HEX (45 page)

The emergency generator didn't even budge. Not a fucking spark.

In the trembling ellipse of his headlight, Marty fiddled with the fuel line. His forehead was gleaming with sweat. They had tested the damn thing three weeks before and it had worked without a hitch. It was baffling, but no matter what they tried, it remained dark in the former Popolopen Visitor Center, and in that darkness Grim's thoughts ran rampant.
Oh, Christ, what was that shock? What was the shock we all felt?

At the intersection farther down the road below Crystal Meth Church, the atmosphere was brewing. Warren Castillo had run all the way over at top speed to size things up. He had to clear a path through a tangle of worried residents who grabbed him, asking questions he couldn't answer and baring souls he couldn't enlighten. It was half past five, and at least two hundred people had flocked to The Point to Point Inn's plaza, where the hotel staff had lit a number of braziers. Warren heard rumors about people driving into town as if the Devil himself were on their heels and locking themselves into their houses without so much as a word. His first inclination was to dismiss it all as fear talking. But then he noticed Rey Darrel's Chevy with the words “Rush Painting” on the side diagonally parked across Deep Hollow Road with its headlights slicing through the dark. A blockade. Darrel's silhouette walked up to the crowd with his arms raised and shouted, “Do not leave town! It's not safe! Listen, people: Stay in town!”

Restless murmuring, hovering on the razor's edge. “What you talkin' about?” someone asked.

“You can't leave! You're gonna get yourself killed if you go out there!”

Warren pushed himself forward and grabbed Darrel by the collar. “Keep your ass down, dude. You're scaring the crap out of these people.”

“They have every reason to be scared,” Darrel said with plain sincerity, and Warren suddenly realized the painter was genuinely terrified.

“What happened?”

“I drove out of town. They seem to have normal power at the MWR at Round Pond. But as soon as I got out of Black Spring, something … something was stopping me. I don't know how else to describe it. It's like there's these big motherfucking suspenders strapped over the road that pull you back in as soon as you drive out of town. You can't see it, but you can feel it.” His voice broke. “Even before I hit the golf course, I wanted to shoot myself. I wanted to get my Lancaster .410 out of the back and swallow a bullet. I have three kids and I've never wanted to commit suicide.”

Deep silence.

“It's really, really bad,” Darrel added—no shit, Sherlock.

That was the signal for the townsfolk to lose their wits. It had a domino effect: One began to whisper, another spoke up, a few tried to call their partners or family members who hadn't come home from work, all in a growing panic. It swept through the crowd like a wave. Warren looked around in dismay; he no longer recognized his fellow townspeople. His body was rigid, so rigid he couldn't get himself moving. He had been trained not to let himself be caught off guard by rumors and superstition. He tried to force himself to drag his emotions into the light, where they could be analyzed and swept aside because they made no sense whatsoever. But he couldn't. What if this time, this one time, the fear was legitimate? What if this time they really had been cut off from the outside world, forced to await the falling darkness and the following dawn and see what they held in store for Black Spring?

Farther east, in the direction he had come from, Warren heard screaming. There were no moon or stars to penetrate the night, and that end of Deep Hollow Road was a charcoal black. Nothing moved there. But what was that pressure in the atmosphere? And why was it so abnormally dark?

Warren couldn't keep from staring at it. The wind sank its teeth into him. It numbed him, blew through his hair, and made his eyeballs so cold they teared, but still he couldn't close them.

It's Katherine's night
. The thought hit him out of nowhere … and then he understood. Then he understood everything.

The darkness spat out three shrieking men, running in a freak mirage cast by their own flashlights:
Now you see me, now you don't
. They kept looking over their shoulders at what was behind them until they stumbled into the glow of the braziers and met the glances of a good hundred townsfolk. Warren Castillo saw that one of them bore the face of a clown: He had scratched his nails like rays across his cheeks to draw a sunshine mask of blood.

“It's her eyes!” he screamed. “Her eyes are open! We've seen it, she was there! She
looked
at us! Run for your lives, people, the evil eye is upon all of us!”

And so doom came to Black Spring.

