HEX

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  “That’s terrible!” Bammy cried. “So she had to choose between her children?”

  Pete shrugged. “They weren’t exactly sweethearts back then. It was a cold wind that blew over from the Old World. Accusations and convictions of witchcraft were the order of the day. Katherine had no choice, so she killed her son to save her daughter, after which she was sentenced to the noose as an act of mercy. They didn’t hang her themselves, though: She was forced to jump of her own accord, to symbolize atonement and self-chastisement. When she was dead, her body was thrown into one of the witch’s pools in the woods for the wild animals. That’s the way it usually happened. Either that, or they would be burned at the stake. Innocent, of course.”

  “How awful,” Bammy muttered.

  “Except, in this case, she wasn’t all that innocent,” Grim said. The Delarosas looked at him.

  “Yeah, well, we don’t know that,” Pete said hastily. “We don’t know if she was guilty of the crimes she was convicted of. Even in Black Spring, it is a little far out to make those assumptions. This much we do know: The settlers believed she had raised her son from the dead, and that was enough for them. Looking back, it’s possible, even probable, that during her lifetime she possessed certain powers, but there’s no indication that she performed miracles or used her gift to harm anyone. What’s more likely is that her violent death, preceded by horrible torture and being forced to kill her own child, made her what she is now. But that’s all guesswork. In the world of the occult, we don’t really have a lot of reference material, you know.”

  “Good,” Burt Delarosa said. He tossed back his Stoli. “So you guys have your own village ghost.” He produced a high-pitched laugh, as if he were surprised to hear himself say those words, and he lifted his empty glass to Grim. “That’s terrific. So you were telling the truth when you called me, you son of a bitch. I thought you were pulling my leg. Well … of course I thought you were pulling my leg.”

  “What are you talking about?” Bammy asked, looking bewildered.

  “The day he and that woman tried to bribe us. That night he called me on my cell phone and tried it again, with some cock-and-bull story about the Wicked Witch of the West. I didn’t tell you because I was shocked by how far they were willing to go with their badgering, and I didn’t want to upset you. And … well, you know what we thought about them, honey.”

  “Sorry,” Grim admitted, without any noticeable irony.

  “You called her a village ghost,” Pete said, “which is not entirely correct, but it’s close. You don’t seem to be having much trouble accepting the reality of something very peculiar hanging out in your bedroom. Why didn’t you guys call the police when you saw her? That’s the first thing most people do when they encounter an intruder. Or maybe an ambulance, given the state she’s in?”

  The Delarosas exchanged awkward glances and didn’t know what to say. A sudden feeling of déjà vu crept over Steve, as it so often did when they were giving new folks the lowdown. It only happened a couple of times a year, if they were lucky, and usually at a more civilized hour. But the hour had nothing to do with what he was recalling. It had been eighteen years ago, with the same Pete VanderMeer, quite a bit younger then and working in the Department of Sociology at New York University; maybe less proficient in his storytelling, but with the same thoughtful calmness in his voice. What Steve mainly recollected was their fear and their uncertainty. We were listening to a story about omens and witches, yet at no time did we fail to believe him. Not … after what we had seen.

  Finally, it was Bammy who spoke. “You just felt that she … well, that she was no intruder. One look at her and there was no denying it. She felt like something bad.” She turned to her husband. “May I tell them how it happened?”

  Burt seemed to want to say something, but he waved his hand. “Whatever.”

  “We hadn’t fallen asleep yet. We were … engaged with each other.” Elegant blushes appeared on her cheeks and both Steve and Grim bit their tongues. In all his years as a doctor, Steve didn’t think he had ever heard a more prudish description of the act, or one more aptly suited to the person uttering it. “I turned onto my back and suddenly there she was, at the foot of the bed. I saw her behind Burt. And that was the creepy thing about it. First she hadn’t been there at all, and then she was, and she was looking at me. Except she didn’t have eyes, only black, frayed threads, and she looked at me with them. I wish she hadn’t done that.”

