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Grim's experience at sizing up situations provided him with immediate reassurance. The Delarosas had run outside as fast as their legs could carry them, forgetting their cell phones in their haste. This gave Grim and his team a bit more time before it occurred to the Delarosas to call 911. In any case, the Delarosas didn't look as if they'd had the kind of experience that warranted calling the law. An exorcist, perhaps—if such a thing lay within their frame of reference.

On the right side of the screen, a square of light appeared in the darkness of the house next door and soon Mrs. Soderson came outside. More worried neighbors arrived from across the street and tried to calm the newbies down.

“Yup, a home encounter,” Grim said. “Congratulations, Warren. You can split the kitty.”

“Now the phone rings,” Claire said. Sure enough, one second later, it did. Claire answered and began talking to one of the Delarosas' neighbors.

Warren stood next to Grim, staring pensively at the screen. “Now they're going to find out that they're stuck with us for the rest of their lives.”

“Such a tragedy. Couldn't happen to nicer people.”

“Who's going to do it?”

“I will,” said Grim without a second thought. Although he knew that blew his chance of getting any sleep tonight, he accepted it without complaint. Having to inform newbies was no easy task and charity wasn't exactly his forte, but Grim felt sympathy for the Delarosas. They would have to revise their perception of the spiritual and the supernatural in ways that were subtle, but drastic nonetheless. Grim, born and bred in Black Spring, had never had that experience, but he had witnessed it often enough from the sidelines to know its traumatizing effects. He was a lapsed Methodist, and outside his job he would have nothing whatsoever to do with the paranormal. Yet somewhere in his indeterminate notions of the whole
spiritus mundi
he simply accepted the fact that inexplicable things happened, bewildering things, even in a world that regarded itself as fully enlightened. Still, that wasn't what was most painful: For many newcomers in Black Spring, the irreversibility of their fate, its
finality,
was their first uncanny confrontation with their own mortality. People desperately resisted the idea of their own death by looking away for as long as they could and avoiding the subject. But in Black Spring, they lived with death. They took her into their homes and hid her from the outside world … and sometimes they put a lamppost in her path.

The Delarosas, however … irreversibility and death didn't fit in with their cosmopolitan life of cool sophistication and postmenopausal career switches. Black Spring was the arsenic pill they had accidentally discovered under their tongues and had bitten into before they knew it. If Robert Grim hadn't just lost his bet, he might have felt sorry for them.

They watched on the big screen as the Delarosas were taken by their neighbors to Mrs. Soderson's house. Claire hung up and said, “They're in good hands. I promised to have a team ready in ten minutes. Who's going?”

“Me,” Grim said. “Are they religious?”

“No. If I remember correctly, he was a Methodist as a boy, but he's not practicing.”

“Then let's leave the church out of it.”

“‘Thy rod and thy staff they comfort them,'” Warren recited solemnly.

“Should you really be going, Robert? After our last run-in with them, you're probably the last person to ease their minds.”

We're not going to ease their minds,
Grim thought.
We're going to shake up their world even more
. “They're in too much shock to realize that. I'll take Pete VanderMeer and Steve Grant. They're on call this month. A sociologist and a doctor, and cool enough to know how to thread that needle. Oh, and one of their wives, for Bammy. That ought to do it.” He threw on his coat and added, “You'll be getting them out of bed when you call, angel.”

He left Warren and Claire behind in the control center and prepared for a long night.

 

SIX

“HER NAME IS
Katherine van Wyler, but most of us call her the Black Rock Witch,” Pete VanderMeer said. He took a long drag on his cigarette and fell thoughtfully silent.

They were in the lounge of The Point to Point Inn, sitting in vintage leather armchairs that smelled of age. The coffee table in between them was littered with half-full glasses, bottles, and thermoses. After the innkeeper prepared a room for the Delarosas, she had withdrawn to bed, leaving the dimly lit hotel bar to her guests. Pete VanderMeer and Grim were having beer; Steve drank coffee. Jocelyn was sipping from a steaming mug of chamomile tea, as was Bammy Delarosa—but not until after Grim made her down a shot of vodka. Her husband needed no such encouragement: he was already on his third shot. He wasn't altogether drunk yet, but was well on his way.
Probably a good thing,
Steve thought.

