HEX (10 page)

“I'm sorry, but I don't believe that,” Burt said.

Pete took a sip of beer and put his glass on the table. “Mr. Delarosa, when your wife ran outside and you walked back into your bedroom, did you hear her whispering?”

His voice faltered. “I … I did hear something, I guess. The corner of her mouth moved. Barely visible. I wanted to hear if she was saying something.”

“And what did you hear?”

“She whispered.”

“And, please excuse me, but was there a moment that you considered suicide?”

Bammy shrieked, a stifled scream, and knocked over her empty teacup, which was resting on the arm of her leather chair. It hit the floor and broke into three pieces. Jocelyn rushed forward to pick up the bits. Bammy tried to open her mouth to say something, but then she saw her husband's face, and her lower lip began to tremble.

“You did, right?” Pete said. “You heard her whispering, and you played with the idea of harming yourself. That's how she gets at you. She has people kill themselves, just as she herself was forced to do.”

“Burt?” Bammy asked, voice quivering. “What do they mean, Burt?”

Burt tried to speak but wasn't able, and he cleared his throat. All the color had drained from his face. “I was alone with her for only a few seconds. I didn't say anything. I was afraid that if I made any noise she would look up. I didn't want her to look up, you know what I mean? Even if she's blind, I didn't want her to see me. And I heard her whispering. Then I went out to the hallway and I wanted to slam my skull against the doorpost.” Bammy flinched as if someone had struck her, and she clapped her hands to her mouth. “I swear to God, in my mind's eye I was grabbing the doorpost and smashing my forehead against it three times till it was crushed. And then … then you screamed, honey. That woke me up, and I ran after you. I didn't do it, because you screamed.”

“Stop it!” Bammy wailed, grabbing her husband. “That isn't true, is it? I don't want to listen to this anymore, Burt. Please.”

“Calm down,” Jocelyn shushed. “You're safe. It didn't go on long enough to have any lasting effect.”

Burt put his arm around his weeping wife and turned to Pete. For the first time Steve saw how sick and overwrought he looked … and that he
believed
it. “Who knows about this?” he asked, with difficulty.

“The people at The Point, right down the road,” Grim said. “But just a small, highly classified division all the way at the top. I'm talking the kind of small that's not under the supervision of any commissions, to avoid the risk of leaks.”

“Get out of here.”

“I suspect even the president doesn't know. They used to—oh yeah. All the way back, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, they must have known about what was going on here, because we know from the archive that they visited Black Spring. In 1802, the U.S. Military Academy was established at West Point to help us cover it up. Don't hold me to it, but it must have been toward the end of the Civil War that The Point was deemed trustworthy enough to be given exclusive authority over Black Spring. Probably on the orders of good old Abe himself. The matter is just too delicate. Later on, when the region got developed and the risk of leaks became higher, we got organized. We went pro. And so, HEX was born.”

“What's HEX?”

“That's us. We're the ghostbusters. We hide the witch in plain sight.”

Burt looked at Grim with visible difficulty. “What does the name stand for?”

“Oh, it's just some old acronym that stuck. No one really knows. It's what we do that matters. Over there at The Point they let us take care of our own business, but we write up reports to keep them happy, so we have something to fall back on in case we have to close off roads or if we need a favor at the state reserve. How else do you think we could have succeeded in keeping it quiet? You can set up smoke screens all you want, but that takes money—and complete secrecy. The Point is set up to preserve the status quo because they're totally clueless as to what to do with this mess, apart from keeping it secret from the general public and from foreign intelligence services. There's no control—that's a bald-faced lie. In fact, they're shitting their pants. If they could, they'd put a big fence around us and turn the area into an uninhabited reservation, but then the blood of three thousand people would be on their hands, as many as died on 9/11. So they decided on a containment policy. Until a solution is found—whatever the hell that means—life here goes on as usual and we get subsidized for keeping our mouths shut, by way of an almost untraceable cache in the state treasury.”

“It's a matter of image,” Pete said. “If you have a wart on your neck, you wear high collars.”

