HEX (43 page)

Not madness,
he thought.
Love
. Katherine had shown him what unspeakable suffering really was. Only if we have suffered can we make choices out of love.

The question was: Did he believe that Katherine was capable of raising Tyler from the dead? Steve had nothing to justify that hope, nothing but a three-hundred-fifty-year-old legend brought to life by Pete VanderMeer's flamboyant narrative style and a vague black-and-white smudge on a MacBook screen. It defied all logic; it was outright implausible.

And yet. All signs pointed in favor. Tyler had
said it out loud
when he and Lawrence were in the woods, fleeing from something that may have been Fletcher.

It had seemed like a message.

Help me, Dad.

Suddenly he was furious at every ounce of common sense that was trying to reason him out of his intention. Even if there was only one goddamn chance in a million, he'd take it.

Katherine had entered the stables and he rushed after her. Even before he went inside he could hear the horses going wild. Paladin kicked at the massive wooden door of his stall and almost knocked it out of true. Nuala snorted and sniffed as if she were rabid or possessed. After the animals had broken out in early November, Jocelyn had had new bolts installed. Steve hoped they could withstand such superhuman force. He tried to shush the animals, but Paladin reared up, eyes rolling, kicked dents in the walls with his powerful hooves, and Steve shrank back.
Get it over with and get the hell out of here, before the neighbors catch on.

Katherine waited patiently at the workbench at the far end of the stable, paying no attention to the horses. When Steve approached her, she reached her arms as far from her body as they would go, tightening the chains. Then she nodded at the dusty workbench. At first Steve didn't understand what she was getting at. On the workbench he saw the feed bucket for the horses and the jigsaw, underneath it the metal toolbox …

Next to the toolbox was a pair of midsize bolt cutters.

Are you really willing to risk everything you have?
begged the last slippery remains of Steve's reasoning brain.
You're putting everyone's life in the balance … not only the people of Black Spring, but your family. Your wife, your other son, yourself … and for what? For nothing more than a smudge on a screen. That's not love, that's selfishness. Think about Matt; think about Jocelyn! They're alive!

But then he heard Tyler's voice:
If you had to let somebody die,
o padre mio,
who would it be: your own kid or the rest of our town?

And with a sudden, cold savagery he thought about something Matt had said when he had offered his sports pennant at the Wicker Burning on All Hallows' Eve:
Besides, if you sacrifice something that isn't important to you, what's the point, right?

Something audible clicked in his head: the collapse of his last resistance. The rest of his life—everything, except his most basic reflexes—seized up and retreated into the deepest holes of his memory.

Steve picked up the bolt cutters and felt the cold weight in his hands. In a confused image that meant little to him anymore he saw himself breaking the chain lock on Tyler's bike last spring—one of those occasions when Tyler had lost his keys. The blades were made to cut through modern stainless steel, and Steve assumed that brittle seventeenth-century iron, corroded by the elements, would present no problem.

Again, Katherine tried to stretch her arms.

With trembling hands, Steve placed the cutting blades around one of the links in the chain. In the distance, without recognizing it as the sound of his own screaming thoughts, he heard an anguished cry of madness:
What am I doing oh fuck what am I doing what am I doing WHAT AM I DOING?

And then the lever closed.

With a loud
ZINNNNG!
the chain sprang open and both loose ends hit the stable floor.

Everywhere in Black Spring, people looked up from whatever they were doing, as if they heard distant thunder in the skies. People abruptly put down their work, stopped cooking or doing the dishes, and experienced a collective ripple of alarm that permeated into the core of their bones. No one could identify it, but everyone felt instinctively that something,
something
was dreadfully amiss.

The iron had to be cut in three more places; only then was Steve able to unwind the chains from the witch's gaunt body.

When it was done, she slowly raised her dead hands to her blind face. Then she beckoned at Steve to come.

