by Josh Kent
He looked at the little book. He set down the metal box and pulled the little book out and opened it.
“I recognize these. These are like the writings that my father lost in the caves since before I was a boy, the spells, the Waycraft, the stories from the River People.” He flipped the pages. “This is my father’s book, but it’s written by other people. How is that possible? Preacher, how is that possible?”
“I do not know, Falk. I do not know.”
Falk flipped greedily through the pages. He wondered if there was anything in here at all that could help them. He hoped.
“This is what they are after?” he asked after a bit.
The preacher nodded. “I think that’s a fair assumption.”
“I need to find that witch.”
The preacher pointed with his good arm toward the North. “She is hidden. You’ll need to get that little box from Simon and what’s inside,” the preacher said.
Jim tipped his hat to the preacher. “What’s inside?”
“A thumb.”
“A thumb?”
“Her thumb.”
“Where do you think Simon came across the little box?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
Jim scratched his chin.
“Preacher,” Jim said, “whatever happened to that Starkey baby? What happened to that little girl?”
The preacher said, “No one knows what happened to the little baby Rebeccah.”
Jim turned and left and the preacher watched him go, feeling his limp arm with his right hand.
“What is all this knowing or not knowing?” Benjamin Straddler asked Lane. He was smiling and looking at his face in the little mirror. He was smiling for real.
Lane was almost afraid to look anywhere but straight at her husband’s mouth, afraid that if she blinked, that smile would disappear.
“You know something,” he said, “or you don’t know something. What does it do? Where does it end?”
Lane was close to him. His shirt was off and his hands were clean and his eyes were bright. The morning light was coming in through the windows in the kitchen, casting long shadows of the rickety chairs, making his eyes gleam with the sun’s light.
He dried his hands on a rag and then grabbed her hands up in his hands. He pressed her open palms suddenly on his hairy chest.
She felt his heart in there, something like a big frog jumping against his bones.
“That’s it!” he said and laughed. “That’s what we know.”
She put her arms around his neck and kissed his big face. She was looking at his mouth and the way he was smiling so wide. Then his mouth twisted a bit, but the smile stayed there.
Benjamin started sobbing, “My father, my father! I saw my father’s face—it wasn’t a dream, Lane. It made me know. It made me know just like this, like my heart thumping, it made me know.”
The feeling Lane had in her chest turned inward on itself and, as she held him, a shiver of something passed through her mind. She thought of all these years she’d spent with him, taking care of him as he drank bottles and sobbed about his lost family, never listening to her talk about hope, him never changing, always arguing against it, some excuse, some memory blotting it out. She thought of her prayers nightly—prayers for his peace, for him to be sent peace. The shiver in her mind told her that God, if there was a God, had given him a peace here—even if it was the twisted peace of madness, it was peace.
Yet he’d not picked up a bottle since seeing the outlander lying there in the mud. He’d not done a thing but sleep, sleep and eat and smile with that weird light in his eyes. And now, here he was in front of her, getting ready to go out. She let go of him, feeling the shiver blossom in her stomach.
“I’m going to the Marbos’,” he said.
Her heart went cold. She walked to the stove. This is what she had feared. “They’re closed up,” she said quietly. “They’re closed up on account of what’s been going on.”
“What’s been going on?” he asked.
“The happenings,” she said, fearful. “Bill Hill gone. The chicken man gone. Both dead, probably. Says there’s been demons around, spooks. Haven’t you heard? Now what—you gonna go up and have a drink and see about it?”
“No,” he said after a moment’s thought. “No. I am not going to Huck’s for a drink. I’m going over to the Marbos’ house. I need to tell Huck and May too. I need to tell them what’s happened to me and start setting some things right around here.”
“What did you see?” Lane turned and looked at him. Her heart wanted this hope to be real, wanted her husband to be back and to be what she once thought he could be. But this tremor lay in her and a greater and more real-feeling fear mixed in her and soured the hope. He had gone out of his mind.
“What did you see, Benji?” she asked again as he didn’t seem able at first to answer her.
Benjamin looked at his beautiful wife and saw that awful fear in her eyes. He stepped up to the table and pulled away a chair and sat on it.
“Come,” he said.
“What?”
“Come and sit down. Sit down and we’ll talk.”
“About?”
He smiled again. “About what’s happening, Lane.”
“What’s happened here?”
“Yes, I saw something that . . . well, I saw, yes, but it’s more than that. It’s more than that, Lane.”
“What did you see, Benji? The stranger’s face in the dark? With wolves all around and lightning flashing and whisky in your stomach? And you saw your father? That stranger is not your father.”
“Lane, come and sit down.”
She’d begun to cry a little bit.
“I want to tell you exactly,” he said.
She started shaking her head no.
He looked at her for a long time, watching her shake her head and stare at the floor with her eyes wide, too many thoughts moving in her mind.
Benjamin wanted to speak, but he did not. He wanted to say something, but he did not.
