been the time for them.
During those quiet and frozen days, no one knew if anyone was alive at all and they had been so frightened. They had all been so frightened. So many had died, and so many were yet to be found, some of them frozen and clinging to one another, their eyes shut, the lashes black crystals, the blue children, the gray dogs. The wind was almost the same then, too. It was as if it would never stop blowing. It was as if the wind itself was a thing, an angry thing that wanted to destroy everything else. The winds kindled the fires and froze the town.
The cold had taken the preacher’s ears and Anna Marbo’s life and so many of the children. Nearly all. She’d heard that things were worse in the Ridges, but no one knew for sure. But Violet had seen with her own eyes the spidery spook clambering on the rooftops, its disgusting maw swallowing down the frozen and the living. She shuddered with the memory.
How could she have known that Bill would come back? Bill could have been just as dead as the others. How could she know what would happen when Huck found her, all that death and grief pent up inside him, all the fear that makes men and women cling to one another in the darkness. Her mind sunk into the moment, Huck’s arms around her body,
squeezing her to him.
Then her eyes opened. The wind beat against the sides of the house and once in a while she could hear another noise. A noise that sounded far away, like a person singing a bad song or calling out injured in the wind. When she became attentive to it, though, it died away again. It died away into the darkness until she could convince herself that she hadn’t heard it. She hadn’t heard it at all. She had only heard the wind through the ugly trees. Then, then it would come again. It came again closer and it was a voice, it was an unmistakable voice like a wailing.
She was sure now that it wasn’t just part of her dreams or her imagination, and she could hear it more and more clearly now and in between the whirling gusts of wind. It called out to her. It was calling her name. It was Bill’s voice, but it sounded somehow wrong.
In fact, it sounded garbled and strange, and as it got closer and closer it came not to sound like his voice at all.
There was a crash on the porch.
She got up now and ran to the front room meaning to grab the gun.
He burst into the front door, that hideous wind blowing and whirling behind him.
It looked like Bill, but worse. His eyes had gone all white and his skin had gone all white and he looked dead, but he wasn’t.
“Violet!” he screamed and fell forward. His body was covered in dark blood. He fell right on the ground, and it looked as though his legs had suddenly gotten paralyzed. His mouth was so wide open, it was too wide open, and from inside what looked like black worms stretched themselves along the floor toward her toes.
“Violet!” he screamed again and blood spat out.
Violet was frozen at first. He lay in the doorway, clambering for her. Beside him, mounted up on the wall, was the gun. She couldn’t get to it without him grasping her.
She turned and ran back into the kitchen and, picking up her little bag of powder and other things, she flew open the window and slid herself out into the night, carefully moving so that she did not tear her clothing. Then she ran. Behind her, in the night, in her home, she could hear her husband moaning and wailing.
Now she was exhausted, but too scared to shut her eyes.
She wasn’t sure she had left him far behind, she couldn’t hear him, but she was too scared to fall asleep now. She was hungry too, but not hungry enough to think of eating those awful leaves she had been sucking on.
Somewhere out here among these ugly trees she knew there was that stranger who might help her. She’d met him before. She couldn’t remember the exact spot now, but she knew it was around here somewhere.
She was so tired, though, and she sat and rested under a tree, watching the shadows grow long and the sunlight crawling up over the hill. Soon the woods went quiet and still, the beating of her heart slowed, and the pulsing blood in her ear quieted. Now and again she could hear the chirping of some bird that was flitting among the branches.
She looked around in the gray and brown winter woods.
“Have I been out here all day?” she asked herself out loud.
She looked in her little bag. She had powder and some other things in there.
“I didn’t get any rest last night at all,” she said and thought again of the strange, pale skin of her husband and of the terror she felt when she saw him and how she was somehow sure that it was not really him somehow.
She thought that if she could close her eyes for just a few minutes she would be able to figure out what to do. She did have some choices. She could simply go back down into town from here. There was a clear stream that ran not too far from here that went straight back into town. She would have to find somewhere to go soon, even if it was up in this tree, because the wolves might be around. They’d disappeared for the whole day. In fact, the whole day had been totally quiet. She was sure that at some turn she would see her husband’s gangly form romping through the woods behind her, but she hadn’t. She was sure that as she rested here, she would hear the gentle rustling of leaves as the stranger came around the tree, but he hadn’t come at all.
Sometime after the blizzard, the hooded stranger had come to her when she’d been out here. He lived out here, lived in the woods. Maybe there was a time when some people thought the stranger was a witch or a sorcerer or something of the sort. He knew the ways of the woods. He’d told her as much. He preferred to live on his own out here. Didn’t say much else, other than the sayings. He seemed to know many of the sayings out the scripture. He’d given her the powder that helped her sleep and to think clear and sharp, but he wasn’t coming today. He seemed to know somehow when she’d run out and he’d show up then.
