HEX

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  That was an argument Justin couldn’t refute, and it more or less ended the debate.

  A car approached St. Mary’s Church. The elderly volunteers at the fountain stuck their necks out and looked at it, but the car stopped at the roadblock and turned left. The ladies relaxed. Probably someone from town. If any Outsiders had been spotted, the old ladies would already have gathered around Gramma to walk with her, busily chattering among themselves. And if she stopped, Tyler knew (and this, more than anything else, was what truly made him ashamed of being a Black Spring boy), they’d huddle around her and start practicing church hymns like a kind of Glee for the near dead. The deeper meaning behind this was beyond him, but it was a brilliant example of reverse psychology: No one would ever notice the gaunt women with the chains standing in their midst if they didn’t know she was there already. And no one could stomach an old folks’ choir long enough to find out.

  The woman with the sewn-shut eyes went past the patio right in front of them and advanced to the square, watched closely by the ladies at the fountain. Tyler turned the GoPro. It was essential for the success of their experiment that no Outsiders be there. Just as he was about to bask in the luck of their good fortune, Sue came out and stood in the doorway as if suddenly struck by this public-spirited and hitherto unseen sense of responsibility for her underage guests.

  “Got any pesticide?” Jaydon asked.

  Sue laughed and said, “If that worked, we would have tried it long ago, Jaydon,” not realizing that it was her they needed it for, not the other witch. But Burak got the hint; he walked up to her with some lame excuse about planning his work schedule, and they both went inside together.

  Justin grinned. “That woman would let you screw her even sideways, Jaydon.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Guys, shut up,” Tyler said. “It’s gonna happen.” He took the GoPro out from under the menu and shielded it with his body from the security cam that was mounted on The Point to Point Inn’s façade across the intersection. To their hilarity, the camera was still hanging at a low, crooked angle, just as Jaydon had left it last night after hitting it with a long stick. Jaydon was like a living ordnance map when it came to the square and its surroundings, since he and his mom lived behind the butcher shop on the other side. He had said there were two other cameras that had a view of the lamppost on the eastern side of the cemetery. One was located in the bushes at the highest corner of Temple Hill, which they had neutralized by hanging a pine branch in front of it. The second camera was inaccessible. It was hidden in a window casing of Crystal Meth Church, but they had decided there were too many trees in front of it to cause real problems at night.

  It was 2:57 a.m. when they hung Burak’s long black cloth like a curtain from the branches of the oak tree that forked over the cemetery hedge. It was 3:36 when they wrung out the soaked curtain and rolled it up. And in all that time only one car had come down Deep Hollow Road, and it had passed without slowing down.

  The only visible evidence of their operation was that the streetlight behind the curtain had gone out at 3:17, just when Jaydon cut through the exposed electrical cable that ran to the underground power box. Fortunately, the lamppost itself was not too tall, and its classical-looking fitting was aluminum, not cast iron. Easy-peasy. By the time they had cleaned everything up and had raised their toast to science, the lamppost was no longer standing against the cemetery hedge, but was neatly planted in the middle of the sidewalk, a foot and a half to the left.

  Ground Zero.

  So. As you can see in the clips below, she comes straight out of the woods and walks west down Deep Hollow Road. She arrives at the square, walks along the creek, up over the sidewalk, turns a kind of three-quarter pirouette at the cemetery hedge as if she’s the Ballet Princess or something, and stands facing the street, as if someone had pulled her plug. I mean, we’re talking serious runtime error here. A wisp of smoke rising from her hair would add to the dramatic effect. Exactly eight minutes and thirty-six seconds later, it’s as if someone had pushed Ctrl+Alt+Del, because she starts walking again and disappears behind the houses on Hilltop Drive. And she does this every week, in exactly the same way (except the stupid thing is that no one knows exactly where and how she disappears—ideas, guys?).

  It all happened in a flash.

