“Where is she?”
“What does she want?”
“What’s she going to do?”
“What’s going to happen to us?”
“It’s our right as Americans to know!”
“Why hasn’t anybody come to help us out?”
“Is it true that that coward Mathers did himself in?”
“What about our loved ones who were out of town—where are they?”
Soon the square was too small for so many lost souls, and the crowd began to push, shove, and squeeze, as if everyone needed to be where their neighbor was, and, once they got there, join in the surge to return to their original spot. Some lost their balance in the crush and some started fights. Grim saw a young woman get knocked over on the cobblestones, after which a fat man planted his heel on her face and broke her jaw.
This is madness, Grim thought. Madness. Yesterday afternoon these folks were still ordinary, mild-mannered twenty-first-century Americans.…
“A sacrifice!” John Blanchard screamed suddenly with the passion of the insane. “We must offer a blood sacrifice! Whoever it was that called this doom upon us! Bring him here! Stone him!”
Swelling cheers.
“Goddamn it, calm down!” Grim shouted, but only the few dozen people surrounding him paused to listen. “We’re doing everything we can to get the situation under control, but there’s no point in trying if we lose our composure! Since there’s no communication, we’re going to start giving updates on the town square every three hours.… Hey, listen to me!”
“Tell us somethin’ we don’t already know!” someone roared. “Who opened her eyes?”
“Yeah, who did it?!”
“Kill him!”
“Tear him to pieces!”
Grim began to panic: He was powerless before this mob. The rage that possessed them could not be exorcized by one man, and Grim sensed that something terrible was about to happen.
In the lower corner of the square, the crowd began to push back from Griselda’s Butchery & Delicacies’ shop window. Mother Holst and her son had just come outside, petrified in the presence of so many people. The expression on Jaydon’s face was one of total bewilderment. Grim wondered if it was possible that he really didn’t have a clue about what had taken place around him. Even the crowd fell silent, face-to-face with their heretic, their convict, their exile.
Griselda had offered sacrifices before: She knew the wordless vocabulary of such an act and made use of the moment by slipping back inside and pulling the door shut behind her.
“There he is!” someone roared, pointing with a desk lamp he’d brought from home.
“He did it!”
Yes, they all knew. They were all convinced. Who else could have opened Katherine’s eyes but this piece of scum who had stoned her, who had been given his rightful punishment and been released at their merciful hands, only to turn around and take vengeance on all of Black Spring? This injustice ignited a maddening frenzy that no one could resist. Soon a semicircle of thirty or forty people closed in on the perpetrator, pushing forward with trembling hands and clenched fists.
In those last moments, Jaydon must have seen the dehumanization on their faces, and he turned toward the door of the butcher shop with his own face twisted in a primal grin of fear. What must he have thought when he realized the door was locked? What must have gone through his mind as he began to bang on the glass, his mother staring out with stony eyes, and saw the reflection of the ever-tightening circle closing around him?
Then, all at once, his attackers abandoned their last shred of restraint and the circle collapsed on top of him. In an instant they had him raised up above their heads like savages and carried him along over the undulating, roaring throng. Jaydon screamed his lungs out. From the church steps, Grim could see his eyes bulging as the townsfolk tore at his clothes, his limbs, his hair. It wasn’t long before he fell, and the people attacked him like wolves. They sank their devouring claws and knives and hammers into his flesh, and Grim, all hope and resistance gone, went down on his knees and threw up on the concrete steps.
A deep loathing of his fellow men overtook him; he wanted to distance himself from it all, from being human in his core, for if this was humanity, he wanted nothing to do with it. He dropped onto the paving stones and sank into the cloudy depths in a bubble of his own consciousness, sweating and suffering for no one but himself, his throat choked by hot, sick tears and the sour taste of bile. He had no idea how long he lay there like that—until he heard the gunshot resonating against the surrounding houses. So he did have something in common with them after all: The noise made all of them flinch.
Grim looked up, wiped his face.
To the left of where the lynching had taken place was Marty Keller, lost in the rage of the populace. He was holding a black .38 Special over his head with both hands, still trembling from the force of the shot. The haggard eyes of hundreds stared at him in disbelief, the blood still dripping down their fingers, their cheeks covered in sweat, their fires extinguished.