  “My wife screamed,” Burt said, his voice flat and toneless, “and she squirmed out from under me as if she’d been electrocuted. Then I saw her, too. And I screamed. I don’t think I’ve screamed since I had to jump into a hole in the ice during frat hazing at Jamaica Bay, but I screamed now. It’s like Bammy says: There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that she was some sort of apparition, or a nightmare—except this was a nightmare that was real, and we were both sharing it. Bammy pulled the sheet up around her and ran out of the room. I followed her, but when I got to the doorway I turned around, because I wanted to see if she disappeared when you blinked your eyes, as nightmares do. But she was still there. And … I went back.”

  “But why?” Bammy asked, shocked.

  He shrugged. “You know. There was a maimed woman in our bedroom. All chained up. I wanted to see if I could do something for her, I guess.”

  “Did anything happen?” Grim wanted to know.

  At first Burt said nothing, and Steve saw Bammy’s hand stiffen around his. “No,” he finally said. “She just stood there. I was afraid, and I went out after my wife.”

  Grim and Steve exchanged glances. Pete saw the lie, too, but decided it wasn’t relevant, at least not now. “Fine. So you both had the feeling that she isn’t human.”

  “How come this isn’t more widely known?” Burt asked. “I mean, if there really is a ghost haunting your town—and that’s not something I’m ready to accept until I’ve studied it carefully—but, say it’s true, it would turn science on its head. Have you ever captured her on video?”

  “We have more than forty thousand hours of footage in our digital archive,” Grim said. “We have cameras hanging all over town. Didn’t you notice? We save the material for ten years, but then we throw it away. It gets pretty boring after a while.”

  Again the Delarosas stared at him. “I don’t think I follow,” Burt said slowly.

  “What he’s trying to say,” Pete said, “is that we’re doing everything we can to make sure it isn’t widely known. In fact, our lives depend on it.” He looked each of them straight in the eye, first Burt, then Bammy. Steve had deep respect for the fact that he didn’t turn away as he was uttering these words. “Katherine’s story doesn’t end with her death, you see. One winter morning in 1665, four months after she was hanged, a party led by former Director-General Peter Stuyvesant himself went into the hills to see what the trappers had been up to, and they found New Beeck completely deserted. Icicles were hanging from the roofs and everything was covered in a thick blanket of snow. The odd thing, though, was that the snow wasn’t fresh. There should have been tracks all over the place, but there weren’t. It was as if the townsfolk had gone up in smoke in the course of one fateful night. They were never seen again. The Dutch suspected a curse, and they avoided the ghost town and the hills around it, where they felt the ‘evil eye’ was upon them. In June of that year, Stuyvesant returned to the Netherlands. Most of the original settlers left, and the events sank into oblivion. The only official historical documentation on the disappearance didn’t turn up until more than forty years later, in 1708, in the annals of the Dutch Republic, which include a brief account of the legend. We have that document in our archive. It attributes the exodus from New Beeck to the economic difficulties caused by the Second Anglo-Dutch War and the annexation of New York, and assumes that the settlers had been killed in a battle between Indian tribes.”

  “So it was local folklore,” Burt muttered.

  “Except,” Jocelyn said, “there are those wh
o say that the Indians had already abandoned the area the previous fall, right in the middle of hunting season. Legend has it that they were afraid, saying that the woods they once claimed had been ‘contaminated.’ Whatever it was, why would the Indians just walk away from lucrative trade with the settlers, and why did it happen right after the trappers had left Katherine’s body in the woods?”

