As he took a step back, her mutilated mouth fell open with a limp plop. Katherine shuddered and drew a rasping, scraping breath. Once again, a shock ran through the townsfolk of Black Spring, even more severe this time. Eyes opened wide, cries rose in the streets, people looked at one another feverishly and thought, For God’s sake … what’s happening?
Oblivious to the scenes outside, Steve started on the stitches on her left eye.
The threads fell to the floor one by one.
The eyelid’s flaking, bluish, inflamed skin quivered.
When he was done, Steve turned to the right eye.
And when that, too, was done, the witch turned away from him with her hand over her eyes in an effort to protect her liberator from herself. Her face became contorted as if she were suffering excruciating pain, and her body pitched forward unnaturally. She waved her free arm at Steve, gesturing at him to go away, away, away from here.
Just then, a new shock reverberated through Black Spring, but now it didn’t strike the townsfolk from within; this time it seemed to come from the earth itself. For a moment, everything appeared to darken before their eyes. The streets were filled with a very real sound, a low sound, as if something gigantic had rolled over in the vaulted darkness beneath the town that made the asphalt and the woods quake. The bells of Crystal Meth Church resounded with a deep and sonorous hymn. At Ackerman’s Corner, John Blanchard’s sheep broke out and bolted. Jaydon Holst, lost in a fever dream about a faceless executioner who kept mutilating his tortured body over and over again, groaned restlessly in his sleep. In the HEX control center, Robert Grim and Claire Hammer came rushing down the aisle to the screen, which was flickering on and off with a humming electrical buzz. Then all the power in Black Spring went out. Emergency generators roared up but shut down immediately, and the Christmas lights in some of the windows sputtered in the dying daylight.
Black Spring wasn’t the only place where darkness fell: All over the Highlands and the Hudson Valley—yes, even on the highways and in Manhattan office buildings—residents of Black Spring who happened to be outside the town limits when Katherine opened her eyes were struck by an unspeakable, morbid sadness and gloom that exceeded human comprehension. Immediately they began seeing images that were simply too much for their brittle spirits to bear and that awakened in them an irrepressible desire to seek death as the only way out of their existence. Those lucky enough to be relatively close to home understood that the force that had always bound them to Black Spring had intensified to the Nth degree, and they rushed to get back … but there were those for whom salvation came too late, and they hanged themselves in broom closets or ran their cars into trees with the pedal to the metal so their bodies were crushed in clouds of smoke and darkness.
In the house at the end of Deep Hollow Road, Steve gaped with horror at the inhuman, crooked figure who was still covering her evil eye with her hand. Again she waved for him to leave, a swastika of ashen flesh and bent limbs. For a moment, his legs seemed liquid, and he was unable to move his feet. Icy needles pricked his neck at the thought of her opening her eyes … and turning them on him.
Steve fled from his house, screaming. He ran into the woods, and he ran for his life.
TWENTY-NINE
TEN MILES AWAY in Newburgh, Jocelyn Grant did feel the initial shock, but she dismissed it as a jolt of unsettled biorhythms and put it out of her mind. When the second shock came, she looked up from the copy of Esquire she had been mindlessly leafing through and stared into the silent hospital room. And when the third shock followed shortly thereafter, more intense than the previous two put together, she rocketed out of her seat and the magazine slid to the floor.
Matt moaned and moved his head in his sleep. Startled, Jocelyn eased her way around his bed and put a hand on his shoulder. “Matt! Matt, can you hear me? Can you hear me, darling?”
But Matt didn’t answer. His left eye was covered with a wad of cotton, held in place by a bandage wrapped around his head. The bandage over his right eye had been removed. The eye stayed shut, but this restlessness was a greater sign of life than he had shown in days. Would he finally wake up? Her excitement was no match, however, for her sudden rising panic: Something’s wrong. Something’s very wrong.
She felt it. This was not her imagination. It was all around her, but she couldn’t get a handle on it. It was as untouchable as the static between two radio channels. The clock on the wall said it was a few minutes past five. The wind was having a field day in the parking lot, whipping a plastic bag against the grills of cars that glistened in the Christmas lighting. Everything looked normal, but it wasn’t.
