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

breathing.
Even though they tore at him to kill him, his memory of Fennie swelled. There
was no spit for him to swallow.
    He chopped hard then at his right. The back haft of his
hatchet cracked the skull of a wolf that was ripping at his right forearm.
    That one yipped out then and let go.
    Jim tried to get up and slid a bit on the soaking floor
of the wood. He wondered if he lay in rain or in his own blood or in the blood
of the wolves, and figured probably all three. A picture flashed in his mind
that he had seen in one of Barnhouse’s books: it was a scratchy drawing of a
man with a wolf head holding a hatchet. There were words underneath the drawing:
“Vryka had turned.”
    He tried again to get up and he was able to half stand
now.
    The woods got murky and he thought he might have seen
the wolves running off, but others, many others stayed. They were staying, waiting.
Why weren’t they killing him? He saw some snouts go up into the air as if they
suddenly had a scent, even in all the rain.
    Jim’s right arm felt flat and ached. He tried to
move it.
    In the gray and blue light, blood rolled from his fingertips
and mingled in the black water. But his hand only shook.
    The woods around him faded in and out. A huge wind blew
the treetops. The sky went dark. Thunder rolled. The rains poured on. The wolves
looked as if they were traveling around him in a circle, a spinning circle,
that soon was one long wolf with a thousand hollow-lit eyes.
    He couldn’t feel his right arm. He felt around for himself.
He grabbed his belt with his left hand; he couldn’t feel it. His hatchet seemed
to float in front of his face.
    Heaviness came to him.
    He staggered and tumbled back to the ground again and
thought about May Marbo. Her teeth were white and then crooked, like warm ivory
vines. He felt he could remember her from somewhere else—if he could only reach
out to her. She was right there, holding his pistol out to him.
    He struggled just enough to sit up again, and then he
half stood. He was going to make it. If he could just get at his pistol . . .
Through the blurring rain and the wind, he thought he saw May holding it up to
him in the rain.
    Then it happened. A wolf, he thought, leapt from behind
him and took his neck in its maw. As he flipped, he saw the wolf that had come
for him. He was certain that around each of its silver eyes he saw other eyes,
so that the wolf’s face had four eyes on each side of its head and that from
its fanged mouth extended something that looked like flexing spines.
    He saw May turn with a wide mouth, covering her eyes
as this monster wolf dropped him to the ground and, as the forest faded from his
vision, May faded too. The sky became the trees. His head banged on a rock. The
raging of the wolf at his neck became quiet now, a tickling stream in his ears.
    He saw another shape then. A hulking form passed onto
the trail, waving its thick arms. It lurched from the corner of his vision.
    There was a flash and a noise like a thunder-crack.
    He was wet with his own blood as the giant wolf leapt
over him, wildly dashing away. The figure leaned over him.
    The night faded out.
    
    May put a cloth on his head. His skin looked soft and
white and there was a fever running in him fierce.
    “Make sure to keep those bands tight and don’t let him
move his arms,” Doc Pritham said. “He may wake up soon. When he does, come and
get me immediately.”
    Doc Pritham stood. May looked at his old face and his
transparent blue eyes. He talked with some kind of heavy accent from the North,
but May could understand him very well. In fact, most people could understand
him fine; some people just pretended not to.
    She nodded.
    “This collar he wears around his neck—I am not sure where
he found such a thing,” the doctor said and pointed at it. “This is what saved
his life. Otherwise, crunch! The wolf would have had his neck and his head
would have come right off.” The doctor coughed and looked at May’s