HEX

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  Saturday came and she stood behind the shop counter in a particularly good mood. As the specialty of the day, she had made her “lukewarm meatballs à la gravy.” People poured into the shop, as if they all secretly knew that she was their savior. Even Mrs. Schaeffer greeted her wholeheartedly and bought a two-pound rump steak like it was nothing.

  That evening, Griselda lay in bed watching Saturday Night Live with a tray full of liverwurst and a sense of satisfaction when she heard a loud banging on the door downstairs. She was surprised; no one ever came to visit her, and Jaydon had shut himself up in his room after dinner.

  “Jaydon, the door!” she screamed. Nothing, only the thumping from his stereo in the attic. “Jaydon!”

  Resentfully, she slid into her slippers and went out to the hallway in her pajamas. She was about to go upstairs and give Jaydon a piece of her mind—how often had she told him that his affairs with his friends were his business, not hers? But there was more pounding, even louder this time, and she lumbered back down the stairs, grumbling all the while. As she turned on the light in the shop the doorbell began ringing nonstop. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” she snarled, shuffling around the counter. “I’m not sixteen anymore, you know!”

  Behind the braided window curtain were three hefty figures. There—Jaydon’s friends, just as she’d expected. She unlocked the door and was about to greet the visitors with a harsh Couldn’t you guys have called him on his goddamned phone? but the words died on her lips. It was Rey Darrel and Joe Ramsey from Rush Painting, accompanied by Theo Stackhouse, owner of the garage on Deep Hollow Road where Jaydon had had some lousy-ass job last summer, as he had called it himself. Three big, overblown guys full of testosterone who looked as if they were about to pop. Only now did she notice Colton Mathers in their wake, two heads shorter and hidden away inside his overcoat. Rey Darrel’s Chevy was idling in the distance, lights still on.

  Griselda looked nervously from one face to another. “What can I do for you guys?”

  “Is Jaydon home?” Darrel asked abruptly.

  “What mess did he get himself into now?” She looked suspiciously over her shoulder and the men took the opportunity to squeeze right past her and enter the shop. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing! Colton, what’s this all about?”

  The councilman looked at her with a contorted mask of anger. Suddenly Griselda was struck with fear, burning fear. “These officers of the law have come to arrest Jaydon, Griselda. You’d be well advised to let them do their work without any resistance.”

  “Arrest? What on earth for?”

  The three men ignored her and walked around the counter to the private comfort of Griselda’s home. “Hey, get back here! This is my house! Jaydon!”

  Colton Mathers placed his hand on her arm and called her name, articulating each syllable, but Griselda, in the spur of the moment, turned and went after the intruders, who had shamelessly started up the stairs. They couldn’t just do that, could they? With a shock, Griselda realized that indeed they could if the situation called for it. Black Spring’s local police force consisted of nothing more than a bunch of volunteer officers supervised by the HEX staff, who were called in for internal matters. There were no clear rules for carrying out arrests and it often came down to improvisation, but who could you turn to and complain about the lack of a search warrant? The authority was standing downstairs in the shop, waiting.

  Ramsey, Stackhouse, and Darrel followed the music and went straight to the attic. The first of the three slammed Jaydon’s bedroom door against the wall with a house-shattering bang. Griselda was right behind them, out of breath, and saw Jaydon, who had been gaming on his laptop in bed, sit bolt upright.

  “Jaydon Holst, you are under arrest for breaking just about every goddamn law in the Emergency Decree,” Rey Darrel said. He almost shouted it out, and for the first time Griselda realized that the men were not only worked up about their task but were also sincerely outraged. “You have the right to remain silent, but I wouldn’t count on an attorney, you stupid little fuck.” With a loud crash he hurled Jaydon’s desk chair to the floor.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Griselda screamed. She grabbed him by the sleeve, but Darrel freed himself with a simple twist of the arm.