She led him back to the house. Behind them, the horses, now crazed with fear, lashed into the stable doors, but Steve didn't hear them. Nor did he see his own reflection as they walked past the mirror in the dining room like a pair of ghosts, one after the other. That was a good thing, because if he had seen his face, he probably would have started screaming. It was the face of a decrepit old man, with eyes and a mouth so twisted that they looked as if they'd never close again.

Up in the bedroom, he found Jocelyn's fingernail scissors and a pair of tweezers.

Katherine waited downstairs, with all the patience in the world.

When he faced her again, she pointed to her mouth.

Steve tried to speak, but his voice cracked and he was barely able to produce sound. He cleared his throat and tried once more: “Bring back my Tyler.”

The witch pointed to her mouth.

“Please. Bring him back to life, just like you did to your own son.”

That finger: scrawny, commanding, unaffected.

Steve obeyed the order.

With trembling fingers, he snipped the stitches that held her lips together one by one.

With the tweezers he pulled the threads from her dead flesh.

As he took a step back, her mutilated mouth fell open with a limp plop. Katherine shuddered and drew a rasping, scraping breath. Once again, a shock ran through the townsfolk of Black Spring, even more severe this time. Eyes opened wide, cries rose in the streets, people looked at one another feverishly and thought,
For God's sake … what's happening?

Oblivious to the scenes outside, Steve started on the stitches on her left eye.

The threads fell to the floor one by one.

The eyelid's flaking, bluish, inflamed skin quivered.

When he was done, Steve turned to the right eye.

And when that, too, was done, the witch turned away from him with her hand over her eyes in an effort to protect her liberator from herself. Her face became contorted as if she were suffering excruciating pain, and her body pitched forward unnaturally. She waved her free arm at Steve, gesturing at him to go away, away, away from here.

Just then, a new shock reverberated through Black Spring, but now it didn't strike the townsfolk from within; this time it seemed to come from the earth itself. For a moment, everything appeared to darken before their eyes. The streets were filled with a very real sound, a
low
sound, as if something gigantic had rolled over in the vaulted darkness beneath the town that made the asphalt and the woods quake. The bells of Crystal Meth Church resounded with a deep and sonorous hymn. At Ackerman's Corner, John Blanchard's sheep broke out and bolted. Jaydon Holst, lost in a fever dream about a faceless executioner who kept mutilating his tortured body over and over again, groaned restlessly in his sleep. In the HEX control center, Robert Grim and Claire Hammer came rushing down the aisle to the screen, which was flickering on and off with a humming electrical buzz. Then all the power in Black Spring went out. Emergency generators roared up but shut down immediately, and the Christmas lights in some of the windows sputtered in the dying daylight.

Black Spring wasn't the only place where darkness fell: All over the Highlands and the Hudson Valley—yes, even on the highways and in Manhattan office buildings—residents of Black Spring who happened to be outside the town limits when Katherine opened her eyes were struck by an unspeakable, morbid sadness and gloom that exceeded human comprehension. Immediately they began seeing images that were simply too much for their brittle spirits to bear and that awakened in them an irrepressible desire to seek death as the only way out of their existence. Those lucky enough to be relatively close to home understood that the force that had always bound them to Black Spring had intensified to the Nth degree, and they rushed to get back … but there were those for whom salvation came too late, and they hanged themselves in broom closets or ran their cars into trees with the pedal to the metal so their bodies were crushed in clouds of smoke and darkness.

In the house at the end of Deep Hollow Road, Steve gaped with horror at the inhuman, crooked figure who was still covering her evil eye with her hand. Again she waved for him to leave, a swastika of ashen flesh and bent limbs. For a moment, his legs seemed liquid, and he was unable to move his feet. Icy needles pricked his neck at the thought of her opening her eyes … and turning them on him.

Steve fled from his house, screaming. He ran into the woods, and he ran for his life.

