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  Griselda would bring Katherine the most prestigious offering that lay in her power to procure … and that could stay hidden in a Market & Deli shopping bag.

  Confidently, she had driven down Popolopen Drive to the petting zoo near the Presbyterian church in Monroe. It was a modest little park with some goats, some ducks, and a peacock. She parked the Dodge in a dark spot between two streetlights and crossed the street. Then she peered through the chain-link fence. No peacock in sight. A car approached and Griselda jumped behind a tree. Frantically, she wondered what to do next. She couldn’t just show up with a stupid duck in her arms. Twenty minutes passed—she was losing precious time. Then she remembered what she had read back home when she had Googled “how to catch a peacock”: that peacocks often slept in trees.

  She looked up and saw tail feathers hanging from the shadow of the big oak near the pond.

  Idiot! she said to herself. If you’re such a hero, don’t just stand there dawdling!

  And so she glanced around to make sure she wasn’t being observed, threw the shopping bag over the fence, and hoisted herself up. Griselda, who had her stature and overtaxed arms working against her, but the power of the simpleminded to her advantage, somehow succeeded and landed in the bird droppings with a thud. She scrambled up on her weak, trembling legs, brushed off her scratched hands, and got to work.

  First, she knocked the peacock out of the tree with a large rock.

  The bird ran off amid piercing shrieks. Griselda pressed herself against the tree trunk with her heart in her mouth, convinced that half of the town of Monroe was now wide awake. The racket the bird made was excruciating, not to mention highly unbecoming for such a prestigious robe of blue feathers. Griselda hoped Katherine wouldn’t find it irritating.

  Ten minutes later, she stole out of the shadows, the blanket from the shopping bag spread out and ready. The bird stood in front of the mesh wire eyeing her suspiciously. When Griselda got closer, it hurried away, dragging its tail feathers behind it like the train of a gown. Griselda chased the peacock into a corner of the zoo. If anyone happened to come along now, she’d be screwed: There was no way she could pass herself off as the owner, and if she were to be taken to the police, she’d have to explain the meaning of all this. But Griselda had such blind faith in Katherine that she didn’t even look around. She tossed the blanket over the bird and threw her full weight on top of it.

  Back in Black Spring, she hurried past the enclosure of the trailhead behind the former Hopewell residence, at the foot of Bog Meadow Hill. She shivered at the prospect of having to enter the woods, where pitch-darkness reigned and where she would be alone with the wind and with her. But Griselda forced herself not to think about it and continued on her way. The peacock in the shopping bag was silent. Griselda was afraid she might have broken its wing in the assault; it had made a noise as if she had stepped on a box of eggs. The bird had moaned balefully, but halfway through the journey back home, it fell asleep. Every now and then Griselda assured herself that it was still alive by sticking her hand inside the bag to feel the movement of its delicate little body.

  Making her way through the ink black night was madness, but finally she found Katherine just where the HEXApp said she’d be: in the woods behind the fields of Ackerman’s Corner. By studying the map, she had had a vague idea of which trails Katherine would be standing near, but Griselda didn’t want to risk taking the trails because they would be under extra surveillance now, even at night. So she worked her way through underbrush, so dense that she had to turn back in places. The offering in her arms grew heavier with every step. The smell of mud and mold and forest decay was almost unbearable. Griselda’s plump body screamed with pain, and she panted with exhaustion. She was almost about to give up when Katherine suddenly appeared right in front of her, barely detectable in the opaque darkness.

  Griselda’s blood froze.

  “You startled me, Katherine,” she said, her mouth dry. “It’s me, Griselda.” The sound of her own voice in the darkness made her hair stand on end, and it cost tremendous force of will not to give in to the primitive urge to turn tail and run. The witch stood there, a motionless black silhouette, everything around her suffused with death.

  Griselda glanced around. She was in the middle of a group of tall, old pine trees. She kept telling herself that the bewitching of the creeks wasn’t any more ominous here than it was anywhere else, that she only had to walk down the hill to be back in familiar town environs, away from the heathen, malevolent power that seemed to linger here. Katherine had come to this spot, driven by ancient instinct. The witch would be good to her, if Griselda was good to the witch.

