HEX (24 page)

She dropped to her knees, her left kneecap sinking into something slimy. She jumped back as if she had been electrified. Warily, she groped along the dark forest floor until she felt something moist, lukewarm, and elastic. It wasn't long before Griselda's butcher hands recognized what it was: a pig's heart. Suddenly she was angry, even insulted, which calmed her fear. Someone else had been here before her. That dirty coward! Whoever it was must have been trying to get on Katherine's good side. Carelessly, she tossed the filthy thing into the bushes and wiped her hands on her pants.

Now that the altar was free, she knelt before her goddess.

“Oh, look at you. I'm so sorry, Katherine. I may not be as good a speaker as Colton or John Blanchard or any of the others, but my heart is in the right place, just keep that in mind. I failed with my sacrifices, and I want to thank you on my bare knees for pointing that out to me. I should have known better. Please accept my peace offering; it's the most beautiful one I could think of.” With timid pride she added, “It's a peacock.”

Katherine stood motionless in the dark. Griselda rose and took the roll of hemp rope from her coat pocket. The peacock moved around nervously in its shopping bag and began to coo softly.

“I don't want to ask too much of you, but do you think you might make everything the way it was before? The creek, I mean, and all that … I know you didn't mean any harm, but you gave the townsfolk the heebie-jeebies—and me too, to be honest. I've brought you a live sacrifice, just like you wanted. I know you got no use for a nasty organ like that. Whoever brought that filthy thing here, anyway? If I find out, I'll show her, the bitch, don't you worry about that!”

Griselda started in on her task. She had left her butcher knives at home, because the last pieces of the puzzle had suddenly fallen into place on the way back from the petting zoo. What if Katherine wasn't entirely pleased with a pool of warm blood on her bare feet? Then her offering might be entirely misinterpreted. It would have to happen in a clean and dignified way, and it didn't take long for Griselda to figure out how.

She gnawed off two yards of rope and tied one end around both handles of the shopping bag. Then she took a pair of wax earplugs out of her pocket—she used to put them in every night because of Jim's snoring, and she still did it out of habit—when she realized something that made her stop dead in her tracks.

The witch wasn't whispering.

Only now did Griselda realize how utterly silent it was in the woods.

She listened carefully, turned her ear to Katherine, and counted to sixty. Silence.

Deeply moved, and overwhelmed by something that, in all simplicity, may have been closer to friendship than Griselda had ever known in her life, she kissed her own bare hands and reverently blew the kiss toward the witch. “Thank you, dear,” she said with a quavering voice. “Thank you for welcoming me.”

No longer afraid, and now ready to come closer, Griselda threaded the hemp through one of the links of the iron chains around Katherine's body, taking great care not to touch her, despite everything. She knotted the remaining end to a long, thick branch. Standing behind the witch, she wrapped the rope around the branch until it was tight; then she lifted it up like a fishing pole, causing the shopping bag to rise from the ground. As soon as it was hanging from the witch's body, the peacock began erupting with its icy shrieks. Griselda's eyes opened wide, bulging in the darkness. Up here in the woods, the bird's screeching didn't sound out of place at all, but terrible and melancholy, like the call of a dead man. Griselda moaned, but kept on going. With all her strength, she raised the shopping bag as high as it would go, then began to walk the tightened rope around Katherine, unwinding it from the branch as she went, until the rope was tightly wrapped around her, and Griselda knotted the far end to the handles of the shopping bag.

With great relief she paused to catch her breath. Too bad it was so dark; she would have liked to see the result of her hard work. But there was no doubt in her mind that Katherine would be satisfied. When it came time for her to disappear later tonight, the peacock in the shopping bag would burn and rise like a phoenix.

Once more, Griselda came closer.

This time, to rearrange its feathers.

 

FIFTEEN

JUST BEFORE SEVEN-THIRTY
on Monday morning, Marty Keller called to tell him he'd better come up right away, and even before Robert Grim cut off the conversation, his thoughts wandered off to dwell on a tempting fantasy in which he bit off Colton Mathers's scrotum, spat it out, and beat his convulsing testicles to a pulp with a croquet mallet on his mother's old butcher block. It's wasn't a very soothing thought, but it gave him a joyless satisfaction nonetheless.