  “What the fuck?” Jaydon stammered. He turned to Griselda for help. “Mom…”

  “What kind of psychopath are you?” Theo Stackhouse asked, his lips white with rage. He walked up to Jaydon and grabbed him by the arm, fusing his hand to the boy’s skin. “This is not what I hired you for! You fucking ate lunch at my house with my wife and kids, every single day!”

  “Theo, chill out, man. What’s this all about?”

  “You’re the one who should’ve chilled out!” he roared, and Jaydon shrank back. “Not so tough without a stone in your hand, are you?”

  Jaydon raised both his palms. “Listen, that was just a joke, nothing more.”

  “I’ll show you a joke.” With one quick move he grabbed Jaydon’s wrist and twisted his arm onto his back. Jaydon bent forward and screamed.

  “Stop it!” Griselda screamed, but Darrel held her back with fingers that felt like steel cables. “Rey, I’m never going to sell you that ground beef you like so much unless you tell me right now what the hell you think you’re doing!”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Holst. Orders.”

  “Why don’t you just call me Griselda, like you always do?”

  But Darrel roughly pushed her aside and grabbed Jaydon’s free arm. “You’re coming with me,” he ordered. They dragged him past Griselda and out of the room. Ramsey snatched Jaydon’s laptop from the bed, pulled the charger from the wall, and tucked it under his arm.

  “Wait!” Griselda shouted. Holding on to the banister for support, she heaved herself down the stairs after the group of men. She felt her heart racing like mad and she was panting like a runner, but what kept her on her feet were her son’s terrified cries for help. She reached the stairs to the ground floor just in time to see Darrel jab him violently in the back, so Jaydon flew down the last few steps and fell flat on his face in the doorway to the shop. Blood spurted out of his nose. In a blind rage, Griselda threw herself on the man in front of her, Joe Ramsey, but he had grabbed the banister, and despite her impressive weight it was as if she had crashed against a wall.

  “Don’t hurt him, you monsters!” she wept. “Keep your dirty hands off my son!”

  Lying facedown, Jaydon groped in his pant pocket for his phone, but Theo Stackhouse planted a leather boot on Jaydon’s wrist and he screamed. The garage owner took the phone and stuck it into the pocket of his coat.

  “Motherfuckers!” Jaydon wailed. “I have rights, too, you know!”

  “Not anymore,” Stackhouse said.

  He gave him such a hard kick in the small of his back that Jaydon bent in half and coughed up a gob of saliva, and at that moment all Griselda could see was Jim; at that moment all Griselda could see was her late husband kicking her son, and a red haze of madness spread over her vision.

  “Enough!” thundered the voice of the councilman above all the other noise. “Stand up, boy.”

  His face contorted with pain, Jaydon scrambled to his feet and held the doorpost for support, but he did manage to stand up without the help of the arresting team. He pressed his wounded wrist against his chest and blood dripped from his upper lip. With tear-filled eyes clouded with pathological hatred, he looked up into Colton Mathers’s steel face.

  “Young master Holst, I am arresting you in the name of God for the repeated and disproportionate violation of the Emergency Decree, the stoning of Katherine van Wyler, and for maliciously endangering the lives of the almost three thousand residents of Black Spring. May the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

  Darrel and Stackhouse grabbed Jaydon and led him past the counter. “Mom, you saw what they did to me!” he cried. “Tell everybody! She saw how you beat me up, motherfucker. You’re not getting away with this!”

  But Griselda could barely h
ear him. She could no longer think clearly. Everything had become a blur. The only thing she could hear was: The stoning of Katherine van Wyler. At these words, her brain had shut down with an audible click. The stoning of Katherine van Wyler. The stoning …

  “Don’t hurt him,” she said, but the words were spoken hesitantly, almost like a question.

  Oh, dear God. Did he say STONING?

  “For heaven’s sake, Colton, what did he do?”