The kid had taken the goddamn service gun from the safe and had stuck it in his belt. Grim didn’t know who had given him permission to do that, but he could have kissed him.
Then came the witch.
It ran through the crowd like a loveless prayer: the witch, there’s the witch, oh God, it’s the witch … All around him the people shrank back, exposing what was left of Jaydon Holst: a reduced pulp of lukewarm blood and convulsing muscle. But their eyes were not focused on him. All of them turned to face the same direction as their worst nightmare came to meet them, and Grim followed their gaze.
Katherine van Wyler came walking down Upper Reservoir Road with a costumed child in each hand, an absurd picture of calmness. Undaunted, without any impulse to hurry, she strode to meet her flock. For the first time, the townsfolk were greeted by the sight of her open eyes, and all their happy thoughts vanished at a stroke. Her pallid face bore the characteristic features they knew so well, but now the bloodless, needle-pitted flesh of her lips and eyelids had come to life and was gleaming like fresh tissue. Each and every soul on the square was struck by the fact that her eyes did not squint, nor did they possess the hideous, sickly luster they had expected in their darkest dreams. In fact, now that her ghastly mask of stitched-up eyes and mouth was gone, Katherine’s face was strikingly human. Beneath the horror, its gentle lines and refined structure had become visible. She gazed at the streets, the houses, and the twenty-first-century people with a pent-up eagerness born of three hundred fifty years of darkness, smiling with amazement and delight. There was no trace of malice: just a mother and her children. Was that what she had wanted all along? The expression in her eyes could only be described as one of unparalleled bliss.
This was so out of keeping with the horrific images that Katherine had imprinted in their minds, and the fears they had lived with for all those years, that the residents of Black Spring naturally felt very ill at ease. Could this really be true? She wasn’t an abomination—they had turned her into an abomination.
Robert Grim looked on in absolute terror as Katherine and her children reached the square. It had almost all the makings of a happy scene—but it wasn’t happy; it wasn’t the idyll it should have been. Because it was then that Katherine looked out over the terrified townsfolk and the sad remains of Jaydon Holst, and her eyes filled with sorrow.
And Grim thought, We never learn.
The crowd shrank back even farther. Some tried to make a run for it, but most understood that running away was pointless. As if at an invisible cue they all dropped to their knees, hundreds together, like Muslims turning toward Mecca. With lumps in their throats, they threw themselves at the witch’s feet, entirely at her mercy, and begged her in a collective prayer, We’re sorry, Katherine. We accept you, Katherine. Spare us, Katherine.
But there was still blood on their hands, and soon more blood would flow. From the corner of his eye, Robert Grim saw fate approaching in the form of Marty
Keller, who held the gun in his trembling hands and stepped forward amid the kneeling throng.
Grim tried to stand up and scream at him to back off, but he stumbled and fell facefirst onto the paving stones. The air was knocked out of his lungs, and although he did scream, it came too late.
Marty shot, but Marty was a data specialist, not a marksman. Not only that, but never in his life had he been under such enormous pressure as the second he pulled that trigger. Little Joey Hoffman was struck in the neck and was thrown onto the pavement. A fan-shaped stipplework of blood sprayed Katherine’s dress as she bent over in a shocked attempt to catch the child, but he was dead before he hit the ground.
Little Naomi screamed, stamped her feet, and threw her arms around the witch’s neck. The next bullet, meant to blow away Katherine’s curse once and for all, tore away the greater part of the girl’s skull. They heard the witch hoarsely gasp for breath as she lost the second child as well, staggering in a macabre waltz with the two little bodies.
This is a joke, Grim thought. Some kind of terrible misunderstanding that I cannot get my head around.
The witch looked up at Marty.
Marty began to scream. He tried to get away, but his feet wouldn’t obey him. The witch came for him, crooked, calm, imprisoning his gaze in her attitude of contempt, grief, and merciless revenge.