After the call, Grim and Warren Castillo slipped on their rain capes and hurried up the hill along Old Miners Road. It was a murky morning and the wind was rising. There wasn't a soul to be seen out on the street. Those who didn't have to go to work that morning bolted their doors and shut their curtains against the storm. Those who did called in sick in large numbers, reported Lucy Everett—the telephone lines were so red-hot she had only been able to monitor them via random checks. Grim knew that the real storm people feared wasn't raging outside, but within. He had felt the anxiety of the townsfolk, and it was finally getting to him as well.

Katherine, what are you up to, girl? Who got a rise out of you?

Warren, almost ten years younger than Grim, had trouble keeping up with him as they trod along the wet roadside. “How bad is this going to be, you think?” he asked, panting.

“Nothing we can't deal with,” Grim said, but his voice sounded strangely hollow. After the crazy incident with Grant's horses on Saturday afternoon, Grim had thought he had the situation more or less under control. It had almost given him a heart attack when it happened, of course, but the animal hadn't been up to any mischief and was soon calmed down. It had bolted in a blind panic, broken out, was probably frightened by its own reflection, and had jumped right through it. Grim had had the Grants' horses moved to Saul Humfries's pasture on the other side of town … because the source of their supernatural terror was right behind their stable, where Philosopher's Creek ran along Steve Grant's property.

When Grim had seen what was going on at the creek, he had understood that the situation was not under control at all. In fact, the situation had never been so royally fucked up.

Mathers had said he wanted to keep it under wraps, and Grim had almost exploded.

“Listen,” he said, “I got animals running wild, I got a dog who committed suicide, and Mount Misery is excreting its own goddamn placenta. You go ahead and scatter bread crumbs in the enchanted forest; I'm reporting this to The Point.”

“You'll do no such thing, Robert,” the old councilman said with the kind of dogged passion only seen in very small children and dangerous religious fanatics. But Grim also heard doubt in his voice, and a deep bedrock of weary old age.

“We have no choice. Katherine never bothers with house pets. For the first time in a hundred and twenty years she's changed her pattern, and no one knows why or where this is going to lead.”

“Exactly. And that's why we have to find out what happened before we make any brash decisions. This is a town matter. Black Spring has always taken care of itself, and we will take care of ourselves now.”

“But we
don't
know—that's just it!” Grim cried in dismay. “This is a unique and entirely precarious situation. The people are scared shitless. And who can blame them? We've got to put the authorities on standby in case the whole thing escalates.”

“Mr. Mathers is right, Robert,” said Adrian Chass, one of the other Council members. “What can they do for us over at West Point, besides watching from behind their bulletproof windows as things here spiral out of control?”

Griselda Holst nodded passionately and said, “Trust in the Lord.”

“This is a fucking fiasco.” Grim shook his head. “Sorry, I can't go along with this. I have an obligation.”

Mathers's bony fingers slipped around Grim's wrist like a poisonous snake. “The decision of the Council is binding, Robert. If you refuse to comply, I will discharge you from your position.”

Grim cursed Colton Mathers and the midwife who had delivered him. Not that he himself had such a high opinion of the folks at The Point: He had dutifully filed his reports year after year, but usually he regarded them as nothing more than a bureaucratic pain in the ass whose friendship had to be maintained in order to keep the money flowing. But now things were different. Grim wanted to send them a sample of the creek water and have it lab-analyzed ASAP. He wanted them … well, he wanted them to
know.
Maybe it would only add to the
appearance
of safety, but it felt like the right thing to do. That damn creek water had given Grim a serious case of the howling fantods, and every bit of reason that he could cling to was welcome indeed.

