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Maybe I ought to go for a walk,
he thought.
Just walk a little ways down the road. What's there to lose?

It was a tempting impulse and it felt like the inevitable thing to do … but Warren Castillo, grabbing his hand in a simple, grateful gesture and squeezing it gently, held him back. A captain was always the last to leave a sinking ship.

*   *   *

THE NEXT MORNING,
Grim planned to go back to the town limits as soon as first light of day touched the Hudson sky. It was Friday morning and there were bound to be commuters on the road. Route 293 wasn't a major highway, but there were always cars. Always. They could wave them in when they got close.

And then—what next? What do you think the officials at The Point can do …
Avada Kedavra
and the witch is gone?

Grim pushed the thought aside. It was the least of his worries, as it turned out. For even from Old Miners Road he could hear it: the muted, restless clamor of a crowd that had gathered on the square and in the streets around Crystal Meth Church. Small groups of townsfolk hurried from every direction to see what was going on. Grim turned pale when he saw that many of them, fearful of the unknown that awaited them outside, had armed themselves with kitchen knives, hammers, baseball bats … and guns. Most held their weaponry limply at their sides, but their hands were clearly itching, and they were ready to draw blood if necessary. A neatly dressed woman whom he recognized as a nurse from Roseburgh had yanked the crucifix off the wall and was holding it grimly aloft as she followed the crowd, stumbling and wavering like a drunk.

“So here we go,” Grim said. “Shit's gonna hit the fan.”

Warren shook his head gloomily. “The shit hit the fan a long, long time ago.”

He was struck with a strong sense of déjà vu: It was the town trauma all over again, the mass gathering of November 15 when the young convicts of the stoning were publicly tortured in the presence of all the citizenry … although not nearly as many people were out and about now as there were then. And the air was different, too, more oppressive. You could smell the stench of something bad about to happen. The townsfolk hadn't slept a wink and were chilled to the bone, but were surprised to find they had survived the first night. Now the dull light of day had given them fresh inspiration … in the form of rage that had replaced their fear like a changing of the guard. Incited by doomsayers like John Blanchard, they were beside themselves. They demanded to know what they were supposed to do.

And they demanded to know who was responsible.

As Grim made his way through the tangle of people at the intersection, Marty Keller suddenly burst through the crowd and clamped onto him. His eyes were wide open and red rimmed and there was a single teardrop of dried blood on his lip that had come from his nostril. “Robert! We've got to do something!”

“Marty, what the hell's going on?”

“There are riots everywhere. They trashed Market & Deli like a bunch of wild pigs. Someone threw a chair through the front window of Jim's Supply Store and they've emptied it, I tell you. People are hoarding—they're afraid no help is coming. But that's not true, is it? Help is coming, right?”

It's already happening,
Grim thought, shocked.
This is all it takes for people to plunge into insanity: one night alone with themselves and what they fear the most.

Marty was clinging to his arm now. He looked as though he was about to cry. “You don't think so, do you? I can see it in your face. They say fires have been lit at North and South 293, but they aren't attracting anybody. The electric companies must have known something's seriously wrong since fucking yesterday. And what about family members? They must have sounded the alarm, so close to Christmas. But why isn't anyone coming? I mean, what the fuck?”

“I don't know, Marty,” Grim muttered. “Are you all right? You look like shit.”

“I … I don't feel too well. Think I have a fever.”

“Where the hell is Mathers?”

“Don't you know?”

“Know what?”

“Mathers committed suicide.”

Under nearly any other circumstances, Grim would have sounded the alphorns with great pomp and ceremony and tooted his way across mountains and valleys to sing the happy news of Mathers's death, but now his only thought was:
Fuck me! So now that things are getting too hot, the weasel bails out on us.

At least the councilman would have been able to calm the mob. Now the minister was trying to do the same from the paved square in front of the church, but his voice wasn't nearly strong enough to be heard above the prevailing turmoil. He looked grateful when Grim climbed the church steps and took over.

“Everyone, please!” he roared. “Calm down!”

