HEX Page 16

  “Never believe an alcoholic,” Grim said, “except if he’s paying.”

  “Of course, the number of suicides is unusually high in these parts. Always has been. That’s mostly due to social isolation, depression, and ongoing pressure. You know, like in Japan, where people work so hard that at some point something just snaps inside them. This is the same thing. I think the fact that Katherine follows her same old pattern every day is the only reason the situation here is livable. It’s been so long since things got out of hand. Back in ’67, I had just turned twenty, and you, Robert … when were you born?”

  “August 17, 1955, the night Hurricane Diane hit the Hudson Valley and flooded it,” said Grim. “They say the river puked me out.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised, you old shipwreck. But see, even you were just a kid. She’s so damn stable, Steve—that’s been our salvation. The ones who sewed her eyes shut, God knows how, did us a huge favor.”

  Pete stood still for a moment with his hands on his hips and looked around. The vegetation had become denser; trees were blocking out the daylight, and scrambling over the stumps and moldering trunks was tiring.

  Grim took over and said, “The last time she really departed from her pattern—or so we suspect—was in 1887, when Eliza Hoffman disappeared into the woods. No one knew what had led her to do it, but the public outrage that followed made The Point decide to establish HEX.”

  “What happened, exactly?” Steve asked, familiar only with the gist of the story.

  “Eliza Hoffman was the daughter of a prominent New York family that had only recently moved to Black Spring,” Pete said. “I heard this story from my gramps, who heard it from his father before him. He was the owner of one of the old bleacheries that had prospered in Black Spring back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thanks to the clean spring water coming down from the hills. But by 1887, bleaching had become a dying trade: after they passed strict environmental laws and dry cleaners and Laundromats started to pop up in the cities, it pretty much forced the traditional bleacheries out of the region. Business wasn’t exactly booming for old VanderMeer, is all I’m saying. Anyway, one day the Hoffmans lost sight of their little girl while they were out in the woods. She was never seen again. Poor kid wasn’t even eight years old. They called in searchers with tracker dogs and they dredged Popolopen Lake, but no luck.”

  “So they put it down to kidnapping,” Steve assumed.

  “That’s right. But the people in Black Spring knew better. For three days, the water in Philosopher’s Creek turned a deep blood red and countless dead ermines floated to the surface, after collectively drowning themselves for no apparent reason. The water was undrinkable for days. My gramps had to shut down the bleachery for a week, which didn’t do the business any good. But the weird thing was that the blood didn’t come from the ermines, because they had all drowned. My gramps said that it seemed as if the earth itself was bleeding.”

  Steve wasn’t sure whether he believed that. Not for the first time, he noticed that even if accepting one supernatural reality came relatively easy, it didn’t mean that a second one would follow … because he simply lacked the willingness to believe. “It doesn’t sound like Katherine,” he finally said.

  “That’s the odd thing about it. No one knew why it had happened. Or where the little kid was.”

  “But … ermines?”

  “We still have some of them in formaldehyde,” Robert Grim said. “They saved a few when they burned the carcasses. You can come and look at them sometime if you like, although they’re nothing special. Just old, dead animal.”

  “And nothing like it ever happened again?”

  “Nope,” Pete said. “And it would have been swept under the carpet if it weren’t for the facts that Hoffman had previously been a prominent judge in New York and that the case had stirred quite a bit of interest. An article appeared in the New York Times with the suggestive title ‘Is Mount Misery Haunted?’ As far as I know, that’s the only time any of the major media reported on what’s going on here. They even tried to link the case to, and I quote, ‘the folklore concerning the disappearances in Black Rock Forest of 1713 and 1665, which were said to have something to do with a witch.’ When The Point got wind of that, they decided to act.”

  “And so HEX was born,” Steve said.

