HEX Read online

  Christ, go back to bed, he said to himself. He shivered from the cold, spooked by his own delusions.

  Nevertheless, he had to stifle a cry when the wind blew a branch against the bay window, and without thinking twice he dove into bed. Steve bit his lip at his own stupidity and soon fell asleep.

  TWELVE

  TYLER CAME DOWNSTAIRS at a quarter past eight the next morning. The other family members were already at the breakfast table, Matt with bags under his eyes and an open history book at his elbow, Jocelyn still in her bathrobe. The smell of fresh buns from the oven usually made his mouth water, but today it left him cold. He pulled up a chair without saying a word and began chewing apathetically on a cracker.

  “Wow, someone had a good night’s sleep,” Matt commented.

  “Cut it, douche bag,” Tyler snapped back.

  Jocelyn put her knife down on her plate and said, “Hey, come on, guys.…”

  “All I asked was how he slept,” Matt protested. “Don’t be so touchy, dude. Jeez…”

  “One big happy family,” Steve said. “Hurry up, guys, or you’ll miss your bus.”

  “It’s Staff Development Day,” Tyler said. “Forgot to mention it.”

  “For real?” Matt cried out. “How did you get so lucky?”

  “It’s for high school, not junior high.” The lie was out before he knew it. Until that moment he hadn’t realized that he was planning on playing hooky. It troubled him, being able to lie so easily to his dad, especially since he didn’t feel even slightly guilty about it. Of course you didn’t let your parents in on everything, but something essential had changed in their relationship since he disavowed his father’s one important question: You haven’t got something else up your sleeve, I hope? With that, he had set out on a course that he could no longer easily depart from.

  “Good. Then you can take the dog out,” Steve said.

  Tyler shrugged and pulled another cracker from the box. Matt hugged Jocelyn and Steve good-bye and left for the bus stop. When the back door slammed, Jocelyn grumbled, but she didn’t chase after him. Instead, she poured herself another cup of coffee. Everything was fine: same shit, different day. Suddenly Tyler felt the need to throw up. He put his cracker down. Sweat burst from his pores and his stomach went into a spasm.

  You haven’t got something else up your sleeve, I hope?

  Nothing was fine. Yesterday’s events were pressing down on his guts like a rock. When the meeting began and Jaydon still hadn’t checked in or shown up, Tyler was initially furious. They needed him to raise their complaint about privacy and Internet policies, since he was the only one in the group who was of age. Tyler understood that the situation was different now that someone had died, but at least Jaydon could have responded to their zillions of apps so the others could have come up with a plan B.

  Tyler had always felt that everything he was doing for Open Your Eyes was based on common sense. But was there any common sense in the desperate, shattered feeling that had come over him after the grim opening of the Council meeting and the vote on Arthur Roth? In no time, his morale had hit rock-bottom. Did he really believe that the same people who had screamed, Burn the motherfucker! and Offer him up to the Wicker Woman! would be willing to pass a positive judgment on something as stupid as their right to Twitter and Facebook? It was ludicrous. For the first time, Tyler realized that bigger forces were at play here.

  Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness.

  But he was afraid. And every time he wondered whether trying to change those forces was a good idea, he thought of Jaydon in the woods jabbing the witch with his stick, and the thought that had occurred to Tyler at that very moment, suddenly, out of nowhere: Something’s gonna happen here, dude. Something pretty creepy, I think.

  No more bullshit with the witch, no YouTube clips, no crazy ideas.

  They won’t do the firing squad anymore. But corporal punishments are still written into the Emergency Decree.

  We may be fucked up here, but that’s a whole nother level of fucked-upness.

  Welcome to Black Spring.

  “You okay?” Steve asked with a frown. “You look feverish, maybe a bit under the weather.”

  Tyler blinked. “I’m fine,” he said, and struggled to put a smile on his face. “Not really awake yet, I guess.”

  He left the table, ran the last few steps to the bathroom, and hung over the toilet, but nothing came up. Tyler splashed water on his face and looked at himself in the mirror with bloodshot eyes. Let it go, he thought. Let them all go to hell. It’s none of your business.

  But it was. And if he didn’t open his mouth, who would?

