by Josh Kent
Jim had used the ancient words given to him by his father to restore her to her true form, and when she was restored she offered help.
He looked around again and squeezed his eyes and tried to clear out his mind so he could think of all the possibilities of what might happen if they started out of the woods and someone saw them. He felt around to see if anyone was standing about. Something in his mind told him that it was safe, but they had to go right now, right now, or else someone would come along. He waved at her to come with him and right away.
Wylene looked at him from her shadows. Here was this raggedy man in a beat-up hat who had for some reason restored her to herself. She wondered if he really even knew what he had done or how he had done it or why. Now, for some reason, he was leading her back into the town where she knew her captors from long ago were still lurking, still waiting. Yet there was something that was speaking to her through this broken-looking person. Something from long ago nudged her toward him, and she did move out of the shades and down the embankment toward Jim Falk. She wanted to help him.
There was a worn-out road that went up from what probably used to be a well just at the edge of the wood. Somewhere around here, long ago, might have been a house. They stuck to the edge of the clearing, making their way around the long way around.
The snow was still coming, and it made the clearing a silvery pink and white as it mixed with the morning sunshine. Wylene smiled underneath the veil that hid her face. Her eyes were hungry for the light: she yearned to take off the veil and run into the sunshine, it had been so long, so long.
Jim and Wylene came to a spot where they had to cross directly across the old road and then down into the little hollow where the doctor’s house was. Wylene seemed to have no problem completely vanishing from sight while she stood along the tree line, but Jim was just a man after all. He looked left and right and right and left and squinted and looked and looked again. He couldn’t see much but trees and snow swirling and the old, dirty road.
“Let’s go,” he whispered to her.
They crossed so quickly and vanished into the hollow so fast that anyone who wasn’t staring straight at them would have only thought their eyes were playing tricks on them. But Merla Mosely, who was staring out the window and down the road and right at that spot, saw them both. She saw the shape of the outlander who had brought all the evil, Jim Falk, go across the road, and what she saw following behind him made her shudder. A moving shadow, a shadow that slinked and flickered across the road, following behind him, not pursuing him, but following the way a hound follows a master. Jim was leading a witch into town.
“It’s snowing again,” the doctor said. “It looks like it might get bad out.”
The window was broken because of what the thing had done and the two of them shooting through it.
Violet stared into the doctor’s little fire and wished that she had never called Falk. Violet wished that her husband was still alive. She wished that she could go back to a time when her husband was angry and a strange creature stared in her window. She was only frightened back then. There was part of her too that could still imagine the spook wasn’t real. There was in those times something like a hope that the people in the little town of Sparrow were right after all and that her seeing the spook was on account of that she was crazy. But these were dreams of before, these things could no longer be.
“When will he be here? Why do we have to stay here? Could we not just meet at Huck’s or in the town somewhere?” she asked, and her eyes dropped to her necklace and then back to the doctor.
“Violet, if there are more of those things out here . . .” The doctor stopped and crouched down beside her by the fireplace and stoked it a bit. He got up off his haunches and looked at her. “I have to ask you where you got what you have been taking out of that necklace. I don’t mean to pry, but I do not think that the medicine I have been giving you has helped you as much as it could, and if I know . . .”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what it is,” she snapped. “It was given to me by . . . by a stranger that lives out here in the woods. All I know is that when I take it, I don’t feel afraid anymore.”
At that moment they both turned their heads because they could hear someone coming along the path.
“Doctor, please tell me that’s him and that’s not something else,” she said and tightened her jacket around her.
The doctor kept squinting and looking out the window. Beside him on the table lay the satchel with Simon’s book.
He could hear two sets of steps coming too, tramping through the snow.
The doctor didn’t like what he saw coming up the path. Jim was walking deliberately in front of a figure that the doctor couldn’t make out much except that it appeared to be female, it was wrapped in a black cloak, and it made him uneasy.
Violet, sitting in the rocker, saw the doctor’s hands fidgeting and heard his breath huffing as he tried to make decisions in his mind as to what it was that he saw. She stood up and came up beside him and looked through the busted-out window with him. The doctor, though he appeared soft and round, was more like a boulder than anything. She put her hand on his hard shoulder and asked him, “Who is that?”
Her other hand was raised now as she watched the two figures moving down to the door. Her hand went up to her neck and began fiddling with the empty locket that was hanging there.
A woman with her face veiled was walking behind Jim, her steps light and all her angles sharp. Violet knew why the doctor was huffing. She felt her skin go cold.
A witch.
Violet would not take her eyes off the witch. The witch didn’t take any notice of Violet staring at her. They just came in the door together, like old friends.
The witch was busy studying the doctor’s face and the flames in the fireplace.
“I can’t understand you,” the doctor said as the two stood there.
“Me?” Jim only half turned to look at the doctor with one eye.
“Yes, you. A witch like this killed your mother is what you said. What you told me. And now here you stand?”
The outlander smiled and looked at him and then at Violet. “You believe in all that, witches and such?”
