HEX

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  As a grim hubbub arose from a crowd of people who had apparently gathered on the town square outside her window, the oh-so-plausible idea began to dawn on Griselda that she could indeed save herself by sacrificing her son, Jaydon, to Katherine … thereby entirely misinterpreting what the witch had meant by her message.

  THIRTY-ONE

  “THIS IS IT, right?” Warren Castillo said after returning to the control center. “The end.”

  Grim nodded, hardly able to look him in the eyes. His coworker sounded like a frightened child begging his mother to tell him it was all just a nightmare, and Grim would have given his right kidney if he could have created that illusion for the both of them. His rectum, if he had to. “Warren, I appreciate that you came back, but if you want to be with your wife right now, I completely understand.”

  Warren had trouble restraining his emotions, but he pulled himself together. “No, I’m staying. The town needs us.”

  Then Grim did something totally out of character, something he had believed to be impossible under any circumstances: He took Warren in his arms and hugged him. It was a little awkward, but it strengthened both men at this moment of absolute darkness. All things considered, Warren had nailed it: Grim reckoned their chances of getting out of this alive to be about a zillion to one.

  While he was feverishly trying to dream up a protocol, his thoughts kept on peppering him with shrapnel from the Delarosa talk: What does the damn witch want from you, for crying out loud?

  Revenge.

  We’re assuming she wants revenge.

  HEX didn’t even have a calamity plan in place for the Day of Judgment, simply because no one had had the faintest idea how it would unfold. The only vaguely articulated scenario was to evacuate everyone as soon as possible, but if the rumors proved to be true, that road was a massive fucking no-go.

  Grim had immediately sent Claire Hammer to find Eddie McConroy, the town’s electrical engineer, to investigate the power glitch, but it soon became evident that what was cutting Black Spring off from the outside world was not a problem of the technical sort but a supernatural one. And it wasn’t only the electricity. It was everything. The water supply system. The telephone lines. The gas connections. The whole goddamn shooting match. By nine o’clock that night, Robert Grim was convinced that Black Spring had been catapulted back into the seventeenth century, and his shock was so deep he could no longer clearly reflect on what that implied.

  We have every reason to believe that if her eyes open and she starts uttering her spells, we will all die.

  Focus! Think happy thoughts. Think babies. Blood!

  He cracked his fingers behind his neck. “Okay. Right. We have to get help. There’s no other way. The Point.”

  Claire stopped him in his tracks. “Robert, you know that without Colton Mathers we can’t make that decision.…”

  “Do you see Colton Mathers here?” He almost screamed these words. It was her forehead—it distracted him. He couldn’t stand it. Claire had knotted her hair so tightly in the back of her head that it looked as if her face might tear loose from her skull at any moment and have to be secured with stitches. “No? Then I’m in charge!”

  Claire recoiled. Grim suppressed the impulse to rip the elastic from her knot and release the pressure on her forehead, but instead he turned to the old CB. With sweat-soaked temples gleaming in the light of the Coleman lanterns, he tried to tune it in, but all he got was dead silence on all frequencies.

  Lucy Everett came up with the satellite phone. “This won’t connect, either, Robert.…”

  “What the fuck!” He snatched it from her hands. “It’s a fucking satellite. That doesn’t have anything to do with our communication network!” He tapped the phone on the desk tentatively, looked at the screen, and hurled it into a corner. Barbed wire, barbed wire, he thought, attempting to calm himself, but his mind had a will of its own. She doesn’t want to be understood; she must not be understood. Katherine is a paranormal time bomb.

  “Robert, calm down,” Claire’s forehead implored, and it was all Grim could do to keep from screaming.