Its residents, a collective of bewitched souls who could find no escape from the panic that seized them, scattered in every direction. Imprisoned in a fate they all shared, not one of them raised their voice higher than that of their neighbor or suffered any less. These were the rules of chaos, and from that chaos a sort of deranged solidarity emerged: Within a few seconds, the illusion of individuality had been swept away and only one wish, one dying scream, prevailed over the collective consciousness of Black Spring. The people
were
Black Spring, and Black Spring had fallen. The primal scream that remained was
Away! Away! Away from her evil eye!

The chaos was immeasurable. People let their bladders go, screamed their throats raw, trampled each other underfoot, and prayed to heaven for mercy. They pulled each other's limbs and hair. No app was necessary to spread the news, and within minutes even those living on the outskirts of town were aware of what had happened. But despite their fear, the witch didn't come. The witch's eyes were open, but no one except the doomsayers had seen it for themselves, and no one had any wish to see her coming. Many fled into their houses and barricaded their doors and windows with whatever was at hand. Quaking with fear, they said their prayers in the inky darkness. There were those who slit their wrists or swallowed the contents of their medicine cabinets. Although the possibility that this day might come had always been in the backs of the minds of even the most naïve among them, no one knew how it would reveal itself or what would happen afterward. Dying without finding out was better than living and having to wait for it. Those with a stronger survival instinct attempted to escape, but they turned around almost as soon as they passed the town limits, gripped by the terrifying realization that they were trapped. Rey Darrel was right. Only an unhappy few went on, and nothing was ever seen of them again.

By seven o'clock, only the wind and its shadow moved through the streets of Black Spring. Katherine's expected revenge failed to happen, and if people were dying it was under their own spell.

One of the first to succumb was Colton Mathers. All his life the old councilman had believed that suicides would go straight to hell, but God had sent him a vision. He had been in church praying when the panic broke out, and as he watched from the church steps a shaky image glimmered through his mind of colonial huts and rickety seventeenth-century farms. The buildings conveyed a sense of completely abandoned isolation, unholiness, and death, and Katherine van Wyler stood there motionless in the front yard of the church like a figurehead in the wind …
seeing.
This illusion, this Godly phantasm, was enough to convince Colton Mathers that the dear Lord had abandoned Black Spring for good. The fires of hell would be a soothing balm compared to what was in store for them here. And so the shepherd—as he was always wont to regard himself—abandoned his flock; he went home and threw himself from his balcony, broke every bone in his body, and bled to death later that night on the patio floor. When word spread at daybreak, many would call it an act of unprecedented cowardice.

And Katherine?

No one knew where she was.

No one knew what she wanted.

In their home in Upper Mineral Valley, Jackie and Clarence Hoffman had taken refuge in the kitchen along with their children, Joey and Naomi. It was a luxurious kitchen, usually bathed in the strong sunlight that fell through the double windows over the sink. But now the doors and windows were boarded up with wood from all the bookshelves in the house (they were passionate readers, the Hoffmans). Nevertheless, at 11:15 the lamp over the kitchen table began swaying back and forth as if the cold December air had found a way in, and all the candles blew out at once. An instant later, Katherine appeared in their midst. It so happened that the poor kids were at the other end of the kitchen at the time (they had overcome their exhaustion and were playing
Angry Birds
on their iPad while they still had battery left), and Katherine's appearance cut them off from their parents. She cast a grotesque shadow on the walls for the few seconds that little Joey was able to hold on to his iPad. Then he dropped it and the screen cracked on the kitchen floor, ushering in complete darkness.

No, not complete: There was a dim, lesser shade of black leaking from the cracks between the boards, just enough to distinguish the shapes of Joey and Naomi pressed rigidly against the barricaded door and the obscure shadow of the witch towering over them. Jackie screamed. Clarence Hoffman edged his way along the counter in order to reach his children, but suddenly the shadow twisted her body and hissed at him like a cat. There were no eyes to behold in the darkness, but Clarence felt them upon him nonetheless, inhuman and malevolent. He shrank back as if he had been hit by a brick and grabbed Jackie by the waist when she ran forward.

