HEX

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  “I don’t know if I want to see this,” Bammy said, wiping away her tears.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Burt said. “You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to.” He wiggled nervously and looked over at Pete for confirmation. Pete nodded. Grim put his MacBook on his lap and clicked PLAY.

  * * *

  THE IMAGES ARE shocking, no doubt about it. They’re authentic, digitized Super 8 images from the sixties, and, unlike Tyler’s GoPro, invoke that nostalgic film feeling that even Instagram photos can only approximate. Steve catches himself having an instinctive preference for the style, even though the colors are washed-out and his oldest son would have called him hopelessly outdated. Not that Steve is looking at the footage now; he’s sitting on the other side of the lounge with his arms around Jocelyn, staring at Burt and Bammy Delarosa’s faces. But he knows what the images show. Everyone in Black Spring knows. They’ve all been indoctrinated with them, most of them from early childhood. Steve is fiercely opposed to showing the fragment to fifth-grade children at Black Rock Elementary, so when it was Tyler’s turn, and then Matt’s, he tried to call them in sick. But the fines were simply too high. In Black Spring, you have to abide by the Emergency Decree.

  He still remembers the showings as if they were yesterday: All the parents were there, and it was horrible. For many children, watching the images marks the point at which they become adults, and it happens much too early.

  The setting is a square-shaped general practitioner’s office, with Katherine van Wyler in a chair in the middle. They’ve managed to force her to sit down by using a wire-looped grasper, an instrument normally used to restrain mad dogs. An officer from The Point in a tweed jacket is standing at a distance, the loop of his grasper still around her neck. Two others are behind her with their poles at the ready.

  But she doesn’t look as if she’s planning on going anywhere.

  The Black Rock Witch is not moving.

  There are three other men in the room: two doctors from Black Spring and the cameraman, who is providing running commentary in a deep Walter Cronkite kind of voice. The doctors don’t say a word. You don’t have to look closely to see the sweat on their foreheads. They’re as nervous as they can be. They’re kneeling in front of the witch, shifting their weight from one foot to the other to find comfortable positions while trying not to touch her. One of them has a pair of tweezers and a stitch cutter. “Doctor McGee is now going to remove the first thread from her mouth,” the newsreel voice says, and you can hear his fear and uncertainty.

  Grim, Burt, and Bammy—who doesn’t want to watch, but watches anyway—see Doctor McGee warily push aside the quivering, dried flesh in the left corner of the witch’s mouth with his tweezers and tighten the farthest stitch. He draws the knife blade along the stitch and it snaps like a rubber band. The doctor recoils and changes position. He wipes the sweat from his brow. Katherine hasn’t moved. The curved black thread is sticking out of the corner of her mouth, just as it is today. We can see the corner of her mouth unmistakably trembling. Doctor McGee bends over again and a surprised expression appears on his face. The other doctor also moves in closer. The officers from The Point can’t hear her whisper; they don’t realize that from that moment on they are in her domain. “That was the first stitch,” says the voice that is not Walter Cronkite’s, and McGee blinks. He wipes his brow again and raises his tweezers, but his hand drops halfway there. He bends over again. “Is everything all right … Doctor McGee?” asks the newsreel voice, and Doctor McGee answers by suddenly raising the stitch cutter and, with the speed of a Singer sewing machine needle, plunging it into his own face again and again.

  In the next few seconds, everything happens at once. The chaos is complete. A howling can be heard that chills you to the bone. The camera is knocked over, forcing the tripod against the wall, so we suddenly see the room from a nauseating perspective. The witch is no longer in her chair but is now standing in a corner of the office and we only see her lower body; the rest is cut off by the camera angle. The grasper has crashed to the floor. Doctor McGee is lying sprawled in a large pool of blood, his body in convulsions. We also see the legs of the second doctor lying nearby—at least, we assume they’re the legs of the second doctor. The officers are screaming and running from the scene. Bammy Delarosa looks as if she’d like to do the same; she’s holding her hands in front of her face and hyperventilating. Her husband seems too deep in shock to realize he’s watching actual events.

  “That,” Robert Grim says, “was the last time the intelligence services got their fingers burned on the witch.”

  He clicks COMMAND-Q and the screen goes black.

  * * *

  “FIVE PEOPLE DIED,” Pete resumed. “The two doctors committed suicide right then and there, but elsewhere in Black Spring three elderly people dropped dead in the street, all at the same time. Autopsies revealed that they had all been struck by acute cerebral hemorrhages. It’s assumed that their time of death exactly coincided with the cutting of the first stitch.”