And it wasn’t here that things were wrong; it was at home in Black Spring. She felt it pulling her, whatever it was.
She called Steve but got no answer, not even his voice mail. Only silence. And her mind responded uncompromisingly, as if that silence had everything to do with the hunch she was having: We have to get home before it’s too late.
It took her by surprise: the dream, the same dream, and she recognized it immediately. It was the dream she had dreamt only once before, eighteen years ago in a bamboo bungalow in Thailand, but it had always been present in the back of her mind and had been responsible for much of the darkness of their life in Black Spring, despite the relative happiness they believed they had known.
The intensity was different, but the essence of the dream was the same. She saw herself hysterically pulling strands of her hair out. She saw herself tossing the papers from Matt’s clipboard all around the room. They fluttered to the floor, and she saw them form a photo collage, pictures of the dead. All children, little children and big children. They had all sorts of cuts on their faces and bodies. In the next image, the dead children were actually lying in the hospital room, the children of Black Spring, and one of them was Matt. His face was cut off and stuffed with black coals. She saw herself naked and rolling in glittering pools of paint, her body red and black, while she was taken by a wild boar. The curved tusks of the animal gleamed as it thrust its member into her, snarling and grunting and stamping its hooves, and she screamed out in ecstasy.
Jocelyn hadn’t the faintest idea how long she had been staring at Matt’s bed in that numbed state of horror. Nor did all the images she saw register in her mind. The only thing that got through to her was the vague but urgent sense that she could end it all by taking her life. That prospect didn’t frighten her; it only filled her with a dull sadness, nothing worse than what was tormenting her now. She crossed over to the window with leaden legs. She picked up the chair she had been sitting in by its back and heaved it over her head, about to smash the glass and remove the last obstacle from a four-story fall.
What saved her life was her phone, which began to ring at that very moment. Dazed, she looked up, not liberated from the immense sadness but at least conscious of herself, and she thought, Oh my God. I really wanted to do it. I really wanted to jump out the window. What’s happening to me?
She groped for her phone, assuming she would see Steve’s picture on the touch screen. But it wasn’t Steve. It was her father.
“Dad!”
“You want to come down for dinner, maybe? It’s not too crowded in—”
“Dad, I have to get home. Can you please take me there?”
“But I thought you—”
“There’s something wrong with Steve,” she said, the most obvious thing she could think of. And the truth: “I can’t reach him.” She couldn’t explain to her father why she had to go back to Black Spring. The urgency had risen within her, as if a magnet had been put in place farther south that was pulling at her mind. She felt her home beckoning with gentle, swelling chants—compelling choir voices that she had to obey before something terrible happened.
“He’s probably gone out for a breath of fresh air,” Milford Hampton said calmly and charitably. “Jocelyn, you’re at your wits’ end. Tell you what, why don’t you—”
“Dad! Please, I have to go home. Can you br
ing the car around? I’ll see you at the entrance.”
“Well, I suppose that’s all right, if you really want to.…” her father said. Jocelyn hung up without answering. Get a grip, she thought. Get a grip, keep focused …
A noise behind her. Matt had torn out his IV tube and she saw him drawing the end to his lips. In a leap and a jump Jocelyn was at his bedside, snatching the tube from his hands with a shout. The needle flew from his arm, bandage and all, spattering a thin streak of blood on the sheet.
“Matt, calm down,” she said feverishly. “I’m getting you out of here. Calm down. Everything’s going to be all right.”
But the gloom, that pull, that swelling inside her didn’t go away, it only got stronger. It had taken hold of Matt as well. Cautiously but quickly, fighting the impulses that fired her mind with madness, she pulled the slippery feeding tube out of Matt’s nose and dropped it on the blanket. Then she wrestled his rigid body into his hoodie. She had to start over again three times because her hands were trembling too much to disentangle the sleeves.