  As the others took Jaydon away, the councilman gave her a highly abridged version of the charges, but it was enough. Griselda’s thoughts twisted and turned and plummeted in an insane free fall. “It is my duty to tell you this because you are his mother, Griselda, but I am not here in my official capacity. We have decided that it would be better if you…”

  But Griselda wasn’t listening; she had started hyperventilating, and in her thoughts she was with Katherine, not with a desire for reconciliation—oh, was reconciliation even possible after something like this?—but solely to wash her feet with her tears. She took one clumsy, off-balance step toward the hat rack.

  “Griselda, what are you doing?” Colton Mathers asked quietly.

  “I have to…” go see her, she had almost blurted out. “Go with him, of course.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “But I…”

  Mathers grabbed her with both hands and pushed her gently but firmly against the wall behind the counter. She felt his crooked, gouty right hand drop to her breast. She smelled his breath, a heavy, intensely penetrating, predatory smell, and her mouth closed with a wet, audible plop.

  “Quiet now. I’m on your side, Griselda. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes…”

  “Good. Trust me.”

  “But what—”

  “No, Griselda. Trust me. Do you trust me?”

  “I trust you…”

  “I want you to repeat after me. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Repeat after me, Griselda. I, Griselda Holst…”

  “I, Griselda Holst…”

  “Resign from the Council of my own free will…”

  She looked at him with shock. “What?”

  “Resign from the Council of my own free will…” His hand clamped around her breast and squeezed, painful and cruel. “Say it, Griselda. I want to hear you say it. Resign from the Council of my own free will…”

  She was horrified now and tried to wrest herself from his grasp, but to no avail. “But why?”

  “Because I know, Griselda,” the councilman said with a sincere sadness. “I know you’ve been going to the witch and I know you gave her the peacock. I know you visit her on a regular basis; I know it all, and I don’t want to try you officially, but by God I will if you don’t resign voluntarily. Repeat after me, Griselda: I hereby resign from the Council of my own free will…”

  She blushed scarlet and looked at him with big, guilty eyes. “Colton, I…”

  “Repeat after me!” the old councilman suddenly roared in an unconcealed frenzy, and a dizzying chill jolted through Griselda’s body. “Repeat after me, Griselda! Repeat after me! I, Griselda Holst, resign from the Council of my own free will!”

  “Resign from the Council of my own free will,” she moaned, cowering. Now that his mask of restraint had fallen away, Mathers’s face had become a repulsive web of tendons and creases, and dangerous but absolutely not senile old age.

  “And I will not do anything to impede the investigation in any way…”

  “I will not impede the investigation … Ow, Colton, you’re hurting me.”

  “Or go anywhere near the witch, not even once.”

  “You don’t understand…”

  “Say it!” A searing pain shot through her nipple as he squeezed even harder.

  “I won’t go anywhere near Katherine anymore!”

  The councilman relaxed and his face became composed, as if a layer of clouds had broken open under his skin. “Very well, Griselda. May God have mercy on you, too.”

  He straightened his overcoat and walked out the door without saying another word. The little bell jingled gaily, as it had always done. Griselda dropped to the floor and began to cry.

  * * *

  JAYDON’S ARREST WAS followed by a shadowy interval in which Griselda felt an almost pathological need to make things clean, first herself and then the shop, thoroughly and repeatedly, to try to wash away the filth of her body and soul. She did it in a daze, as if she were hovering over herself, transcending her body, a floating balloon of confusing images that followed each other like fever dreams: Colton Mathers kicking Jaydon’s corpse; townsfolk with blank, empty faces who knew what Griselda had done and were throwing stones at her (instead of the medals she deserved); Mathers’s hands on her breast, his randy breath down her neck.

  Oh, Katherine, what’s happening to me? I’m going crazy.

  She shuddered at the thought of the councilman’s touch, which somehow had been much more horrible than Arthur Roth’s. With Roth it had been sheer lust, and she could simply disassociate herself from it. When Colton Mathers squeezed her nipple she had seen on his face the sick concentration of an inquisitor, and it was as if she had been looking through a deep chasm into a distant, long-gone past.

