HEX

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  All around them, people come out of their houses. The VanderMeers—Pete, Mary, and Lawrence—hurry over, and so do the Wilsons across the street, and many others. The HEX cams show how they’re drawn to the Grant home like a magnet, then to the area behind it. In the control center, Warren Castillo and Claire Hammer look at the screen with open mouths. They watch as Steve, Tyler, and Grim emerge, too, to see what it was that spooked the horses so badly. Claire quickly switches over to a new camera and feels herself becoming sick.

  The image shows a small group crowded together on the sandy bed of Philosopher’s Creek.

  Swirling in the dark oozing water are unmistakable trails of blood.

  FOURTEEN

  THAT SUNDAY THE silver bell over the door of Griselda’s Butchery & Delicacies didn’t stop ringing. Usually Griselda was closed on Sundays, but today she got it in her mind to do her community duty and open the lunchroom for the anxious townsfolk who had attended church services in droves and now needed to talk about what was going on.

  It was a sunny autumn day, refreshingly cold and with a pale but intense light that was reflected in the puddles along the streets. Yet a gloominess had fallen over Black Spring that could be read in people’s faces. They shied away from the hills that morning, haunted by the polluted smell of the woods and streams that hung so heavily in the air. To Griselda they looked like people on the run: making their way to Crystal Meth or St. Mary’s, drawn by the sound of the carillon and compelled by the need to share their fear and faith with one another. Rules strictly prohibited both the Reverend and the Father from preaching about Katherine—there might be Outsiders in attendance—but they got around the rules by encouraging their parishioners not to give in to the “terror by night” and to “put their trust in the Lord God.” At least that’s what Mrs. Talbot, one of Griselda’s early customers, said, because Griselda and God weren’t really on the same wavelength and she had spent the entire morning in the kitchen making preparations for a busy lunchtime. According to Mrs. Talbot, someone in the church choir had risen up from the pew when Reverend Newman was pronouncing the benediction and shouted, “This is hogwash! Why don’t you talk about what’s really goin’ on and what we oughta do about it?” The voice had broken off and dissolved into a sob, and the people had exchanged anxious glances and kept their thoughts to themselves.

  But at Griselda’s, they were eager to speak their minds. The bloody creek and the death of the dog were the talk of the day, but even in that intense climate the townsfolk didn’t forget what the poor butcher’s wife had had to put up with recently, and they all came over to buy her meat. They bought it and they ate it. It was as if they were saying: Give us your meat, Griselda, and let us eat; give us your meat and we will share your burden.…

  “Who the hell could have rattled Katherine so much?” Mrs. Strauss asked out loud while munching on her warm mutton sandwich.

  Some of the guests muttered distractedly and whispered names. Old Mr. Pierson’s frail but firm hand grabbed Griselda as she passed by. “It’s that damn Internet,” he said, his masticating jaws pulverizing the meatball on his fork. “I always told you: nothing good will come of it. What are we going to do when it’s not a dog but one of us, next time?”

  A number of old folks nodded in agreement, but there was sneering laughter as well. Griselda handed the old man a napkin (after unconsciously dabbing at the sweat on her forehead), as there was thick gravy dripping down his chin.

  The Schaeffer woman, wife of the surgeon, was already waiting at the counter. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, “you have so much to put up with. Such a brave soul. Gimme a slice of that Holst pâté, and make it a nice thick one today.” Usually Griselda loathed Mrs. Schaeffer, but she noticed that the woman was clutching her little bag with white knuckles and that her fingers were trembling as she handed over the money. The poor creature was scared to death.

  Give us your meat, Griselda, and let us eat; give us your meat and we’ll all get through this together,…

  Griselda was also out of sorts, and all those folks in her lunchroom just made her more jittery. It had only been four days since that Arthur Roth mess and she hadn’t yet recovered from the shock. And now there was this new rumpus.

  They held a crisis meeting of the Council. The last time she had seen Colton Mathers, he had taken her in hand and whispered gently but urgently, “Calm down, Griselda. You’ve done well. It was a natural death. No one ever has to know.” This time they were on the bank of Philosopher’s Creek, the entire Council along with a number of the HEX staff looking silently at the stream, afraid to get even one step closer to the cursed water. Blood welled up from the bottom of the creek in several places and swirled around lazily like trails of red ink. There was too little to saturate the water, but rusty deposits were already forming on the banks. The phenomenon, unnatural and blasphemous, possessed a dark magnetism, and the sight of it made Griselda shiver.

  What had happened that had caused Katherine to express her dissatisfaction so strongly? Like many of the townsfolk, Griselda was obsessed with the idea that she herself was at the root of it. The difference was that, in Griselda’s case, it had to be true. Last night she lay awake, tossing and turning. The sheet had irritatingly crept up between her buttocks and she was surrounded by the penetrating smell of her own sweat. More and more she had convinced herself that she was failing somehow, that Katherine was personally singling her out and might appear in her bedroom at any moment with open, milky eyes, silently pointing her finger at her.…

  Even now, while she cleaned the coffee machine in broad daylight, the thought made her feel queasy.