  When the woman with the sewn-shut eyes walked up along the creek and passed the SLOW—CHILDREN sign, the boys on the patio forgot their boredom and became so excited that they left their seats and rocked from one leg to another. They couldn’t help it. It felt as if they were witnessing one of those rare significant moments in human history that would outlive even Wikipedia, like the invention of penicillin or the first explosion of the silicone breast implant. Tyler forgot his fear of Doodletown and no longer bothered to keep his GoPro out of sight of the surveillance cam. This had to be captured.

  “O-M-F-G,” Justin said, without taking a breath.

  “She’s gonna see it … she’s gonna see it … she’s gonna see it…”

  She didn’t see it. With an audible thud, the Black Rock Witch walked straight into the lamppost and fell backward on her butt.

  The ladies at the fountain jumped up, all shrieks and hands covering mouths. Tyler and his friends looked at one another in silent, speechless amazement, their jaws down on the sidewalk. Burak had appeared in the restaurant doorway. It was as if the impact had sucked all the oxygen out of the air. It exceeded their wildest dreams. They had just floored a three-hundred-year-old supernatural phenomenon, and they had it on fucking video.

  Gramma was squirming on the drying sidewalk at the foot of the lamppost, as you might imagine an enchilada squirming in cellophane. All the creepiness her mutilated face and reputation had bestowed on her had been knocked for a loop. Now she just looked helpless, like a baby bird fallen from its nest. There was no way she’d be able to stand up on her own. One of the elderly women approached her, hand on cheek, and for a moment Tyler was afraid the woman had made the suicidal decision to help her up when something totally freaky happened. In a flash, the witch was back on her feet. The elderly woman recoiled with a scream. One moment Gramma had been lying there, helpless and twitching on the sidewalk; the next moment, like in a stop-motion video, she was up and chafing against the lamppost with her chains, as if she were trying to walk straight through it.

  “Jesus fuck…” was all Jaydon could manage.

  “Did you get that?” Lawrence asked. Tyler looked down and discovered that he had just made the most dire mistake of his budding career as a reporter: In his consternation, he had let his camera dangle and shoot some super-interesting footage of the sidewalk, and had missed the witch’s stop-motion trick. He felt his cheeks turn purple and cursed himself, but the others were much too engrossed in what she was doing to pay any attention to him.

  “What’s going on?” Sue asked as she struggled to see something from the doorway behind Burak. No one took the trouble to inform her.

  “Look at that,” Justin said. “She’s trying to push right through it.”

  It was true. For three hundred years the witch had been passing through that very spot, and today was no exception, lamppost or no lamppost.

  “She’s, like, preprogrammed,” Lawrence said.

  “She’s, like, fucking the lamppost,” Jaydon said.

  After half a minute of metal grating against metal, she suddenly slipped past it, did her three-quarter pirouette, and disconnected.

  Justin was the first to laugh.

  Burak was the second.

  Then they all laughed, wild, uncontrollable laughter, and they slapped each other on the shoulders and punched each other on the arms. The humorless crones at the fountain turned around and fixed their eyes on the group of boys. They saw the GoPro and one of them shouted, “Hey, what have you got there? What are you doing with that camera, young man?”

  “Busted!” Jaydon roared. “Which one of you pushed her over?”

  This caused general confusion among
the women, as if they were seriously considering the possibility that one of them had pushed her (that, or people over seventy lost all their talent for clever comebacks), and that made the boys laugh even harder. They were still laughing when they slid past the roadblock a minute later and ran down Deep Hollow Road, and they were laughing even harder when, two hundred yards farther on, they could no longer suppress their curiosity and stopped on the shoulder to watch the footage on the GoPro’s LCD screen.

  * * *

  THE IMAGES SHOULD hold no surprises; you know what’s there. These are the first pictures in journalistic history to feature a supernatural phenomenon going for a nosedive. They’re so unique that they go viral on YouTube in a matter of minutes and are celebrated and debunked on hundreds of blogs, not to mention being endlessly repeated on Jimmy Fallon. But of course that doesn’t happen; of course the images are kept secret. Still, that same evening they do achieve a certain cult status.

  The boys weren’t born yesterday and they know they’re in for it. They figure there’s only one way to escape Doodletown: to step forward on their own and play the holy innocent.

