HEX (38 page)

Warren drew a step closer. “Hey, haven't you done enough?”

“Warren, stop it,” Grim whispered, revulsed and stricken with a maddening fear. There was no doubt in his mind who in Black Spring was pulling the strings, and until this threat was behind them they were entirely at her mercy. “Get the fuck over here before you end up on a rope, too.”

Time dragged on. Forty-five minutes and counting. They went downstairs. Grim tried to wake Steve from his shock, to no avail. Outside, the sky was bleeding.

Warren suggested they carefully push her away with brooms. Where to? Down the stairs, if necessary; the fall would make her disappear. Just like when those assholes used sticks to drive her into the tank at Philosopher's Creek in order to pelt her with rocks. Grim saw the dark rings under Jocelyn's eyes and hesitated. Risk the life of some old bugger from town? Morality was shifting as surely as time itself.

Back upstairs. Warren with a broom, Grim with a mop. Cold drops of sweat tingled on their foreheads. With extreme caution they began poking Katherine gently with the ends of the handles. Her brittle body yielded, but she didn't budge—except she kept turning her dead, stitched-up face to wherever she felt herself being prodded.

It was as grotesque as it was loathsome, but Tyler's body was hanging in the way.

Neither of them dared to push the situation.

“
I want to go to my baby!
” Jocelyn's heartrending cry resounded from below. Grim and Warren exchanged startled glances, and soon Pete VanderMeer came upstairs. He was clearly overwhelmed, but he had brought an extra broom with him. Grim felt a deep appreciation for the man.

“How's it going downstairs?” he asked quietly.

“Messed up,” Pete said. “How did you think it was going? But Mary's making her a nice pot of chamomile tea.” He laughed briefly through his tears. It was absurd indeed: as if chamomile tea was the solution to such unutterable misery.

The three of them tried to force Katherine around Tyler's body to the right, and she finally took a staggering step to the side. Grim felt his heart pounding. Warren pushed harder … and in a flash the witch was
in front of
the hanging boy, right in their midst, and Grim could have sworn he heard her hissing. With a jolt the group sprang apart. Warren stumbled over his own feet and ended up on his ass in the remains of the fairy ring.

The rest unfolded with terrifying speed. “
Jocelyn
!” someone shouted from below—Mary, Grim realized—but in his shock he was too late to grasp what was happening, too late to stop her. All he heard were Jocelyn's swelling growls as she ran up the stairs, her teeth bared. And with a swing that hit it right out of the ballpark, she smashed the nice pot of chamomile tea into the witch's face.

The effect was astonishing. Splinters of glass and boiling-hot tea water splashed onto the wallpaper, and Grim had to jump aside to avoid them. The witch doubled over and instantly disappeared. Screaming, Jocelyn let go of the plastic handle and threw her arms around the body of her dead son.

*   *   *

THE POLICE CAME
and asked questions. Thank God Mary VanderMeer had already taken Jocelyn to St. Luke's, because Grim didn't think she'd be capable of answering without shooting off her mouth. After he had Pete call 911, Grim sat down with Steve at the dining room table and asked him if he thought he was able to make a statement.

Steve slowly absorbed his question, as if he were coming back from a dark, faraway place. With infinitely sad eyes he asked, “Will they take Tyler down then?”

That did it; Grim felt all this was becoming too much, even for him, and he took Steve in his arms, holding the mourning father as close as he could. “Yes,” Grim said, glad he didn't have to look him in the eye, “that's what they're gonna do, buddy.” He managed to keep himself under control, partly because he had to make a professional diagnosis: Steve was lucid enough to realize what had happened, which meant that he would probably also know what he could and could not tell the police.

Grim let him go and sat upright. “Steve, I have to ask you this. Is there anything … anything that can explain this?”

Steve slowly shook his head.

“Something he may have said?” When Steve kept shaking his head no, Grim continued: “I'm asking you this in confidence, not for the Council. If anything happened, I need to know about it for the sake of security. I know Tyler was working on that website of his, but I don't believe this had anything to do with that or it would have happened much earlier. We tracked his laptop over the past month and haven't caught him working on anything new. Do you know if he had other stuff going on? Where in God's name did it go wrong?”

“I don't know, Robert,” Steve said finally, sincere and composed.

