Steve touched his arm and said, “Come on, you’re freezing.”
When Tyler looked again, the cat had disappeared.
“What is it?” Steve asked.
“I thought I saw a white cat. On the roof of the stable.”
“It must have been the moonlight.”
Tyler paused for a moment, then turned around.
The pebbles on the path glistened in the light of the full moon as if they were showing them the way home.
* * *
NO DOGS WERE reported missing in town and no one else had heard the barking. When Tyler got home from school, Steve told him the creek had stopped bleeding that morning, and that by midday the water was as crystal clear as it always had been. HEX dutifully combed the woods, but was unable to discover anything unusual. They were frankly optimistic. The escaped dog must have come from Mountainville or Central Valley on the other side of the reserve, Steve guessed, and was undoubtedly back with its master. After the window people left, he and Jocelyn went to the Warehouse Furniture Showroom in Newburgh and picked out a new dining room table. While waiting for the delivery, they brought the old pine table down from the attic. The strong “fresh start” vibes of it all made Tyler feel iffy. By now the people in town would be relieved that everything was back to the way it used to be, which was good enough for them.
Tyler was not relieved. He was more ill at ease than ever, and an ever-increasing sense of desperation was hanging over him. Everything around him felt wrong, disrupted.
It had taken him a long time to fall asleep that night. He had sat in his bedroom window, blankets over his shoulders, the pale moonlight reflecting in his eyes, and had heard the voice of his younger brother: No, but he’s never been dead before, either. These words came back to him at school during geography when he got a PM from Lawrence:
Did you hear that dog last night?? didnt know if i should tell you this but i shat my pants, thought it was Fletcher!
“Tyler, is there something you need to tell me?” Steve asked suddenly as Tyler was getting ready to go upstairs that evening. It was just after eleven and the networks had called Ohio for Obama, earning him another four years in office.
“No. Why?” He gave his father an open, honest look, but inside he cursed himself. Was it so obvious?
“I don’t know. You’ve been so quiet lately.”
He shrugged. “A lot’s been goin’ on, huh?”
“I suppose so.” Steve looked at him, searching for what was going on behind his eyes. Tyler practically felt like a billboard. “You going to be okay?”
“Sure.”
Steve smiled and said, “Well, whenever you’re ready, give me a holler.” Tyler managed to produce something like a smile and ran up the stairs. At that moment he hated his dad for seeing through him so easily; it was a fiery, hostile stab, the strength of which surprised him and even hurt a little. It forced him to acknowledge that things changed, and not all for the good. Seldom for the good, when he got right down to it.
When the clock in the downstairs hall chimed one, he jumped into his jeans, put on two sweaters, and loaded up his stuff in his Adidas sports bag: Maglite, GoPro, iPhone, and the half-full, folded-up bag of dog kibble he had brought upstairs from the pantry earlier in the evening. Something else they hadn’t thrown away yet, even though Fletcher would never be there to eat it. He listened for a minute on the landing, then decided he couldn’t risk taking the creaking stairs. When he’d assured himself that everyone was asleep, he opened his bedroom window as quietly as he could, put his hands on the sill, and lowered himself down the unstable trellis until his sneakers found the mortared upper edge of the kitchen window more to the left. Cautiously he pushed the window ajar. The hinges and the casement stay gave out earsplitting squeaks and Tyler thought his whole plan was fucked. His parents would be wide awake. They’d find him hanging from the ivy trellis and send him straight back to bed.
But they didn’t, so Tyler jumped down, sank to his knees, and rolled over the ground.
He stole noiselessly into the VanderMeers’ backyard and called Lawrence on his phone. It took ten minutes before a sleepy head finally appeared at the window; Tyler had been calling without letup and had ended up maliciously pelting his window with pebbles. “Sorry, I fell asleep,” Lawrence hissed. After another five minutes he finally climbed out and dropped from the sun porch roof to the patio.
“I told you to set your alarm, didn’t I?”
“I slept right through it.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and rubbed them against his thighs to warm them up. “Jesus, it’s cold. So what’s up?”