 

TWENTY-NINE

TEN MILES AWAY
in Newburgh, Jocelyn Grant did feel the initial shock, but she dismissed it as a jolt of unsettled biorhythms and put it out of her mind. When the second shock came, she looked up from the copy of
Esquire
she had been mindlessly leafing through and stared into the silent hospital room. And when the third shock followed shortly thereafter, more intense than the previous two put together, she rocketed out of her seat and the magazine slid to the floor.

Matt moaned and moved his head in his sleep. Startled, Jocelyn eased her way around his bed and put a hand on his shoulder. “Matt! Matt, can you hear me? Can you hear me, darling?”

But Matt didn't answer. His left eye was covered with a wad of cotton, held in place by a bandage wrapped around his head. The bandage over his right eye had been removed. The eye stayed shut, but this restlessness was a greater sign of life than he had shown in days. Would he finally wake up? Her excitement was no match, however, for her sudden rising panic:
Something's wrong. Something's very wrong.

She felt it. This was not her imagination. It was all around her, but she couldn't get a handle on it. It was as untouchable as the static between two radio channels. The clock on the wall said it was a few minutes past five. The wind was having a field day in the parking lot, whipping a plastic bag against the grills of cars that glistened in the Christmas lighting. Everything looked normal, but it wasn't.

And it wasn't here that things were wrong; it was at home in Black Spring. She felt it pulling her, whatever it was.

She called Steve but got no answer, not even his voice mail. Only silence. And her mind responded uncompromisingly, as if that silence had everything to do with the hunch she was having:
We
have
to get home before it's too late.

It took her by surprise: the dream, the same dream, and she recognized it immediately. It was the dream she had dreamt only once before, eighteen years ago in a bamboo bungalow in Thailand, but it had always been present in the back of her mind and had been responsible for much of the darkness of their life in Black Spring, despite the relative happiness they believed they had known.

The intensity was different, but the essence of the dream was the same. She saw herself hysterically pulling strands of her hair out. She saw herself tossing the papers from Matt's clipboard all around the room. They fluttered to the floor, and she saw them form a photo collage, pictures of the dead. All children, little children and big children. They had all sorts of cuts on their faces and bodies. In the next image, the dead children were actually lying in the hospital room, the children of Black Spring, and one of them was Matt. His face was cut off and stuffed with black coals. She saw herself naked and rolling in glittering pools of paint, her body red and black, while she was taken by a wild boar. The curved tusks of the animal gleamed as it thrust its member into her, snarling and grunting and stamping its hooves, and she screamed out in ecstasy.

Jocelyn hadn't the faintest idea how long she had been staring at Matt's bed in that numbed state of horror. Nor did all the images she saw register in her mind. The only thing that got through to her was the vague but urgent sense that she could end it all by taking her life. That prospect didn't frighten her; it only filled her with a dull sadness, nothing worse than what was tormenting her now. She crossed over to the window with leaden legs. She picked up the chair she had been sitting in by its back and heaved it over her head, about to smash the glass and remove the last obstacle from a four-story fall.

What saved her life was her phone, which began to ring at that very moment. Dazed, she looked up, not liberated from the immense sadness but at least conscious of herself, and she thought,
Oh my God. I really wanted to do it. I really wanted to jump out the window. What's happening to me?

She groped for her phone, assuming she would see Steve's picture on the touch screen. But it wasn't Steve. It was her father.

“Dad!”

“You want to come down for dinner, maybe? It's not too crowded in—”

“Dad, I
have
to get home. Can you please take me there?”

“But I thought you—”

“There's something wrong with Steve,” she said, the most obvious thing she could think of. And the truth: “I can't reach him.” She couldn't explain to her father why she had to go back to Black Spring. The urgency had risen within her, as if a magnet had been put in place farther south that was pulling at her mind. She felt her home beckoning with gentle, swelling chants—compelling choir voices that she had to obey before something terrible happened.

“He's probably gone out for a breath of fresh air,” Milford Hampton said calmly and charitably. “Jocelyn, you're at your wits' end. Tell you what, why don't you—”