Grim looked at him, met his gaze, and believed he was speaking the truth. Steve was as perplexed as he was shocked. He decided to leave it for now; Steve would have enough on his mind. He patted him on the shoulder. “Take it easy, buddy. I'll call you tonight.”

Steve said thanks and Grim handed the car keys to Warren, who would stay behind as a friend of the family to handle the state police. Grim himself was relieved to get out of the house. He could feel the presence of death hanging over it like a heavy, contagious veil, creeping up on him from the every corner. It was superstition, of course, but in this house it seemed as if death had been obeying the laws of darkness, with disaster begetting more disaster and spreading like a sickness. With legs of rubber Robert Grim fled to the back door. He didn't stop until he got halfway across the backyard, inhaling the evening air in deep gulps, head bent and thighs trembling.

Baffled and more or less nonfunctional, he set out toward the former visitor center. In order to avoid bumping into the police he took the trail through the woods, which rose up sharply along a fallow field where the ground fog silently reflected the moonlight. The subzero temperatures of the previous week had been followed by a thaw, and the air was heavy with moisture. Grim watched his breath form little clouds in the dark.

After a few minutes, he was sorry he had taken the forest trail.

He used his cell phone to light the way and quickened his pace. The hemlocks formed a massive black wall to his left. Elsewhere in the hills, more to the north or farther to the west, people would exercise their dogs, go for evening walks, or make love on summer evenings. But not here, not in these bewitched parts. In Black Spring, no one went out after dark.

The eyes of that little kid.

How could anyone do that to himself? Had Katherine made him do it, or had she shown him something so deranged that he had wanted to blind himself, in an eerie imitation of the witch herself? How far did her influence extend?

The sight of Jocelyn smashing the pot of chamomile tea in the witch's face suddenly came back to him, but this time when the glass shattered, blood sprang from his own eyes and he staggered, falling backward down the stairs.…

Get a hold of yourself, idiot.

But he was badly shaken and he couldn't ease his mind. It was something about the way the wind rose just then, the way it made the trees flail in the sky. Robert Grim hurried along, trying not to let the darkness get to him. Alone out here, his incredulity and bewilderment were being shaped into something manageable, and the questions began to arise. How could this have happened? In the almost thirty years that Grim had been serving as HEX security chief, Katherine had never attacked in this way. She had claimed no suicide victims since the ones who cut the corner of her mouth open back in '67. Everyone knew what Katherine's whispering could make you do, and no one would ever take the risk and expose themselves to it. Tyler and his friends may have been playing on the edge with their pranks and clips, but Tyler had been a bright kid, and he never would have made such an enormous mistake, would he? Now, much too late, Grim began to get the gnawing feeling that he may have made the wrong choice in failing to let the Council know about Tyler's activities.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty, my friend. With all due respect, you didn't do him any favors by keeping mum.

He stopped and turned around. Something was moving on the trail behind him.

His feet began to slip on the frost-covered roots. He regained his balance, and whatever it was that had moved out there—the mist or his own mind playing tricks on him—was now gone. Driven by a sudden sense of urgency, Grim began to run. It hit him all at once, a sudden, irrational fear and a terrifying premonition of approaching horror.

Something dreadful was coming.

It was all part of the same downward spiral of cause and effect. The box cutter slicing into Katherine's breast. The death of the dog. The bewitched creek. The stoning and the subsequent madness in town. Jaydon, who had tottered on the brink of death at the hands of the executioner, but had come out on the right side. And now Tyler.

The children dug holes outside the walls of the settlement and carried fruit crates out to put in their graves, walking in procession. Their parents thought they were possessed, and the game was seen as a bad omen.

Wincing at the sharp stitch in his side, Grim took the gravel path that ran past the old Hopewell home and finally reached Deep Hollow Road. The street was well lit, and he continued with a stumbling gait to the former Popolopen Visitor Center.

Sitting on the edge of the roof, above the frieze, was a tawny owl. The bird stared at him with sinister, glistening predator's eyes. Grim couldn't understand why it filled him with such a sense of disaster and gloom, but he clapped his hands sharply to chase it away. Much to his dismay, the owl didn't move, didn't even blink its eyes. Only when Grim picked up a stone and viciously hurled it did it flap its strong wings and fly away.