“Stick it up your ass, Grim,” a man in the crowd yelped—he was crying, which somehow upset Grim deeply. “Her eyes are open. What's the point of calming down now?”

Someone else piped up in agreement, and in no time at all the crowd became a wild tangle of furious eyes and shaking fists. They didn't chant slogans, and it was impossible to distinguish individual voices in that wall of sound, but the tone was one of rage and dissension. Churchgoers, unbelievers, and those bereft of hope had all joined forces and whipped each other up with the same questions:

“Where is she?”

“What does she want?”

“What's she going to do?”

“What's going to happen to us?”

“It's our right as Americans to know!”

“Why hasn't anybody come to help us out?”

“Is it true that that coward Mathers did himself in?”

“What about our loved ones who were out of town—where are they?”

Soon the square was too small for so many lost souls, and the crowd began to push, shove, and squeeze, as if everyone needed to be where their neighbor was, and, once they got there, join in the surge to return to their original spot. Some lost their balance in the crush and some started fights. Grim saw a young woman get knocked over on the cobblestones, after which a fat man planted his heel on her face and broke her jaw.

This is madness,
Grim thought.
Madness. Yesterday afternoon these folks were still ordinary, mild-mannered twenty-first-century Americans.…

“A sacrifice!” John Blanchard screamed suddenly with the passion of the insane. “We must offer a blood sacrifice! Whoever it was that called this doom upon us! Bring him here! Stone him!”

Swelling cheers.

“Goddamn it, calm down!” Grim shouted, but only the few dozen people surrounding him paused to listen. “We're doing everything we can to get the situation under control, but there's no point in trying if we lose our composure! Since there's no communication, we're going to start giving updates on the town square every three hours.… Hey, listen to me!”

“Tell us somethin' we don't already know!” someone roared. “Who opened her eyes?”

“Yeah, who did it?!”

“Kill him!”

“Tear him to pieces!”

Grim began to panic: He was powerless before this mob. The rage that possessed them could not be exorcized by one man, and Grim sensed that something terrible was about to happen.

In the lower corner of the square, the crowd began to push back from Griselda's Butchery & Delicacies' shop window. Mother Holst and her son had just come outside, petrified in the presence of so many people. The expression on Jaydon's face was one of total bewilderment. Grim wondered if it was possible that he really didn't have a clue about what had taken place around him. Even the crowd fell silent, face-to-face with their heretic, their convict, their exile.

Griselda had offered sacrifices before: She knew the wordless vocabulary of such an act and made use of the moment by slipping back inside and pulling the door shut behind her.

“There he is!” someone roared, pointing with a desk lamp he'd brought from home.

“He did it!”

Yes, they all knew. They were all convinced. Who else could have opened Katherine's eyes but this piece of scum who had stoned her, who had been given his rightful punishment and been released at their merciful hands, only to turn around and take vengeance on all of Black Spring? This injustice ignited a maddening frenzy that no one could resist. Soon a semicircle of thirty or forty people closed in on the perpetrator, pushing forward with trembling hands and clenched fists.

In those last moments, Jaydon must have seen the dehumanization on their faces, and he turned toward the door of the butcher shop with his own face twisted in a primal grin of fear. What must he have thought when he realized the door was locked? What must have gone through his mind as he began to bang on the glass, his mother staring out with stony eyes, and saw the reflection of the ever-tightening circle closing around him?

Then, all at once, his attackers abandoned their last shred of restraint and the circle collapsed on top of him. In an instant they had him raised up above their heads like savages and carried him along over the undulating, roaring throng. Jaydon screamed his lungs out. From the church steps, Grim could see his eyes bulging as the townsfolk tore at his clothes, his limbs, his hair. It wasn't long before he fell, and the people attacked him like wolves. They sank their devouring claws and knives and hammers into his flesh, and Grim, all hope and resistance gone, went down on his knees and threw up on the concrete steps.

