HEX (41 page)

Cautiously, Griselda lifted the neckline of Jaydon's T-shirt. Jaydon didn't wake up. She winced when she noticed the revolting palette of badly healed wounds and mangled skin on his back. During his probation, psychiatrists would help Jaydon deal with the symptoms of his trauma, but Griselda knew that these scars were for life. For three lonely weeks she had tried, for better or worse, to prepare herself for his release, but this was a reality she had completely overlooked:
Everyone knows he bears these scars. Everyone knows what Jaydon has done. This curse will be on him forever.

Griselda picked up her embroidery and sung a slow lullaby for her son, alternating love with hatred:
“The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round…”

She pushed the needle through the fabric and snipped the thread with a pair of sewing scissors. Every time her hand was free, she stroked Jaydon's hair.

“The horn on the bus goes beep beep beep, beep beep beep…”

Suddenly Griselda stopped stitching and looked up, stunned, sewing scissors in one hand, the other casually stroking Jaydon's hair.

“The babies on the bus go wah wah wah, wah wah wah…”

Love and hate, love and hate.

“The mommies on the bus … go…”

All at once, Griselda had the idea of stabbing the sewing scissors into Jaydon's throat, below the rhythmic swelling and sinking of his Adam's apple. It was a purely rational thought, not born of hatred, but of love.

It would be like putting him out of his misery. Jaydon no longer had a life in this town, and there was no alternative. Didn't Griselda have the right to give his life meaning by making the ultimate sacrifice to Katherine?

Griselda Holst, whose poetic genius usually amounted to appreciating cutesy Hallmark cards, now thought,
My blood threw those terrible rocks at you. Now I give you my blood. The way they once forced you to kill your blood.

With halting breath, she pressed the point of the scissors against the pale skin of Jaydon's throat.

The flesh yielded gently.

Jaydon didn't move.

In those few crucial seconds, she tried to imagine what life without Jaydon would be like, a life in which she would no longer have to hide him away like a shameful secret at the back of the butcher shop, a life without his tantrums and aggression, without him thwarting her efforts to obtain Katherine's grace.…

But then Jaydon moved in his sleep; laid his hand on her thigh—and that gesture, the disarming gesture of a child instinctively searching for his mother's support, brought her back to her senses with a jolt. Her heart beat rapidly and painfully in her chest, and with a restrained sort of moan she threw the scissors into a corner of the room. Griselda pressed her lips together and wrestled to regain self-control.

“Hush, little baby,” she said, and began stroking him again. “Hush now. You're safe with Mommy. Mommy is the only one you got. Nobody is ever going to hurt you anymore.”

And it was almost as if she could hear Jaydon reply:
We'll make them all pay for what they did, Mom.

Now it wasn't Jaydon who was being buried, but Tyler Grant. As if Katherine had given them a sign that she had forgiven them. And while Griselda Holst, cheeks stinging from the frost, stuck her key in the lock of the butcher shop, she thought,
Yes, son, I'll take you with me into Katherine's grace. I'll show you the right path. It's us and Katherine against the rest of them.

The little bell jingled, and it was the stench that hit her first. Gagging, she recoiled and brought her hand up to her mouth. She grabbed the doorpost, harshly sucking in her breath and staring at the meat case in disbelief. At first she didn't understand what she was looking at, fooled into thinking that someone had taken all the meat away and replaced it with an odd, dusty blanket. Then she saw that everything was covered with a blue-gray layer of mold, like spongy tissue on an infected wound, dull but glaring in the striplight of the display case. All her meat, from left to right, was spoiled and flecked with fly eggs, as if she had been away for weeks instead of a little over forty minutes. The ground beef was crawling with pale worms. The steaks were discolored like tubercular lungs. The meatballs she had kneaded that morning stank as if they had been rotting in their gravy since October. A thick yellowish scum was caked onto the stew and infested with vermin.

It's an omen,
Griselda thought with horror and dread.
Oh, good heavens, what the hell is happening?

Outside, the funeral bells began to toll, and Griselda shrank with a scream, and ten miles north Matt's blind eyes suddenly shot open behind the bandages. And as the nurse rushed up to see what was wrong, he cried out, “Don't do it! Don't do it! Don't let him cut her eyes open! Mom! Dad! Don't let him cut her eyes open!”