More than anything he could feel that something somewhere inside of her had shut itself off from him. That this moment he’d wanted, where she would sit across from him and the words would come out of his mouth that would make her understand, that moment would not be.
She turned away from him and walked toward the side window, looking out.
Slowly he stood and thought of going to her, but again he felt that shut-off feeling coming from her and he stepped back toward the door.
“Yes,” the voice said in Lane’s mind. “There’s no telling. There’s no telling what he’ll do.”
“Lane,” Benjamin said at last, “I’ll be back and you’ll see. I mean to set it right.”
She did not turn around, and she felt it, too. She thought of him, but nothing happened in her heart. What about her? What was he going off to set right that didn’t start right here? Here at this moment when she wanted to be able to turn to her husband and hope, she could feel nothing except a flatness. She looked out the window at the frost on the grass.
She heard the door slowly open and close behind her. She began to gather her things.
Benjamin Straddler walked through Sparrow in the early morning. The frost was on the grass and there was a clean, wet scent somewhere underneath everything, too. Benjamin thought there was something that smelled a bit like gunpowder.
Then he heard the reports, loud and clear, coming from down where the doctor lives.
He ran up the little hill to see if he could see. He got to the top and looked down toward the doctor’s house. He could see figures moving about, but some kind of a fog had descended on the whole area down there so that he couldn’t really see. He heard more reports then and saw figures running about. He could see something bigger than a man, something dark and much bigger than a man whirling around in the mist.
Benjamin patted his waist and his sides. He’d nothing with him, not even his knife. He thought about running down there
to find out and help whoever was down there in the mist. He squinted and looked in again.
Behind him was the long road out to the Marbos’ and the Hills’ house. He could run home and get his gun. He stood there looking. Now a deeper thunder and crackle came, and the mist seemed to grow thicker. He took a few steps toward the mist to see if he could get a better view.
He heard a voice beside him. “Are you lookin’ too?”
It was Hattie Jones and Samuel. Samuel’s eyes looked keen and liquid down toward the noises.
“We’ve been hearin’ the noise for a while,” said Hattie. “It’s like they got an animal down there. I think it might be one of them bears like a big black bear from somewhere down there, like one of them black bears mighta come out of the woods just like the other critters, the wolves, and the raccoons. You had any trouble with raccoons? We sure have. You know the woods have gone barren, they say. And worse than that. They say that there’s places you get to where the trees turn to dust if you touch them.”
Hattie Jones turned his eyes away from the mist as two more thuds came up from below. He looked at Benjamin.
“My gracious,” he said, seeing Benjamin’s face. “My gracious.”
Benjamin looked back at Hattie; his old forehead was wrinkled up in some kind of wonder.
“Look at you!” Hattie said and smiled and kind of went back on his heels.
Benjamin smiled too. Knowing now that what he had seen in the mirror this morning wasn’t just wishful thinking or that his hope and whatever this feeling was inside him just made him think that he looked that way. There really was something different, there really was some light in his eyes that hadn’t been there.
Samuel’s eyes were darting this way and that. He was looking into the mist, but his eyes seemed to be following some kind of movement down there.
It got quiet all of a sudden and the mist seemed to grow even darker, changing from a cloudy white gradually to an oily gray. There was no noise for a little piece and then all the wind died away.
Hattie whispered, “I heard some shots and came to see, but it seems like there’s nothin’ to see. I tried goin’ down in there, but that gave me the shivers so bad I got dizzy. It’s strange, isn’t it? I couldn’t see a thing in that fog, and the more I was in it, the more I felt like something else was in there with me. Strange, isn’t it?”
Hattie reached out when he said this and grabbed onto Samuel’s arm. “Come on, son, let’s come away from this place.”
Benjamin said, “Hattie Jones, you’ve known me for a long time. You’ve known all my story and you were there when the wolves killed my pa. I want you to know that you’ve been a good friend to me.”
Hattie turned very slowly and said, “Are you dying?”
Benjamin paused a moment and thought about that because, to be honest, he felt that sounded right even though he wasn’t really dying. “No,” he said. “No. I am not. Not exactly.”
Hattie Jones tipped his hat and looked back into the darkening mist and then to his left and his right and was not sure what to say. “Well, okay,” he said and tromped off, his hand around Samuel’s wrist.
Benjamin could hear him saying, “I’m done in this town. The devil take it.”
Chapter 15
Simon cried. The tears were all over his cheeks and his nose was running and he had to keep wiping his hands across his face. The fear had him.
He looked once more through the just cracked doorway into his mother’s room. For a moment he froze and didn’t breathe. His reddened eyes widened and his mouth parted, his breath stuck in his chest.
There it went.
Another black shadow danced along the inside of the door frame. The fire crackled and Simon walked quiet as he could to the door and closed it. When it was clicked shut, his breath came out in a sob.