  She dropped to her knees, her left kneecap sinking into something slimy. She jumped back as if she had been electrified. Warily, she groped along the dark forest floor until she felt something moist, lukewarm, and elastic. It wasn’t long before Griselda’s butcher hands recognized what it was: a pig’s heart. Suddenly she was angry, even insulted, which calmed her fear. Someone else had been here before her. That dirty coward! Whoever it was must have been trying to get on Katherine’s good side. Carelessly, she tossed the filthy thing into the bushes and wiped her hands on her pants.

  Now that the altar was free, she knelt before her goddess.

  “Oh, look at you. I’m so sorry, Katherine. I may not be as good a speaker as Colton or John Blanchard or any of the others, but my heart is in the right place, just keep that in mind. I failed with my sacrifices, and I want to thank you on my bare knees for pointing that out to me. I should have known better. Please accept my peace offering; it’s the most beautiful one I could think of.” With timid pride she added, “It’s a peacock.”

  Katherine stood motionless in the dark. Griselda rose and took the roll of hemp rope from her coat pocket. The peacock moved around nervously in its shopping bag and began to coo softly.

  “I don’t want to ask too much of you, but do you think you might make everything the way it was before? The creek, I mean, and all that … I know you didn’t mean any harm, but you gave the townsfolk the heebie-jeebies—and me too, to be honest. I’ve brought you a live sacrifice, just like you wanted. I know you got no use for a nasty organ like that. Whoever brought that filthy thing here, anyway? If I find out, I’ll show her, the bitch, don’t you worry about that!”

  Griselda started in on her task. She had left her butcher knives at home, because the last pieces of the puzzle had suddenly fallen into place on the way back from the petting zoo. What if Katherine wasn’t entirely pleased with a pool of warm blood on her bare feet? Then her offering might be entirely misinterpreted. It would have to happen in a clean and dignified way, and it didn’t take long for Griselda to figure out how.

  She gnawed off two yards of rope and tied one end around both handles of the shopping bag. Then she took a pair of wax earplugs out of her pocket—she used to put them in every night because of Jim’s snoring, and she still did it out of habit—when she realized something that made her stop dead in her tracks.

  The witch wasn’t whispering.

  Only now did Griselda realize how utterly silent it was in the woods.

  She listened carefully, turned her ear to Katherine, and counted to sixty. Silence.

  Deeply moved, and overwhelmed by something that, in all simplicity, may have been closer to friendship than Griselda had ever known in her life, she kissed her own bare hands and reverently blew the kiss toward the witch. “Thank you, dear,” she said with a quavering voice. “Thank you for welcoming me.”

  No longer afraid, and now ready to come closer, Griselda threaded the hemp through one of the links of the iron chains around Katherine’s body, taking great care not to touch her, despite everything. She knotted the remaining end to a long, thick branch. Standing behind the witch, she wrapped the rope around the branch until it was tight; then she lifted it up like a fishing pole, causing the shopping bag to rise from the ground. As soon as it was hanging from the witch’s body, the peacock began eruptin
g with its icy shrieks. Griselda’s eyes opened wide, bulging in the darkness. Up here in the woods, the bird’s screeching didn’t sound out of place at all, but terrible and melancholy, like the call of a dead man. Griselda moaned, but kept on going. With all her strength, she raised the shopping bag as high as it would go, then began to walk the tightened rope around Katherine, unwinding it from the branch as she went, until the rope was tightly wrapped around her, and Griselda knotted the far end to the handles of the shopping bag.

  With great relief she paused to catch her breath. Too bad it was so dark; she would have liked to see the result of her hard work. But there was no doubt in her mind that Katherine would be satisfied. When it came time for her to disappear later tonight, the peacock in the shopping bag would burn and rise like a phoenix.

  Once more, Griselda came closer.

  This time, to rearrange its feathers.