Burt and Bammy Delarosa were far from the arrogant snobs Grim had made them out to be. Steve found that he rather liked them, insofar as this was a good time to judge. Now that the initial shock had passed, they were able to take the situation a bit more lightheartedly. That wasn't to say that they had come to grips with it. They were numbed, with the same numbness that undertakers so cleverly exploit when practical matters have to be discussed with the bereaved. Tomorrow, or during the weekend at the latest, reality would hit hard, and when it did they'd be better off knowing what they were up against. In any case, now they had the chance of making the discovery within the safe confines of the hotel. There was nothing in the world that could have persuaded the Delarosas to go back to their dark, abandoned house … where
she
was.

Grim had gone to pick up Pete, Jocelyn, and Steve in his Dodge Ram, and the new folks had greeted them, politely but with trembling hands, in the lobby. Steve felt racked and dazed; he and Jocelyn had been asleep for almost two hours when the phone rang. But now that the coffee had settled in his stomach, his mind was finally starting to clear.

“Katherine van Wyler,” Burt Delarosa said unsteadily.

“Yes,” Pete said. “She lived in Philosopher's Deep, in the woods behind where Steve and Jocelyn and my wife and I now live. It was in Black Spring that she was sentenced to death for witchcraft in 1664—although they didn't call it Black Spring back then; it was a Dutch trappers' colony known as New Beeck—and it's here in Black Spring that she's remained ever since.”

Behind them a block of wood crackled in the fireplace, and Bammy shot up like a jack-in-the-box. The poor woman was as nervous as a deer, Steve noticed, and there were deep furrows of tension around her mouth.

“In Highland Falls, Fort Montgomery, and of course The Point they all know that the hills and woods around here are haunted. They don't even need to know the details. You can feel it because it's in the air, like the smell of ozone after a lightning storm. But the witch is a Black Spring problem, and unfortunately we can't do anything but try to keep it that way.”

He sipped his beer. The Delarosas looked forlornly at their own drinks and couldn't bring themselves to pick up their glasses.

“Little to nothing is known about her life, which only adds to the mystery. She must have come here on one of the Dutch West India Company's ships in about 1647. New Amsterdam was a bustling port city at the time. The outposts up along the Hudson, where they traded with the Indians, were very primitive, and stories went around by word of mouth. Many of them were lost over time. Katherine may have been a shepherd, or maybe she was a midwife. The role of women in the New World was to build up the community.”

“By bearing children,” Jocelyn explained.

“Right. They were sowing the seeds of a new civilization, you see. The settlements that the Dutch founded were mainly along the secure riverbanks. But the woods out west were full of game, and the Munsee did their trapping in what's now known as Black Rock Forest, so that's where the Dutch established New Beeck. They got along with the Indians all right. Traded with 'em. It was the English that gave 'em the jitters. New England was breathing down their neck and eager to add New Netherland to their territory. Well, that's exactly what happened the next year: The English annexed the Dutch settlements without spilling a single drop of blood. They were the ones who finally drove the Munsee away … but many argue that the Munsee left the area of their own free will and went north. Because by then, Black Spring had already been cursed.”

“Excuse me, but what exactly does that mean?” Burt Delarosa asked.

“Bewitched,” Robert Grim said, with his customary lack of subtlety. “Gone sour. Doomed.”

“At least, that's what they believed back then,” Bammy presumed.

“Yeah, that's one way of putting it,” Grim sneered, but he slumped back in his chair at Pete VanderMeer's venomous stare. The Delarosas looked at each other and frowned. Under different circumstances, it might have been almost comical to see how perfectly synchronously they acted.