“Jesus,” Burt Delarosa muttered. “Has anyone ever tried to open her eyes?”

“Once,” Pete said after a long silence. “Although they never even got that far. This took place in 1967, at the initiative of the Military Intelligence unit at The Point. Nothing had happened for so long that people began to doubt if she really posed such a danger. Even in town there was talk that people just wanted to understand her and, you know,
give
her something. It was like Bammy said: Maybe she just wanted to be heard. The experiment was recorded on film. Robert, maybe you can show it to them?”

Grim took his MacBook out of his briefcase and opened it. “We use this fragment to give new folks an idea of how serious the situation is. Perception, image-forming, all that. But, let me warn you: It was some piss-poor judgment on everybody's part. The images are pretty wild. The kind of wild that they usually censor on the six o'clock news, if you know what I'm saying.”

“I don't know if I want to see this,” Bammy said, wiping away her tears.

“It's okay, honey,” Burt said. “You don't have to watch if you don't want to.” He wiggled nervously and looked over at Pete for confirmation. Pete nodded. Grim put his MacBook on his lap and clicked
PLAY
.

*   *   *

THE IMAGES
ARE
shocking, no doubt about it. They're authentic, digitized Super 8 images from the sixties, and, unlike Tyler's GoPro, invoke that nostalgic film feeling that even Instagram photos can only approximate. Steve catches himself having an instinctive preference for the style, even though the colors are washed-out and his oldest son would have called him hopelessly outdated. Not that Steve is looking at the footage now; he's sitting on the other side of the lounge with his arms around Jocelyn, staring at Burt and Bammy Delarosa's faces. But he knows what the images show. Everyone in Black Spring knows. They've all been indoctrinated with them, most of them from early childhood. Steve is fiercely opposed to showing the fragment to fifth-grade children at Black Rock Elementary, so when it was Tyler's turn, and then Matt's, he tried to call them in sick. But the fines were simply too high. In Black Spring, you have to abide by the Emergency Decree.

He still remembers the showings as if they were yesterday: All the parents were there, and it was horrible. For many children, watching the images marks the point at which they become adults, and it happens much too early.

The setting is a square-shaped general practitioner's office, with Katherine van Wyler in a chair in the middle. They've managed to force her to sit down by using a wire-looped grasper, an instrument normally used to restrain mad dogs. An officer from The Point in a tweed jacket is standing at a distance, the loop of his grasper still around her neck. Two others are behind her with their poles at the ready.

But she doesn't look as if she's planning on going anywhere.

The Black Rock Witch is not moving.

There are three other men in the room: two doctors from Black Spring and the cameraman, who is providing running commentary in a deep Walter Cronkite kind of voice. The doctors don't say a word. You don't have to look closely to see the sweat on their foreheads. They're as nervous as they can be. They're kneeling in front of the witch, shifting their weight from one foot to the other to find comfortable positions while trying not to touch her. One of them has a pair of tweezers and a stitch cutter. “Doctor McGee is now going to remove the first thread from her mouth,” the newsreel voice says, and you can hear his fear and uncertainty.

Grim, Burt, and Bammy—who doesn't want to watch, but watches anyway—see Doctor McGee warily push aside the quivering, dried flesh in the left corner of the witch's mouth with his tweezers and tighten the farthest stitch. He draws the knife blade along the stitch and it snaps like a rubber band. The doctor recoils and changes position. He wipes the sweat from his brow. Katherine hasn't moved. The curved black thread is sticking out of the corner of her mouth, just as it is today. We can see the corner of her mouth unmistakably trembling. Doctor McGee bends over again and a surprised expression appears on his face. The other doctor also moves in closer. The officers from The Point can't hear her whisper; they don't realize that from that moment on they are in
her
domain. “That was the first stitch,” says the voice that is not Walter Cronkite's, and McGee blinks. He wipes his brow again and raises his tweezers, but his hand drops halfway there. He bends over again. “Is everything all right … Doctor McGee?” asks the newsreel voice, and Doctor McGee answers by suddenly raising the stitch cutter and, with the speed of a Singer sewing machine needle, plunging it into his own face again and again.

