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  “But … why?” Mr. Delarosa asked after finally recovering his voice.

  “We have our reasons,” Grim said impassively. “It’s for your own good that you leave right now and forget all about it. We can lay out the details of the agreement in a contract.…”

  “What authority do you represent, anyway?”

  “Irrelevant. I want you to terminate the purchase, and you’ll be given five thousand dollars for it. There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, you got us.”

  Delarosa looked as if Grim had just suggested that he was going to publicly execute his wife on the town scaffold. “Do you think I’m crazy?” he raged. “Who do you think you’re dealing with?”

  Grim closed his eyes and hunkered down. “Think about the money.” He himself was thinking about cyanide. “And take it as a business proposition.”

  “I’m not going to let myself be bribed by the first neighborhood watchdog who comes along! My wife and I love this house and we’re signing the contract tomorrow. You should be glad I’m not pressing charges.”

  “Listen. Mrs. Barphwell had a leaky roof every fall. Last year it did considerable water damage to her floors. This,” Grim said, gesturing with two hands, “is a shitty house. There are beautiful properties in Highland Falls—just as rustic but right on the Hudson, and the house prices there are lower.”

  “You’re wrong if you think I can be fobbed off for five thousand dollars,” Delarosa said. Then something occurred to him. “Are you those jokers from the Night Bazaar? Why the hell are you doing this?”

  Grim opened his mouth, but Claire beat him to it. “We don’t like you,” she snapped, hating her role, but in top form as usual. “We don’t care for city slickers like yourselves. They pollute the air.”

  “It’s a healthy dose of inbred humor,” Grim added confidentially. He knew they had just lost their case.

  Bammy Delarosa looked at him stupidly, turned to her husband, and asked, “What exactly are they saying, dear?” Robert Grim imagined her brains as something burned to a crisp under a sunbed and now encrusted on the inner wall of her skull.

  “Shush, hon,” Delarosa said, and he drew her up close. “Get out of here, before I call the police!”

  “You’re going to regret this,” Claire said, but Grim pulled her away.

  “Never mind, Claire. It’s useless.”

  That night he called Delarosa on his cell phone and begged him to give up on the purchase. When the man asked him why he was going to so much trouble, Grim told him that Black Spring suffered from a three-hundred-year-old curse, and that it would infect them, too, if they decided to settle in town, and that they’d be doomed until their death, and that there was a wicked witch living in Black Spring. Delarosa hung up.

  “Damn you!” Grim shouted now, staring at the movers. He threw his pen at the big screen and the twenty monitors around it jumped to new camera angles, offering views of people loafing around in town. “I was doing you a fucking favor!”

  “Relax,” Warren said. He folded up his newspaper and laid it on the desk. “We did everything we could. He may be an intellectual, cocksuckin’ asshole, but at least he’s our intellectual, cocksuckin’ asshole. And she looks like a juicy little piece.”

  “Pig,” said Claire.

  Grim stabbed at the screen with his finger. “In the Council, they’re rubbing their hands together. But when these folks raise hell, who’s going in to clean up the mess?”

  “We are,” Warren said, “and we’re good at it. Dude, let off some steam. Be happy we’ve got something new to bet on. Fifty bucks on a home encounter.”

  “Fifty bucks?” Claire was shocked. “You’re crazy. Statistically speaking, home encounters never come first.”

  “I feel it in my fingers, baby,” Warren said, and he began drumming on the desk. “If I were her, I’d go over and check out the new meat, if you know what I’m saying.” He raised his eyebrows. “Who’s in?”

  “Fifty dollars—you’re on,” Claire said. “I say they see her on the street.”

  “The security cams,” chimed in Marty Keller, their online data analyst, from the other side of the control center. “And I raise the stakes to seventy-five.”

  The others stared at him as if he had lost his mind. “Nobody ever sees those things if they don’t know they’re there,” Warren said.

  “He will.” Marty nodded at the monitor. “He’s just the type. They see the security cams and start asking questions. Seventy-five.”

  “Count me in,” Claire said promptly.

  “Me too,” Warren said, “and first drink’s on me.”

  Marty tapped Lucy Everett, who was in the chair beside him listening in on phone calls. She took off her headphones. “Say what?”