  Back in his room, he turned on the radio and cranked the volume up to full blast when he recognized a Train song. The stirring melody raised his spirits a little. He apped Lawrence to ask if he was on the bus, and Lawrence apped back that his dad had been easy on him after last night’s meeting and had called him in sick, so they met at nine-thirty at the boulders in front of their houses. Fletcher jumped up on Lawrence, wagging his tail and leaving muddy marks all over his jacket.

  “Hey, calm down, boy!” he said. He patted the dog’s head and Fletcher barked. Tyler suggested they go into the woods, but Lawrence said, “Haven’t you heard? The witch is at Burak’s house.”

  “Burak’s?”

  “Yeah, that’s what the HEXApp said this morning. I haven’t heard from Burak, but usually his parents let him off after the Council meetings.”

  They decided to walk in that direction. The Şayer family lived in Lower South near Popolopen Lake, in a house on Morris Avenue. Burak’s parents were Turkish and were among the tiny group of practicing Muslims in Black Spring. Tyler had always been puzzled about how that influenced their attitude toward the witch, but Burak usually just shrugged if anyone asked him about it. As far as Tyler knew, Burak himself didn’t go to the mosque in Newburgh, but that didn’t keep Jaydon from taking him down a peg or two with jokes of a highly politically incorrect nature.

  They had just reached the town square, where the festival cleanup activities were in full swing. One of the town workers was spraying the big black stain of ash at the intersection with a high-pressure hose when Tyler got a message from Burak:

  Jaydon here, trippin. Pls come asap!

  They ran the last half mile to Burak’s house with Fletcher in the lead, and Tyler felt sick, on the brink of losing control.

  “Dude’s gonna go too far one of these days,” Lawrence panted.

  Yeah, and leave him to it. It’s none of your business, Tyler thought again. But that wasn’t true, and if things got out of hand, he was partly responsible.

  The Şayers’ car was gone, which meant Burak’s parents weren’t home. They crossed the lawn and went around to the backyard, using Fletcher’s leash to tie the dog to one of the poplars. Evidently Fletcher hadn’t yet noticed that the witch was nearby because he began to sniff the hedge energetically. Tyler tried the back door. It was open.

  “Hello?” he called. Lawrence followed him through the kitchen when the bead curtain leading to the living room clattered open. It was Burak. His eyes looked wild, bordering on panic.

  “Tyler, you have to…”

  But then Lawrence saw it, and his voice sounded like a sob. “Oh, Jesus fuck…”

  It was a surrealistic nightmare. The living room behind Burak shimmered in the semidarkness because the drapes were closed and heavy with a spicy odor, the way you might imagine the mist in The Arabian Nights to smell. Tyler saw immediately where it was coming from: Long incense sticks were burning on the coffee table and mantelpiece. And next to them was Katherine. Usually there were no overt religious symbols in the Şayer household, but now countless amulets dangled around the witch like blue peacock eyes, tied to lengths of string tacked to the ceiling. In an eerie repetition of last week’s episode in the woods, Jaydon was standing in front of Katherine with a stick in his hands, only now there was an X-Acto
knife duct-taped to the tip. He had used it to cut away the rags of her dress, which hung down like a drawbridge to expose Katherine van Wyler’s dangling, pale purple right tit.

  A flash of bright white light as Jaydon took a picture with his iPhone. The flash revealed it all, more than Tyler ever wanted to see, burning onto his retina the horrifying image of Katherine’s black nipple on the soft, dead vaulting of her breast. It wasn’t sexy, as some strange, exotic breasts could be. It was repulsive, obscene. And there was more: Jaydon hadn’t cut carefully. There were scratches in her bare flesh. A drop of dark blood was slowly leaking from one of them.

  That one drop of blood, that black nipple in Jaydon’s camera flash, those blue teardrop eyes on strings were what Tyler would never forget.

  “Lawrence … Tyler,” Jaydon said with raised eyebrows. “I hope you haven’t come to spoil my party, or you can both get the hell out of here.”

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Tyler stammered. He was nailed to the ground. Oh, Jesus. Just now, when he needed to keep his head straight, it was all slipping away. This was way too much for him. This was unreal.