  “Exactly. And that was pretty easy by that time, since Black Spring had been self-governing since 1871. Before that it was part of the municipality of Highland Mills, and the town council met in Black Spring. It was a tough one for the mayor, having that double agenda. Every week councilmen would arrive from Highland Mills, Central Valley, and Harriman, unaware of the situation. But Katherine doesn’t adapt to administrative shuffling. The curse is only on us. The Point granted autonomy to Black Spring and founded HEX under terms of confidentiality, to enable us to fend for ourselves. They supervise the ins and outs and channel money to us, but otherwise they don’t want to get their fingers burned. And who can blame them? They’re scared shitless.”

  Steve waded through a pile of fallen leaves. “That word will get out?”

  “That something like this is even possible, and that they can’t send in the army to deal with it.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Pete said. He had come to such a sudden stop that Steven almost bumped into him.

  There was a bit more light here. To the right of the game trail they had been following, three slender, dead trees broke through the thinning November canopy. They may have been silver birches, but the trunks were so old and weathered that it was difficult to tell. They swayed in the wind, groaning gently, their bare branches as jagged as black, crystallized lightning against the steel gray sky. Pete looked up, and now Steve saw what he was looking at: Hanging at least fifty feet up, almost at the top, was Fletcher.

  The border collie hung with his head and forelegs caught in a forked branch, the fur on his upper body bunched up because of his hanging weight. He was in no way mutilated, not even visibly disfigured, and the fact that he was unblemished imparted a sinister quality to the cadaver, as if it might open its eyes at any moment and start barking. But you didn’t have to get up close and make a diagnosis to know that would never happen. Fletcher’s eyes were half open and glassy, and his tongue drooped out of his mouth, pale and desiccated. Despite the late season, the ants had found him first.

  “Is that Fletcher?” Grim asked, although he already knew the answer.

  “Yeah, that’s him all right,” Steve sighed. How was he supposed to tell them about this at home? Fletcher was part of the family. They had all been crazy about the damn dog—not just Jocelyn and himself, but the boys, too. It all seemed so pointless. Pete patted him on the back, a simple gesture that, at such a moment of emotional dismay, was as moving to Steve as it was encouraging.

  “This isn’t the work of some animal torturer,” Grim said. “No man would climb up so high in a tree and risk his own life to hang a dog.”

  No one said a word. They were only about five minutes from the trails, yet an imposing silence seemed to have descended on the forest.

  “Is there the slightest possibility that your dog could have climbed up there himself and slipped?”

  Steve grimaced. “No way. Dogs aren’t climbers. And just look … look at the tree. There’s something very wrong here. You see it, too, don’t you?”

  It was true, and they all knew it. Something was terribly wrong with what they were seeing, something about the atmosphere of this place. It was dead—that’s what was wrong. As a doctor, he knew he should be approaching this in a scientific way, but he felt incapable. The sudden presence of the three skeleton trees in the middle of the windswept wilderness did not seem accidental, nor did the way they were grouped together, or the fact that Fletcher had chosen this particular place to die. There were small mountain ashes growing around, but they did nothing to dispel the sense of hidden darkness encompassing the dead trees, as if something from last night was still clinging to them. Even the air here w
as still, cold, and unchanging. All at once, Steve was certain that Fletcher had met a bad end, that there had been nothing good or peaceful about his death.

  Maybe it would have been different if we had walked past that fairy ring with our eyes closed, he thought. Maybe Fletcher wouldn’t have died.

  It was a stupid thought, it was bullshit, it was the kind of superstitious madness that he didn’t want to submit to … but it was also true.

  Later I stopped believing in witches, so I did it as a balancing exercise.

  “I don’t like this at all, Robert,” Pete said.

  “Call me crazy,” Grim said, “but doesn’t it sorta look like the dog jumped down from the top of the tree by his own doing? That he somehow managed to hoist himself all the way up … and then hanged himself?”

  A coldness descended on Steve, a chill of such elementary intensity that it pressed down on his chest and made it hard to breathe. In his mind’s eye, he suddenly saw Fletcher with big, frightened eyes, clambering up the withered tree trunk, lured by a crooked, whispering female form. In a druidic symmetry, dangling from the two other dead trees by lengths of Manila rope were the bodies of both of his sons, Matt and Tyler. Their eyes were open and stared at him accusatorily with cloudy, ivory-colored corneas that made him think of the toadstools in the fairy ring, the ring he’d broken.…

  With a jerk he turned away, his hands on his knees. He squeezed his eyes closed until he felt dizzy. When he opened them again he saw spots, but at least they obliterated the grotesque image from his mind.