  Silence fell in the hotel bar. Steve glanced at his phone and noticed that the time was now a quarter past three. Bammy was in Burt’s arms, shaking and crying, and the others looked uneasily at their feet. “I don’t want to go back to that house, Burt!” Bammy cried. “I don’t ever want to go back.”

  “There, there,” Burt said huskily. “You won’t have to.” He turned to Grim. “Tell you what, we’re both pretty upset. I really appreciate your having booked this hotel room for us, but I don’t think my wife and I want to stay in Black Spring one minute longer. We’re full of questions, but they can wait. If my wife is in any condition to drive, we’ll go stay with friends in Manhattan tonight. If not, we’ll take a taxi and grab a motel in Newburgh.”

  “I don’t think—” Pete tried to interrupt, but Burt didn’t let him get a word in.

  “Tomorrow I’ll call a real estate agent. I’m … sorry you have to live with this, but … it’s not for us. We’re moving out.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,” Pete said softly. Now, Steve realized, even Pete didn’t have the nerve to keep his eyes on them.

  At last Burt said, “What do you mean?”

  “You said ‘your’ village ghost and ‘your’ witch earlier. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I’m afraid that starting tonight, it’s your problem, too. She’s not going to let you go. You live in Black Spring now. That means the curse is on you as well.”

  The silence that followed could only be broken by Robert Grim: “Welcome home.” His face assumed a morbid grin. “We have all sorts of great town fairs.”

  SEVEN

  TYLER CAME HOME from community service the following afternoon drenched with rain, his face tense. Steve was at the dining room table reading an article in the New Yorker, but he had had to start over again twice because his mind kept wandering. They hadn’t gotten home that morning until a quarter to six, leaving him and Jocelyn feeling dull and exhausted. They had dozed off and snapped awake over a cup of tea in the kitchen until, much to his frustration, Steve could begin to make out the contours of the woods behind the house when the first sign of dawn touched the sky in the east. He had decided to skip going to bed with Jocelyn and switch to coffee—he had to get up for work at seven.

  That afternoon after classes, he retreated to his office at the research center to look over a pile of Ph.D. test results but caught himself staring at the streaks of rain running down the window. His thoughts drifted to the conversation with the Delarosas.

  “I don’t know what’s on your mind,” his graduate assistant Laura Frazier said when she popped into his office to file a stack of forms, “but take my advice: Go home and get some sleep. You look like you need it.”

  Steve gave her a dazed smile. “Short night. My wife is sick.” He was shocked by how naturally the lie passed over his lips. Christ, what a prolific liar he had become after eighteen years. Part of the Black Spring identity, Pete VanderMeer would have said.
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  “You’ll get sick yourself if you don’t watch out. I’m not kidding.”

  “I look like shit, don’t I?” he said, and suddenly Burt Delarosa’s cry of despair ran through his head: Why didn’t you try harder to keep us away from here, you sons of bitches?

  Now Jocelyn was in bed upstairs and Matt was doing his homework. Tyler muttered a stiff “hi” to his dad and went upstairs to hang up his wet clothes. Steve could see there was something eating at him. He knew they’d have to talk, but there was more to it than that. You didn’t ask Tyler right out; you waited until he came around. That boyish vulnerability was one of the traits Steve admired in him.

  And sure enough, there he is, he said to himself when Tyler came down fifteen minutes later. But he didn’t look up from his article; he didn’t want to give him the impression that he had been waiting for this moment to arrive.

  “Mom told me it got pretty late with the new people,” Tyler said with forced lightheartedness. He sat down on the dining room table.

  “Don’t get me started,” Steve said. “We ended up pulling an all-nighter.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Lousy, as usual. But they’ll get through it somehow. How’s community service?”

  Tyler turned red and grinned guiltily. “So you know.”

  “The whole town knows,” he said, but he gave him a wink and punched him confidently in the side. Tyler was visibly relieved. “You’re quite a bunch. Robert Grim showed me the images last night. It’s your most sensational report so far, I must say.”

  “No kidding. We were shocked. And honestly, I felt kind of embarrassed for doing that to her. I mean, we expected something, but not this—not that she’d go flat on her ass.…”

  Steve grinned but continued, more seriously. “I hope you understand that you’ve all been incredibly lucky. Just one mistake and you wouldn’t be picking up papers in the park right now; you’d be out on that island.”

  “Robert is on our side, you know.”