  “What the fuck were you thinking, showing my PM to that fucking ol’ man of yours, who had to share it with the whole fucking town?” Jaydon practically shouted those last words, and spit was shining on his lips. The stick with the X-Acto knife shook in his hands.

  “You should have stayed in touch!” Lawrence yelled. “We were calling and texting you all night! Where the hell were you?”

  “Maybe I had more important shit on my mind than your fucking tests. Mathers gave it to me today with both barrels and then some! And all because that faggot there couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”

  “Dude, I just want you outta here, now…” Burak said, sounding desperate. “If my parents find out what you did in our house, they’ll kill me.”

  “You’re sick,” Tyler said softly, his glance still locked on the witch’s hideous black nipple. “You’re playing with everybody’s lives. If the Council ever found out about this, you’d get a lot worse than Doodletown.” He dug around in the pocket of his jacket and took out the GoPro, but as soon as Jaydon saw the camera he lunged at Tyler with his knife stick. Tyler screamed and shrank back, bumping into Lawrence.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Jaydon said, and the look in his eyes made Tyler put the GoPro back in his pocket. Jaydon had lost it. Completely. “The only one who’s filming or taking pictures today is me. The best fucking pictures in human history. The bare tit of a ghost.” He roared with laughter. “I’ll send them to Justin and I’ll send them to Burak, because this is probably the first tit Mohammed here has ever seen and I know that he’ll want to go back to his room and jack off to it later on. But if anybody opens their mouth about this, I’ll tell them all about the website and your tests. I’ll drag you all down with me.”

  “Get that fucking knife out of my face!” Tyler said sharply.

  “Whatever you say, dude,” Jaydon said, and in one fluent move he turned around and brutally jabbed the X-Acto stick at Katherine. The blade was only an inch long, but it disappeared completely into her drooping tit. The witch’s body jolted backward and shuddered as if it had received an electrical shock. Her scrawny hands clenched convulsively. When Jaydon withdrew the knife, it released a gush of blood that spattered all over the carpet.

  “Fuck!”

  “Now look what you’ve done!” Burak shrieked, pointing at the carpet. “My dad’s gonna kill me!”

  Lawrence turned away and stumbled backward, tears on his cheeks. The witch was hanging forward in her chains, exposing her breast even more. The wound had split her nipple and blood was forming in dark spots on her dress. Go on, disappear, Tyler thought. Get lost before it gets any worse.…

  He tried to control his voice, but it shook nonetheless. “Dude, this is sick—this is abuse. You can’t do that to her.”

  “Who cares? She’s a fucking ghost! If she pops up somewhere else later she’ll be as good as new.”

  “But you can’t humiliate her like that, she’ll…”

  “That bitch murdered my dad!” Jaydon roared, fiercely brandishing his spear. Tyler recoiled once again. “That bitch raped my mom! Don’t tell me what to do, because she’s got it coming!”

  “Jesus,” Tyler said, raising both palms in the air. “Listen, I don’t know what happened yesterday, but let’s talk about it. There isn’t anything we can’t solve together, right guys?”

  He turned to Burak and Lawrence for help. Burak understood what he was trying to do. “Yeah, he’s right. Just calm down.”

  “Don’t try to fucking calm me down. We’ve been making nice to her long enough. Plan’s changed. We’re not going public anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” Tyler asked, but he knew very well what Jaydon meant. Something in Jaydon had snapped, something that had started a long time ago and had come to a climax yesterday. And at the root of it all was the witch. Jaydon didn’t want to keep plugging the holes, didn’t want to foster understanding anymore. If they were to go mainstream and the authorities moved in, it would no longer be possible for him to … Oh, Jesus. To take revenge. What the hell happened down there under the church? What’s come over him? And why is the goddamn witch still here?

  “I mean that OYE doesn’t exist anymore,” Jaydon said, eyes narrowing. “I’m in charge from now on. We’re doing things my way. And I meant what I said. If anyone here blabs I’ll show them all the videos, all the reports, all the messages. You’re all going to Doodletown. Don’t forget my mom’s on the disciplinary board, and believe me, they owe her big-time. She’ll make sure they believe my side, not yours.”

  He hurled the stick with the X-Acto knife into a corner with a crash, tore himself away from the others, and charged through the kitchen and out of the house. The rest were left in the sickly incense clouds, shaken, as if they’d just been hit by a hurricane. No one said a thing. After a few moments, Tyler turned to the witch, trembling.