There was a wheelchair in the hall, and without hesitation, she rolled it through the doors. She dragged Matt into the chair, put his shoes on him, and set his feet up on the footrests. Matt didn’t budge—didn’t even seem to realize what was going on—but his fingers were now clutching the armrests and his one pearly white, wide-open eye stared into the room with blind intensity.
Suicide, she thought. He tried to commit suicide, and so did you.… He’s only been out of Black Spring for a week and you were there just this morning, and you know that’s far too short a time to feel her power. What does that tell you? Oh, what was that shock a minute ago?
Jocelyn wrapped Matt’s legs in his sheet and blanket and snatched his eyedrops from the nightstand. Hoping the corridor was empty, she pushed her son out of the hospital room.
The corridor was not empty. At the far end near the beverage machine two nurses were drinking coffee. Jocelyn suppressed the urge to run and quickly headed for the elevators. She pushed the button. When the bell announced the elevator’s arrival and the doors slid open, she heard voices behind her: “Ma’am?” And sharper: “Ma’am!”
With her jaws clenched, she gave the wheelchair a hard push as the footsteps hurried closer. She slapped the button for the ground floor and the elevator doors shut out the nurses’ livid cries.
The reception area downstairs was humming with people, but nobody paid them any attention. Jocelyn worked her way through the crowd toward the exit. As she pushed the wheelchair through the revolving doors, she searched the pickup area for the Toyota—not there. The wind tugged at Matt’s blanket. She felt that chasm opening up again, that strange, gloomy pull. To keep herself distracted she punched in Steve’s number for the umpteenth time, but didn’t get through.
“Damn!” she shouted, a cry of pure despair and frustration.
Finally her father came driving up. She yanked the back door open even before the car had come to a full stop. Mr. Hampton was aghast as she dragged Matt onto the backseat like a rag doll and kicked the wheelchair away so she could shut the car door behind her.
“Jocelyn, what the hell? What’s Matt doing here?”
“Drive.”
“But he hasn’t been released from the hospital. Come on, Jocelyn, you’re in a tailspin, and no wonder. Let’s get him back now, I can’t allow you to—”
“Don’t you dare leave us here!” Jocelyn shouted, and Mr. Hampton shrank back. “Something very serious is wrong here and Matt has to go home, before it’s too late.”
“But what is it?” her father insisted. “Tell me what’s going on!”
“I can’t. It’s got something to do with Steve. And with us. And…” She began to sob out of pure desperation, dropping her head in her hands. Mr. Hampton looked from his daughter to his grandson, a little unnerved. Through her tears, Jocelyn saw him for the first time as the tired old man he was. The tragic events of the past week had left irreversible traces on his face.
“All right. We’ll drive to Black Spring, if we have to. We’ll see how Steve’s doing, and when we find him we’ll take him with us and come straight back to the hospital. All this fuss can’t be any good for Matt.” He looked in the rearview mirror and drove out onto the circular drive. “But you owe me an explanation.”
“Thanks, Dad,” she sighed, sinking into the backseat, utterly exhausted.
* * *
BY THE TIME they left downtown Newburgh and started up 9W, which looped into the State Park, the digital clock on the dashboard said it was 5:43 p.m., and Jocelyn was beginning to feel the oppressive weight fermenting in her brain like a maddening poison. Back in Thailand it had been bad, but this was far worse. She was beside herself. Why didn’t Steve pick up his goddamn phone? What kind of trouble was he in? And what kind of power had been unleashed that was capable of causing this despair? Her thoughts were adrift like loose clouds, creating an emptiness in her head. Her mind refused to bear the colossal pain; it simply wasn’t up to it. Her world had drained into a big, stinking wound of misery. It broke her will to fight against it: Jocelyn wanted to die. And Matt, poor Matt: In his condition, he wasn’t even able to free himself from this hopeless mess.…
“Jocelyn, for cryin’ out loud!”
The Toyota was swerving all over the road, bouncing Jocelyn and Matt back and forth across the backseat. It snapped her out of her stupor momentarily, but she felt herself sinking right back down, like she was trying, and failing, to fight against anesthesia. With a jolt she came back to her senses, having caught herself winding Matt’s seat belt around his neck in an attempt to strangle him with it—an act of maternal love, to set him free.
