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

scrabbling its lopper-jawed self all
over that log? Lookin’ for what?
    Jim hunkered down behind a lightning-cracked tree near
the edge of the clearing. The wind was mercifully still so the thing might not
pick him up right away, but Jim knew it was just a question of time now. When
the attention came off the log its full focus would be on him.
    The spook paced now, back and forth, its wet eyes staring
at the log.
    There must be something alive in there.
    He could see the log shaking a little, and it was just
wide enough for maybe a rabbit or a mole or a skunk.
    And then there was a skunk, and, just like that, the
wind shifted the stink his way.
    “And the little skunk said, ‘Well, bless my soul,’” he
mumbled.
    Now up came the skunk skittering through the woods and
straight past Jim. Jim looked up and the spook caught him in the eyes and held
him in its pinhole pupils.          
    Jim heard a voice in his head. It was the low, sinister
voice of the spook. “Jim Falk,” it asked, “do you want to die?”
    Jim said, “No.”
    The thing rambled forward shaking its massive head and
wheezing, a few pincers emerging on long, black stalks from under its mane.
    Jim stood and steadied himself.
    It stopped by a tree and cocked its enormous head. Its
jaw lolled against the ground. It froze. Its gaze fixed on him. It gathered itself.
Jim watched its muscles bunching.
    Jim threw his coat’s left breast open. The Dracon pistol
glinted mutely in the gray forest.
    The spook lunged at him, and Jim Falk drew the weapon
and popped the trigger in one move.
    His hand went numb with the blast, and a singing entered
his ears. The flash of the weapon left red, sunny swirls on his vision, and his
nose burned with the blue smell of powder smoke.
    Six balls of the special silver-lode erupted from the
gun and met all at once with flat, wet thuds against the spook.
    One in the thing’s head below the left eye, one in the
center of the chest, one in the pooch of the thing’s baggy stomach, one in its
wrinkly neck, one in its left leg and one in its right.
    “One says good morning and one says good night,” Jim
Falk said and watched it drop dead. The eyes in the head still moved.
    Jim holstered his gun and pulled his weird hatchet.
He could see the silver-lode sinking away into the beast, producing gray twirls
of smoke.
    He leapt on its molting back and hacked full force at
the muscular, convulsing neck of the spook.
    Forged to the purpose, his hatchet rose and fell and
stuck and sawed and rose and fell and twisted and pulled many, many times before
the neck was severed enough to permit him to wrest off the head.
    The forest floor was matted then with black juice and
offal. Nothing would grow here in spring.
    Jim used both hands and tossed the wide, ugly head to
the side. The eyes, though dulled in luster, still blinked slowly and watched,
the mouth yawning in despair, as Jim doused its separate body in the special
burning oil and, as with flint and tinder, set it ablaze.
    The smoke billowed black and thick.
    Jim looked at the head and the face of the thing. It
was cruel, he thought, that something so utterly pitiful, false, and evil-bent should
be alive.
    Then Jim wrapped up the head in a woven blanket and tied
it with a cord.
    He headed down the hill and, at the bottom, back toward
the road. He headed for Violet and Bill’s place.
    The sun washed through the white sky. It waved and flickered
through the creaking black trees. It reminded him exactly of golden wheat and
warmth—a time his father had dunked Jim’s hands in warm water when he was a boy
and rubbed his big coarse hands over his own. “Get all the dirt off for
dinner.”
    Jim got a little smile then and slung the head of the
thing over his left shoulder and walked onto the road as the rays of the sun
disappeared back into the clouds.
    
    Violet was out on the porch. She was up on a stepstool
and trying with a rag and water to clear out the rest of a wasps’ nest