The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel by Josh Kent Read Free Book Online Page A

his mind, a pulse. He could feel the spook now, but it
had moved far up into the hillside somewhere. It seemed unconcerned with them.
    May whispered. Her eyes were darting from side to side,
and she would turn once in a while in great fear to look back up the path.
“What kind of a thing is a spook?”
    Jim said, “May, it all depends. I don’t know for sure,
but none of them are good.”
    “Mr. Falk,” she said as she looked up at him. The fear
was bright in her brown eyes. “Does the Evil One send them?”
    Jim Falk looked at her long, square face and saw softness
in her features. He wanted to comfort her, but instead he told the truth.
“Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes the Evil One does send them.”
    He felt her shudder with her whole body when he said
it. Then he said, “Let’s get you into town and then I’ll come back out here and
maybe, after that, we won’t have to worry about it anymore.”
    “What will you do?” May asked.
    “My job,” Jim said and meant it.
    Jim got May into town.
    She squeezed his arm pretty hard and ran off toward her
pa’s shop without looking back at him.
    Jim unrolled his gear bag and got out his gear and checked
it. He laid down his coat. Then he geared up.
    His hatchet he slung over his left shoulder on a long,
tightly braided leather strap. This hatchet had been his pa’s, and his pa had
executed many evil things with it. He adjusted the strap around his waist so
that it wouldn’t drag along as he ran.
    Then he fed the Dracon pepperbox pistol with six shots
of silver-lode and holstered it. This was the weapon and ammo Barnhouse had
secured for him. He wished he had packed better ordnance; he wished Barnhouse
was along with him; but this was it, and it was time.
    Finally, he put on his leather shirt and collar. This
protected his neck and chest from claws and spines and raggedy teeth.
    He hefted his hatchet a moment in his right hand, straightened
his hat, and plunged into the woods.
    He moved fast.
    Outlined in his memory, punched like a stamp, Ithacus
Falk stood. This was his pa. “When you’re trained in on the jitters, the
jitters is trained in on you. That’s the thing, boy.”
    These woods were thick, and it wasn’t long until all
he could hear was the noise of his breath and his boots crunching on the dead leaves.
Once he got in a ways, he stopped again and unraveled his pack. From inside a
small pocket deep in, he pulled out a leather pouch. Out of this, he got two
green as grass leaves. He put them in his mouth and chewed them. Then he
swallowed them with his eyes closed.
    He took a good drink from his flask, rolled his pack
up, and then started back slow up the hill. The leaves opened up the colors a bit.
    Where there had been only black and gray, now there was
brown and some red, even some purples and a lemon yellow.
    Then his nose opened up too. The crisp, black smell of
mud and the raspberry and smoke smell of the moving wind filled up his nose. He
heard now too the sleeping insects waiting, buried, for spring. Mostly, though,
he could feel the jitter-trail now, heavy as wet rope, leading him through the
trees.
    The hill rose up and up and up, and Jim walked slowly.
This served to conserve his energy as well as keep the noise down.
    The two main things he was going to do today were completely
out.
    He marched and stopped and ran and stopped and looked
through the woods and ran and stopped again.
    Finally, he came up over a crest and saw it. There it
was. Hunched over a log. It was an ugly, messed-up thing and Bill was right—its
eyes were like egg yolks and its face was gray.
    It kept using one of its mangled claws to push its drooping
bottom jaw up. As if it couldn’t keep its own mouth closed for the weight of
its lower jaw.
    The whole beast looked built from the throw-away parts
of other animals: goats, horses, fish; scales glittered under fur, antlers
twisted out of its back and head, and horns sprouted from its legs and thighs.
    What’s it doing