  “Are you in on the bet? Seventy-five bucks.”

  “Sure. Home encounter.”

  “Get the fuck out of here; that’s my bet!” Warren shouted.

  “Then you have to share the winnings with Warren,” Marty said. Lucy turned around and blew Warren a kiss. Warren wiped it off and dropped into his chair.

  “What about you, Robert? You in?” Claire asked.

  Grim sighed. “You guys are more disgusting than I thought. Okay, they’ll hear about it in town. There’s always someone who can’t keep their mouth shut.”

  Marty jotted it down on the whiteboard with a dry-erase marker. “That leaves Liz and Eric. I’ll send them both e-mails. If they join, we’ll have a kitty of … five hundred twenty-five dollars. That’s still two seventy-five for you, Warren.”

  “Two sixty-two fifty, darling,” Claire said.

  “Silence, dragon woman,” sulked Warren.

  Robert Grim slipped into his coat to get some pecan pie in town. His mood was spoiled for the rest of the day, but at least he’d be able to enjoy some state-subsidized pecan pie. Even though he had no official authority without the Council’s mandate, and even though everything had to be reported to his contact at The Point on a quarterly basis, Grim did hold the executive power in Black Spring, and one of his talents was to pry up subsidies from what he called the Bottomless Pit. The annual salaries of the seven HEX employees were paid out of this pit, as were the four-hundred-something surveillance cams and their operating system, the filtered server with Internet access for the entire town, a couple of very successful parties (with excellent wine) following Council meetings, and free iPhones for everyone under the compulsory reporting regulation who preferred to use the HEXApp instead of the 800 number. This last had made Robert Grim the most celebrated man in Black Spring among the younger population, and he could often be found daydreaming about some random young (and usually long-legged) brunette from town coming to the control center to explore the legendary proportions of his cult status amid the piling props still reeking of seventeenth-century decay.

  Robert Grim had always remained single.

  “By the way, we got an e-mail from John Blanchard,” Marty said as Grim was getting ready to leave. “You know, that sheep farmer in the woods, from Ackerman’s Corner.”

  “Oh, God, him,” Warren said. He raised his eyes to heaven.

  “He says his sheep Jackie gave birth to a two-headed lamb. Stillborn.”

  “Two-headed?” Grim asked incredulously. “That’s horrible! That hasn’t happened since Henrietta Russo’s baby in ‘91.”

  “His e-mail kind of freaked me out. He went on about prophecies and omens and something about a ninth circle or whatever.”

  “Ignore him,” Warren said. “At the last Council meeting he said he had seen strange lights in the sky. He said that ‘the ignorant and the sodomites will be punished for their pride and greed.’ The guy is nuts. He sees omens in morning wood.”

  Marty turned toward Grim. “I mean, should we keep it? Here’s the photo he attached.” He clicked on his touch pad, and a photo of an ugly, fleshy, dead thing in the dirt appeared on the big screen—and, sure enough, you could easily discern two deformed lamb’s heads. Jackie had
n’t even wanted to lick off the membrane. Half cut out of the photo and somewhat out of focus, she could be seen eating hay and refusing to give the fetal monster the time of day.

  “Ugh, what a freak,” said Grim, and he turned away. “Yes, have Dr. Stanton take a look, and put it in formaldehyde along with the other specimens in the archive. Anybody else up for pecan pie?”

  A unanimous “yuck” came from all the staff members, so at first Grim didn’t hear that Claire was the only one who didn’t say “yuck,” but “fuck.” He had already grabbed the doorknob when she repeated it: “No, seriously, Robert. Fuck. Marty, give me the Barphwell parcel on full screen.”

  Marty dragged the photo of the dead lamb away and the movers came back into view.

  “No, do the cam at her parcel, D19 … 064.”

  Grim went visibly pale.

  The security camera was located on the lamppost in front of the Delarosa bungalow plot and offered a view of Upper Reservoir Road that sloped down through the edges of Black Rock Forest. The moving van was parked on the right, and you could see the workers picking up boxes and disappearing from the bottom of the image. The rest of the street was empty, except for about twenty yards farther up, on the left. Standing on the lawn of a low-lying house across the street was a woman. She wasn’t looking at the movers but was staring down the hill, motionless. But Robert Grim didn’t need to see her up close to know that she wasn’t staring at all. Panic struck him.

