HEX (44 page)

“
Dad!
Please, I have to go home. Can you bring the car around? I'll see you at the entrance.”

“Well, I suppose that's all right, if you really want to.…” her father said. Jocelyn hung up without answering.
Get a grip,
she thought.
Get a grip, keep focused
 …

A noise behind her. Matt had torn out his IV tube and she saw him drawing the end to his lips. In a leap and a jump Jocelyn was at his bedside, snatching the tube from his hands with a shout. The needle flew from his arm, bandage and all, spattering a thin streak of blood on the sheet.

“Matt, calm down,” she said feverishly. “I'm getting you out of here. Calm down. Everything's going to be all right.”

But the gloom, that pull, that
swelling
inside her didn't go away, it only got stronger. It had taken hold of Matt as well. Cautiously but quickly, fighting the impulses that fired her mind with madness, she pulled the slippery feeding tube out of Matt's nose and dropped it on the blanket. Then she wrestled his rigid body into his hoodie. She had to start over again three times because her hands were trembling too much to disentangle the sleeves.

There was a wheelchair in the hall, and without hesitation, she rolled it through the doors. She dragged Matt into the chair, put his shoes on him, and set his feet up on the footrests. Matt didn't budge—didn't even seem to realize what was going on—but his fingers were now clutching the armrests and his one pearly white, wide-open eye stared into the room with blind intensity.

Suicide
, she thought.
He tried to commit suicide, and so did you.… He's only been out of Black Spring for a week and you were there just this morning, and you know that's far too short a time to feel her power. What does that tell you? Oh, what was that shock a minute ago?

Jocelyn wrapped Matt's legs in his sheet and blanket and snatched his eyedrops from the nightstand. Hoping the corridor was empty, she pushed her son out of the hospital room.

The corridor was not empty. At the far end near the beverage machine two nurses were drinking coffee. Jocelyn suppressed the urge to run and quickly headed for the elevators. She pushed the button. When the bell announced the elevator's arrival and the doors slid open, she heard voices behind her: “Ma'am?” And sharper: “
Ma'am
!”

With her jaws clenched, she gave the wheelchair a hard push as the footsteps hurried closer. She slapped the button for the ground floor and the elevator doors shut out the nurses' livid cries.

The reception area downstairs was humming with people, but nobody paid them any attention. Jocelyn worked her way through the crowd toward the exit. As she pushed the wheelchair through the revolving doors, she searched the pickup area for the Toyota—not there. The wind tugged at Matt's blanket. She felt that chasm opening up again, that strange, gloomy pull. To keep herself distracted she punched in Steve's number for the umpteenth time, but didn't get through.

“Damn!” she shouted, a cry of pure despair and frustration.

Finally her father came driving up. She yanked the back door open even before the car had come to a full stop. Mr. Hampton was aghast as she dragged Matt onto the backseat like a rag doll and kicked the wheelchair away so she could shut the car door behind her.

“Jocelyn, what the hell? What's Matt doing here?”

“Drive.”

“But he hasn't been released from the hospital. Come on, Jocelyn, you're in a tailspin, and no wonder. Let's get him back now, I can't allow you to—”

“Don't you dare leave us here!” Jocelyn shouted, and Mr. Hampton shrank back. “Something very serious is wrong here and Matt
has
to go home, before it's too late.”

“But what
is
it?” her father insisted. “Tell me what's going on!”

“I can't. It's got something to do with Steve. And with us. And…” She began to sob out of pure desperation, dropping her head in her hands. Mr. Hampton looked from his daughter to his grandson, a little unnerved. Through her tears, Jocelyn saw him for the first time as the tired old man he was. The tragic events of the past week had left irreversible traces on his face.

“All right. We'll drive to Black Spring, if we have to. We'll see how Steve's doing, and when we find him we'll take him with us and come straight back to the hospital. All this fuss can't be any good for Matt.” He looked in the rearview mirror and drove out onto the circular drive. “But you owe me an explanation.”

“Thanks, Dad,” she sighed, sinking into the backseat, utterly exhausted.