  “You okay?” Pete asked. Grim was already on the phone. Steve didn’t like the expression on his face. There wasn’t a trace of his usual lively cynicism.

  “To be honest, not really,” he said. “I want to get the fuck out of here.”

  “Let’s go back down,” Pete said. “Rey Darrel’s Rush Painting has a ladder that must be tall enough to get him down. That poor critter deserves a decent burial.”

  * * *

  BY THE TIME Steve came out of the woods for the second time, now with Fletcher’s lifeless body wrapped up in a blanket (he didn’t have the heart to put him in a garbage bag), his head had cleared and he could consider the situation more soberly. The charged atmosphere, the strange agelessness he had felt up there, now seemed like something from a dream. Instead, a much more worldly thought occurred to him: that there were moments that stuck with you your whole life, and they almost always had to do with life and death. This was such a moment: Steve stumbling through the gate of the backyard, the bundle in his arms, aching and sore from the deadweight, the other three members of his family coming out to meet him in tears. It was a moment that would have a deep impact on all of them for the rest of their lives, and it was never to be forgotten. Indeed, it was to be cherished … for the confrontation it presented meant acceptance, and that was a first step toward the day when the pain would stop and warm memories would begin.

  They held a makeshift funeral near the flower bed where honeysuckle grew in the summer, behind the horse pen where their property bordered on Philosopher’s Deep. Fletcher had always liked it there, Jocelyn said. The vet had dropped by earlier in the day. Grim had wanted to have an autopsy performed, but Steve had appealed to him to leave the dog with the family. Grim had given in. According to the vet it was an open-and-shut case, and the worn patches on his coat told the story: Fletcher’s hanging weight had closed off his windpipe and the dog had choked to death. Nothing more to make of it. But Jocelyn told Steve afterward that when she led the man to the kitchen to wash his hands, she saw him make the sign of the horns … the gesture to ward off the evil eye.

  Finally, the moment came when the family was alone, and they used that time to mourn. They lowered Fletcher, wrapped in his blanket, into the newly dug hole and folded the blanket over him. They reminisced. Matt and Jocelyn cried and held each other. Tyler stood beside them, his face shocked and preoccupied, and he didn’t say much. He kept looking around, as if to reassure himself that he was still there. Steve was worried about him. Tyler’s way of dealing with setbacks was to withdraw into himself, but he usually also showed a certain down-to-earthness that was not at all in evidence now.

  They threw flowers into the grave, then damp earth. Steve was reminded of something he had said to the Delarosas about children playing funeral prior to the smallpox epidemic of 1654: 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.

  He dismissed the thought. Jocelyn took the boys inside and Steve walked to the stable to get the shovel. Paladin and Nuala snorted restlessly when he came in—quietly and consolingly in a strangely nostalgic way, as horses do. He hugged them and went back out to fill in the grave.

  * * *

  IT’S A LITTLE after four when Robert Grim returns, bearing bad news like the prophet of doom from an ancient Greek tragedy. Except this bad news comes in the form of a video fragment. “The only fragment we’ve been able to find from all the Mount Misery security cams,” Grim says, “but it tells it all. I thought you guys ought to see it.”

  They gather around the coffee table with the MacBook in front of them and Grim clicks PLAY. First it’s hard to make out what we’re seeing; we seem to be looking at a hazy photo negative. Then Steve realizes that these are infrared images. There’s moisture on the lens, which blurs the image somewhat, yet in the dark anthracite tints he can still distinguish trees, and something that’s clearly a trail. At the bottom of the image are the numbers: 2012/11/02, 8:57 p.m. Yesterday, Steve says to himself.

