HEX (26 page)

The barking in the distance reached a high, ghostly yowl, and Tyler felt chilled to the bone.

“Just listen—it
is
Fletcher…” Matt whispered, losing control of himself.

“Fletcher is
dead,
Matt,” Tyler said. “And, anyway, he sounded really different. Did you ever hear Fletcher howl like that before?”

“No, but he's never been dead before, either.”

There was no arguing with a fool's logic, and it made the corners of Tyler's mouth taste like scrap iron. Matt leaned outside and began to call the name of the dead dog, nervously trying to keep his voice down. It would have been impossible for Tyler to explain why this filled him with such horror, yet it did, and he had to turn away, shuddering. Even Steve seemed to sense it, because he grabbed Matt around the waist and pulled him inside.

“Knock it off!” he hissed. “What the hell would the neighbors think if they heard you? There's a dog on the loose out there, but it's not Fletcher. Fletcher is dead.”

“And what if it's
her
?” Matt protested. “If she can cast a spell on the creek, she can … I dunno.
She's
the one who killed him!”

Steve was unnerved. Jocelyn wrapped her arms around her body—she was only wearing a nightgown—and said, “I don't think it sounded like Fletcher, to be honest…”

“Stay inside,” Steve said, slipping into a pair of rubber clogs that had been lying under the radiator, next to Fletcher's basket. The basket was still there because nobody'd had the heart to store it in the shed. A human fragment of grief, but now it seemed more sinister, as if they had been unconsciously waiting for reasons that they themselves didn't quite understand … and may not have had any control over.

Steve went outside and Tyler slipped out after him. Jocelyn called to him, but Tyler pulled the door shut and ran after his dad. The damp cold hit him like a sledgehammer. It was less than forty degrees out and the patio tiles he was walking on barefoot were covered with wet leaves, which sent the cold up through his ankles and spread it to every inch of his body. Tyler began shivering uncontrollably. He clutched at his waist, trying to rub himself warm. It didn't help. Steve turned toward the noise and was about to say something, but changed his mind. Tyler thought he saw a glimpse of relief in his dad's eyes.

The barking had stopped. There was just the rustling of the wind and the babbling of the creek, out there in the dark … the creek, where the blood would no longer be red, but black. It was a full moon and their breath blew around in luminous white plumes.

Then the barking started up again, deeper in the woods this time, and Tyler suddenly knew with irrational certainty that it
was
Fletcher. It was impossible and it was true. On a cold fairy-tale night like this, such things could easily be true.

“I understand why Matt thought it was Fletcher,” Steve said suddenly, his voice strangely flat. “It
does
sound like him. But all medium-sized dogs sound the same. There are dozens of dogs in town, and it could be any one of them.”

In the dark, Tyler couldn't tell whether his dad's casual attitude was sincere or not, or whether he was just trying to convince himself.

It became quiet again.

They listened for a few minutes, but there was no more barking. Steve turned around and seemed to be making a decision. “If that dog's walking around loose, we'll have to catch it before more bad things happen,” he said. “I'll send a text to Robert Grim. You coming back in with me?”

Tyler thought of the howling they had heard earlier. He leaned his head back and looked at the cold stars, clearing the haunting thoughts that fluttered through his mind. Then he scoured the backyard, distinguishing the shapes of the horse pen; the mound that was Fletcher's grave; the stable, now empty and dark. Something was moving there. On the edge of the roof crouched a snow-white cat: lean, on the hunt.

Steve touched his arm and said, “Come on, you're freezing.”

When Tyler looked again, the cat had disappeared.

“What is it?” Steve asked.

“I thought I saw a white cat. On the roof of the stable.”

“It must have been the moonlight.”

Tyler paused for a moment, then turned around.

The pebbles on the path glistened in the light of the full moon as if they were showing them the way home.