She laid her hands on Marty’s shoulders and looked up at him. For more than ten seconds she stared at the brand-new executioner, as the crowd backed farther and farther away. Then she coughed in his face.
Marty took one unsteady step backward and turned toward the crowd. He began to shiver and sweat as if he had suddenly been struck by a high fever, and blood spat furiously from his nose. He started hacking up blood, too, foaming on his lips.
“Help me…” he stammered, but his fellow townsfolk only shrank away, terrified of being contaminated by whatever it was that had seized him. Marty reached his hands toward them and fell to his knees. Grim saw dark, dimpled papules swelling up on his cheeks and neck to form a grotesque mask of flaky, depigmented scabs. His breathing faltered and he could no longer stop coughing, a hideous, rasping, croaking hiccup that sounded as if he were coughing up his lungs. Soon he fell to the street and started twitching, kicking his legs as his veins snapped beneath the skin and his gaping face turned a charred black. And while death took possession of him, he stared with blind, upturned, accusatory eyes at the bewildered onlookers, one of whom was Dr. Walt Stanton, whose lips formed a single dreadful word: Smallpox.…
Katherine threw herself down and struck the pavement with both fists. The earth seemed to tremble. Cracks appeared beneath her hands, and Grim knew that on this morning of retribution, there would be no restraint, no reason. Only penance. The people of Black Spring had brought this on themselves: It was they who were evil, a human evil. They had created the evil that was Katherine by allowing the doom and gloom in themselves to gain the upper hand, by punishing the innocent and glorying in their own sense of righteousness. She had given them a choice. Now it was too late, and as everyone around Robert Grim started running in a vain attempt to flee Katherine’s evil eye, this realization gave rise to a primordial horror that could only be matched by his earliest memories in the womb: that first loss, that first irreversible departure from a safe haven, that first longing to cling to what lay behind you.
The infant’s only answer to the cruel hallucination of birth was to scream … so that’s what Grim did.
THIRTY-TWO
LATE IN THE afternoon of Monday, December 24, Steve Grant woke up with water dripping on his face. He was lying on the frost-covered forest floor beneath an endless roof of skeletal branches. He tried to get up but fell back helplessly, rolled onto his side, and cracked through the paper-thin ice crust on the marshy undergrowth. Pain shot through his body, forcing his lips into a tight, white gash. Where the hell was he, and what was he doing there? His watch told him it was 4:30 on the twenty-fourth, but Steve couldn’t grasp what that meant. Christ, he had been in the woods for four days and four nights.
He lay there apathetically for quite some time, listening to the unnatural silence of the woods. He was wet and numb from the cold and couldn’t stop shivering. He was still wearing his funeral clothes. Stubble pricked his chin. His lips felt swollen and painful. His mouth was dry and sticky, coated with a layer of saliva that tasted like woodlands and pinecones. Steve tried to force his body back into the stupor from which he had awakened, but he stayed alert and clung … not to life, but to …
Tyler! Did she bring Tyler back?
That drove him to his feet. A sharp stab of pain in his back brought a grimace to his lips, and he leaned against a leaf-covered earthen wall. He looked around and saw groves of tall, ancient hemlocks on the slope, which he recognized without much emotion as the woods of Mount Misery behind his house. Apparently he had hidden himself in one of the overgrown trenches that the Military Academy had dug out when they used to drill in these parts—or maybe they dated back all the way to the Revolutionary War. Food for the minks and the rattlesnakes.
The events of the past days began to come back to him now, slow and fragmented, like pieces of driftwood washing ashore in the aftermath of a shipwreck. He remembered being home alone after Tyler’s funeral, and that he …
Oh, God. The owl pellet. Tyler’s hair. She had come to him and he had cut her eyes open. What in God’s name had he done?
His memory of what had happened between fleeing into the woods and now was shaky. Was it possible that he had been in a state of delirium all that time? That his mind had been so paralyzed by the premonition of what he had brought upon himself that it had simply shut itself down? Apparently he had wandered around unawares and had slept for hours unawakened by his physical needs. Although you really couldn’t call it sleep; more a state of semiconsciousness in which nightmares and reality merged like a double image in a stereopticon. And it must have been delirium. Why else would he seem to recall seeing a procession of chanting flagellants making their way through the woods and whipping their naked backs with knotted ropes as a cynical expiation? That must have been a delusion, right?
