by Josh Kent
Gasps came from the crowd.
“That’s what’s under the glove! Tell them, Vernon! You man of God! Tell them the truth!” Aline stood now and she was shaking with rage.
The people of Sparrow grew very still now and all who were standing took their seats.
“Yes,” Ruth said. “Preacher, is there some truth that you need to tell us?”
May grabbed her father’s hand.
John Mosely looked at his brother and said, “Brother?”
May whispered to her pa, “Pa,” she said, “we know . . .”
“We don’t know nothing, May. Quiet,” he whispered quick back into her ear.
Ruth said, “Take off the glove and show us, Preacher! Show us the evil hand!”
Vernon stuttered, “Now, I . . . this is . . .”
“Yes,” his wife muttered, “show them!”
Vernon cleared his throat and removed the glove. Beneath the glove, there was a hand, white and skinny as bones with purple fingernails, but a living hand nonetheless. The fingers wiggled. He rolled the rest of his sleeve and showed the church the rest of his arm, which was just as white and dead-looking as his hand, and yet it was shot through with blue veins and the muscles inside bulged a little as he turned it for the crowd.
“Yes, the outlander healed my arm, but not with magic or witchcraft, but with a kind of medicine and faith . . .”
“Liar!” his wife screeched. “You’ve gone to see the witch of the woods! He’d gone up to ask her for power over the spook! At least that’s what he says! A spell of protection on Sparrow! But that’s not what he got! Coming back from the witch’s place he thought better of the whole deal and went to the church to ask forgiveness and it was walking in here that his arm was burned up with holy fire! The arm that he swore an oath to the witch with, God burned it up! Whatever it was that he asked that witch for, God saw fit to burn him up, but then he called on the outlander to heal him up! Now we know this Jim Falk is with the witch. They’re all in league! You’re in league too!” She turned to the crowd with tears in her eyes, her right hand still pointing at her husband. “My husband! Your preacher! Is in league with the Evil One!”
“God did not . . . I’m not . . .” Vernon started in, but it was too late.
Gasps and shouts rose from everywhere in the pews now and someone said, “Tie him up!”
“It was a demon that come in the church that twisted up my arm!” Vernon cried.
“Quiet! Servant of the Darkness!” Ruth Mosely’s voice broke clear and hard over the din of the crowd.
Then several men from the front pews jumped up and rushed Vernon and they overcame him, their hands grabbing hard against him and fingernails digging into his neck as they grappled and dragged him away from the pulpit and against the back wall under the wood cross.
“Brother! Brother!” John was shouting and watching everything happen to his older brother, but there was nothing he could do. How could he come to his aid?
Then another sound was heard. Martha and Annabelle Mofat were screaming and then a cold wind blew up through the center aisle and there was the loud clap of the repaired doors of the church swinging open.
There, in the church door, stood James Falk, the outlander, and beside him under her dark veil, the witch.
“Let the preacher go!” Jim yelled at the men.
The men did not and the crowd got quiet and all exchanged glances.
“Let the preacher go,” Jim said and took a step forward.
“Or else what?” someone in the crowd snarled.
“Preacher!” Falk yelled. “The whole town is against you!”
Violet came in with her pistol out. Her wide eyes met Vernon’s and flickered. The doctor walked in with his pistol out.
Huck grabbed his daughter’s hand and Huck and May Marbo rose up and May’s face beamed out when she saw the outlander place his hand on the witch’s shoulder, but whether in fear or in hope, May could not tell, as both were mixed inside her and both felt equally appealing. “Not the whole town.”
The witch raised her hands to speak.
At this, a shot was fired, shattering the glass and causing the group to all jump but the witch.
Another shot came and splintered the ceiling somewhere in the corner. It came out of Clive Skiles’s rifle. “I didn’t have to miss,” he said.
“Well, this is just fine,” Violet said.
“It’s me they want,” Jim said.
“And me,” the witch said.