  Marty Keller was in even worse shape. Not long after Warren had returned with the shocking news, the kid had snapped. He had thrown himself against the wall, flinging his hands and legs in every direction, while Lucy and Grim had tried to restrain him. His mouth was a wind tunnel of rage, revulsion, and fear. After finally managing to calm down, he hoarsely apologized. Said he was afraid of the dark, that it made him feel claustrophobic. But Grim knew what he didn’t dare say out loud: it was the fear of death roaming the streets. Now he was slumped against the wall with a Maglite in his trembling hands, halfway through a bottle of lukewarm Smirnoff.

  “We gotta kill her, before she wipes us all out,” Marty now said from the floor. His voice sounded as if his tongue had turned to jelly.

  “And how do you intend to do that?” Grim asked impatiently.

  “The trick is to catch her unawares.” Coming from someone who was up to his ass in a bottle of vodka, the logic sounded indisputable. “That’s how those kids were able to stone her. She didn’t see ’em coming. A quick bullet through the head is what I say. We might just stand a chance.”

  Grim managed to raise himself above Marty’s hysteria, and that was good. It reinforced his self-confidence not to be the one without the backbone or even without common sense. “We’ve been trying to kill her for three fucking centuries,” he said. “And, oh, by the way, her eyes were still shut then. You really don’t get it, do you? The only reason they were able to stone her is because she let them do it. She wanted to be stoned. She wanted our morals to rot. It was all part of her plan. The bleeding creek, the trial, that torture porn on the square, Tyler’s suicide … it’s all part of our ultimate collapse. Only then could she get someone to cut her stitches away.”

  “Who do you think did it?” Claire asked.

  “Jaydon Holst?” Warren said. “That wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Or his mother, that crazy butcher woman, as revenge for what they did to her son.”

  Claire shook her head. “No way. She’s as terrified with Katherine as she was obsessed.”

  “I think it was Tyler Grant’s father,” Grim said.

  “Steve? No … why?”

  “I don’t know.” Grim frowned. His eyes strayed to the dark half of the control center. The main screen was shrouded in gloom. Something was skittering around over there. Lucy had heard it, too, apparently, and she cocked her head. “Maybe because he’s the last one you’d expect.”

  “Makes no sense,” Warren said, but there was a trace of doubt in his voice.

  Grim was staring into the darkness. Whatever had been moving there now had friends. Failing to comprehend what his eyes were telling him, he saw a shadow flicker along the wall toward Marty: pitch-black, wiry, fur teeming with fleas. Before Grim could utter a word, Marty shouted and dropped the Maglite. Something shot away in the rolling light beam: a humongous rat. About the size of a young cat, Grim guessed.

  “Son of a bitch! It bit me!” Marty moaned and scrambled to his feet, holding his arm out in front of him. The skin on the back of his hand was ripped and bleeding. Grim searched the area in front of the screen with the beam of his own flashlight, then froze to the bone. Five rats stared back at him with sly, beady eyes and wormtails curled around their bloated bodies. One of the rodents was emaciated and had a white film over its eyes; the animal was clearly sick.

  Claire saw it, too, and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Right,” Grim said, unexpectedly resolute. “Lucy, help Marty with his hand. There’s a first aid kit in the kitchen. Clean the wound thoroughly. It doesn’t look deep, but I don’t want him getting infected.” That’s not what you’re afraid of, said a voice, but he suppressed it violently. “Claire, Warren, and I are taking the service car. We’re driving up to West Point, and if we can’t make that, for whatever reason, we’ll stop at the first house in Upper Highland Falls and call whoever th
e fuck we can. You and Marty can take your car. I want you to look out for anything unusual—anything at all. If you find Katherine, stay away from her, but sound the alarm. Make sure the locals don’t lose sight of her and report to Route 293 immediately—you’ll find our car.”

  “We can’t leave town, Robert…”

  But Grim had to see for himself. The first summer houses down the road in Upper Highland Falls were less than three miles from the Black Spring border—for the first time in his life he was actually pleased by this fact—and the Army’s MWR at Round Pond barely half a mile away. Katherine was a seventeenth-century witch, not an alien force field. Half a mile—how bad could it be?