Somewhere a branch snapped, and Steve froze, his scalp crawling. Once again he noticed the unnatural stillness. No birds, no living things scurrying in the underbrush. Only the gentle whisper of the wind through the treetops and the occasional crunch of frosty leaves. But what had caused that branch to pop? Was it Katherine? Had she been with him in the dark as he lay sleeping? Or … could it be Tyler?
“Cut it out,” he said hoarsely. The realization that, although in full possession of his faculties, he was considering the possibility that his dead son was trailing him in these woods caused the skin on his skull to tighten and sent shivers down his spine.
It has to happen one way or another, right? The promised resurrection—let’s call it what it is.
But he didn’t dare—he couldn’t—invest his hope in … in what, really? Steve shuddered and tried to erase the possibility from his thoughts, but it refused to go away. Everything felt dreadfully wrong. The silence was wrong; the way the gathering twilight sank through the trees was wrong. What he had done pressed down on him like a deadweight. He groped in his pockets for his cell phone, but apparently he had left it at home.
Steve didn’t need a crystal ball to see what now lay ahead of him: He’d follow the trail back home and face the consequences of his actions. It was probably expected of him, and he felt the obligation.…
But the hell with it. The fact was that he didn’t dare face it just yet. He prayed that Jocelyn, for whatever reason, had stayed at St. Luke’s with Matt. Or that she had turned around at the first sign of … of whatever indication there was that Katherine’s eyes were open, and had fled back to the safety of a Newburgh motel.
That’s why the plan was so doggone perfect, right? Jocelyn had been in Newburgh with Matt … out of the way, safe and sound. Maybe it was Katherine herself who had waited for the right circumstances
to be in place … so we could be kept out of harm’s way.
He prayed this was true, but he didn’t allow himself the luxury of believing it.
He would walk down the trail, but not the trail that zigzagged through Philosopher’s Deep and back to his house. He would go farther south, across Ackerman’s Corner where Spy Rock Valley switchbacked into town. And he would make a judgment. Size up the situation. If it could reasonably be assumed that everything was more or less all right, he would go home to see if Jocelyn was there. But not before. Because if the blood of Black Spring was on his hands, there was a terrible chance he was also responsible for the fate of his wife … and he didn’t know if he was ready to face that.
Steve began to walk downhill in the last light of day. His body hurt all over and his stomach rose up in revolt, but after a little while he seemed to settle into a rhythm. Even if he hit Philosopher’s Trail, he’d keep strictly to the right—he wouldn’t even look down that way.
What were those sounds coming from town last night?
The thought came to him unbidden and he braced himself to withstand it—it had the power to almost knock him off his feet. Yes, there had been cold and pain, he now recalled. There had been hunger and cramps, and there had been uncontrolled shivering, but the physical suffering was nothing compared with the mental torture he had had to endure. The annihilating fear of the darkness he had unleashed had lent his stupor some seriously sick hallucinatory effects, probably boosted by a severe case of panic-induced oxygen deprivation. It had started with the noises. Along with the noises came the smells. And inspired by the noises and the smells came hideous images that should have robbed him of his sanity … and maybe they had. As he heard moaning, he saw people suffering, writhing and black-faced with swollen buboes in their armpits and necks. Not from smallpox, though: This was the disease of the Old World. As he smelled the stench of melting asphalt, he saw tar barrels being burned on the street corners in an effort to purify the miasmatic air; for some reason it was Pete VanderMeer who set them afire, with a homemade torch made from a pair of gasoline-soaked Levi’s wrapped around a Rubbermaid mop, while bundles of straw hung from derelict façades to show which houses were infected. And as he smelled fire, he saw Crystal Meth Church ablaze. Behind the stained glass were the sick and the dead, and all of them were screaming. The faces in his vision were gaping masks of horror, and Steve turned away as if he didn’t want to acknowledge the fact—not even in his dream—that his friends and fellow townsfolk were burning.
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