  “We were just fooling around,” Tyler says when they show Robert Grim a director’s cut of the clip. In this version, you only see the witch walk up along the creek, bump into the lamppost, and topple over. Grim plays the images directly from the memory card. They’re the only recordings from that morning still in the camera—Tyler fixed it that way. The rest is safely tucked away on his MacBook, password protected. Tyler tries to add a contrite quality to his voice by imagining a halo hanging over his head, but at a certain point he can’t hold back his laughter.

  Robert Grim is laughing, too. In fact, tears stream down his cheeks when he sees what a trick the kids have pulled. He laughs for the same reason the boys laugh, and for the same reason the regulars at the Quiet Man Tavern laugh when they crowd around Grim’s laptop that night. None of them realizes that this is more than a bit of amusement over the witch’s vaudevillian pratfall: It’s a triumph, small and inconsequential though it may seem, over the very thing that has cast a shadow over their lives for as long as they can remember. Within the laughter lies a collective relief so deep-seated that it becomes a little uncanny. And later on, when Tyler realizes why, it scares him to the marrow.

  “Officially, I can’t approve of this, of course,” Robert Grim says, after pulling himself together and wiping the tears from his eyes. But then he just starts roaring again. Without a murmur the boys agree to his proposal: In order to steer clear of the Council, they must put everything back as it had been, pay for the severed cable out of their own pockets, and spend the rest of the week picking up trash in Ladycliff Park.

  While he’s in bed that night, Tyler gets a PM from Jaydon:

  @QT Man. Falling #ag mks evrybdy crack up.

  FCKD UP!

  At that point, Tyler is still dazed by the success of the lamppost test (although he gets seriously stymied while writing his report for OYE when Lawrence asks him, “Okay, but what does this all prove?”), so he doesn’t yet understand what Jaydon means.

  But the next day, as he’s doing his cleanup work in the park and sees the faces of the people in the rain, it begins to dawn on him. Everybody seems to know what he has done, and from one day to the next he has become a cult hero. No one says a thing, but they all smile at him and silently express their support. It’s those smiling faces that get to him. They should seem pleasant, but they’re not. They’re perverse, like they always have been. Because when these faces smile, he no longer recognizes them. They’re faces that have forgotten how to smile. They’re faces with too much skin on them, too many wrinkles for their years. They’re faces that are leading lives of their own, and every day they sag a little further. They’re flattened faces, grim faces, faces under insurmountable stress. They’re the faces of Black Spring. And when they try to smile, it looks like they’re screaming.

  That evening Tyler lies in bed with a terrible premonition of darkness and horror, and there are two images that keep him awake until the crack of dawn: screaming faces in the rain and the falling witch. Then they fade to black.

  FIVE

  THE FORMER POPOLOPEN Visitor Center at the bottom of Old Miners Road had been the property of the United States Military Academy at West Point since 1802. Still on display in the frieze on the outer wall was the tiled tableau with the school’s motto in large, old-fashioned letters: DUTY—HONOR—COUNTRY. Now the outpost was abandoned and the officers at The Point went out of their way to avoid it, but the flag with the eagle emblem still hung in the humble museum at the visitor center, where you could find nostalgic sepia prints of army officers dressed in tails and women wearing fur collars. The visitor center was now closed, too. But if you happened to peer inside, you might be able to make out a grubby black-and-white photo hanging inconspicuously in a corner, a picture of St. Mary’s Church Square. In it, three women dressed in rags and with their eyes painted shut were leaning forward and shaking their fists at a small group of children in knee pants and heavy overcoats. In their clawlike hands they held broomsticks, the kind chimney sweeps used at the beginning of the previous century. The photo’s caption read: ALL HALLOW’S EVE CELEBRATION, 1932.

  But even if the photo witches had been captured jamming their broomsticks up the children’s little behinds and spinning them around until they burst into flames, it wouldn’t have spoiled one itsy bit of Robert Grim’s excellent mood. Just after midnight on the night of the lamppost incident, he left the Quiet Man and walked downhill, a broad grin on his face and his laptop under his arm.