  “Exactly,” Pete said. “And there’s more. Because what happened in 1713 is documented. In April of that year, the English settlers moved into town, renaming it Black Spring. After a week, three people committed suicide. Bethia Kelly, a midwife, killed eight children before they put her away.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “I wish I were. When they came to arrest her, she declared that this woman coming from out of the woods had whispered to her to make a choice between the children. She said she couldn’t choose, so she killed them all. In the archive, there’s a brief mention of local folklore having to do with the evil eye and strange phenomena that took place on Mount Misery, supposedly in connection with a witch. A month later, a party of church elders went into the woods. When they came back, they claimed to have expelled a possessed woman by sewing her eyes and mouth shut and chaining up her body. That same year all of them died, although the circumstances are unknown. But at least they were partly successful. They closed her evil eye.”

  “But she never went away,” Bammy said with an expression of deep horror on her face.

  “No, that’s sort of the problem,” Pete agreed. “She never went away. Until this day, Katherine van Wyler walks the streets of Black Spring day and night … and appears in our houses.”

  No one spoke, so Grim took up the task. “We’re not talking about the outdated kind of ghost who’s only seen by some irritating, autistic, and neglected kid who no one believes but always ends up being right in the end. The Black Rock Witch is always here. And she’s no benign sort of specter or an echo from the past like in those drippy adolescent horror-porn flicks. She confronts us with her presence like a fenced-in pit bull. Muzzled, never moving an inch. But if you stick your finger through the bars, she doesn’t just feel it to see if it’s fat enough. She rips it off.”

  Burt rose. He was about to grab the bottle of Stoli, but changed his mind. Suddenly he seemed completely sober, despite the considerable amount of alcohol running through his veins. “Assuming all this is true … what does she want? What does the damn witch want from you, for crying out loud?”

  “We’re assuming she wants revenge,” Pete said grimly. “Whatever it is that’s driving her, her death released a power that seeks revenge against the people who made her commit those terrible acts. And even though three hundred fifty years have passed, those people are us, the people of Black Spring.”

  “But, I mean, how do you know? Has anyone ever tried to communicate with her? Or, I dunno, exorcise her?”

  “Yes,” Bammy said, backing him up. “Maybe she’s just wants to be heard.…”

  “Been there, done that,” Grim said. “Ouija boards are out of the question—don’t mess with those fuckers, they’ll kill you. Airy-fairy pagan shit simply doesn’t work on her. Tried it all before. We’ve had exorcists from the Vatican who concluded she was godless, so they couldn’t help us. Of course, the truth was that those pansies were scared shitless by what they found here. Priests, shamans, white witches, commandos, the army … it all leads to very nasty situations. In the past, they tried to behead her and set her on fire, but she just vanishes as soon as the smoke rises from under her skirt, so to speak. Now we have an Emergency Decree that strictly prohibits those kinds of stunts, because they always end in death. Innocent people of Black Spring suddenly keel over the minute someone else tries to hurt her. Stitching her up has made her mostly harmless—God only knows how they managed that—but if what’s happening here leaks out, people will inevitably want to open her eyes and mouth. Humanity has proven time and time again that it has a tendency to cross boundaries it shouldn’t. And we have every reason to believe that if her eyes open and she starts uttering her spells, we will all die. That’s why we keep her out of sight. She doesn’t want to be understood—she must not be understood. Katherine is a paranormal time bomb.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that,” Burt said.

  Pete took a sip of beer and put his glass on the table. “Mr. Delarosa, when your wife ran outside and you walked back into your bedroom, did you hear her whispering?”

  His voice faltered. “I … I did hear something, I guess. The corner of her mouth moved. Barely visible. I wanted to hear if she was saying something.”

  “And what did you hear?”

  “She whispered.”

  “And, please excuse me, but was there a moment that you considered suicide?”

  Bammy shrieked, a stifled scream, and knocked over her empty teacup, which was resting on the arm of her leather chair. It hit the floor and broke into three pieces. Jocelyn rushed forward to pick up the bits. Bammy tried to open her mouth to say something, but then she saw her husband’s face, and her lower lip began to tremble.

  “You did, right?” Pete said. “You heard her whispering, and you played with the idea of harming yourself. That’s how she gets at you. She has people kill themselves, just as she herself was forced to do.”