  FIFTEEN

  JUST BEFORE SEVEN-THIRTY on Monday morning, Marty Keller called to tell him he’d better come up right away, and even before Robert Grim cut off the conversation, his thoughts wandered off to dwell on a tempting fantasy in which he bit off Colton Mathers’s scrotum, spat it out, and beat his convulsing testicles to a pulp with a croquet mallet on his mother’s old butcher block. It’s wasn’t a very soothing thought, but it gave him a joyless satisfaction nonetheless.

  After the call, Grim and Warren Castillo slipped on their rain capes and hurried up the hill along Old Miners Road. It was a murky morning and the wind was rising. There wasn’t a soul to be seen out on the street. Those who didn’t have to go to work that morning bolted their doors and shut their curtains against the storm. Those who did called in sick in large numbers, reported Lucy Everett—the telephone lines were so red-hot she had only been able to monitor them via random checks. Grim knew that the real storm people feared wasn’t raging outside, but within. He had felt the anxiety of the townsfolk, and it was finally getting to him as well.

  Katherine, what are you up to, girl? Who got a rise out of you?

  Warren, almost ten years younger than Grim, had trouble keeping up with him as they trod along the wet roadside. “How bad is this going to be, you think?” he asked, panting.

  “Nothing we can’t deal with,” Grim said, but his voice sounded strangely hollow. After the crazy incident with Grant’s horses on Saturday afternoon, Grim had thought he had the situation more or less under control. It had almost given him a heart attack when it happened, of course, but the animal hadn’t been up to any mischief and was soon calmed down. It had bolted in a blind panic, broken out, was probably frightened by its own reflection, and had jumped right through it. Grim had had the Grants’ horses moved to Saul Humfries’s pasture on the other side of town … because the source of their supernatural terror was right behind their stable, where Philosopher’s Creek ran along Steve Grant’s property.

  When Grim had seen what was going on at the creek, he had understood that the situation was not under control at all. In fact, the situation had never been so royally fucked up.

  Mathers had said he wanted to keep it under wraps, and Grim had almost exploded.

  “Listen,” he said, “I got animals running wild, I got a dog who committed suicide, and Mount Misery is excreting its own goddamn placenta. You go ahead and scatter bread crumbs in the enchanted forest; I’m reporting this to The Point.”

  “You’ll do no such thing, Robert,” the old councilman said with the kind of dogged passion only seen in very small children and dangerous religious fanatics. But Grim also heard doubt in his voice, and a deep bedrock of weary old age.

  “We have no choice. Katherine never bothers with house pets. For the first time in a hundred and twenty years she’s changed her pattern, and no one knows why or where this is going to lead.”

  “Exactly. And that’s why we have to find out what happened before we make any brash decisions. This is a town matter. Black Spring has always taken care of itself, and we will take care of ourselves now.”

  “But we don’t know—that’s just it!” Grim cried in dismay. “This is a unique and entirely precarious situation. The people are scared shitless. And who can blame them? We’ve got to put the authorities on standby in case the whole thing escalates.”

  “Mr. Mathers is right, Robert,” said Adrian Chass, one of the other Council members. “What can they do for us over at West Point, besides watching from behind their bulletproof windows as things here spiral out of control?”

  Griselda Holst nodded passionately and said, “Trust in the Lord.”

  “This is a fucking fiasco.” Grim shook his head. “Sorry, I can’t go along with this. I have an obligation.”

  Mathers’s bony fingers slipped around Grim’s wrist like a poisonous snake. “The decision of the Council is binding, Robert. If you refuse to comply, I will discharge you from your position.”

  Grim cursed Colton Mathers and the midwife who had delivered him. Not that he himself had such a high opinion of the folks at The Point: He had dutifully filed his reports year after year, but usually he regarded them as nothing more than a bureaucratic pain in the ass whose friendship had to be maintained in order to keep the money flowing. But now things were different. Grim wanted to send them a sample of the creek water and have it lab-analyzed ASAP. He wanted them … well, he wanted them to know. Maybe it would only add to the appearance of safety, but it felt like the right thing to do. That damn creek water had given Grim a serious case of the howling fantods, and every bit of reason that he could cling to was welcome indeed.