  I’m on your side, Griselda.

  But Griselda had lived long enough to know that no one was on her side, not Colton Mathers, not Jaydon, and certainly not the townsfolk who ate her pâté. Only Katherine had always been on her side. But now that had changed. Every time she dozed off to sleep that night the same image appeared before her: Katherine strolling up and down Deep Hollow Road, sniffing the air like a beast of prey and searching with blind eyes for Griselda, for it had been her son who had stoned Katherine, her flesh and blood who had taken the peacock away from her. Again and again Griselda awoke with a jolt, her body cold and clammy with sweat. She spent the whole night tossing and turning, caught between two extremes: If she wanted to pay her debt to Katherine she would have to remain faithful to her, but if she wanted to keep Jaydon from harm, she would have to choose his side.

  At first light on Sunday she called Town Hall, but no one answered. She tried calling Mathers, but no one picked up there, either, just as she expected. At HEX she got Robert Grim on the line, who reluctantly told her that Jaydon had been interrogated and was now in solitary confinement in Doodletown awaiting his trial, as were his friends. Grim added that Jaydon, unlike the others, was of age, and that he, Grim, wasn’t obliged to pass this information on to Griselda.

  “Please don’t hurt him, Robert,” she begged. “No matter what he did, and no matter what you think of me, don’t hurt my son.”

  “Of course not,” he said tersely. “They’ll be treated like anybody else.”

  “When Jaydon was arrested they pushed him down the stairs and kicked him hard.”

  There was silence; Grim was struggling to keep his voice even. “I’m sorry about that. That shouldn’t have happened.”

  But it had, and that was only the beginning. The news of the stoning spread through Black Spring like a virus, no longer whispered but trumpeted loudly in lunatic shrieks. Suddenly the carefully repressed fear had returned, and in its shadow came the panic, the rage, and the insinuations. It was as if the clock had been turned back a week. But the very fact that they had foolishly believed the danger was finally behind them made the indignation all the more distressing and the fear all the more paralyzing.

  From her bedroom window, Griselda peeked out over the square and saw crowds of people gathered in front of Crystal Meth Church and the Quiet Man. Sometimes they yelled slogans to fan the flames. It wasn’t long before people started banging on the windows of the lunchroom. Amid the furious screaming, Griselda tried to distinguish the voices of townsfolk who had always treated her kindly. She hid behind the curtain and desperately waited for the hysteria to blow over, but as soon as dusk set in, dark clouds of smoke could be seen rising in the west and the fire engine siren
s began to wail. Someone had taken a crate of empty beer bottles, filled them with gasoline, tossed the sucker through the window of that Turkish friend of Jaydon’s—that Buran—and set the house on fire. The family was away for questioning and escaped injury, but the downstairs burned out and the house was declared uninhabitable.

  The Şayers were an easy scapegoat, of course. Griselda had earned more respect than them over the years, but the next day her customers abandoned her, and that afternoon two men from the Lower South came with baseball bats and smashed her glass display cases to smithereens.

  As soon as she was finally able, she closed the shop and darkened the windows for her own protection. Despondently fishing splinters of glass out of the ground beef, Griselda was struck by a chilling realization that she couldn’t put into words but that felt indisputable nonetheless: As each individual gave in to the collective hysteria, Black Spring was deteriorating into a state of insanity.

  What remained was a horror: the soul of the town, which was irreversibly bewitched.

  TWENTY

  THE TRIAL WAS held on Tuesday evening in Memorial Hall, and the whole town showed up. When Steve arrived with Jocelyn and Tyler and saw the rows of people waiting at the entrance, he immediately understood that the humble building had not been made to accommodate such a large crowd and was about to burst at the seams. While about eight hundred individuals had shown up for the All Hallows gathering, now there must have been almost two thousand.