*   *   *

BY THE TIME
they left downtown Newburgh and started up 9W, which looped into the State Park, the digital clock on the dashboard said it was 5:43 p.m., and Jocelyn was beginning to feel the oppressive weight fermenting in her brain like a maddening poison. Back in Thailand it had been bad, but this was far worse. She was beside herself. Why didn't Steve pick up his goddamn phone? What kind of trouble was he in? And what kind of power had been unleashed that was capable of causing this despair? Her thoughts were adrift like loose clouds, creating an emptiness in her head. Her mind refused to bear the colossal pain; it simply wasn't up to it. Her world had drained into a big, stinking wound of misery. It broke her will to fight against it: Jocelyn wanted to die. And Matt, poor Matt: In his condition, he wasn't even able to free himself from this hopeless mess.…

“Jocelyn, for cryin' out loud!”

The Toyota was swerving all over the road, bouncing Jocelyn and Matt back and forth across the backseat. It snapped her out of her stupor momentarily, but she felt herself sinking right back down, like she was trying, and failing, to fight against anesthesia. With a jolt she came back to her senses, having caught herself winding Matt's seat belt around his neck in an attempt to strangle him with it—an act of maternal love, to set him free.

In a flash of intense, ineffable fear, she let go of the belt.

It's bewitching you. It's hypnotizing you. And once you're under, it will force you to commit suicide. That's how she must have gotten Tyler.

With a shrill whine, the Toyota came to a halt on the shoulder. “What the hell is wrong with you, goddamn it?” her father shouted, looking back from the driver's seat.

“Oh, Dad, I don't know.” Mr. Hampton was startled by what he saw: Jocelyn really was downright terrified. Her eyes were wide and imploring. “Hurry, drive us home. And keep me talking—please…”

“But tell me what's going
on
!”

She couldn't, any more than she could tell her father the real reason for Tyler's death. She deeply regretted this, and she supposed she would tell him everything in due course. He had the right to know, even though it was against town rules, that Black Spring had cost him his oldest grandson. But first it was crucial that she get back to town, because she felt
her
influence dragging her down.…

“Please don't ask questions,” she said, choking on her words. “I'll explain later. Just keep me talking; that's important.”

There was something in those last words that finally struck Mr. Hampton as well. Whatever it was that had gotten into her, it was giving him the heebie-jeebies. So he steered the Toyota onto the exit off 9W and then onto Route 293 toward Black Spring. “I had a bad feeling about Steve staying home. You two should be together, 'specially right now. I'm worried about him. He's not coping well. Nobody is, goddamn it; it's all such a lousy, rotten business, but…”

With the very best of intentions, Mr. Hampton was making the fatal mistake of doing all the talking himself … so he didn't realize that Jocelyn's eyes had almost immediately lost their luster and were staring blankly into nothing. They hadn't gone halfway up to the single orange traffic light that marked the exit to Deep Hollow Road before Jocelyn and Matt, on opposite sides of the backseat, began bashing their heads against the car doors. Mr. Hampton let out a smothered curse. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Jocelyn grope for the door handle, and he violently pounded on the brakes. The wheel spun in his hands, whirring so fast it burned his palms, and once again they jolted to a halt, all three of them thrown forward onto their seat belts.

“Dad, help me, please…” Jocelyn looked up at him, rigid with fear. There was a gash on the side of her head and blood was running down her face. She took Matt in her arms again and began to rock him.

Mr. Hampton stared at them blankly. He started feeling nauseated. It was beyond him, utterly beyond him, but he felt the urgency and it was eating at him. And suddenly he knew that the cause of all this was ahead of them, waiting … a secret at the end of this road, in the woods, in the night.

All at once, Mr. Hampton was convinced that if he never discovered what the secret was, he wouldn't be the least regretful.

With a trembling hand he shifted the car into gear and drove in the direction of Black Spring.