*   *   *

NO DOGS WERE
reported missing in town and no one else had heard the barking. When Tyler got home from school, Steve told him the creek had stopped bleeding that morning, and that by midday the water was as crystal clear as it always had been. HEX dutifully combed the woods, but was unable to discover anything unusual. They were frankly optimistic. The escaped dog must have come from Mountainville or Central Valley on the other side of the reserve, Steve guessed, and was undoubtedly back with its master. After the window people left, he and Jocelyn went to the Warehouse Furniture Showroom in Newburgh and picked out a new dining room table. While waiting for the delivery, they brought the old pine table down from the attic. The strong “fresh start” vibes of it all made Tyler feel iffy. By now the people in town would be relieved that everything was back to the way it used to be, which was good enough for them.

Tyler was not relieved. He was more ill at ease than ever, and an ever-increasing sense of desperation was hanging over him. Everything around him felt wrong, disrupted.

It had taken him a long time to fall asleep that night. He had sat in his bedroom window, blankets over his shoulders, the pale moonlight reflecting in his eyes, and had heard the voice of his younger brother:
No, but he's never been dead before, either.
These words came back to him at school during geography when he got a PM from Lawrence:

Did you hear that dog last night?? didnt know if i should tell you this but i shat my pants, thought it was Fletcher!

“Tyler, is there something you need to tell me?” Steve asked suddenly as Tyler was getting ready to go upstairs that evening. It was just after eleven and the networks had called Ohio for Obama, earning him another four years in office.

“No. Why?” He gave his father an open, honest look, but inside he cursed himself. Was it so obvious?

“I don't know. You've been so quiet lately.”

He shrugged. “A lot's been goin' on, huh?”

“I suppose so.” Steve looked at him, searching for what was going on behind his eyes. Tyler practically felt like a billboard. “You going to be okay?”

“Sure.”

Steve smiled and said, “Well, whenever you're ready, give me a holler.” Tyler managed to produce something like a smile and ran up the stairs. At that moment he hated his dad for seeing through him so easily; it was a fiery, hostile stab, the strength of which surprised him and even hurt a little. It forced him to acknowledge that things changed, and not all for the good. Seldom for the good, when he got right down to it.

When the clock in the downstairs hall chimed one, he jumped into his jeans, put on two sweaters, and loaded up his stuff in his Adidas sports bag: Maglite, GoPro, iPhone, and the half-full, folded-up bag of dog kibble he had brought upstairs from the pantry earlier in the evening. Something else they hadn't thrown away yet, even though Fletcher would never be there to eat it. He listened for a minute on the landing, then decided he couldn't risk taking the creaking stairs. When he'd assured himself that everyone was asleep, he opened his bedroom window as quietly as he could, put his hands on the sill, and lowered himself down the unstable trellis until his sneakers found the mortared upper edge of the kitchen window more to the left. Cautiously he pushed the window ajar. The hinges and the casement stay gave out earsplitting squeaks and Tyler thought his whole plan was fucked. His parents would be wide awake. They'd find him hanging from the ivy trellis and send him straight back to bed.

But they didn't, so Tyler jumped down, sank to his knees, and rolled over the ground.

He stole noiselessly into the VanderMeers' backyard and called Lawrence on his phone. It took ten minutes before a sleepy head finally appeared at the window; Tyler had been calling without letup and had ended up maliciously pelting his window with pebbles. “Sorry, I fell asleep,” Lawrence hissed. After another five minutes he finally climbed out and dropped from the sun porch roof to the patio.

“I told you to set your alarm, didn't I?”

“I slept right through it.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and rubbed them against his thighs to warm them up. “Jesus, it's cold. So what's up?”

“We're going into the woods.”

Lawrence hesitated, as if reconsidering his earlier promise, as if Tyler's idea had lost all its logic and sense now that it had been exposed to the starlight glittering among the turbulent clouds. “I don't know, man. I haven't heard shit tonight.”

“I want to be sure.”

Neither of them spoke as they took the Highland Trail on the other side of the creek, which ran steeply up the side of the ridge. Every now and then they saw the glowing LEDs from the security cams in the trees high above them, but the app said the witch was in town, not up here in the woods. Tyler was all too happy to risk being seen by HEX because the trail eased his mind a little, just as lighthouse beacons must have eased the minds of the old seamen on stormy nights long ago. The darkness was monumental. Every sound—a snapping twig, the rustling of the wind, the nervous call of a night bird—was magnified to spectacular proportions, as if the night itself were acting as a natural amplifier and the woods teeming with secret life. Here, at age seventeen, he was still the child he thought he had left behind long ago, and he understood the vulnerability of who they were and what they were doing—two children, alone and wandering through a vast, dark forest.