“And me,” the preacher said.
Huck Marbo produced his pistol and said to the crowd, “Do you know, before my family came into Sparrow, there was trouble? There’s been trouble and tales of trouble for so many years going back, as I hear, before even us Joneses came to Sparrow, ain’t that right, Hattie?”
Httie said, “That’s right!”
Huck continued, “Why, I heard tell that even one of the first families here in the area, the Ingerfells, bore three sons and that the third was a devil with wings and horns, but with a horse’s head and hooves. That it lurked here in these woods and made offspring so as all the horses around here were once feared to be the offspring of this devil. So that sometimes, in the night, you might hear a whinny or a neighing and you’d freeze up wondering if the thing was coming to catch you up. See, this ain’t no kind of news to me about demons and spooks crawling around in the woods around here. These people brought nothing. Well, I don’t know about that exactly,” Huck said, indicating the witch.
Benjamin Straddler stood up and was about to speak when everyone noticed that John Mosely was muttering to himself. He had a pistol of his own and it was pointing at the witch. Tears were dripping from him, and he was muttering, “Evil. Evil. Evil. Evil.”
John Mosely fired and his blast hit the witch and she fell straight back against the floor as if she’d been a sack of rocks.
But John Mosely never saw what happened after that because his own head was whipped back with a burning force and a crack of light. He tumbled down from beside the pew and everyone was running in every direction suddenly.
John flailed, clutching at the empty space where his nose and eyes once were. White smoke filtered from Falk’s Dracon pistol. May was holding her ears and Jim and the doctor rushed to the fallen witch.
The people fled the building, Ruth running, Clive Skiles bounding along the pews, Hattie running with Samuel, the crowd screaming and pushing and falling and kicking out the broken door.
A man’s voice from outside rang clear. “They’ve killed John Mosely! They’ve killed the preacher’s brother!”
“John!” Vernon cried and fell to his knees and hot tears formed in his eyes. “My own brother! No!”
Jim and the doctor looked at the witch. Her body lay still and her right hand was in a tight fist over her chest and smoke curled from beneath the white fist.
“Alive?” Jim asked the doctor.
The doctor grabbed at her hand to feel her wrist, and as he did the hand fell open and inside was a bloody and smoking lump of black lead. The witch’s face moved and beneath that thin, dark veil, the doctor and Jim were sure they saw a smirk that revealed the white curving teeth behind red lips. Then the witch, Wylene, cackled in high, sharp bursts, gleeful and wild, and got all too quickly to her feet. She dropped the smoking shot to the floor and cackled again, shrill and climbing ever higher into the rafters of the little church, ringing like silver knives in the air.
“We must leave this place,” she said. “I’ve heard their thoughts. They mean to shut us up in here and burn us all alive.”
The witch turned to Huck and May, “All of us.”
When they turned to the doorway it was dark and hammers could be heard hammering in the nails. Then the windows went dark too.
The next dawn, the church still burned and burned, bright against the gray light of the morning. There were still a few folks about watching the blaze. The snow had stopped completely and when the church went on burn
ing into the afternoon, many thought that the whispers about the unholy fire might be true.
“How come the church is on fire?” Hattie Jones asked one of the men from up at the ridge who’d come down when the snow got bad. He didn’t recognize the man for sure, but he looked, he thought, like Clive Skiles.
“There was a witch inside,” said Clive Skiles.
Hattie nodded. “You saw that witch in the church?”
“Yessir, and that outlander, and a crew he’d formed I guess with the doctor and all. You was there.”
“Yeah, but I got out quick. What’s the preacher say about all this?”
“Preacher was inside too when they boarded them up. As far as I hear tell, he’d gone over to their side! He was one of them, in league, as they say. And they shot and killed John Mosely, yessir. Ruth, his wife, put a gun in his hand and whispered to him to kill the witch, told him that if he killed the witch, the others might come out from under the spell that had come over them or something as such. Yessir, I was on my way out the door, but then I got involved! All I seen was people running this way and that and John shot at the witch and the witch goes down! And then, bang! He comes falling down and he’s got no more face at all, and he fell right down right there and he was just dead.”