  There was a disturbance in the street and the whispering in the lunchroom died down. Griselda peeked outside. In front of the cemetery, a small group of people were swarming around sheep farmer John Blanchard, who was making wide gestures with one hand and holding one of those small, flat computer thingies with the other—a tablet, they called it. Griselda slapped her dishtowel over her shoulder and stood in the doorway. The little bell jingled over her head.

  Believe it or not, the sheep farmer was actually preaching. “Damnation! Damnation! Didn’t I warn you all when lights appeared in the night sky earlier this month, and isn’t it true that the witch has now killed the doctor’s dog? I told you, but you wouldn’t listen. Isn’t it true that owls have been flying during the day, that she made the earth bleed, and that the doctor’s horses have run wild?”

  “Yeah,” one of his listeners chimed in. “Isn’t this all the fault of that Dr. Grant with that blarney he talks?”

  “No,” said John Blanchard, “for the wrath is not his alone to bear. My sheep have been restless since the birth of the Two-Headed Lamb. They refuse to eat. Didn’t the Lord say to Jeremiah that the people would be punished because their ancestors had forsaken Him? And didn’t He say that the punishment would have four faces: the plague, the sword, famine, and, uh … eh…” The sheep farmer touched the screen of his tablet. When it didn’t respond, he tapped it several more times irritably. “Exile!”

  Liza Belt, the tailor, came over to Griselda and said, “If they’ve gone and published the Old Testament as an e-book, too, I will personally eat my mother’s big family Bible. Good grief, is that John Blanchard?”

  “Yes,” Griselda said, “and he has followers.”

  Blanchard’s voice was vigorous and resonant, and the fact that he was preaching doom with the local, trusted Highland accent made it more uncanny than corny. “Confess your sins and glorify Him—that’s the only way to ward off the Evil Eye, good people. Adulterers, reveal yourselves! Homosexuals, reveal yourselves! Pedophiles, foreigners, brother-killers, reveal yourselves and confess thy sins! Let us sing together…” He tapped the screen a few more times and lost his temper. “Does anybody know how this cocksuckin’ thing works?”

  “You have to get a real one, not some garbage from Best Buy,” somebody from the crowd said.

  “No, this came with a subscription to Autoweek,”
Blanchard said absently. “There, I got it.” He turned the screen toward his followers. It showed a karaoke hymn on YouTube, and shrill organ music emerged from the little speaker. But because he was outside and far away from a Wi-Fi spot there was a delay between the image and the sound, so that the words kept flashing up too late, and the people who were singing along—and there were certainly quite a few—couldn’t keep up with the melody.

  If your Lord should heareth this, Griselda thought, He’d wish he had never started in on His Creation.

  Not much later, Blanchard and his congregation were chased away by members of the HEX staff. Things remained restless all afternoon, and at five-thirty, when the last of the townsfolk had finally left and Griselda Holst had flipped the sign on the front door to CLOSED, she felt both drained and relieved.

  * * *

  THAT EVENING, IN the comforting twilight of her little home at the back of the butcher shop, Griselda did something she hadn’t done in twenty years: she medicated herself with drink. Not beer; Jim had always drunk beer, and Griselda thought it stank of barley and sweat and Jim’s grasping hands. Griselda drank wine. And good wine, too. She had bought the bottle the year before at Market & Deli to save for guests, but no guests ever came, and now she remembered that she had hidden it under the meat cooler so Jaydon wouldn’t polish it off. Griselda despised alcohol in principle, but if ever there was a good time to violate her regime, it was tonight. Because just before dinner, as she was stirring a big panful of hash, the thought occurred to her so naturally that it must have been there all afternoon, slumbering: When are you going to butcher something for her … when are you going to bring her your blood offering?

  There was a certain logical balance to the idea that was impossible to deny. Griselda had given the witch pâté. She had given her a dead calf’s head. The witch had taken a live dog. So apparently it hadn’t been enough: Katherine wanted a live offering.

  Another person probably would have wriggled out of their duty by counting Arthur Roth as an offering, but, in an odd way, Griselda was too pragmatic for that. Here, too, there was an undeniable balance: Griselda had begged the witch to visit Roth and finish him off; and though she’d wound up doing it by herself, wasn’t there a certain poetic justice in the fact that she’d done it with a broomstick? But it was no offering; Griselda understood that. She had acted solely on her own behalf. With every blow to that miserable, mutilated head, she had further freed herself from Jim and gotten even with her past. The intense aching of the muscles in her arms, which prevented her from raising them above shoulder level even today, was a liberation.

  Griselda sat in her chair at the window and poured the wine into a tumbler. The bitter taste made her wince, but after a while it settled in her throat and didn’t seem so bad. She was a robust woman, but she was not accustomed to alcohol, and halfway through the second glass she began to feel woozy and her thoughts started to run free.

  Jim used to slaughter cattle, mainly for small farmers from the Highlands who would bring him a calf and a couple of lambs each year. In the back of his workshop he had an old shackle-and-hoist sling, a manual grinder for making lamb sausage with hog casings, a cold chamber for aging, a smoking cabinet, and a curing bath for ham. After his death, Griselda had sold all of it—she ordered everything from the wholesaler’s these days. The workshop still smelled a lot like blood, but that was the smell of metal and spilled oil from Jaydon’s bike. The Holst butcher shop was no longer a high-quality establishment, but at least she had been able to keep the business running.