In the next few seconds, everything happens at once. The chaos is complete. A howling can be heard that chills you to the bone. The camera is knocked over, forcing the tripod against the wall, so we suddenly see the room from a nauseating perspective. The witch is no longer in her chair but is now standing in a corner of the office and we only see her lower body; the rest is cut off by the camera angle. The grasper has crashed to the floor. Doctor McGee is lying sprawled in a large pool of blood, his body in convulsions. We also see the legs of the second doctor lying nearby—at least, we assume they're the legs of the second doctor. The officers are screaming and running from the scene. Bammy Delarosa looks as if she'd like to do the same; she's holding her hands in front of her face and hyperventilating. Her husband seems too deep in shock to realize he's watching actual events.

“That,” Robert Grim says, “was the last time the intelligence services got their fingers burned on the witch.”

He clicks
COMMAND-
Q and the screen goes black.

*   *   *

“FIVE PEOPLE DIED,”
Pete resumed. “The two doctors committed suicide right then and there, but elsewhere in Black Spring three elderly people dropped dead in the street, all at the same time. Autopsies revealed that they had all been struck by acute cerebral hemorrhages. It's assumed that their time of death exactly coincided with the cutting of the first stitch.”

Silence fell in the hotel bar. Steve glanced at his phone and noticed that the time was now a quarter past three. Bammy was in Burt's arms, shaking and crying, and the others looked uneasily at their feet. “I don't want to go back to that house, Burt!” Bammy cried. “I don't ever want to go back.”

“There, there,” Burt said huskily. “You won't have to.” He turned to Grim. “Tell you what, we're both pretty upset. I really appreciate your having booked this hotel room for us, but I don't think my wife and I want to stay in Black Spring one minute longer. We're full of questions, but they can wait. If my wife is in any condition to drive, we'll go stay with friends in Manhattan tonight. If not, we'll take a taxi and grab a motel in Newburgh.”

“I don't think—” Pete tried to interrupt, but Burt didn't let him get a word in.

“Tomorrow I'll call a real estate agent. I'm … sorry you have to live with this, but … it's not for us. We're moving out.”

“I'm afraid that's not going to happen,” Pete said softly. Now, Steve realized, even Pete didn't have the nerve to keep his eyes on them.

At last Burt said, “What do you mean?”

“You said ‘your' village ghost and ‘your' witch earlier. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but I'm afraid that starting tonight, it's your problem, too. She's not going to let you go. You live in Black Spring now. That means the curse is on you as well.”

The silence that followed could only be broken by Robert Grim: “Welcome home.” His face assumed a morbid grin. “We have all sorts of great town fairs.”

 

SEVEN

TYLER CAME HOME
from community service the following afternoon drenched with rain, his face tense. Steve was at the dining room table reading an article in the
New Yorker,
but he had had to start over again twice because his mind kept wandering. They hadn't gotten home that morning until a quarter to six, leaving him and Jocelyn feeling dull and exhausted. They had dozed off and snapped awake over a cup of tea in the kitchen until, much to his frustration, Steve could begin to make out the contours of the woods behind the house when the first sign of dawn touched the sky in the east. He had decided to skip going to bed with Jocelyn and switch to coffee—he had to get up for work at seven.

That afternoon after classes, he retreated to his office at the research center to look over a pile of Ph.D. test results but caught himself staring at the streaks of rain running down the window. His thoughts drifted to the conversation with the Delarosas.

“I don't know what's on your mind,” his graduate assistant Laura Frazier said when she popped into his office to file a stack of forms, “but take my advice: Go home and get some sleep. You look like you need it.”

Steve gave her a dazed smile. “Short night. My wife is sick.” He was shocked by how naturally the lie passed over his lips. Christ, what a prolific liar he had become after eighteen years.
Part of the Black Spring identity,
Pete VanderMeer would have said.