The burning church crackled.
“So that’s what they did, then? They closed it all up and burned it down.”
“Yessir, they were all still inside, some said they could hear ’em all screaming as the flames got to them,” Clive said.
“It sure has been burning a long time,” Hattie said.
“You know,” Clive whispered, “some say it’s a special fire that God caused to happen so as to burn up all the evil inside the church.”
Chapter 17
The snow flew against their faces and the outlander and the witch led the way. Behind her, May thought she could still hear the hollering and yelling of the men who’d set about to burning the church. Hadn’t they?
She held tight to her pa’s hand and he held tight to hers as they rushed along behind Jim and the witch. Jim’s cool blue eyes glinted at her as no Sparrow boy’s ever had when she’d handed him the doctor’s medicine. But now, how could this be? Rushing along suddenly in the night. At one moment they had been in the church and then . . . had she imagined all that?
Her right foot slipped and she almost went down, but her pa’s arm tightened and he said, “Watch!” harsh under his breath.
She knew he couldn’t like the situation they were suddenly in. But they didn’t seem to have a choice now. Somehow, Ruth Mosely got the whole town up and against them. That made less sense to her than following a witch through the dark woods in the snow. Up ahead, May saw the black shape of the witch passing back and forth among the trees. Had she saved them all from the flames of the burning church? Between the smoke and the snow, May couldn’t remember.
There was heat and smoke, choking, running, and then darkness. Darkness for a long time and then the cool wind and the stars and the trees and the snow.
Ahead of her, they moved and she could hear Jim whispering to the witch and the witch whispering back. She could make out the tall shape of the Hill woman walking ahead of her. Around her, the other folk were moving along with them through the snow and darkness. The poor preacher and the doctor too struggling up the side of a rocky hill. The way was growing steeper and steeper. She guessed they might be headed up into the Ridges, where she’d never been. She’d heard of them, she’d seen the folk come down to the church at times and knew that they built good houses, almost as good as the ones that Bill Hill used to. She watched the back of Violet’s head for a moment against the sky and then dip down with the effort of getting up through the rocks.
These people from the Ridges came down once in every so often, mostly when something big was happening. That’s why they’d been down to Sparrow when everyone was at the church. May wondered if anyone from up on the Ridges had seen a spook, or knew about the witch. She’d heard that long ago the people of Sparrow, before it was called Sparrow, had it out over something religious and that those who lost out had moved on up to the Ridges. Whatever it was that had driven them apart, the power of it had faded over the years to the point where someone might come down once in a while. Some of the older people in Sparrow still gave the folk at the Ridges a sidelong glance when they showed up.
Her pa was pulling her up now, and she was climbing then along with the rest of them, using her hands and grasping cold rocks and slippery weeds and brambles in snow, dulled and crisped by the wetting of winter. At last she smelled the crispness of open air, and a strong wind blew across her face and whipped her hair and snow all about.
The sky opened up over her head and dark shadows of crooked rocks stood up in the starlight. Then the clouds closed the hole. But she saw clearly now the figures around her in the darkness and could see their faces in gray and blue shades.
It was dusk and they had come up along the crest of the western side of the hill. In a little line, they stood for a while and watched as the sun, just at the very edge of another row of darkening hills, burned a pink circle behind the veil of the white sky. It was going down.
Jim and the witch had led them the whole way here, but now, as the sun began to set, Jim’s face bowed down and up again. His left hand went to his hip and then up to his head. He took off his hat. He put it back on. He crouched and turned and picked up snow and dirt and turned again.
Watching all this from a little distance away, the doctor turned and looked at Violet, who was standing high up on a rock as if to try and keep off the same spot where the witch was. The witch stood straight and motionless beside a straight and motionless tree.