But Mathers was afraid, and fear overruled clearheaded reason. It made the councilman unpredictable, drove him into a corner. And like Steve Grant, Grim understood the potentially dangerous consequences: the primitive human urge to channel fear, transform it into rage … and find a scapegoat. It was a devotion bordering on fanaticism, and it was happening all over town. Who had mocked the witch? What had changed to make her want to punish us? Everyone looked close to home for some unusual recent event and made the obvious connection. The Wicker Burning. The coming of the Outsiders during the festival. The woman next door, who had painted her garden fence that ugly terra-cotta. Dr. Grant—because after all, it had been
his
dog.

Colton Mathers blamed the blood that had clung to the hands of the butcher's wife since last Wednesday at a little after five. Grim could only guess at what had happened, but whatever it was, it wasn't exactly kosher. The Holst woman had been found in deep shock at Roth's side—and now, Katherine's rumblings. For Mathers, it was a no-brainer.

It's too much of a motherfucking honor for you, you orc,
Grim thought,
to have your private hotline with God
and
influence on the witch as well.

In any case, Mathers had had Roth buried out in the woods, his corpse wrapped in a Hefty bag and sealed with duct tape, and the death was never reported to The Point. Now it was a matter of waiting for lightning to strike. Colton Mathers wanted to keep the intelligence services outside their door. The Council voted—five for, two against—and Grim had his back against the wall.

Since the blood first showed on Saturday, the seven-member HEX staff had been on high alert getting the situation under control. There were reports of the same phenomenon occurring in the Spy Rock Valley Creek, which emptied out more to the west, at the site of the historic waterwheel across from Town Hall. When the sun rose on Sunday morning, it provided a forlorn sight: For the first time since its restoration in 1984, the waterwheel wasn't turning. Fences were erected to block the entrance to the trails in the reserve, there and on Mount Misery. The creeks continued to bleed. Not enough to saturate the water, and they probably could have told hikers that there was rust in the springs, but Grim didn't want to take any chances. No one knew if the pollution was harmful, or how the situation would develop. It scared the shit out of the animals, and Grim readily trusted their instincts.

To make matters worse, Sunday was a gorgeous day, so a good many hikers had to be sent elsewhere. Grim had posted an army of volunteers in State Trooper uniforms at every barrier, who had told the hikers that the Military Academy was conducting a large-scale drill involving gunfire. And there
was
gunfire: it came from the HEX sound-effects library.

For the first twenty-four hours, he had three people following Katherine like a shadow. Initially she had appeared in a broom closet on Sutherland Drive (the discovery was purely accidental, after the house dachshund had started throwing itself against the closet door in a furious rage). Then she had ambled back and forth a bit on the steep, enclosed fields of Ackerman's Corner, and on Sunday night, she had stayed out in the woods. It was her old random pattern, nothing to indicate a behavioral change. The weather had turned frigid and her escorts were getting bored to extinction, so Grim had sent them home.

That, as it turned out, had been his biggest mistake since running out of espresso on Sunday and switching to Red Bull. Robert Grim felt as if he was having a caffeine convulsion and was just about to snap an artery.

He called Marty, who steered Grim and Warren through the rainy woods. The kid came running up to them in great agitation, with drenched sneakers and a face that had last night written all over it. “Just a little farther up,” he panted. “Robert, this is fucked up.…”

Christ on a bike,
Grim thought when he saw it. His jaw nearly dropped with a crash to the sodden forest ground.

The witch was standing among the ferns, dripping wet, her small form saturated and dark with rainwater. In a fraction of a second, she managed to evoke the illusion of standing at a poultry market with a peacock under her arm.
Am I really seeing this?
Grim thought incredulously—but then he noticed that someone had tied a blue, sewn-up shopping bag around her waist, from which an enormous fan of peacock feathers proudly protruded. Countless green and blue peacock eyes with dark pupils looked out at the three of them, as if Katherine herself had opened her eyes and was staring them down.

The thought hit Grim like a slap in the face. If Grim had seen the witch amid the
nazar boncuğu
—the blue, tear-shaped amulets warding off the evil eye—in the Şayer living room a few days ago, he would have been immediately struck by their eerie resemblance to what he was seeing now. But he hadn't, and Robert Grim had never in his life had such a strong premonition of intensifying power …
bad
power.