In a flash of intense, ineffable fear, she let go of the belt.
It’s bewitching you. It’s hypnotizing you. And once you’re under, it will force you to commit suicide. That’s how she must have gotten Tyler.
With a shrill whine, the Toyota came to a halt on the shoulder. “What the hell is wrong with you, goddamn it?” her father shouted, looking back from the driver’s seat.
“Oh, Dad, I don’t know.” Mr. Hampton was startled by what he saw: Jocelyn really was downright terrified. Her eyes were wide and imploring. “Hurry, drive us home. And keep me talking—please…”
“But tell me what’s going on!”
She couldn’t, any more than she could tell her father the real reason for Tyler’s death. She deeply regretted this, and she supposed she would tell him everything in due course. He had the right to know, even though it was against town rules, that Black Spring had cost him his oldest grandson. But first it was crucial that she get back to town, because she felt her influence dragging her down.…
“Please don’t ask questions,” she said, choking on her words. “I’ll explain later. Just keep me talking; that’s important.”
There was something in those last words that finally struck Mr. Hampton as well. Whatever it was that had gotten into her, it was giving him the heebie-jeebies. So he steered the Toyota onto the exit off 9W and then onto Route 293 toward Black Spring. “I had a bad feeling about Steve staying home. You two should be together, ’specially right now. I’m worried about him. He’s not coping well. Nobody is, goddamn it; it’s all such a lousy, rotten business, but…”
With the very best of intentions, Mr. Hampton was making the fatal mistake of doing all the talking himself … so he didn’t realize that Jocelyn’s eyes had almost immediately lost their luster and were staring blankly into nothing. They hadn’t gone halfway up to the single orange traffic light that marked the exit to Deep Hollow Road before Jocelyn and Matt, on opposite sides of the backseat, began bashing their heads against the car doors. Mr. Hampton let out a smothered curse. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Jocelyn grope for the door handle, and he violently pounded on the brakes. The wheel spun in his hands, whirring so fast it burned his palms, and once again they jolted to a halt, all three of them thrown forward onto their seat belts.
“
Dad, help me, please…” Jocelyn looked up at him, rigid with fear. There was a gash on the side of her head and blood was running down her face. She took Matt in her arms again and began to rock him.
Mr. Hampton stared at them blankly. He started feeling nauseated. It was beyond him, utterly beyond him, but he felt the urgency and it was eating at him. And suddenly he knew that the cause of all this was ahead of them, waiting … a secret at the end of this road, in the woods, in the night.
All at once, Mr. Hampton was convinced that if he never discovered what the secret was, he wouldn’t be the least regretful.
With a trembling hand he shifted the car into gear and drove in the direction of Black Spring.
Jocelyn rolled down the window and felt her head clear in the cold airstream. The darkness of the Black Rock Forest lay in silence as they passed, suggesting a normality that wasn’t there. She sensed how bad it was. A little farther down the road they would be safe, whatever that safety implied. There was no point in speculating, since she’d be seeing it with her own eyes in just a few moments … assuming there was something to see, of course.
With the sign WELCOME TO BLACK SPRING already in sight, she saw it—and her jaw dropped.
Mr. Hampton took his foot off the gas, then slammed on the brakes.
“I don’t want to go to Black Spring,” he muttered.
“Dad?”
“I … You know what? Let’s go back. We still have … things to do … in Newburgh. Yeah. I ought to be somewhere else.” He had already started to turn the car around, but he didn’t take his eyes off what lay before them. It almost caused them to careen off the road and into the adjacent ditch.
“Dad—don’t! We have to keep going!”
But her father wasn’t listening. He muttered something unintelligible and the sound of his voice made Jocelyn turn stone cold. A dumbfounded expression appeared on her face that turned into full comprehension. This wasn’t her father. The same influence that was driving her back to Black Spring was chasing him away from it.
HEX Page 33