“We’re going into the woods.”
Lawrence hesitated, as if reconsidering his earlier promise, as if Tyler’s idea had lost all its logic and sense now that it had been exposed to the starlight glittering among the turbulent clouds. “I don’t know, man. I haven’t heard shit tonight.”
“I want to be sure.”
Neither of them spoke as they took the Highland Trail on the other side of the creek, which ran steeply up the side of the ridge. Every now and then they saw the glowing LEDs from the security cams in the trees high above them, but the app said the witch was in town, not up here in the woods. Tyler was all too happy to risk being seen by HEX because the trail eased his mind a little, just as lighthouse beacons must have eased the minds of the old seamen on stormy nights long ago. The darkness was monumental. Every sound—a snapping twig, the rustling of the wind, the nervous call of a night bird—was magnified to spectacular proportions, as if the night itself were acting as a natural amplifier and the woods teeming with secret life. Here, at age seventeen, he was still the child he thought he had left behind long ago, and he understood the vulnerability of who they were and what they were doing—two children, alone and wandering through a vast, dark forest.
After a while he took a handful of dog kibble from his bag and began to scatter it bit by bit across the trail.
“Fuck, man.” Lawrence watched him uncomfortably. “That looks way too much like the beginning of a fairy tale to me. One of the bad ones, where you get eaten by the big bad wolf in the end.”
Tyler flashed a smile. “I think you’re mixing them up.” They talked like little boys around a campfire: muffled, hushed. Tyler dropped a piece of kibble and began to whistle softly.
“You really think that helps?” Lawrence asked. Tyler shrugged, and after a while Lawrence joined in. In unison, their whistling sounded like high-pitched, shrill bird calls, as frail and glassy as a dead symphony. It made the hair on the back of Tyler’s neck stand on end. They both stopped at the same time and stood shoulder to shoulder. The ellipse cast by the Maglite jumped from tree trunk to tree trunk.
“I really feel like a moron, you know that?” Lawrence said, laughing foolishly. “That wasn’t Fletcher last night. I said it sounded like him, but Fletcher’s dead. We saw how Jaydon sicced him on the witch, right? So she got back at him. What the fuck are we doing here, Tyler?”
“Do you think Jaydon is afraid?” Tyler asked. “That she’ll get to him, too, I mean?”
“No, I don’t think so. At first he was—that’s why he didn’t hit back when you punched him in the face. But I don’t think she’s after him. Fletcher bit her with his bare teeth. Jaydon’s knife was on a stick. They never touched skin to skin.”
“I think he’s much more dangerous if he knows that,” Tyler said.
“Why?”
Tyler shrugged. It was a gut feeling; a premonition, if you will—he couldn’t explain why he knew it was true. The look in Jaydon’s eyes before he so violently drove the X-Acto knife into Katherine’s nipple kept coming back to him, and Tyler had come to the conclusion that this went far beyond reckless bravado, juvenile delinquency, or even lunacy.
This was a whole nother level of fucked-upness.
They had walked for about fifteen minutes when Tyler came to a halt. They’d gone up quite a steep incline, and somewhere on the left there were large rocky outcro
ps that formed the top of the hill, behind which lay Aleck Meadow Reservoir and Lookout Point. The shaft of light from the Maglite shone brightly over the impenetrable jumble of tree trunks and fallen branches on the hillside, but it didn’t reach farther than about ten yards and revealed nothing. He turned around and directed the Maglite down the path they’d come up over, where the scattered trail of dog kibble disappeared in a grisly tunnel of trees. Tyler was just calming himself with the thought that, as in every fairy tale, you only had to follow the trail and retrace your steps along the path to get home when something moved down there in the darkness.
Tyler abruptly stopped moving the dull circle of yellow light and listened to the sound. For a second he didn’t even know if he could still hear it. Then: crunching undergrowth, rustling leaves, the stealthy movement of an animal of some kind. Lawrence cocked his head, his mouth pursed and tense.