  It was rare for Grim to be in such high spirits, and given the fact that he had been officially admonished by Colton Mathers earlier that day, it was all the more astonishing. The councilman’s poor conservative ego had felt locked out of that lamppost business. To call Robert Grim progressive was like calling Auschwitz a Boy Scout camp, but Colton Mathers’s conservatism had fallen to an altogether different, amphibian low, as if it had been scorned by evolution itself after crawling out of the primordial swamp and, out of pure misery, had turned around and crept right back in. Mathers’s excuse was God; but then the Crusades were God’s work, too, Grim reasoned.

  And so were blue laws.

  And jihad.

  He walked toward Old Miners Road. The next day it would rain, a dull, persistent rain that would continue through the whole first week of October, but now it was dry and the clouds drifted through the air in dark wisps. Grim fished the keys to the former visitor center out of his pocket and went inside. He didn’t have night duty, but he felt too elated to sleep. He locked the door behind him, walked behind the counter in the dusty darkness, and went down the three flights of stairs at the end of the hallway to the secret that lay sunken in the hillside.

  It was no accident that the former military outpost had been built against the steep crest of the hill, since of course its main purpose had not been to house the Popolopen Visitor Center. The income that had accrued from renting the building to the private owners of the Black Rock Forest Reserve until they moved north to Cornwall in 1989 had covered most of the expenses The Point incurred for running its own covert operation: the supervision of the residents of Black Spring. For Robert Grim, the goal was subtly different: saving their damn skins.

  The interior of the HEX control center looked like a cross between NASA Mission Control in Houston and a dilapidated neighborhood clubhouse. Next to the coordination room with its big screen and horseshoe-shaped computer desk there were well-maintained video and microfilm archives; the town’s network provider room; a small library of the occult; a storeroom for smoke screens, which resembled theater props more than anything else (the large artifacts, such as the construction hut for when she appeared on public roads, were kept in a shed on Deep Hollow Road); a lounging area with old, stained sofas; and a small kitchen without a dishwasher. The control center had been renovated many times over the years, and modernized with both an eye toward technica
l progress and upstate, penny-pinching provinciality. As the HEX security chief, Robert Grim had always had the feeling that he was playing a part in a James Bond movie directed by the mentally deprived. The most painful example of this was the cardboard box donated weekly by Colton Mathers that contained instant ramen noodles and Lipton tea in fourteen different flavors.

  The electric kettle had been out of service for months.

  But tonight, even the thought of Mathers’s petty face failed to shake Grim’s upbeat mood. He entered the coordination room and bid the night shift, Warren Castillo and Claire Hammer, an almost musical good evening.

  “You get laid or something?” Warren asked.

  “Better,” Grim said. “I’ve had a gala premiere.” With a grin, he put the laptop on the desk.

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “Hero!”

  Warren laughed out loud, but Claire snapped like a mousetrap. “Robert, what the hell are you thinking?” she asked. “You’ve already rubbed Colton the wrong way once today, and you don’t want to do that again.”

  “What’s he gonna do, bawl me out again?”

  “According to protocol…”

  “Fuck protocol. The whole town is behind me. They loved it. Absolutely loved it. They need this, Claire. Let them blow off some steam once in a while. We have enough to put up with here. And Colton’s sorry ass appreciates a practical joke every now and then.”

  Warren raised his eyebrows. “Colton Mathers appreciating practical jokes is as unlikely as a Disney movie where everybody dies in the end of internal hemorrhaging.”

  “I’m just saying, be careful, Robert,” Claire said. “This is going to come back and hit you hard.”

  “Karma’s a bitch. Enough about this. Where’s our lovely lady tonight?”

  Warren dragged the digital map to the main screen, which marked her most recent appearances with tiny lights. One of them, somewhere in lower Black Spring near Route 293, was blinking red. “She’s been on Weyant Road, in Mrs. Clemens’s basement, since half past five. It’s supposed to be packed with furniture. Mrs. Clemens didn’t see her until she went down to get a can of corn. She’s jammed between a massage chair and an ironing board.”