  But Mathers was afraid, and fear overruled clearheaded reason. It made the councilman unpredictable, drove him into a corner. And like Steve Grant, Grim understood the potentially dangerous consequences: the primitive human urge to channel fear, transform it into rage … and find a scapegoat. It was a devotion bordering on fanaticism, and it was happening all over town. Who had mocked the witch? What had changed to make her want to punish us? Everyone looked close to home for some unusual recent event and made the obvious connection. The Wicker Burning. The coming of the Outsiders during the festival. The woman next door, who had painted her garden fence that ugly terra-cotta. Dr. Grant—because after all, it had been his dog.

  Colton Mathers blamed the blood that had clung to the hands of the butcher’s wife since last Wednesday at a little after five. Grim could only guess at what had happened, but whatever it was, it wasn’t exactly kosher. The Holst woman had been found in deep shock at Roth’s side—and now, Katherine’s rumblings. For Mathers, it was a no-brainer.

  It’s too much of a motherfucking honor for you, you orc, Grim thought, to have your private hotline with God and influence on the witch as well.

  In any case, Mathers had had Roth buried out in the woods, his corpse wrapped in a Hefty bag and sealed with duct tape, and the death was never reported to The Point. Now it was a matter of waiting for lightning to strike. Colton Mathers wanted to keep the intelligence services outside their door. The Council voted—five for, two against—and Grim had his back against the wall.

  Since the blood first showed on Saturday, the seven-member HEX staff had been on high alert getting the situation under control. There were reports of the same phenomenon occurring in the Spy Rock Valley Creek, which emptied out more to the west, at the site of the historic waterwheel across from Town Hall. When the sun rose on Sunday morning, it provided a forlorn sight: For the first time since its restoration in 1984, the waterwheel wasn’t turning. Fences were erected to block the entrance to the trails in the reserve, there and on Mount Misery. The creeks continued to bleed. Not enough to saturate the water, and they probably could have told hikers that there was rust in the springs, but Grim didn’t want to take any chances. No one knew if the pollution was harmful, or how the situation would develop. It scared the shit out of the animals, and Grim readily trusted their instincts.

  To make matters worse, Sunday was a gorgeous day, so a good many hikers had to be sent elsewhere. Grim had posted an army of
volunteers in State Trooper uniforms at every barrier, who had told the hikers that the Military Academy was conducting a large-scale drill involving gunfire. And there was gunfire: it came from the HEX sound-effects library.

  For the first twenty-four hours, he had three people following Katherine like a shadow. Initially she had appeared in a broom closet on Sutherland Drive (the discovery was purely accidental, after the house dachshund had started throwing itself against the closet door in a furious rage). Then she had ambled back and forth a bit on the steep, enclosed fields of Ackerman’s Corner, and on Sunday night, she had stayed out in the woods. It was her old random pattern, nothing to indicate a behavioral change. The weather had turned frigid and her escorts were getting bored to extinction, so Grim had sent them home.

  That, as it turned out, had been his biggest mistake since running out of espresso on Sunday and switching to Red Bull. Robert Grim felt as if he was having a caffeine convulsion and was just about to snap an artery.

  He called Marty, who steered Grim and Warren through the rainy woods. The kid came running up to them in great agitation, with drenched sneakers and a face that had last night written all over it. “Just a little farther up,” he panted. “Robert, this is fucked up.…”

  Christ on a bike, Grim thought when he saw it. His jaw nearly dropped with a crash to the sodden forest ground.

  The witch was standing among the ferns, dripping wet, her small form saturated and dark with rainwater. In a fraction of a second, she managed to evoke the illusion of standing at a poultry market with a peacock under her arm. Am I really seeing this? Grim thought incredulously—but then he noticed that someone had tied a blue, sewn-up shopping bag around her waist, from which an enormous fan of peacock feathers proudly protruded. Countless green and blue peacock eyes with dark pupils looked out at the three of them, as if Katherine herself had opened her eyes and was staring them down.