Jocelyn rolled down the window and felt her head clear in the cold airstream. The darkness of the Black Rock Forest lay in silence as they passed, suggesting a normality that wasn't there. She sensed how bad it was. A little farther down the road they would be safe, whatever that safety implied. There was no point in speculating, since she'd be seeing it with her own eyes in just a few moments … assuming there was something to see, of course.

With the sign
WELCOME TO BLACK SPRING
already in sight, she saw it—and her jaw dropped.

Mr. Hampton took his foot off the gas, then slammed on the brakes.

“I don't want to go to Black Spring,” he muttered.

“Dad?”

“I … You know what? Let's go back. We still have … things to do … in Newburgh. Yeah. I ought to be somewhere else.” He had already started to turn the car around, but he didn't take his eyes off what lay before them. It almost caused them to careen off the road and into the adjacent ditch.

“Dad—don't! We have to keep going!”

But her father wasn't listening. He muttered something unintelligible and the sound of his voice made Jocelyn turn stone cold. A dumbfounded expression appeared on her face that turned into full comprehension. This wasn't her father. The same influence that was driving her back to Black Spring was chasing him away from it.

Because he was an Outsider.

She yanked the car door open and pulled Matt out onto the street. They couldn't go back to Newburgh; that would be their grave. “Dad, please…” she begged.

“Sorry, hon.” He looked around at her with eyes that were not her father's. “I got a lot to do. Back home, in Atlanta.”

With the back door still open, the Toyota shot onto the road. It lurched forward, and, after a hundred feet, the door slammed shut. Jocelyn screamed after him, but he was soon gone.

At age thirteen, Matt was still a child waiting to hit his growth spurt, yet Jocelyn felt the heaviness of his slack weight in her arms. It would be a back buster carrying him home, but she had no choice. At the very least, they had to cross the town border. With her jaws set, she hoisted him up and began to walk.

Black Spring lay before them in total darkness.

On the Highland Falls side of the border the streetlights were on, reflecting dully in Long Pond at the side of the road. In Black Spring it was pitch-dark. The houses and the trees were monumental, barely distinguishable forms outlined against the night. She couldn't even make out the single traffic light farther down, apart from its creaking in the wind. The power was out. But it was more than just the absence of electric lights … it was as if the night
itself
had become more intense, a deeper shade of black, a darkness to which your eyes could never become accustomed. Here, at the edge of town, the contrast was undeniable. It felt to Jocelyn as if an ink blot had leaked into this remote corner of the world and would grow bigger and bigger until it had covered all of Black Spring and had blocked out every ray of light or hope. She moaned incoherently, knowing that the only salvation for Matt and herself lay in that darkness.

With her son in her arms, Jocelyn passed the welcome sign and was swallowed up by the gloom.

 

THIRTY

IN BLACK SPRING
people were swarming through the streets. It was a little like New Year's Eve, when everyone would go outside to exchange happy greetings, except there were no fireworks. Instead the townsfolk were carrying flashlights, candles, or homemade torches that etched intensely dark, sharp-edged shadows on the frosty ground. There was nothing happy about it, either. Gradually the initial shock had ebbed away, only to be replaced by an abiding fear, fanned by the rumors that were spreading through town like wildfire.

“Did she claim another victim…?”

“I tell you, it's just like back in '67…”

“No … you don't think this is … tell me it's not true…”

Their eyes gleamed like mercury in the faint light, ghastly and afraid. Their bones ached from the cold, yet only a few turned back home; most wouldn't think of leaving until they got word of what was going on.

In the HEX control center, Robert Grim and Marty Keller were feverishly trying to start up the emergency generator. Not only had the power gone out in town—a grid-wide fucking failure; bye-bye wireless—but there was no more pressure in the water pipes and the entire telephone network was down, landlines included. The implications of this were beyond contemplation—
As is what caused it,
Grim thought with mounting trepidation—but right now his number-one priority was to get the control center up and running. If they couldn't even manage to do that, they'd be fried. The security cams, HEXApp, and the warning system wouldn't be worth shit. It meant that the general illusion of safety could not be maintained … and they sure as hell were heading that way.