The doctor smiled a bit too, a little amazed, and then looked at the outlander. “How can you trust this witch? Just let her come on in! Maybe she is the same one who killed your mother and knocked you on the head.”
“This witch, as you say, she’s not the same.”
Violet eyed the witch. She was too scared to move, but she didn’t want the witch to know that. “Not the same? The same as what?”
“I am not a witch,” said the witch. “Call me what you like, but a witch is not what I am.”
“See?” Jim said. “We don’t have time for all this and we have business to do. Doctor, why don’t you show me up there by the Starkey house? Tell me what happened, about you shooting that magician,” Jim said and gestured over his shoulder as if back in the direction of the Starkey house.
The doctor squinted and tried to read the face of Jim Falk, but he couldn’t. Jim just looked serious and normal.
Violet’s eyes darted back and forth. “What? Where are you two going? You’re just going to leave me here, with, with this?”
Jim turned and said, “Violet Hill, there is nothing to fear. We won’t be long.”
They left and closed the door.
“Nothing to fear?” she called after him. “Nothing to fear?” She turned in a half-circle away from the witch and picked up the bottle of the doctor’s whisky and looked at the witch and took a big swig. “Nothing to fear.”
The witch sat down on a chair near the fireplace and stretched her white hands toward the fire to warm them. Violet looked at the hands, covered in dark symbols ending in talons. She looked at Jim Falk and the doctor, took another drink, and flicked her eyes once and again toward the witch to try and catch a glimpse of the face hidden behind the veil. Despite the creature’s we
ird clothing and the writing that covered her hands and even crawled up her wrists in places to her white elbows, what Violet felt coming through the veil was not fear—a deep, almost sleepy peace was coming from the witch.
Peace? Violet chased this thought away and put her hand into the sack on her lap and felt the cool, heavy handle of her pistol.
“You’re a dreamer,” the witch suddenly spoke from across the fire in a soft, deep tone.
Violet’s eyes came slowly up and focused on that area of the veil where she thought the witch’s mouth might be.
“You’re a dreamer and you dream dreams, talking dreams and calling dreams. In the tales of the River People who live deep in the woods, there is a story like this. Calling Woman and Talking God. Have you heard the tale?” the witch said, and her voice sounded rich and somehow happy. She spread her hands wide and turned them to warm the backs of them.
“I don’t take in stories that don’t come from the church or a preacher,” Violet said and gripped the pistol tighter. Jim she trusted, and the doctor, sure. Jim had said that the witch would not harm her, but she was in no mood to communicate with the thing.
“I think it’s best if you and I just keep to our own business, don’t you?” Violet said.
“Very well,” the witch said and continued warming her weird hands.
It didn’t take Jim and the doctor long to move their way up the winding path behind the doctor’s house and over the hill to where he had last seen the magician.
Jim looked up the path to the collapsed house where a thin spiral of black smoke was still twisting up over the trees and into the gray sky.
“That’s where the Starkey house was then, right?” Jim asked the doctor.
“Yes,” Doc Pritham said and turned in a circle looking at the ground. His feet crunched the frozen mud.
Jim knelt down by the spot where the doctor told him that the body had been.
“How could I miss?” Doc Pritham stopped spinning and looked down where Jim was.
“You say you shot him in the head?” Jim asked, now reaching down and touching the indentation there in the hard ground of the path.
“Shot him right here, look!” The doctor turned and tapped the back of his own head just under his hat, indicating where he’d put the bullet in Simon—but he wasn’t so sure now.
“Look here.” Jim got up and walked a few paces away up toward the house. “Here’s his feet coming down.” He walked along with the feet. “Coming down.” He pointed in a different place. “Here’s you coming along.”
Jim jogged back down toward the doctor a ways. “Here’s where you stood and fired. It looks like he ran at you.” The mud made it all easy.
The doctor said, “He was very interested, I think, in getting the contents of his sack.”
Jim pondered this for a moment, rubbing his chin and looking into the doctor’s eyes. He hadn’t considered the sack. He hadn’t heard a thing about the sack until just now. Something in his mind told him that the contents of the sack held a clue to where that little baby had disappeared to, a clue to what the preacher said about the witch’s thumb. Somehow, Simon Starkey had gotten a hold of some things that belonged to someone else—someone who was a far piece more powerful than Simon may have understood.
Now Jim came right up to the doctor. “Yes, you shot at him up close, but look here,” he said, ignoring the doctor’s reference about the sack and its contents. “You should have brought the body with you.”
“Yes, I relish the idea of dragging a dead magician through town in the middle of the night, wouldn’t you?”
Jim ignored that and showed the doctor the black blood in the frosted mud and a round little hole a few inches away. “See here,” Jim said crouching again and sticking his finger down into the little round hole. “Your bullet’s down in there somewhere most likely. See where these feet go?” Jim pointed along the ground in a zigzag kind of way until he was pointing at the edge of the woods.
The doctor pulled up in his memory the final bullet that he had snapped off, he thought, into Simon’s brain, but darkness was all he could see. His lips quivered and twisted and his hands curled at his sides. “That magician boy,” the doctor said in a deeper voice and pointed to the smoldering home back up the trail. “He’s in league.”