  “Robert, maybe, but the Council isn’t. You said yourself that you didn’t know what to expect. She could have walked around the lamppost; instead she bumped into it and fell over. God knows what else could have happened. If it were up to the Council, you’d all be in Doodletown right now.”

  Tyler shrugged, a gesture that left Steve a little nonplussed. “Do you have any idea what you’re messing with?” he said. “Your good intentions don’t make you invulnerable, you know. And I’m not even talking about her. The Council doesn’t think highly of characters like Jaydon Holst. Was this his idea?”

  “No, it was all of us,” Tyler said, with eyes that didn’t waver. That was something else Steve admired in him: Tyler never let others take the rap for his own behavior.

  The problem wasn’t so much that they had played a prank and recorded it on video: those were boyish tricks. When it came to raising children, Steve and Jocelyn had always had progressive ideas, despite the restrictions of the Emergency Decree. The only thing that made the situation in Black Spring manageable—survivable, as some claimed—was that Black Spring was an indoctrinated commune. The townsfolk lived according to strict rules because they believed in those rules and accepted them without question. Children took in the commandments of the Emergency Decree with their mothers’ milk: Thou shalt not associate with the witch. Thou shalt not say a word about her to people on the outside. Thou shalt comply with the visitor regulation. And the mortal sin: Thou shalt never, under any circumstances, open the witch’s eyes. These were rules prompted by fear, and Steve knew that fear invariably led to violence. He’d seen plenty of blank, pale little faces with black-and-blue patches and swollen lips on the playground of Black Rock Elementary in earlier years, faces of children who had spilled the beans with friends or cousins from out of town and had been beaten until they were fully reprogrammed according to their parents’ example.

  Steve and Jocelyn disapproved of these methods. They had chosen to raise their sons in well-grounded harmony and symbiosis, with plenty of room for independent thought but without losing sight of the reality of their fate. As a result, both of them had grown into kindhearted, sensible kids, kids who inspired trust that they’d never get mixed up in any funny business.

  But that confidence is an illusion, Steve thought. For years you think you’ve got everything under control, and then somebody mentions the word “Doodletown” and you see how carelessly Tyler shrugs his shoulders.

  “When was the last time you visited the bunker?” Steve asked.

  “Sixth grade, I think. Ms. Richardson took us out there.”

  “Maybe it’s about time we went back there to take another look, then. Do you remember what it looks like on the inside?”

  Tyler’s shoulders drooped. The Doodletown Detention Center was a privately owned bunker on gloomy Iona Island in the Hudson, a little over five miles out of town and in the shadow of Bear Mountain Bridge. Part of the specially adapted curriculum at Black Rock Elementary was that all pupils be given a tour to raise awareness. “The walls and floors are padded,” Tyler said.

  “Exactly, and for good reason. Three weeks of solitary confinement in one of the cells out there will drive you nuts. You’d feel so miserable that you’d beg them on your knees to let you go back to Black Spring. And at that point you’re still wondering what the padded walls are for. Until halfway through the third week, when you start going haywire and getting suicidal. You’re under supervision to keep you from actually doing it, but you have to experience it. You see what I’m saying?”

  “Dad, I know what it’s like,” Tyler sighed.

  “No, you don’t,” Steve said, and a cold hand closed around his entrails as the memory flashed before him from so long ago in Thailand, when he found himself with the sheet in his hands, staring at his own dangling feet … how close had the intention come to reality? “That’s it: you don’t, and that’s exactly the problem.”

  Doodletown was based on the idea that if the condemned had experienced the witch’s influence firsthand, he would be aware of the danger he posed to himself and his fellow townsfolk. And although Steve was fiercely opposed to this form of sanction in principle, it proved extremely effective: The rate of recidivism was almost nil.

  “Do you know how many basic human rights they violate with Doodletown?” Tyler remarked.

  “That may well be, but you’re not dealing with a dictator here. Katherine is a supernatural evil. That renders all norms invalid and makes safety our first, second, and third concern.”

  “You sound like you support it.”

  “Of course I don’t. But did you ever notice what a puritanical bunch of bastards most of the people here in Black Spring are? It doesn’t matter whether I support it or not; they support it. And I’d like to see you try to refute their arguments. What else can we do?”

  “Come out of the closet,” Tyler said, dead serious.

  Steve raised his eyebrows. “And how exactly would you go about doing that? A pride parade down Deep Hollow Road?”

  “Ha-ha. Seriously, in True Blood the vampires came out of the closet. If you go mainstream and you have scientific proof, then nobody can get around it, witch or not. It’s the only thing that hasn’t been tried.”