After a while he took a handful of dog kibble from his bag and began to scatter it bit by bit across the trail.

“Fuck, man.” Lawrence watched him uncomfortably. “That looks way too much like the beginning of a fairy tale to me. One of the bad ones, where you get eaten by the big bad wolf in the end.”

Tyler flashed a smile. “I think you're mixing them up.” They talked like little boys around a campfire: muffled, hushed. Tyler dropped a piece of kibble and began to whistle softly.

“You really think that helps?” Lawrence asked. Tyler shrugged, and after a while Lawrence joined in. In unison, their whistling sounded like high-pitched, shrill bird calls, as frail and glassy as a dead symphony. It made the hair on the back of Tyler's neck stand on end. They both stopped at the same time and stood shoulder to shoulder. The ellipse cast by the Maglite jumped from tree trunk to tree trunk.

“I really feel like a moron, you know that?” Lawrence said, laughing foolishly. “That wasn't Fletcher last night. I said it sounded like him, but Fletcher's dead. We saw how Jaydon sicced him on the witch, right? So she got back at him. What the fuck are we doing here, Tyler?”

“Do you think Jaydon is afraid?” Tyler asked. “That she'll get to him, too, I mean?”

“No, I don't think so. At first he was—that's why he didn't hit back when you punched him in the face. But I don't think she's after him. Fletcher bit her with his bare teeth. Jaydon's knife was on a stick. They never touched skin to skin.”

“I think he's much more dangerous if he knows that,” Tyler said.

“Why?”

Tyler shrugged. It was a gut feeling; a premonition, if you will—he couldn't explain why he knew it was true. The look in Jaydon's eyes before he so violently drove the X-Acto knife into Katherine's nipple kept coming back to him, and Tyler had come to the conclusion that this went far beyond reckless bravado, juvenile delinquency, or even lunacy.

This was a whole nother level of fucked-upness.

They had walked for about fifteen minutes when Tyler came to a halt. They'd gone up quite a steep incline, and somewhere on the left there were large rocky outcrops that formed the top of the hill, behind which lay Aleck Meadow Reservoir and Lookout Point. The shaft of light from the Maglite shone brightly over the impenetrable jumble of tree trunks and fallen branches on the hillside, but it didn't reach farther than about ten yards and revealed nothing. He turned around and directed the Maglite down the path they'd come up over, where the scattered trail of dog kibble disappeared in a grisly tunnel of trees. Tyler was just calming himself with the thought that, as in every fairy tale, you only had to follow the trail and retrace your steps along the path to get home when something moved down there in the darkness.

Tyler abruptly stopped moving the dull circle of yellow light and listened to the sound. For a second he didn't even know if he could still hear it. Then: crunching undergrowth, rustling leaves, the stealthy movement of an animal of some kind. Lawrence cocked his head, his mouth pursed and tense.

Tyler's right hand reached reflexively into his sports bag and took out the GoPro. He turned it on and pressed
REC
. In the dark, the LCD screen lit up like a solid, green-and-black stain.

Once again they heard the sound, lower down on the trail. It came closer. Tyler felt his blood shoot up to his head. The palms of his hands got clammy and the Maglite almost slipped out of his fingers; his mouth, however, had gone completely dry.

“Fletcher?” he whispered.

“Oh, Jesus, shut up,” Lawrence moaned.

“You hear it, don't you?”

“That's not Fletcher down there, it's a deer or a fox or a fucking raccoon; it could be anything. I want to get the hell out of here.”

The sound shifted to the right of the trail, seemed to distance itself on the slope but came back again. It was a
fast
sound, hurried, and Tyler knew it was no deer or raccoon; what was moving out there was driven by a hunting instinct and was making its way through the crackling undergrowth on rapid paws. The night seemed to be breathing, swelling, and waiting to burst. Tyler's legs began to feel like rubber. Pattering there in front of them in the dark was unmistakably a dog.