  “Oh, dammit!” he shouted. His right hand went up to his mouth and covered it. “Dammit, how the hell is that possible…” He ran back to the desk and his eyes flew across the screen.

  The enormous truck was obstructing the view for the yuppie couple and their movers, but it would only take one fool to walk around the loading ramp and they’d see her. Code Fucking Red quadrupled. They’d call 911: a seriously mutilated, underfed woman—yes, she looks disheveled; send an ambulance and the police. Or, worse: They’d try to help her themselves. Then the consequences would be vast.

  “What’s she doing there, for Christ’s sake? Wasn’t she supposed to be with the Grant family?”

  “Yes, until…” Claire looked in her log. “At least until eight thirty-seven this morning, when the kid apped that he had to go to school. After that the house was empty.”

  “How does the old bag figure it out?”

  “Relax,” Warren said. “Be happy she’s not in their living room. She’s standing on a lawn; we’ll put the old umbrella clothesline on her, with sheets. You and Marty can be there in five minutes. I’ll call the folks from that property or one of their neighbors and ask them to cover her with a blanket till we get there.”

  Grim ran to the exit and pushed Marty down the corridor. “What a clusterfuck.”

  “If they see her, we’ll say she’s part of the festival,” Warren said. He flashed Grim a smile that was more appropriate for a mojito at a salsa party than a situation where people could die, and failed abysmally in his goal to calm Grim down. “A joke from the locals to welcome the newbies. Ooo-ooo-ooo, what a little suggestion can do. It’s only a witch.”

  Robert Grim spun around in the doorway. “This is not fucking Hansel and Gretel!”

  THREE

  THE LAST WARM day of the year came and went. The semester was weeks under way and Steve Grant had begun to adjust to the rhythm of alternating between classes at New York Med and his job as project leader at the scientific research center. Jocelyn was working three and a half days a week at the Hudson Highlands Nature Museum in Cornwall and the boys had begun to settle into their new school year at O’Neill High School in Highland Falls, albeit with the usual reluctance. Tyler had made it through junior year by the skin of his teeth and was now taking extra math classes to keep on track for his finals. It made him irritable. Tyler was a man of words, not of numbers, and if he passed this year—a big “if,” if you asked Steve—he wanted to work with words. Journalism, preferably at NYU in the city, although that would mean commuting back and forth every day. A dorm room on campus, at such a distance from Black Spring, would be too dangerous. It would creep up on him slowly, almost imperceptibly … but in the end it would hit home, and possibly too unexpectedly for him to see it coming.

  Matt had waltzed through his first year of junior high and begun his second with the hyperactive mood swings of puberty. He surrounded himself with girls from school and seemed to share their endless giggling fits as well as their PMS rages, and would go into a funk at the drop of a hat. Jocelyn had expressed her concern that Matt might come out of the closet this year or the next, and although Steve had raised his eyebrows at the idea he suspected Jocelyn was right. The idea alarmed him, not because either of them held conservative views but because he still saw Matt as what he always had been: a sweet, vulnerable child.

  They’re really growing up, he thought, not without a touch of wistfulness. And we’re growing old. No one’s making an exception for us. We’re all going to get old … and it will be in Black Spring.

  Plunged into a grave mood by this thought, he walked down the path along the horse pen to the end of the yard. Although it was almost eleven, it was still quite warm. A typical late-summer evening with no hint of fall in the air, though WAMC had predicted rain for the following day. The woods rose up high before him, silent and pitch-black. Steve whistled for Fletcher, who was hiding somewhere out there.

  On the other side of the fence, Pete VanderMeer’s cigarette glowed in the dark. Steve raised his hand and Pete sympathetically tapped two fingers to his temple. A sociologist to the core, Pete often sat in his backyard smoking far into the wee hours. He had taken early retirement a couple of years ago on account of rheumatoid arthritis. His wife, Mary, brought home the bacon ever since. Pete was fifteen years Steve’s senior, but his son, Lawrence, was the same age as Tyler, and the families had become close over the years.