The doctor looked back at Violet’s face. She looked better. She was better. Different already from the blue-looking woman he had seen, her trembling lips talking about her Bill, her hands steadily firing shots into that thing that picked him up and tried to eat him alive. The sun, disappearing behind the hills, cast a pink light across her face, filling in all the shadows of her angles—her face was full and her cheeks soft and her eyes shone green. But she was thinking of some memory that pained her, and her gaze drifted toward the witch and her feet moved in her brown shoes to keep their footing on the snowy rock where she stood.
The doctor wanted to comfort her, but he couldn’t.
They were all looking down at Sparrow from the big hill in the dark. Down in Sparrow, they could see the flames shooting up to the sky. The church was still burning. Still.
“We should be dead,” Violet said and looked at the doctor’s face looking up at her. “What will we do?” She glanced at the witch, who stood stiff and still as the tree she stood by.
“What is it that happened?” Violet said. “We’re going to need food. Where will we go?”
“The sun is going down,” Jim Falk said. “We need to find shelter and find it quick.”
As if it had heard the thing that Jim said and wanted to make the point, a wolf howled. It wasn’t from far away. It was close. The group shrunk together. May, Huck, Doc Pritham, the preacher, Violet, Jim, and the witch, all of them made a little circle.
There was another howl and a yip. May sniffled a bit and reached out for her pa’s hand and found his arm. She squeezed close to him.
“I won’t let them get you, May,” he said. “No matter what.”
“There is a cave near here,” Violet said. “I remember it being near here. I’ve been up here before. If we can just make it along up that way.” She pointed and waved her hand so that they could all see where she was pointing to.
Jim Falk said, “She’s right. It’s up over that crest. If we can move.”
There were little snarls from in the woods near them.
“It’s too late,” Vernon Mosely said. “They are upon us!”
When Mosely said that, a group of wolves sauntered into the open, blocking the way to the hill beyond where the cave was, just as if they knew that was where the group was
headed.
May whimpered. She had never seen a wolf and she had never smelled one before, but now here they were, right from a nightmare, and they smelled bad.
“Stay in a circle,” the witch said. She looked at Jim. “I am weak from making the tunnel. I don’t know what I can do, but I will do what I can.”
They all wondered, the tunnel?
But Jim was quick and angry. He grabbed the doctor and pulled him forward. “We’ll take them!” he shouted. “Run! Follow Violet! Run!”
Violet ran fast up toward the trees, and the rest followed her as Jim’s gun cracked and the doctor’s gun cracked and flashed and lit up the night. They heard the barking and the yowling of the wolves, they heard Jim shouting and the doctor shouting.
“This way!” Violet called.
May and Huck followed close behind, but May could see out the corner of her eyes that there were dark forms rushing along beside of them. She glimpsed the shadowy shapes of their pointed noses and their sharp ears and heard them panting. She could hear the guns of the doctor and the outlander banging and the flashes from their guns lighting up the woods with green and yellow lightning.
Her pa fired his rifle into the bushes and May shrieked and three wolves scurried. “Stay close, May, stay as close as you can. Don’t look anywhere but straight ahead!”
He was struggling with his leg. She wasn’t sure how long he would be able to keep up with Violet, but she also knew that he was strong. He squeezed her hand hard.
The wind and the darkness moved against them. The gunshots rang in their ears. The wolves that ran to the right and left of them only scattered momentarily. They came right back. One of them rushed across the path in front of them. As Huck ran, which was not very fast with his leg, he let go her hand and struggled to reload his weapon.
“Stay close, May, stay close,” he said again.
The witch and Violet were getting farther and farther away so that May could barely see them against the trees. May shut her eyes tight and opened them at any movement expecting those slavering teeth to clamp down on her leg or her neck. Another wolf rushed out into the path in front of them, and this time it stopped cold and another appeared behind it.