  * * *

  BUT NO HELP would ever come.

  None of them made it even halfway to the MWR lodge, where Christmas lights were still flickering. They almost lost Warren Castillo, and Grim had to pull a breakneck stunt to get him back that nearly cost him his own life. Earlier he had come close to killing all three of them, but Claire had had the presence of mind to call for a full stop just before the town limits so they could continue on foot … just in case.

  Oh God. The images she showed them. Nothing in their everyday fantasies came even remotely close to such unutterable horror. Not in the darkest moments of their lives had they ever experienced such hostile melancholy, such destructive sorrow. As soon as they passed the back of the Black Spring welcome sign it was as if they had entered an invisible cloud of poisonous gas, leaden with pessimism, fear, and a craving for suicide. Grim had to keep Warren from smashing his skull against the road’s pitted blacktop surface, but he himself yearned to crack his own head open and release the hideous thoughts that plagued it.

  Somehow they managed to get back across the town limits of Black Spring. They stood like survivors of a shipwreck, hovering between two oceans of madness, gazing at the orange traffic light suspended in the distance at the MWR’s safe haven. Before them was death, but Grim feared things far worse than death.

  They shouted. They honked. They emptied the flare gun. They were joined by a couple of brave souls from nearby houses who were attracted by the noise, but no one came out of the MWR and no car came up the road. Claire suggested that the lodge might be abandoned (with all those Christmas lights?) or that their honking didn’t carry more than a few hundred yards, but Grim didn’t know who she was trying to convince. Sure, it was possible. Fifteen minutes later they returned with a shitload of fireworks from the back of Bob Tooky’s pickup—Bobby was the local hotshot who always managed to fly under the radar during the holiday season. They put on a nonstop, phenomenal, red-and-green light show that lit up the contours of the hills and could be seen and heard for miles around, up to Highland Falls, West Point, and probably even across the Hudson.

  But nothing happened.

  No one came.

  The only answer came a little before 11:30, after the air had cleared of the gunpowder smell: a shrill, maniacal cry that rose from the darkness behind them, a high-pitched, piercing shriek that seemed to freeze every joint in Grim’s body. Yet he immediately recognized what it was—of course; what else could it be?

  Farther back on the Black Spring side of the border, where the service car was parked, a peacock scurried across the road. It was followed by another … and another. From the undergrowth along the shoulder they jerked their heads toward Grim and his crew and began screeching their plaintive cries, first fragmented, then all together in unison. Grim had never thought that the sound of peacocks could fill him with such dizzying dread, but it did, and his vision began to go blindingly haywire. He forced down a lungful of cold air and managed not to faint. The air cleared his head a little—that was something, at least.

  Warren turned toward him, and in the weak light Grim saw that all the fierce resolve he had mustered to rise up against whatever was happening had disappeared from his face, leaving only a bleak mask of resignation and fatalistic calm. “Peacocks. You know what that means, right?”

  Grim didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. They were rats in a trap. With every passing hour that no one showed up, the chances of anybody showing up dwindled. Grim knew that. But what if the hours turned into days? What lay ahead of them then? As Grim thought about legends of freezing winters long ago, of starvation and epidemics and an empty town, the peacocks screeched their demented symphony, and after a while, Grim had the urge to screech along with them.

  Maybe I ought to go for a walk, he thought. Just walk a little ways down the road. What’s there to lose?

  It was a tempting impulse and it felt like the inevitable thing to do … but Warren Castillo, grabbing his hand in a simple, grateful gesture and squeezing it gently, held him back. A captain was always the last to leave a sinking ship.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, Grim planned to go back to the town limits as soon as first light of day touched the Hudson sky. It was Friday morning and there were bound to be commuters on the road. Route 293 wasn’t a major highway, but there were always cars. Always. They could wave them in when they got close.

  And then—what next? What do you think the officials at The Point can do … Avada Kedavra and the witch is gone?