  “Tyler … True Blood is a TV series!”

  “So what? The media inspire reality. Take the Arab Spring. It all started when one person had a dream and put it out on Facebook. Two months later, all of Tahrir Square was packed. It was social media that got all those people up off their asses. Even if you live in Iran, freedom is just a couple of mouse clicks away. Why not in Black Spring?”

  “Tyler…” Steve stammered, but the boy was on a roll and there was no stopping him.

  “I’m not the only one who’s like this. All the kids feel the same way. I’m just the only one brave enough to open his mouth. We’re sick of living in the Dark Ages. We want free Internet and we want our privacy. Our Facebook and WhatsApp messages are all censored by HEX like this is fucking
Moscow, and sometimes they don’t even get through. You can’t even access Twitter here. Do you have any idea how incredibly backward we are? Your generation may be indoctrinated, but we want change.”

  Steve looked at his son with helpless admiration. “Most of the people in town don’t give a damn about your Internet. They see it as one hell of a leak in their maze. Don’t let anybody hear about this idea of yours or they’ll cut you off even more.”

  “Let ’em try,” Tyler sneered.

  “And how did you plan on doing this? Send an e-mail to the New York Times with your little clip of her walking into the lamppost?”

  Tyler let out an infinitely contemptuous groan. “We’d have National Geographic or Discovery Channel make a documentary, in deepest secrecy and well prepped. It’d be a media sensation, of course. The town will be swamped with journalists and scientists from all over the world. It all comes down to good preparation. If we’re clear from the get-go about how serious it is and how important it is to keep her eyes and mouth shut, nothing could go wrong.”

  “Tyler … the army would have to step in! We’d be so overrun by the press and by the morbidly curious that they’d have to put the town under quarantine. Maybe they’d say they were doing it for our own safety; but no, they’d be doing it to prevent a popular uprising. A dictator you can predict, but not a witch. You’d leave them no other option than to shut us off from the rest of the world. And you think you don’t have any freedom now?”

  Tyler wavered only slightly. “Maybe in the beginning. But think about it. With all those cameras at the borders, we’d have the perfect platform for telling our story! The sympathy would be overwhelming. And maybe we’d even find a solution to the whole problem! Let the world figure it out. I mean, it’s not like we’re the first fucking town in history with a curse on our head.”

  Steve was perplexed. This wasn’t just a passing thought. Tyler seemed absolutely convinced. But it was impossible. He remembered one of the many questions Burt Delarosa had fired off the night before in his emotional tirade: How’s it possible that something as big as this has been kept a secret for so long? That was always what puzzled newcomers the most. Steve’s reply had been a perfect summary of the impossibility of Tyler’s ideals: It all boils down to our will to survive. If this gets out, it will almost certainly result in our death. Every single time Outsiders have come here, and whether it was officials from the military or scientists of the occult, their fear and disbelief went hand in hand with their curiosity to open her eyes. It’s like this desire that takes hold of them. If it didn’t result in a disaster like in ’67, it took a whole damn lot of bribery to get them to leave. That’s why we do everything we can to cover her up. We build tiled walls around her or put a folding screen in front of her if she appears in restaurants or in the supermarket. Just last year around Easter she appeared in one of the aisles of the Market & Deli, and she decided to stay for three days. We had to put a man-sized, hollow Easter bunny over her like a big tea cozy. The Point called Grim on the carpet for that one, but they don’t understand how practical you’ve got to be. We block the streets where she walks, we plant shrubs around her if she’s standing near one of the trails in the woods … anything that works. And here’s the biggest trick: We brag about her. Just like they do in Roswell with their UFOs. Didn’t you see the brightly colored figure of a crooked old witch with a broomstick in front of Sue’s Highland Diner? It looks more like the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz than Katherine, but still. Next to it is a wooden welcome sign that says: BLACK SPRING, HOME OF THE BLACK ROCK WITCH. Sue’s Highland Diner organizes a special witch tour through the woods. Every now and then groups sign up for it, mainly pensioners or kids on local school trips, and they can pose for a photo with the witch: an actress from town. I know, sounds kinda corny and provincial. But it’s the perfect cover. Because we cannot guarantee that she’ll never be seen. This is a pretty touristy area, with plenty of hikers and sightseers around. Whenever somebody from the outside does happen to see her—which is rare, thanks to the good work of Robert Grim—we throw in a makeshift tour from Sue’s where both the participants and the witch are actors from Black Spring, to explain what they thought they’d seen. Case closed.