 

TWENTY-SEVEN

AFTER THE FUNERAL,
Jocelyn said she wanted to go with her father to St. Luke's to be with Matt. Tomorrow would mark his first week in Newburgh. After everyone had finally returned home that afternoon—the condolences seemed interminable—Jocelyn had told Steve that if there was no improvement by the next week, they would have to figure out a way to bring Matt back to Black Spring … before
her
hold on their youngest son became too strong.

Steve had nodded absently and said he still had a few odds and ends to wrap up with the funeral director, but he'd come to Newburgh later. All the while, he was thinking,
There it is again. Your youngest son. He's your only son now, and don't you forget it.

In his black suit, but with his collar unbuttoned and his tie hanging loose, he walked to the end of the backyard, where Fletcher's grave was. The real reason he hadn't wanted to go was that he wanted to be alone with his grief. An insistent part of his brain refused to accept the fact that he had only one son left, refused to let Tyler go. It never let up; kept coming at him. The presence of so many familiar faces at the funeral had, in a sense, forced him to screen himself off from his despair, but afterward it returned in all its intensity. It tried to twist reality, and bounced back on his soul every time he was confronted with the facts. It caused a short-circuit that made him drift away not only from his family but also from himself. Despite his misery, he realized that by cutting himself off he was playing a dangerous game. On Tuesday, after the closing of the coffin, he had briefly—and in full possession of his senses—considered suicide as a logical conclusion of his pain. It had seemed stupid, an act of utter self-pity.

Steve Grant didn't believe in an afterlife, and it wouldn't bring him back to Tyler.

It was chilly. The light in the woods had a hostile quality. Years ago, before they had built the horse pen, little Tyler had spent summer after summer doing somersaults on the trampoline here with a lazy detachment and a blind faith, as if the future didn't exist at all. Steve remembered that Jocelyn had been a bit afraid of the dark pit under the trampoline. Someday one of the springs would snap and Tyler would end up with a twisted leg caught in that shadowy hole. Later they had removed the trampoline, but the hole remained: The hole was death, and it caught him in the end. He was in that hole now, a mile away in St. Mary's Cemetery, a hole in the dark, and that's where he'd stay.

Steve knelt down beside Fletcher's grave mound with the scrap-wood marker Matt had fashioned, and he whispered, “Hey, boy. Take good care of Tyler, okay? I know you would have given your life for him. I'd do the same.”

Suddenly he heard Tyler's voice:
Fletcher is
dead,
Matt. Did you ever hear Fletcher howl like that before?

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

Steve felt a chill run through his whole body. He had dismissed it as bullshit that night, but it was also true, wasn't it? Fletcher had been dead … except that night, when they heard him howling in the woods, he wasn't. The night he was brought back to life by Katherine.

No. We don't think those kinds of things.

He shivered and thought,
Later I stopped believing in witches, so I did it as a balancing exercise.

Someone cleared his throat, and he looked up with a start. It was Lawrence. He looked sad and worn-out in his funeral suit. “Sorry. I didn't mean to startle you.”

“No problem, Lawrence. You okay?”

The boy shrugged, as if to say that whether
he
was okay was irrelevant. “I wanted to thank you for what you did. For not ratting on us, I mean. Tyler and me.”

“That's all right.”

Lawrence came around and stood next to him at the grave. “He was crazy about Fletcher, you know. Maybe … if Jaydon hadn't sicced that friggin dog on her … maybe none of this would have happened. He didn't deserve it, you know.…” His voice cracked and tears spilled down his cheeks. Steve felt something burst in his throat.

No, Tyler didn't deserve this—not Tyler. Don't let him slip away from you, because you'll never forgive yourself if you do. If there's pain, cherish it; if there's a flame, don't blow it out. Let it burn, keep it alive. Yes, keep him alive.…

Oh, Jesus.
It was too much. This pain was too big; he wasn't able to bear it. Every cell in his body longed,
screamed
so intensely for Tyler—to hold him, to tell him he loved him. He would have given literally everything for the chance to undo what had happened. There was no journalistic breakthrough for Tyler, no pretty girlfriend from the city; he had died in a noose with his consciousness intact, fully aware of what was going on as the world spun away.