  “Hey, Steve. Trying to squeeze the last little bit out of summer?”

  He smiled. “As much as I can.”

  “Enjoy it while it lasts. There’s a storm coming.”

  Steve raised his eyebrows.

  “Haven’t you heard?” Pete exhaled a cloud of smoke. “We’ve got fresh meat.”

  “Oh, shit,” Steve said. “What kind of people are they?”

  “A couple from the city, still pretty young. He’s been offered a job in Newburgh. Put me in mind of you guys.” One of the horses in the stable whinnied softly. “Ain’t that a bitch? It’s easier if you’re born here, like me. They’ll make it, if their marriage is strong enough. Most of them do. But I don’t need to tell you that.”

  Steve smiled resignedly. He and Jocelyn weren’t originally from the area, either. They had moved into their renovated colonial hideaway eighteen years before, when Jocelyn was pregnant with Tyler and Steve had accepted an appointment with the GP group practice at New York Med. There had already been problems with the sale before they left Atlanta—a surly real estate agent, unexpected difficulty obtaining a mortgage—but it was an ideal place to raise children, the Hudson Valley woods all around and within commuting distance of the campus.

  “I hope for their sake that the wife had a say in this, too,” Steve said. “I still thank the boulders from the bottom of my heart every day.”

  Pete threw back his head and laughed. Jocelyn had been working on her Ph.D. in geology at the time and had fallen in love with the boulders left behind by the glaciers that ran the whole length of Deep Hollow Road, from their property to the center of town. Steve had never dared tell her out loud, but he suspected that the boulders had saved their marriage. If the move to Black Spring had been all on his account, he didn’t know whether Jocelyn would ever have been able to forgive him. She may have wanted to, but the grudge she would have held against him simply would have been too strong.

  “Oh, it’ll blow over in the end,” Pete said. “They’ll never fully own this place … but Black Spring will own them, all right.” He gave him a quick wink, as if they were two boys sharing
a secret. “Anyway, I should be heading to bed. We’re going to have some work to do one of these days.”

  They said good night and Steve walked out to the back of the property, looking for Fletcher. From the barn came the sound of one of the horses—either Paladin or Nuala—sniffing, a restless sound, yet intimate at the same time. Oddly enough, Steve loved life in Black Spring despite its restrictions. Here in the dark he felt a strong sense of belonging—something that, like so many aspects of the human psyche, couldn’t be rationally explained, yet existed nonetheless. Steve was too scientifically minded to believe in something spiritual such as the power of place, but even so, there was a more primitive, intuitive part of him that knew his neighbor was right. This place owned them. And even now, in the lee of the late summer night, you could feel that the place itself belonged to something older. Their house was on the edge of the Black Rock Forest nature reserve, at the foot of Mount Misery. The chain of hills, pushed up by the glaciers in past ice ages and cut out by meltwater, had been exerting an attraction on the people who settled there ever since ancient times. Anyone who dug there would find the remains of settlements and burial grounds from the Munsee and Mohican tribes. Later, when the Dutch and English colonists moved in and drove the River Indians away from this area, the cultivated wilderness retained its character and the hills were used by heathen and pagan cults for their rituals. Steve knew the history … but the connection that historians failed to make was the influence of the place itself. That connection was irrational and only existed if you lived here … and it took hold of you.

  Admittedly, it hadn’t been easy, those early years.

  First came denial, then came anger. The denial ended abruptly when, after seven weeks of disbelief and bewilderment, they booked a monthlong vacation in a splendid Thai bamboo beach bungalow. Steve had thought it might be a good idea for Jocelyn to get away from all the fuss for a while during her pregnancy. Halfway through their first week in Asia they both became depressed, as if an intense, invisible sadness had washed over them from the Gulf of Thailand and was now devouring them from the inside out. It had no origin or direction, yet it was there and it spread like an ink blot. Steve absolutely refused to admit that it could have anything to do with the Council’s warning that the length of their vacation was foolish—life threatening, even—until, after less than a week and a half away from home, he began playing with the idea of hanging himself from the bamboo ceiling using the bungalow’s bedsheets.