Now what? To go back into town? To go running to Huck? To tell him that her husband turned into a monster and was chasing her? Another crazy story from Violet Hill, the weird wife of the town carpenter? She could go to the preacher’s house. Maybe that was the thing to do. He would have to take her in. At least for a while. He would understand, maybe. How could they let her husband run off like that in such a state? Something was terribly wrong, and it made her sick to think of what it might be.
She looked at her bag again and looked around. She squinted her eyes, hoping to see the gray hood of the stranger peering around one of the trees near the horizon. She couldn’t see a thing.
The woods were growing dim and clouds began to cover the sky and turn the same color as the gray, ugly trees around her. She looked at the tree she was sitting up against. Above her, climbing up the side of the tree were batches of thorns, like horrible nests, bunched and twisted in patterns along the bark. It might be worse climbing that than it would be to go and see the preacher.
She didn’t want to go and see the preacher, though. The preacher and the preacher’s brother and the preacher’s sister-in-law had all come from up north. And they might be suspicious of her in some way. The people from up there were suspicious of everyone in some way for something; and she had heard that they would, if it suited their purposes, twist your words and your life around in some way that would make you seem evil. Even if you weren’t.
Then again, the doctor might keep her safe too.
The clouds were very dark now and the thought of wolves grew in her head, the thought of the wolves followed by the spook. She decided that she would make her way to the creek and quickly follow the creek back into town and go see the doctor. He might have answers about Bill. She wasn’t sure, but she was sure that she didn’t want to wait through the night.
She got up from her spot on the ground under the tree and began making her way over the little ridge to where the creek was. Just as she started coming up over the ridge she heard something behind her.
Violet stopped, but she turned slow and looked intensely around in the woods. Her face showed no fear. Her cheekbones were strong and the cold made her face white and her eyes sparkle in the dark of the woods. She wasn’t afraid. She was looking. She was looking because what she saw would determine what she would do. She looked and for a while she didn’t see anything, just the crooked trees and the cold wind blowing them around.
Then it seemed that there was something else out there, just beyond where she could see. Yes, she could see something solid and gray among the low branches, but it was tall, like a man. It wasn’t an animal. It moved in and out of the shadows just beyond her vision. She squinted her green eyes trying to see. Yes, it was in the shape of a man, but something about it gave her a strange feeling. She was sure that whoever it was could see her, but whoever it was was only half hiding. Whoever it was was just staying where she could not see, but it seemed as if whoever it was was stepping just into the light enough where she could see. Whoever it was, she stood watching long enough to get the feeling that she didn’t want to find out who it was.
She didn’t get that feeling of comfort that came when the stranger came upon her. When the stranger had come upon her in the woods that time and offered his hand and showed her the way out of the woods, she had felt comforted. There was no feeling in this presence that waved in and ou
t of the edge of her vision now. In fact, she noted now that when she glanced that way there was a certain kind of blankness that came into her senses. Almost a veil of sorts coming over her thoughts.
“What in the world could that be?” she thought and made swift steps over the little hill and toward the creek.
She got there and started through the gray forest along the creek down the hill and into Sparrow. Her mind flickered through the things that she had seen, and her heart began to skip beats as she ran. A cold sweat broke on her forehead. The faces of the frozen children kept coming up in her head. She stopped by the creek and listened as the water trickled and tinkled in the dwindling evening. She reached into her blouse and pulled the necklace and little jar of powder. It was almost empty. Her hands were shaking now and her left eye twitched maddeningly. She looked around. Behind her, just at the edge of the shadows, she saw the figure. This time she could see clearly the shape of a man—the shape of the man, but the head was not the shape of a man’s head, and long, wild horns like branches twisted out from either side of the head.
Her heart thumped in her chest and she crouched down and went about her business with powder, quickly, quickly. The energy shot into her mind and heart. Her thoughts quickened and strength and color returned to her face.
She gathered herself up and tore off into Sparrow.
She ran straight for the doctor’s house and got inside with the door slammed behind her.
Jim finished burying the husk of flesh that was once the preacher’s arm. He got out the little book that he had kept his own writings in over the years. He flipped around in there. There was something in there about when the flesh was rotted by the touch of evil, but he couldn’t remember where. He had a vague memory of talking with Spencer Barnhouse about it in connection with his father getting pulled into the hole.
He found it and started reading over the shallow grave of the arm with his head bowed slightly. He wished he could say for sure whether he believed in the power of these things or not. He knew there was a force in the world, some force that had taken his mother’s life, taken his father to some other place through what looked like magic. But there were too many questions in his mind about it and no one seemed to know any kind of satisfactory answers. And he was so weak—weaker than he’d even imagined himself to be. Always on the run. Getting an old man in Hopestill even to steal the weapons for him. He’d known he didn’t have the ability himself, especially as fuzzy as he’d got with the leaves and the whisky. There was no telling what would have become of him. And yet, he felt driven to try to help some way; he felt that so heavy, that he was supposed to help this town somehow, and that somehow this whole mess would lead him to his father.