  And although Griselda didn’t have her husband’s expertise in slaughtering, she knew how it was done.

  What are you getting yourself into, Griselda? You really want to sacrifice a cow to her? You know how much damn legislation there used to be from when Jim was always whining about it. First of all, you can’t transport cattle yourself. An inspector has to come to check everything before you can even sharpen your knife. Then a tester comes. You think they’re going to check the box for “sacrifice” on their stupid forms? If you do this illegally, you could lose your license, and if Katherine isn’t satisfied, you’ll lose a whole lot more.…

  But did any of this really matter, or was she listening to the voice of cowardice? The same voice had told her not to leave Jim, and look how that had turned out. Besides, she wouldn’t do it in the workshop anyway.

  It would have to happen somewhere up in the woods.

  Systematically, she began running through all the possibilities. She knew a couple of local farmers who might sell her a calf under the table, and some of them still did their own slaughtering, but Griselda regarded them as her competitors. She didn’t want to go down that road. Then she remembered all the hoo-ha on TV last week about the Muslims in the city and their ritual slaughtering business. They had just had their Ramadan, or whatever you called those weird things they do where they slit the throats of goats and let the blood spray all over their mosque. Surely those people could slip her a goat, Griselda thought scornfully. But she’d rather give her own blood than meddle with them, and that was over a week ago, anyway. They were probably all out of goats.

  You’re forgetting the most important thing. What do you think people will say when they see you walking through town with a goat on a rope? “There’s that Wacky Griselda. What’s she up to now?” There’s no denying that you’ve always taken advantage of their pity, but if they suspect that you’re getting mixed up with the witch, they’ll make you their scapegoat.

  Thanks for nothing, she thought, filled with contempt. I’d be doing them a favor!

  And what about all those damn cameras?

  Griselda stood up and grabbed the back of her chair. The living room was spinning around her in a wide, nauseating motion. She stumbled to the kitchen and hung her head over the sink, breaking out in a sweat.

  She had to abandon the idea. It was crazy, and far too dangerous.

  There was a knock at the back door.

  For a moment she froze at the counter, unable to think, overcome by a single thought that filled her mind with acidic terror: It was Katherine. Someone had opened her eyes, and she’d come to demand her sacrifice. Her eyelids would be frayed from the severed threads, and she would seize Griselda with her dead gaze, whispering because she had failed in her duty.…

  She turned off the tap and staggered to the back door. With waxen fingers she pushed aside the old-fashioned lace curtain and peered out. In the dim light of the outside lamp she saw not Katherine but Jaydon, waiting impatiently with his hands in his pockets. Griselda tried to laugh, unlocked the door with trembling hands, and opened it.

  “Sorry, I didn’t have my key,” Jaydon mumbled.

  “You look terrible! What happened?” Griselda stared at Jaydon’s face, hidden in the shadows. His right eye was swollen and had turned an ugly purple.

  “Got into a fight,” he said.

  “Got into a fight? With who?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  It was as if time had come full circle. Jaydon’s black eye. Arthur Roth. The violent collision Griselda had had with her son here in this kitchen. Jim’s fists beating the nine-year-old boy black and blue. Jaydon had seen and experienced more than enough domestic violence; one look at his black eye and Griselda felt a rancid belch rising that filled her nose with the sour smell of alcohol.

  “Honey, they beat you up, let me see…”

  Jaydon waved her off before she could touch him. “Mom, it was my own fault, okay?” His voice broke. “I said something stupid.”

  “But that doesn’t give them any right to lace into you like that, does it?”

  Jaydon muttered something, flung the big blue Market & Deli shopping bag containing his gym clothes into a corner, and ran upstairs, where he slammed the door behind him. Griselda watched him leave, dismayed, and stood indecisively in the kitchen. After a few minutes, she threw the rest of her wine down the sink and poured herself a glass of milk. Halfway through the se
cond glass she realized what kind of impression Jaydon had made on her: the impression that he was scared to death.

  She stared at the Market & Deli shopping bag, and suddenly she knew what she had to do.

  * * *

  FORTY MINUTES LATER, hidden away in her raincoat and with the shopping bag stuffed under her arm, she crossed the lawn and headed for the driveway. A strong wind had blown up in the course of the evening. She drove with enthusiasm—to put it mildly—swinging way out at the first bend and jumping the curb at the next as she made her way to Deep Hollow Road. By the time Griselda’s taillights flashed an hour and a half later as she turned her old Dodge back into her driveway, there was little left of her erratic driving style. Somewhere during that ride in the dark, Griselda had completely sobered up.

  Clutching the shopping bag to her bosom, she went to the workshop. When she came out another half hour later—it was close to one o’clock by then—the shopping bag was sewn shut with needle and thread, except for the far side, where a thick bunch of peacock feathers protruded. These she stuffed under her coat.