With all the restraint he could muster, Steve said, “Maybe you ought to go home now, Lawrence.”

Lawrence wiped away his tears. “I got to tell you something. If I don't do it now, I'll never do it. It's about Tyler.”

Steve squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep, shuddering breath. This boy next door had the idea that he owed him something, and now, in the darkest moment of his grief, he had come to unburden himself. Steve understood that he would have to drink this bitter medicine to the dregs.

“What is it?” he asked numbly.

“Tyler would never have done something like this on his own. He must have heard her whispering. There's no other way. But Tyler was never mean to her. The others were, but not Tyler. He always stood up for her. At first I didn't get why she'd want to take revenge on him, or whatever she did. But then I suddenly knew that
she
wasn't the one who did it.”

Silence, time ticking out. “What do you mean?”

“We made a recording of her whispering. We had this guy from Highland Falls listen to it, to prove it wouldn't hurt him. I assumed that Tyler erased it when you both went to HEX. But, you know … we taped it with Jaydon's phone. I saw Jaydon erase it, but what if he was only pretending? I thought: No, they caught that fucker, right? They must have cleared out his phone right away. But it was an audio file. And that scared me. I mean, why would they take away his music?” Steve understood what Lawrence was getting at before he even said it. “What if Jaydon still has that recording?”

I have never held anything against you,
he heard Griselda Holst say. No, maybe she hadn't. He got it now. In a flash of horror, it all fell into place. His mouth seemed to fall open by itself, and suddenly he thought about what had struck him that night on the bank of the Hudson, when they cleared out Tyler's MacBook: that maybe he wasn't doing Tyler any favors by sparing him.

Lawrence had just thanked him for what he'd done, but if what he suggested was true, then Steve, for all his good intentions, was responsible for the death of his son.

He clenched his fists uncontrollably, and for a moment the backyard floated dangerously before his eyes, as if he were about to faint. His head pounded along with his heartbeat as the blood drained away. From a distance he could hear Lawrence's voice: “Maybe you can find something on his laptop. I know he blogged a lot about what he was doing, even if he didn't put it online. Maybe he wrote something … during the last days.”

Steve heard himself say, “I don't know his password.”

“Oh, but I do.”

“What is it?”

“Your birthday.”

*   *   *

HE REACHED THE
toilet bowl just in time and threw up the half Danish and swallow of tasteless coffee from that morning in a nasty spurt. He fell to his knees, clamped his fingers over the john, and there he hung, eyes closed, head heavy with physical exhaustion and mental collapse until the nausea ebbed away. Most of what had come up was bile; he had hardly been able to get anything down his throat for days. When he felt able, he flushed and hoisted himself up to the sink. He rinsed his mouth and splashed water on his face. Then he glanced into the mirror to inspect the damage.

He froze abruptly. Behind the glass of the bathroom window was a tawny owl. The bird had a field mouse in its small, curved beak. It was carelessly torn apart and a string of intestines hung out of its mutilated little body. The owl's golden-brown full-moon eyes stared coldly at him until Steve gave the window a sudden, sharp rap.

With two rapid jerks the owl threw its head back and swallowed its prey whole. Then it flapped its wings and instantly disappeared.

Overcome by the longing to keep his son alive, Steve stumbled up the stairs to uncover the last facts about his death.

Tyler's bedroom was unchanged. Since last Friday Steve had only come back here to take the clothes they buried him in out of the closet. It immediately struck him how uncannily stale the atmosphere was, how much Tyler's smell was still present in the air. The blankets were rumpled, Tyler's desk chair pushed out. On the desk was his MacBook, waiting there since Tyler had closed the lid on Friday to get the rope from the stable. Steve tried to picture how Tyler must have experienced those last moments, but he was unable to do it, because there was something else, something much more alarming. The whole room felt highly charged, as if it were waiting for something … as if Tyler could walk in at any minute and pick up his life where he had left off, as if nothing had changed.