Tyler’s right hand reached reflexively into his sports bag and took out the GoPro. He turned it on and pressed REC. In the dark, the LCD screen lit up like a solid, green-and-black stain.
Once again they heard the sound, lower down on the trail. It came closer. Tyler felt his blood shoot up to his head. The palms of his hands got clammy and the Maglite almost slipped out of his fingers; his mouth, however, had gone completely dry.
“Fletcher?” he whispered.
“Oh, Jesus, shut up,” Lawrence moaned.
“You hear it, don’t you?”
“That’s not Fletcher down there, it’s a deer or a fox or a fucking raccoon; it could be anything. I want to get the hell out of here.”
The sound shifted to the right of the trail, seemed to distance itself on the slope but came back again. It was a fast sound, hurried, and Tyler knew it was no deer or raccoon; what was moving out there was driven by a hunting instinct and was making its way through the crackling undergrowth on rapid paws. The night seemed to be breathing, swelling, and waiting to burst. Tyler’s legs began to feel like rubber. Pattering there in front of them in the dark was unmistakably a dog.
“Oh, Jesus, it is him,” Lawrence said with a husky voice.
“Fletcher!”
Driven by an uncontrollable impulse, Tyler sprang forward to leave the trail and go into the woods, but Lawrence grabbed him by his sleeve and pulled him back. “Oh no, you don’t! You stay right here!”
“Fletcher!” Tyler hissed again, and he whistled quietly. Lawrence joined him. For a moment Tyler imagined he could hear panting … and then he was convinced that he hadn’t imagined it, that it was really there. Again it moved. There was no doubt that Fletcher was within earshot—if it was Fletcher, of course, but why act as if it wasn’t? He couldn’t be more than fifty feet uphill, although sound carried in strange ways at night. But why didn’t he come? Tyler imagined Fletcher out there, sniffing in the dark, blind and deaf, his tongue lolling in his mouth, and unable to find his way home …
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness.
It was Colton Mathers’s voice and it was in his head, but it didn’t give him any measure of reassurance because it was immediately followed by another voice, popping up out of nowhere, as if Katherine herself were whispering in his head: Nibble, nibble like a mouse, tomorrow everyone will die.
Suddenly Tyler had a brain wave, as cold as a handful of black ice. The Maglite began to shake uncontrollably and he grabbed hold of Lawrence. “They say Katherine raised her son from the dead, right? Isn’t that why they hanged her? Do you believe that? Do you believe she can raise the dead?”
“Fuck off.” It sounded like a sob.
“What if she…”
“I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s Fletcher out there, man. If it is Fletcher, why doesn’t he come?”
“Fletcher!”
“Stop it!”
The air filled with a wild flapping, and in a flash a snow-white owl flew through the ray of the Maglite. The boys screamed and jumped into each other’s arms. The bird shrieked, and with powerful wingbeats disappeared in the direction of the dilapidated wooden cabin on Lookout Point, where they’d spent many a summer night as children and where you could have the best picnics in the world, but which would surely be made of cake if you let this owl guide you, with gingerbread roof tiles and white sugar window frames. And all at once Tyler knew for certain that he didn’t want to see what was slinking around them in the dark, even if it really was Fletcher, because if Fletcher was dead, then this was a horror that would instantly strip you of your sanity.
The next thing he knew they were running, and Tyler heard it coming after them, reducing the distance between them with laughable ease. The Maglite cleaved the path in front of them in a freak light show. Sometimes Lawrence was up front and sometimes Tyler, and they would scream at each other, “Not so fast, wait for me!” but neither of them slowed down. At some point Tyler thought he heard the jingling of metal, and it made him think of the buckle of Fletcher’s collar.
Of course the trail of kibble ended not much farther down the hill. You know how it goes with such trails that are meant to lead little boys out of the woods. Yet, oddly enough, that soothed Tyler’s panic, and deep in his heart he felt a strong sense of belonging because he knew exactly where they were: out in the middle of nowhere being chased by a nightmare straight out of a fairy tale, and at the end of the trail was Black Spring. At the end of the trail was always Black Spring, the end-of-the-line from the cold outside world, where no one knew their names or their way of life.