A deep loathing of his fellow men overtook him; he wanted to distance himself from it all, from being human in his core, for if this was humanity, he wanted nothing to do with it. He dropped onto the paving stones and sank into the cloudy depths in a bubble of his own consciousness, sweating and suffering for no one but himself, his throat choked by hot, sick tears and the sour taste of bile. He had no idea how long he lay there like that—until he heard the gunshot resonating against the surrounding houses. So he did have something in common with them after all: The noise made all of them flinch.

Grim looked up, wiped his face.

To the left of where the lynching had taken place was Marty Keller, lost in the rage of the populace. He was holding a black .38 Special over his head with both hands, still trembling from the force of the shot. The haggard eyes of hundreds stared at him in disbelief, the blood still dripping down their fingers, their cheeks covered in sweat, their fires extinguished.

The kid had taken the goddamn service gun from the safe and had stuck it in his belt. Grim didn't know who had given him permission to do
that,
but he could have kissed him.

Then came the witch.

It ran through the crowd like a loveless prayer:
the witch, there's the witch, oh God, it's the witch …
All around him the people shrank back, exposing what was left of Jaydon Holst: a reduced pulp of lukewarm blood and convulsing muscle. But their eyes were not focused on him. All of them turned to face the same direction as their worst nightmare came to meet them, and Grim followed their gaze.

Katherine van Wyler came walking down Upper Reservoir Road with a costumed child in each hand, an absurd picture of calmness. Undaunted, without any impulse to hurry, she strode to meet her flock. For the first time, the townsfolk were greeted by the sight of her open eyes, and all their happy thoughts vanished at a stroke. Her pallid face bore the characteristic features they knew so well, but now the bloodless, needle-pitted flesh of her lips and eyelids had come to life and was gleaming like fresh tissue. Each and every soul on the square was struck by the fact that her eyes did not squint, nor did they possess the hideous, sickly luster they had expected in their darkest dreams. In fact, now that her ghastly mask of stitched-up eyes and mouth was gone, Katherine's face was strikingly
human.
Beneath the horror, its gentle lines and refined structure had become visible. She gazed at the streets, the houses, and the twenty-first-century people with a pent-up eagerness born of three hundred fifty years of darkness, smiling with amazement and delight. There was no trace of malice: just a mother and her children. Was that what she had wanted all along? The expression in her eyes could only be described as one of unparalleled bliss.

This was so out of keeping with the horrific images that Katherine had imprinted in their minds, and the fears they had lived with for all those years, that the residents of Black Spring naturally felt very ill at ease. Could this really be true? She wasn't an abomination—
they
had turned her into an abomination.

Robert Grim looked on in absolute terror as Katherine and her children reached the square. It had almost all the makings of a happy scene—but it wasn't happy; it wasn't the idyll it should have been. Because it was then that Katherine looked out over the terrified townsfolk and the sad remains of Jaydon Holst, and her eyes filled with sorrow.

And Grim thought,
We never learn
.

The crowd shrank back even farther. Some tried to make a run for it, but most understood that running away was pointless. As if at an invisible cue they all dropped to their knees, hundreds together, like Muslims turning toward Mecca. With lumps in their throats, they threw themselves at the witch's feet, entirely at her mercy, and begged her in a collective prayer,
We're sorry, Katherine. We accept you, Katherine. Spare us, Katherine.

But there was still blood on their hands, and soon more blood would flow. From the corner of his eye, Robert Grim saw fate approaching in the form of Marty Keller, who held the gun in his trembling hands and stepped forward amid the kneeling throng.

Grim tried to stand up and scream at him to back off, but he stumbled and fell facefirst onto the paving stones. The air was knocked out of his lungs, and although he did scream, it came too late.

Marty shot, but Marty was a data specialist, not a marksman. Not only that, but never in his life had he been under such enormous pressure as the second he pulled that trigger. Little Joey Hoffman was struck in the neck and was thrown onto the pavement. A fan-shaped stipplework of blood sprayed Katherine's dress as she bent over in a shocked attempt to catch the child, but he was dead before he hit the ground.