“Is he now? Either way, we’ll not find the killers by use of his corpse, since there is no corpse,” Jim said, turning his mind on the witch or not a witch, Wylene.
Jim smiled a bit, but hid it from the doctor. He’d read the signs without the help of the leaves.
The two men stood for a while in the frost, listening and looking back and again at the woods and then at the smoking pile that was once a home. They turned and looked down at Sparrow. They needed to get back to Violet and the witch.
The sun was nearly all the way up now, but was only shown by the ever-gradual lightening of the color of the sky from a dim gray to a pale milk color. Snow came from different directions in fitful swirls down through the winding path into town. From here they could see the little church and Huck’s place on the east side, back behind the church. Smoke rose here and there from the scattered little homes in the valley. They could just barely make out the little black spot of the chicken man’s shattered cart. Nothing moved in the valley except the twirling columns of smoke from the chimneys.
“He’s not gone back into town,” Jim said.
“He’s most likely run off,” the doctor said.
“Or he might be looking for the book and his sack,” Jim said.
The doctor didn’t say anything.
Then they saw someone walking across the town toward the church. Then they saw two more. Jim was pretty sure one of them was May, standing in front of where the door had been busted. But there were other people holding rifles. They were looking left and looking right. Then they could make out the forms of Ruth Mosely and John Mosely headed up toward the church.
Jim said to the doctor. “If someone saw me . . .”
The two rushed back into the woods and through the path to the doctor’s house as snow started dumping out of the sky and everything started to turn white.
Violet was chewing on some hard bread, still watching warily the witch on the other side of the fireplace, when the two men came through the door.
Jim said, “Grab up your things, Violet.”
The doctor moved forward and picked up a bucket of dirt and threw it on the fire.
“We’ve got to move. Simon, the magician, is alive,” the doctor said and picked up the sack of books that once belonged to Simon and rolled it up tight. “He’s moving off to the west.”
Jim watched the doctor pick up the sack.
“He’s following after them,” the witch said not moving from her rocker.
“Them?” the doctor asked.
“The ones he hates.”
Jim said, “We don’t have time for this. Something’s going on down at the church. We saw some men with rifles and Ruth and John rushing up there.”
A fit of snow burst suddenly into the broken window.
The four of them said nothing, but Violet gathered her things and the witch, Wylene, stood up.
Chapter 16
Benjamin Straddler walked alongside Huck Marbo. May was behind them, looking this way and that. Each of them, their breath steaming, carried a bundle of wooden slats or tools, a heavy bag of nails jingled at Benjamin’s side.
“Bill would have fixed this right up,” Huck said, looking at Benjamin Straddler. Benjamin was looking at the sky.
“He sure would have,” Benjamin said. “I’d like to see a blue sky sometime, wouldn’t you?”
May nodded her head and Huck said, “Yes.” The snow started.
The three of them got to the church in the center of town. Benjamin Straddler, with a wide smile on his face, took a long look up and down at the busted door on the front of the little church.
Huck got himself up the stairs and began studying the twisted
hinges.
“I’d say that we can do a part fix today,” Huck said. “At least get this part of the door back on, but we’ll have to do more cutting and all to get this right—more than we can do. We’ll have to ask Hattie, or get someone from outside Sparrow, to fashion a whole new door if we want it to look right again, seeing as how the man who made the door is the one that tore it down and I guess he’s most likely dead now.”
May thought about that. She thought about Bill and Violet and remembered back to when she was just a little girl. She remembered sitting in the pews at church between her ma and pa and turning around in the little wooden pew while the preacher was talking. She remembered turning around and seeing Bill and Violet sitting there in the back, their faces looking bright as the sun came in the little windows along the side, the sunlight making Violet’s red hair glow orange. Now what?
May looked at her pa and Benjamin Straddler and felt good to be with them. She felt something changing, but couldn’t quite tell exactly what it was. Something was changing in Sparrow and maybe inside of her, but she wasn’t sure if it was for the better. The sun seemed a little darker and the colors and shapes of things a little harsher. She looked back and forth.
Her father started in on some instructions, pointing and gesturing, but she couldn’t pay attention.
“Alive!” she remembered Benjamin saying over breakfast. “I know it!”
May smiled and almost laughed remembering her pa’s face all scrunched up and concerned and then across at Benjamin’s face all wide open and young-looking, his eyes glittering. “Your Anna lives, Huck Marbo!”
But her pa was angry now. “You need to keep your religion to yourself, Benjamin Straddler! You may think certain things or see certain things. But that’s not the way it is with all of us.”
Benjamin turned his eyes down and looked at his eggs. He fumbled a bit as he talked about seeing his own father’s face in the face of the outlander, and talking of how his bad dreams had gone, and how the fear in his heart had disappeared. A lot of what he said didn’t make sense, not even to him, and Huck couldn’t see where he was going with it or why he was even saying it. May couldn’t piece it back together in her mind, but what she could see and what her father saw was that Benjamin Straddler, no matter how clumsy his words were, believed every word of what he was saying and that his eyes were shining.