  “How’s she doing?” Burak asked gloomily.

  “I don’t know, man.” She still hadn’t moved. She just stood there, bending over as far as the chains would allow, her bleeding breast dripping onto the carpet. One of the blue amulets now dangled against her headscarf. Katherine curled her fingers in … pain? Despair? They were trembling, in any case. To what extent was she aware of the humiliation? Tyler honestly didn’t know. The witch’s humanity was a mystery that no one had unraveled yet, just like her decision to appear and disappear at will. That’s what made her so freaky.

  “Katherine?” Lawrence asked. He approached her cautiously with quivering lips. “Katherine, I’m so sorry. This should never have happened. It was Jaydon; he did it. We never wanted to…”

  “Dude…” Tyler put his hand on his arm.

  Lawrence shrugged and wiped his tears away. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “What’s with all the amulets, anyway?” Tyler asked Burak.

  “They’re the nazar boncuğu—they protect you from the evil eye. When my mother came downstairs this morning and she was here, she hung this freak show all around her, and now they’ve gone to the mosque to pray for her to leave. Fuck, I probably ought to be praying for her to leave myself, because if they come home and she’s still here, and they see her like this…”

  “Have you got an old sheet or something? Just tell your mom and dad you couldn’t stand how she stares at you so you covered her with a sheet.”

  “She’s blind.”

  “You know what I mean. They’ll never check underneath. But we’ve got to get that blood out of the carpet. Maybe we can … do you have a broom? Maybe we can push her upright, carefully. To make her stop leaking.”

  “Fuck, I’m not gonna touch her.”

  “And what about the website?” Lawrence said. “Jaydon has seriously flipped. He sounded like he meant it.”

  “We’ll go on without him,” Tyler said fiercely.

  “I dunno…” Burak said.

  “W
hat? Are you just going to let him threaten you?”

  Burak shook his head with doubt. “Yesterday I was chosen to do the whisper test, and today she suddenly appears in my house. That’s gotta mean something, right?”

  “It doesn’t mean jack shit,” Tyler said, but he sympathized with Burak’s anxiety. “Listen, you don’t have to do the test if you don’t want to. I’ll do it. In a controlled environment, with you guys around. Nothing can go wrong. It’s not like you’ll kill yourself straight off. You have to measure it out properly. There are lots of people who’ve heard her whisper and they’re still around to tell the tale.”

  “I don’t know, Tyler,” Burak said again. “I don’t think it was a coincidence. I think she’s trying to tell us to stop. Your experiments, going public. She’s doesn’t want us to do it. I’m sorry, man.”

  “But…”

  But before Tyler could figure out what to say—he was truly at a loss—it all toppled over the edge into the abyss. The bead curtain was shoved aside and Jaydon came in, his fingers clenched around Fletcher’s collar. Jaydon had taken off, spotted the dog in the backyard, and changed his mind. Maybe he wanted to get even with Tyler; maybe he just saw an opportunity with the witch close at hand. Whatever his motives, he’d come up with the fatal idea to sic Fletcher on her. Tyler didn’t know whether the dog normally detected her by her scent alone or by something more primitive, but the incense must have diverted him. Now that he’d caught sight of her, his growling swelled to a savage howling that filled the Şayers’ small living room, and he pawed the air like a pit bull.

  “Jaydon, don’t!” Tyler screamed. He tried to jump in between Fletcher and the witch, but Jaydon provoked the border collie by yanking on his collar, and Fletcher was deaf to his master. His lips were drawn back from his teeth. He barked ferociously, mad with rage, and then Jaydon let go.

  Fletcher slid across the floor. For a moment Tyler thought he had him, his fingers grasping his fur. But then the dog reached the carpet and his legs gained traction. With a terrific guttural snarl—louder than barking, wilder than growling—he threw himself at the witch. His powerful jaws closed around her right arm. The witch’s body, dangling forward to the left, now jerked to the right, and for a moment Fletcher hung by her chained arm, shaking his head furiously, tearing skin and tendons. One second later, with a howling shriek, the dog flew across the room and slammed against the wall.