  Grim pushed the thought aside. It was the least of his worries, as it turned out. For even from Old Miners Road he could hear it: the muted, restless clamor of a crowd that had gathered on the square and in the streets around Crystal Meth Church. Small groups of townsfolk hurried from every direction to see what was going on. Grim turned pale when he saw that many of them, fearful of the unknown that awaited them outside, had armed themselves with kitchen knives, hammers, baseball bats … and guns. Most held their weaponry limply at their sides, but their hands were clearly itching, and they were ready to draw blood if necessary. A neatly dressed woman whom he recognized as a nurse from Roseburgh had yanked the crucifix off the wall and was holding it grimly aloft as she followed the crowd, stumbling and wavering like a drunk.

  “So here we go,” Grim said. “Shit’s gonna hit the fan.”

  Warren shook his head gloomily. “The shit hit the fan a long, long time ago.”

  He was struck with a strong sense of déjà vu: It was the town trauma all over again, the mass gathering of November 15 when the young convicts of the stoning were publicly tortured in the presence of all the citizenry … although not nearly as many people were out and about now as there were then. And the air was different, too, more oppressive. You could smell the stench of something bad about to happen. The townsfolk hadn’t slept a wink and were chilled to the bone, but were surprised to find they had survived the first night. Now the dull light of day had given them fresh inspiration … in the form of rage that had replaced their fear like a changing of the guard. Incited by doomsayers like John Blanchard, they were beside themselves. They demanded to know what they were supposed to do.

  And they demanded to know who was responsible.

  As Grim made his way through the tangle of people at the intersection, Marty Keller suddenly burst through the crowd and clamped onto him. His eyes were wide open and red rimmed and there was a single teardrop of dried blood on his lip that had come from his nostril. “Robert! We’ve got to do something!”

  “Marty, what the hell’s going on?”

  “There are riots everywhere. They trashed Market & Deli like a bunch of wild pigs. Someone threw a chair through the front window of Jim’s Supply Store and they’ve emptied it, I tell you. People are hoarding—they’re afraid no help is coming. But that’s not true, is it? Help is coming, right?”

  It’s already happening, Grim thought, shocked. This is all it takes for people to plunge into insanity: one night alone with themselves and what they fear the most.

  Marty was clinging to his arm now. He looked as though he was about to cry. “You don’t think so, do you? I can see it in your face. They say fires have been lit at North and South 293, but they aren’t attracting anybody. The electric companies must have known something’s seriously wrong since fucking yesterd
ay. And what about family members? They must have sounded the alarm, so close to Christmas. But why isn’t anyone coming? I mean, what the fuck?”

  “I don’t know, Marty,” Grim muttered. “Are you all right? You look like shit.”

  “I … I don’t feel too well. Think I have a fever.”

  “Where the hell is Mathers?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Mathers committed suicide.”

  Under nearly any other circumstances, Grim would have sounded the alphorns with great pomp and ceremony and tooted his way across mountains and valleys to sing the happy news of Mathers’s death, but now his only thought was: Fuck me! So now that things are getting too hot, the weasel bails out on us.

  At least the councilman would have been able to calm the mob. Now the minister was trying to do the same from the paved square in front of the church, but his voice wasn’t nearly strong enough to be heard above the prevailing turmoil. He looked grateful when Grim climbed the church steps and took over.

  “Everyone, please!” he roared. “Calm down!”

  “Stick it up your ass, Grim,” a man in the crowd yelped—he was crying, which somehow upset Grim deeply. “Her eyes are open. What’s the point of calming down now?”

  Someone else piped up in agreement, and in no time at all the crowd became a wild tangle of furious eyes and shaking fists. They didn’t chant slogans, and it was impossible to distinguish individual voices in that wall of sound, but the tone was one of rage and dissension. Churchgoers, unbelievers, and those bereft of hope had all joined forces and whipped each other up with the same questions: