The Witch at Sparrow Creek: A Jim Falk Novel by Josh Kent

Author:Josh Kent [Kent, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2015-04-05T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Maybe he was alive, maybe he was dead, maybe he was both. After they burned the thing out in front of the doctor’s house, the three of them had gone to Violet’s place to see. To see if the dead and yet living Bill was in the house. Of course, he wasn’t. There were pools and smears of blood and the table was shattered and the front door was removed and splintered. No Bill.

“I’ve been seeing that spook for years,” Violet said after she’d got a little drink and sat at one of the chairs by the smashed table, the one that wasn’t broken. “Just seeing it in the woods looking at me in the night, looking at our house, looking in the window . . . The folks around here and at church and all, they had me thinking I was crazy. For a long time it didn’t seem to care about this place; it was like it was just watching.” She fingered the locket around her neck. “They had me thinking I was crazy, and I thought that maybe I was crazy and that I had started seeing things.” Her eyes began to focus on things around her—Jim standing in the busted doorway listening, the doctor looking into the other room, looking up at the ceiling and then looking back at Violet.

“Even during the blizzard, even when I saw it eating the dog and those kids . . . I rubbed my eyes and thought maybe I was seeing things. Maybe I was. Why did other people not see the same things?” She looked down at her lap and back up at Jim.

Jim pulled his little book from his belt and flipped the pages with his bandaged hand. “Violet,” he said, “Violet, you said that the Starkey baby went missing.”

Violet took a moment to come back from whatever vision was before her eyes and finally said, “That’s right.”

“How do you mean, missing?” Jim asked.

“I mean missing,” Violet said. “Elsie said that the baby went missing.”

“Missing,” Jim said and made a frown.

“Missing,” Violet said.

Jim looked at the doctor, who was looking at Violet. Violet’s head was in her hands. She was looking at the floor through her fingers. She was trying to imagine what it would be like not to be afraid, she was trying to remember when she was a girl and wasn’t afraid. She drew up images of a porch full of sunshine and her mother’s hands on her shoulders, she saw Bill laughing as she tried to saw wood, she drank hot coffee in her mind. She thought of Bill again and her heart filled up with freezing water. She rubbed her chest.

Violet squeezed her eyes and opened them again. Jim was asking her about Elsie’s baby. She looked up at Jim and said, “I don’t remember her name. Elsie came in one day after the blizzard and things had started to warm a little and she said, ‘I can’t find her.’ That was the last I saw of her.

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