  “Burt?” Bammy asked, voice quivering. “What do they mean, Burt?”

  Burt tried to speak but wasn’t able, and he cleared his throat. All the color had drained from his face. “I was alone with her for only a few seconds. I didn’t say anything. I was afraid that if I made any noise she would look up. I didn’t want her to look up, you know what I mean? Even if she’s blind, I didn’t want her to see me. And I heard her whispering. Then I went out to the hallway and I wanted to slam my skull against the doorpost.” Bammy flinched as if someone had struck her, and she clapped her hands to her mouth. “I swear to God, in my mind’s eye I was grabbing the doorpost and smashing my forehead against it three times till it was crushed. And then … then you screamed, honey. That woke me up, and I ran after you. I didn’t do it, because you screamed.”

  “Stop it!” Bammy wailed, grabbing her husband. “That isn’t true, is it? I don’t want to listen to this anymore, Burt. Please.”

  “Calm down,” Jocelyn shushed. “You’re safe. It didn’t go on long enough to have any lasting effect.”

  Burt put his arm around his weeping wife and turned to Pete. For the first time Steve saw how sick and overwrought he looked … and that he believed it. “Who knows about this?” he asked, with difficulty.

  “The people at The Point, right down the road,” Grim said. “But just a small, highly classified division all the way at the top. I’m talking the kind of small that’s not under the supervision of any commissions, to avoid the risk of leaks.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “I suspect even the president doesn’t know. They used to—oh yeah. All the way back, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, they must have known about what was going on here, because we know from the archive that they visited Black Spring. In 1802, the U.S. Military Academy was established at West Point to help us cover it up. Don’t hold me to it, but it must have been toward the end of the Civil War that The Point was deemed trustworthy enough to be given exclusive authority over Black Spring. Probably on the orders of good old Abe himself. The matter is just too delicate. Later on, when the region got developed and the risk of leaks became higher, we got organized. We went pro. And so, HEX was born.”

  “What’s HEX?”

  “That’s us. We’re the ghostbusters. We hide the witch in plain sight.”

  Burt looked at Grim with visible difficulty. “What does the name stand for?”

  “Oh, it’s just some old acronym that stuck. No one really knows. It’s what we do that matters. Over there at The Point they let us take care of our own business, but we write up reports to keep them happy, so we have something to fall back on in case we have to close off roads or
if we need a favor at the state reserve. How else do you think we could have succeeded in keeping it quiet? You can set up smoke screens all you want, but that takes money—and complete secrecy. The Point is set up to preserve the status quo because they’re totally clueless as to what to do with this mess, apart from keeping it secret from the general public and from foreign intelligence services. There’s no control—that’s a bald-faced lie. In fact, they’re shitting their pants. If they could, they’d put a big fence around us and turn the area into an uninhabited reservation, but then the blood of three thousand people would be on their hands, as many as died on 9/11. So they decided on a containment policy. Until a solution is found—whatever the hell that means—life here goes on as usual and we get subsidized for keeping our mouths shut, by way of an almost untraceable cache in the state treasury.”

  “It’s a matter of image,” Pete said. “If you have a wart on your neck, you wear high collars.”

  “Jesus,” Burt Delarosa muttered. “Has anyone ever tried to open her eyes?”

  “Once,” Pete said after a long silence. “Although they never even got that far. This took place in 1967, at the initiative of the Military Intelligence unit at The Point. Nothing had happened for so long that people began to doubt if she really posed such a danger. Even in town there was talk that people just wanted to understand her and, you know, give her something. It was like Bammy said: Maybe she just wanted to be heard. The experiment was recorded on film. Robert, maybe you can show it to them?”

  Grim took his MacBook out of his briefcase and opened it. “We use this fragment to give new folks an idea of how serious the situation is. Perception, image-forming, all that. But, let me warn you: It was some piss-poor judgment on everybody’s part. The images are pretty wild. The kind of wild that they usually censor on the six o’clock news, if you know what I’m saying.”