Inside, Grim learned that Katherine had turned up in a kitchen in Lower South. He summoned Claire and Marty to go to the house, send the residents to The Point to Point, and not lose sight of the witch for a single second. There were no reports of any chamomile-induced casualties. Grim stayed behind in the control center and began working his way through the security cam footage. He played the images over and over again, winding back and forth between key moments. He saw Matt coming home from the bus stop. He saw the deceptive stillness behind the dark windows of the Grant home. In what twilight zone had Tyler lingered before his death? Between the time Matt came home from school and the time his parents drove into the driveway an hour and a half later there was nothing, literally nothing to be seen. Given what was unraveling inside, it was a picture of surreal, ghastly normality.

Warren called from St. Luke's. Steve Grant had stayed behind in Black Spring with Pete VanderMeer and the funeral director and would come later. Matt had suffered severe gastrointestinal poisoning from ingesting the toadstools, but at least he was out of danger. Now the doctors were working on his eyes, but there was no guarantee that they could be saved. Warren wanted to stay in Newburgh in case the boy woke up and started talking—highly unlikely, but not impossible.

Grim hung up. As he began considering various strategies to keep the public shock in town under wraps, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was overlooking something essential, something he would have to find out about fast before disaster struck. It rang through his head like funeral bells. He tried to shift his focus to practical matters: the questions he would have to ask the parents, what things he could make public, whether to have the funeral in or out of town. What if Katherine were to appear during the funeral in front of friends and relatives from outside, like a pyromaniac who comes to watch his own fires?

Maybe she had planned it all. Maybe Tyler's death was part of some dark, preconceived scheme.

Grim jumped as if someone had said these words out loud. With eyes wide open and the flesh on his body suddenly creeping over his bones, he stared at his cell phone, which was beside him on his desk. Two seconds later it began to ring. Claire.

“Hello?”

“Robert, she's gone. She left just a second ago.”

At first he didn't understand where the heavy, stale stench of corpse was coming from. “Okay, just come…” he began, but then he heard the whispering. He looked around, straight into the tormented, nightmarish face of Katherine van Wyler. Her shredded lips were pressed together into a grin, pulling the stitches tight. The open corner on the left moved with great concentration, and the corrupted words entered his mind. Grim dropped the cell phone with a shriek and stumbled backward, rolled across his desk, knocked a pen box onto the floor, and landed next to it on the other side.

At a calm and wary pace Katherine walked around the desk and stood in front of him.

“
Robert? Robert!
” came the tinny sound from the phone.

Grim scrambled away on his ass as the Black Rock Witch came closer and closer on her bare, gray feet. Her nails were a morbid yellow, long and curved at the tips. The iron chains clanked around her gaunt body. In a state of pure panic, Grim bumped up against the big screen and slid backward into a corner—ah, it always ended in a corner.

Moments later Katherine was bending over him, her body rigid, her lips at his ear. It was impossible to flee from the dead woman without touching her, so Robert Grim froze on the spot, stuck his fingers in his ears, and began to sing for all he was worth. But this time it was not Katrina & the Waves, this time his pitiful wailing was not a song at all; the notes that came out were atonal sounds of survival, meant to protect him from the witch's whispers, and all the while he was compelled to look into her stitched-up eye sockets and to breathe in her sickly stench of mud and death.

 

TWENTY-FIVE

MATT WAS KEPT
in an induced coma until Saturday afternoon. At four o'clock, when Steve, Jocelyn, Milford Hampton (Jocelyn's father who had flewn in from Atlanta), and Mary VanderMeer returned from an almost untouched lunch in the hospital courtyard, Matt woke up. Soon it was clear that he was not responding to any external stimuli, however, and he was given the alarming diagnosis of catatonic stupor. They found him in his hospital bed, his skin bleak and translucent, bandages over his eyes like a morbid facial mask deluxe. The ghastly thing was that his head was hovering a couple of inches
above
the pillow, held aloft by stiffened muscles. The attending physician told them that when he changed the bandages, the pupil in his right eye had shown no reflex at all. His left eye wouldn't respond to anything without a cornea transplant. Steve knew from his own medical experience what it must look like under that bandage: grizzly white and cloudy, as if there were no eyeballs at all.