“Please don't hurt my children,” she begged. “They're innocent, just like your children were, Katherine.… Oh, my God, what's she doing? Joey, tell Mommy what she's doing!”

“She's … I think she's giving us something, Mommy.”

“Don't touch it!” their father shrieked.

“What is it?”

“I don't know … I think it's an onion.”

“And mine's a carrot!” Naomi said.

“I told you not to touch it!”

But Jackie elbowed her husband in the side and whispered, “Don't get her worked up, Clarence … Maybe she means well.…”

The shadow didn't move; it seemed to persist. It began to dawn on Jackie Hoffman that if the vegetables came from her apron, they had been pulled out of the ground in 1665 and preserved by Katherine's death. Naomi didn't
like
carrots … but Jackie knew these wouldn't look even remotely like the prepackaged veggies from the cooler at Market & Deli. She understood what the witch was demanding.

“Go ahead, take a bite, darlings.”

“But Mommy…”

“It's what she wants you to do, baby.”

“But I don't want to, Mommy,” Naomi whined in tears.

“Eat the fucking carrot!”

It must have been with enormous reluctance, but she heard the crunching of what must have been Joey's teeth in the onion's skin. Naomi soon followed the brave example of her big brother and took a bite of the carrot. Slowly they began to chew.

“It's sweet!” Naomi cried through her tears. Greedily, the little girl took another bite of her carrot, and then things rapidly got very strange. Later on, Clarence and Jackie Hoffman would never fully agree on exactly how it happened. Both remembered the terrifying moments when Katherine had each of the children by the hand, but neither had the courage to confess what they had seen after that. Or
thought
they had seen, because the scenes they had witnessed were so horrible and contradictory that they
must
have been imaginary. In one of them, Naomi and Joey chewed their way with bloody teeth through the boards that blocked the door, then looked around with eyes that gleamed, dull and obsessive, in a light that seemed to come from nowhere, their palates broken and full of splinters. Ludicrous: Of course it had to be imaginary, because Joey had been wearing a leather jerkin and Naomi a long, grubby smock. Whatever had happened, the fact remained that when Clarence and Jackie came to, the barrier and the door had rotted away as if infested by a plague of woodworms and the cold winter air was whirling through the kitchen. Jackie screamed her heart out for her missing children, but she didn't go out to look for them because she understood there were powers at work that a mere human being couldn't stand up against.

Many people saw the threesome walking the streets that night as they peered through the chinks between their curtains and windows. The witch was a mere shadow, eyes unseen—oh God, her eyes—but a few recognized the Hoffman children, although they couldn't make any sense of their strange, old-fashioned garments. As the wee hours advanced, more and more people saw the little boy in a doublet and breeches and the little girl in a thick cloak with a headscarf. Although their eyes looked glazed, they seemed to be walking with the witch willingly. There were those who believed they had seen the little girl carrying a toy windmill on a wooden stick that rattled around in the wind and made the child crow with laughter.

*   *   *

SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN,
a shadow entered Griselda Holst's bedroom. The stench of rotten meat in the butcher shop had spread through the house like a sickly, sweet blanket, but Griselda hadn't felt up to going downstairs and throwing it out. Early in the evening, Jaydon had fallen asleep, stupefied by his high dose of lithium and barely—if at all—aware of what had happened. This in sheer contrast to his mother. God knows Griselda had prepared more thoroughly than anyone in town for the day when Katherine might eventually open her eyes … but now that it had happened, she found herself in a convulsive paralysis. It was too sudden. She hadn't even been warned! Did this imply that Katherine really
had
abandoned her?

Griselda needed time to think about what was ahead of her now. But the thoughts wouldn't come. With every unfamiliar sound, every creak of the baseboards, and every structural sigh, she got out of bed and haunted the silent upper floor of her house with the stub of a candle in her trembling hands, alert to every shadow that moved in the dark. But she was only chasing phantoms. Finally she fell asleep from exhaustion … and with every breath she took, the decay in the air whirled through her lungs and forced corruption into her pores.