  What the footage shows next is so frightening that his whole body turns ice cold. Everyone is startled, but Tyler most of all: He recoils, biting the palm of his hand, and tears fill his eyes. Two figures appear, pale white and luminous in night vision: the witch, striding like a phantom at a masked ball, with Fletcher at her side. The dog sniffs here and there, even wagging his tail a little. Steve realizes why this seemingly innocent image is so appalling: None of them has ever seen Katherine acting determined before. Until this image, showing the two walking together into the night, side by side, to meet Fletcher’s death.

  “This is extremely alarming, you understand,” Grim says. “I’ve consulted with the Council and we’re trying to keep this under wraps to avoid public unrest, but we’re baffled. This is something completely new. Did anything happen to Fletcher that could have provoked this? If so, I need to know, guys.”

  Jocelyn and Steve slowly shake their heads. “He’s usually scared stiff of her,” Jocelyn says, deeply shocked. “Look at how he just walks along with her.…”

  “It’s all your fault!” Matt suddenly explodes. “You didn’t give her anything!” As Steve looks at him in bewilderment, he adds, “At the Wicker Burning! You didn’t want to offer anything to her, and now she’s taken Fletcher!”

  “That’s completely unrelated,” Steve says. “How can you even think something like that?”

  “What do you know?” Matt is crying, and he pulls himself away from his mother. Steve sees Grim’s distressed expression and he thinks, This is only the beginning. We’ll be hearing a lot more of this crap reasoning in the days to come. The impulse to point the finger, to assign a scapegoat. If this gets out, we’re in deep shit. You know that, don’t you?

  “Tyler? Did anything happen with Fletcher that you know of?”

  Tyler shakes his head rapidly, lips trembling.

  “You didn’t run across her while you were taking him out?”

  “No.”

  Steve gives him a probing look and says, “If anything bad happened, please tell us, okay? This is about our safety.”

  “He’s right,” Grim chimes in. “Don’t worry. If you guys have been messing around like you did with that video you made, I won’t tell the Council. Of course you never wanted this to happen. I just have to know about it. Something very serious is going on, do you understan
d that?”

  There are tears in Tyler’s eyes and his lips are trembling even more, and maybe, just maybe, they’ve pushed him so far that he’s going to say something—but then there’s a loud crash, and it will be a very long time before anyone thinks back to this moment again, the moment before the moment that would cause all the others to be forgotten. Steve has just enough time to turn his head toward where the noise came from—the sound of heavy wood violently slamming into the ground—and he sees, through the French dining room doors, through the window to the backyard, something that his brain cannot fully comprehend. He sees a horse stampeding toward him. He sees straining muscles. He sees foam on black flanks, he sees rolling eyes, he sees flailing hooves. Like exploding crystal, the window is pulverized, and through the curtain of glass shards Paladin comes leaping into the dining room. The horse skids across the dining room table, which crashes to the floor as its legs give way. Paladin’s legs also collapse and the horse rolls over on his flank, mad with fear. His hooves trample splinters from the interior French doors.

  The Grant family and Robert Grim dive for cover as if bombs are falling. No one screams; the violence with which the bolting horse has appeared seems to have sucked all the oxygen from the room. Then the animal rears up, graceful, surreal, decapitating the dining room lamp, and Jocelyn and Matt dart forward in a spontaneous effort to rein the stallion in. But Paladin isn’t the only one who has broken out of the stables; at that very moment, and in a blind panic, Nuala gallops through the backyard gate, around the house, and heads in a westerly direction down Deep Hollow Road. It’s sheer luck that there isn’t any traffic—lucky for the traffic and lucky for Nuala. Several surveillance cameras record her movements: first the one near the parking lot at the trailhead where Philosopher’s Creek ends, then the one on the corner of Patton Street. Inside the house, Jocelyn and Matt are finally able to calm down the confused stallion. The animal snorts and knocks over chairs, but Jocelyn’s stern voice is getting through. Steve helps Robert Grim to his feet, and he is convinced that if his heart were to go any faster, his rib cage would burst apart.