“Now, you have to understand that superstition was embedded deep in the human psyche,” Pete continued. “We're talking about folks who had to manage in a completely strange world, at a time when there was absolutely no security. In Europe, they had had their share of plague epidemics, failed harvests, famine, and outlaws, and the New World was full of unknown wild beasts, savages, and demons. No one knew what kind of supernatural forces haunted the wilderness to the west of the settlements. A pretty unpleasant situation. Without science, people had to rely on old wives' tales and omens. They feared Almighty God and were scared to death of the Devil. This left an unmistakable mark on the surrounding forests—just think about the name of the hill behind our house.”

“Mount Misery?” Burt asked. “We went for a hike up there just this week. Beautiful place. We could see the Hudson from the top.”

“It's a nice walk. Completely harmless these days, as long as you stay on the trail. But those omens … You have to see them as a primitive form of meteorology, except it's not the weather they're predicting; it's impending disaster. You know the Salem witch trials, of course, which happened some twenty or thirty years later in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were preceded by a failed harvest, a smallpox epidemic, and the constant threat of attack by native tribes. The connection wasn't made until afterward, but that doesn't matter. From then on, fear played an enormous role in the flow of rumors that preceded tragedies. People saw the signs everywhere. Stillbirths, strange natural phenomena, rapid putrefaction of the flesh, big birds…” Pete grinned. “The Dutch were somewhat more down-to-earth than the Puritans, but in 1653 there was this large bird that landed on the steeple cross of the harbor church in New Amsterdam every day at sunset for three weeks, causing a huge uproar. They said it was bigger than a goose and gray in color, and it preyed on dead bodies. Today, of course, you'd figure it was a vulture—they used to appear as vagrants in these parts every now and again. But how could the colonists know? So, soon enough, this mob gathers and makes all kinds of predictions based on the bird's appearance. The city council has the poor thing shot, but it was too late: The next year, the population was devastated by smallpox. So they blamed it on the bird.”

Jocelyn remembered something. “Steve, tell them the story about that doctor and the children. I don't know if Pete's familiar with it?”

“No, I'm not.”

“A colleague of mine at New York Med once told me this,” Steve said. “Prior to the same epidemic of 1654, a New Amsterdam doctor named Frederick Verhulst studied the behavior of children who were playing ‘funeral.' The children dug holes outside the walls of the settlement and carried fruit crates out to put in their graves, walking in procession. Their parents thought they were possessed, and the game was seen as a bad omen.”

“Thank God we have Wii now,” Pete said. They all laughed, except for Bammy Delarosa, who could only manage a faint smile.

“There are many stories like this,” Steve said. “Some pretty gruesome. Bodies have been found from that period with bricks shoved between their jaws. During the Boston Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1693, mass graves were often reopened to bury the new dead, and sometimes the gravediggers came across swollen corpses that had blood running out of their mouths, with the shrouds eaten away from around the faces. It was as if the dead person had gnawed his way out of his shroud and had come back to life in order to drink blood. Today we know that decomposing bodies swell up because of gases. Rotting organs force fluids out of the mouth and the shroud is eaten away by the bacteria they contain. But back then it was presented as scientific fact that the ‘shroud eaters' were the undead who fed on the living and spread curses along with the fever, so that more dead would come to life. Church ministers would shove bricks into their mouths so they would starve.”

A profound silence fell, broken only by the crackling of the fire. Then Burt said, “You know, in some towns they actually big-up the place. Tell the new residents how nice the area is—good places to eat, stuff like that…”

Grim snorted and choked on his beer. This time everyone laughed, even Bammy. Jocelyn pounded Grim on the back until he got hold of himself. Steve thought it was a good sign that Burt was able to make jokes. It meant he wasn't so rattled that everything he was hearing tonight was going in one ear and out the other—as long as he didn't knock back that whole bottle of Stoli.

“All well and good,” said Pete when he was laughed out. “The doomsayers contributed to the insecurity and fear that grips people when strange calamity strikes. Children born blind, weird animal tracks in the mud, lights in the night sky … when people start believing in omens, there's a general breakdown in the way they think and live. What terrible thing awaits us? That's the breeding ground where the fear of Katherine van Wyler took root.”