On the table in the room lay the Book flipped open to pages covered in scrawl and spirals—he’d made some of these marks himself. He glanced over and his eyebrows came together and he put both hands up to his face. Out of his mouth came a quick bark of grief. He ran to the table and scooped at it wildly, to pick it up or to knock it onto the floor, he couldn’t tell.
Then a noise came from inside his mother’s room, a low, quiet chattering. Someone was talking, in a way, but trying to keep from being heard.
Simon grabbed up his books. He looked again at the door. His face was white and shone with sweat. He looked at the books on the floor and on the table and he kicked one of the books. “I didn’t mean it,” he whispered, but then he frowned and looked at the door and said it again louder, over the fire, “I didn’t mean it! I take it back! I take it back!”
As in answer to him, a hissing came from his mother’s room. A hiss and then a bump, and then a louder bump.
Simon looked at the Book and quickly grabbed up a sack. His hands and body moved fast; he suddenly caught up its weight and stuffed it in.
He heard another voice in the room now. His mother’s voice. He heard Elsie Starkey’s voice. She said, “Who are you? What do you want?”
He turned away from the door, yanking up the sack onto his back.
He heard his mother’s trembling voice: “Who’s here? Who is that? What do you want?”
Simon knew that they would come for her. Whatever they might be. They always came for their part. They had repeated that several times. He’d kept her as long as he could, which was as long as they said he could. He’d kept her there just as they said he could in exchange for little Rebeccah first. Now they’d come to take what belonged to them.
He could hear the struggling begin now behind the door, he heard the low rasping voices of the killers growling threats and curses in the forgotten language. Suddenly there came a thrashing form from the room and the thumping sound of fists against flesh. Simon put his hand on the latch of the front door, quietly, slowly, fearful to move, fearful not to move, or to distract the things from their task.
Just as he turned the latch, the door to his mother’s room shattered and her body clumsily landed across the table.
“Simon!” Elsie shouted, her face was already swollen. “Simon!”
Simon shut tight his eyes, his right hand gripping the latch. He’d seen the things in the dark room, and they had seen him. For some reason, they had stopped their onslaught and were observing him. Waiting in the blackness of the room. Now and again, the fire flickering in the fireplace would reveal a swatch of the smooth gray skin, or cast a pale light across the sunken faces. In the reddish light, one could see that perhaps these were once men. Yes, they could be just men who’d become crooked and bent into their own evils—lost in the wilderness, wild and without mercy, their nails sharpened, their eyes quick and flashing as a dog’s, but this was only in the light. As the shadows passed over them, or if they receded into the dark corners of the room, the figures grew ever more twisted and cruel, and then, rising from their backs stretched the webbings of long-fingered wings.
But later, in thinking back on the things, the mind could never be fully satisfied or convinced that it had seen anything more than a trick of the shadows and the wild men of the woods—perhaps a tribe of old natives from deep country.
Now those things held back, but they peered into the room where Simon and Elsie were.
Elsie began to recover, sitting up on the table. “I’ve been asleep?” she said. “How long? Was it a dream? Simon?”
Simon could feel Elsie’s eyes on the back of his head. He turned the latch and disappeared into the night as behind him the things launched from Elsie’s bedroom and onto her.
As he ran from his home he could hear crashing and gurgled screams coming from behind him. This was the end for her. But for him, for him, this was not the end at all.
He held the book tighter to his chest and ran down the main road into town. For a moment Elsie’s face flashed up in his mind. He remembered that she had been there. Someone had taken him away from those people. There had been some blurred time of terror and a strange f
igure between those people and Elsie—those people who made him tired, screamed at him in a language he didn’t understand, caged him. He remembered it as if it was some legend told to him by a storyteller, he remembered some cloaked man fighting with the people who had imprisoned him and then Elsie’s warm hands hugging him close. What had he done?
The memories sickened him. Their softness began to sharpen and mix with the images of these dark things that came to him in the blizzard. They spoke of a power to get revenge on those slavers that took his real mother and killed his true father. They spoke of a power that would free him from his current life, bound to a hopeless mother, in nowhere Sparrow, fiddling with parlor tricks, searching, searching. The Way of the preachers and the church were empty tales told by hypocrites and farm hands. The dark things spoke of practicality, of wealth, of power.
But this mother, Elsie, she had been kind, bright as a flower in the moonlight, now . . . “We will show you these powers, but we will take our part. We always take our part.”
He ran on. He was running in fear deep and true and he knew that now. The fear kept him going. On this night, the agreement between him and the dark things was ended. He had the Book now, though, but he would have to get away, far away. They could do as they pleased, as could he. He was no more protected from them anymore than the rest of the folks, but now he could try the powers.
On up ahead of him, he caught sight of a shape at the edge of the path. Out of breath as he was, he put on an extra burst of speed and cut hard away from the shape, thinking that this would get him by. But instead he found himself suddenly lying on his back and struggling for air.
Something had pounded his chest and dropped him hard into the cold mud, his satchel of books somewhere beside him.
“Simon Starkey,” a man’s voice said to him, “where are you headed in this night?”