After that his memory began to fade; his consciousness must have shut down in an instinctive attempt at self-preservation. Apparently they had reached the end of the trail, because the first thing he became aware of was stubbing his toe against something and flying headfirst into Philosopher’s Creek. Ice-cold water swirled past his face, stiffened his cheeks, and soaked into his clothes right down to his naked skin. His mouth opened wide to let out a scream and was filled with liquid sand. That brought him back to reality, and half a beat later Tyler was up on his knees, gagging and slapping the water out of his face. Later he would realize that he had been tottering on the edge of madness at that point; the idea that he had ingested water and sediment from that creek was more than any sane person could bear. He clearly heard a click in his head, like the opening of enormous iron floodgates … and then Lawrence dragged him up and Tyler splashed onto the bank.
They stumbled over the enclosure, staggered down the path to the backyard, and dropped onto the lawn in front of the horses’ stable, utterly exhausted.
And because it was the only conceivable reaction to madness, they burst out laughing.
“This is the part where we’re supposed to find a whole potful of gems and gold, and everybody lives happily ever after,” Tyler said, which made them laugh even harder.
“Here’s your cam,” Lawrence said when he was all laughed out. He handed the GoPro to Tyler; it must have fallen out of his hand when he tripped and ended up in the creek, but the waterproof casing had saved it. The Maglite, sadly, had drowned.
Tyler scrambled to his feet, his clothes heavy and cold and dripping with creek water, his wet hair sticking to his forehead in strands. His teeth started chattering and there was nothing he could do to stop them. “What the f-f-fuck was that?” he stammered inarticulately.
Lawrence shook his head. “I didn’t see anything.”
They gazed at each other and uttered a hollow laugh, but quickly stopped. Indecisive and shivering uncontrollably all over, Tyler just stood there on the lawn. To his amazement, he saw that the red light on the GoPro was still on. The tough little sucker had filmed the entire thing.
Astonished, he turned it off.
* * *
TYLER CAN’T BRING himself to look at the footage until two days later.
He inserts the GoPro memory card into his MacBook and stares at the screen with glassy, dazed eyes. Things have changed: His muddy clothes, reeking of creek water, now smell of laundry det
ergent and are nicely folded in his closet. Katherine has changed, too. She hasn’t been doing her disappearing trick for a few days now because she’s apparently walking around with a large shopping bag containing a dead peacock (this has not quite escaped Tyler’s attention, despite the state he’s in) and appears to be rather attached to it. At the moment she’s a little farther up in the woods behind his house, but Tyler hasn’t gone to take a peek. He’s had enough of the witch, enough of shooting doc. Besides, the woods are still closed off to hikers; there are fences everywhere and there are volunteers from HEX dressed as State Reserve park rangers at the trailhead.
The clip lasts twelve minutes and forty-four seconds, and because of its sheer size, Tyler puts the file on his external hard drive.
Then he looks at the images and sees something terrifying.
He hits PAUSE and stares at it, lost in thought.
Suddenly there’s frantic pounding on the back door downstairs. Slowly, as if coming out of a trance, he looks up. He remembers that he’s home alone. In a reflex that comes from being a video blogger he snatches the memory card from the USB drive, sticks it in the GoPro, and puts the cam in his pocket. He rushes down the stairs, to what will be the last and most shocking report from his career as a journalist.
It’s Lawrence who’s pounding on the door. As soon as Tyler opens it, Lawrence drags him out by the arm. “Come with me, now,” he says. “We’ve got to stop them.”
“What…” Tyler begins, then thinks, Jaydon. He doesn’t know how he knows, but he knows. They run to the backyard gate and down the path to the creek, and it’s like a video being played backward: They’re right where Tyler fell into the creek a few nights before. It takes three seconds to take stock of the situation and to grasp how serious it is, how completely and indisputably fucked up it is. Instinctively, he takes the GoPro out of his pocket and starts shooting.
HEX Page 20
