HEX (15 page)

“It's
his
website,” Justin said with a silly grin.

“Yeah, and his plan,” Burak said.

Jaydon stared at him coldly and Tyler was catapulted back to the past. They were ten and twelve years old and both in elementary school, Tyler in fifth grade and Jaydon in sixth because he had been held-back that summer. It was less than a year after Jaydon's father had left without a trace, but back then Tyler Grant was too young to make the obvious connection. All he knew was that you didn't turn your back on Jaydon if you knew what was good for you because he was the kind of jerk who wasn't stingy about passing along the punches he had received at home.

One day while they were playing soccer during recess, Katherine appeared amid the children on the field behind the school. Some of the kids were frightened, but Miss Ashton told them to move their game a little to the left and keep on playing. “Remember: We run to our teacher or parents as soon as we see her, and then we go on with whatever we were doing as if nothing happened,” she said. Andy Pynchot, a cocky little boy one year Tyler's senior, suggested using her as a goal post and was rewarded with a firm slap on the back of the head. When Miss Ashton finally clapped her hands and the children ran inside, much relieved, the ball had rolled outside the lines not far from the witch. Tyler and Jaydon were the closest and Tyler was about to go get it, but Jaydon had looked at him with the same cold eyes as he did now, seven years later, and little Tyler became frightened—not of the witch, but of Jaydon. Later, when he was able to see the bigger picture, he imagined that wild animals must feel the same kind of uncontrollable fear when they first inhaled the smoky air of a forest fire. Then Jaydon did something appalling: He ran up to the ball, bent backward, and kicked it at the witch, hitting her like a sledgehammer. Katherine doubled over and the leather exploded with a loud bang as the witch disappeared.

All those images shot through Tyler's mind in the few seconds that he and Jaydon stood face-to-face in the woods. Seven years was a long time, and since then they had hung out together off and on. But the foul taste the incident had left in his mouth had never gone away, and Tyler had never forgotten that cold look in Jaydon's eyes. If a boy of twelve had been able to kick a soccer ball at the witch with so much pent-up rage, what would the same boy be capable of at nineteen?

Finally, Jaydon lowered his shoulders and grinned. “Don't cry, faggot.”

Tyler relaxed a little, but remained on guard. “Listen, this is not about who's boss. I just don't want to fuck this up. We're not taking any chances. We may be free soon, so just keep it together, okay?”

“No prob. Best friends forevah.”

Tyler rolled his eyes. “Do they know she's here yet?”

“Nope,” Justin said. “App says she's somewhere in Lower South, and there's no new alert since then. We just bumped into her here.”

“We were just screwing around, that's all,” Burak said.

Tyler walked back to Lawrence and gave Burak a frigid look as he passed. Burak caught his gaze, didn't understand it, and probably felt hurt. But Tyler couldn't make it any clearer: Sure, Jaydon and Justin would stoop this low, but he hadn't expected it of Burak. He turned aside and said, “So can somebody please send an app? We're not that far off the trail, and there are fucking hikers around.”

“Sure,” Jaydon said, and pulled out his iPhone, maybe to show that he truly meant well. Tyler was bending over to calm Fletcher down when Jaydon let out a surprised cry. Tyler's head jerked up. The witch had taken a vigorous step forward and had almost bumped into Jaydon, who had been busy with his text message. Startled, he took a few steps back. The witch stood there motionless, the black stitches sealing her eyes and mouth standing out like hastily made scratches against her pale face.

Jaydon forgot the phone in his hand and all of them fell silent. Fletcher stopped barking and switched to a low, bestial growl. Maybe there was danger lurking within Jaydon, but Katherine possessed a much older, primordial power, and with that one step she had reminded them who was at the top of the food chain.
Something's gonna happen here, dude,
Tyler thought.
Something pretty creepy, I think
.

“Hey,” Jaydon said shyly.

The witch stood facing him, motionless.

“Sorry? What was that? What did you say, Katherine?”

He tilted his head, listening.

Tyler's pounding heart suddenly overwhelmed everything around him.

“What do you want me to do?” Jaydon asked. “Really, Katherine? You want me to touch your boobies?”

Justin and Burak doubled over and shrieked with laughter. Tyler and Lawrence didn't laugh, but they did exchange glances, and Tyler thought,
Please stop it; you're way out of line. Don't mock the witch
. Keeping a safe distance, Jaydon cautiously reached his hands forward and pretended he was fondling Katherine's breasts as he bumped and ground his hips obscenely.

“You haven't got the guts,” Burak said, egging him on.

“Oh no? I'd fuck her, all right,” Jaydon said. Suddenly he bent over toward the witch and bellowed into her face, “
You filthy whore! You'd like that, wouldn't you! Dirty cunt! That's how you did it back in your day, huh?
”

Fletcher started howling and sprang forward so suddenly that Lawrence almost fell over. Tyler grabbed the dog by his collar to help control him and yelled, “Jaydon, knock it off!”

Jaydon turned to the others with a foolish grin. “Twenty bucks,” he said. “Twenty bucks for the one who takes a picture of her tit. Naked, I mean. I want to see what a seventeenth-century tit looks like.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” Tyler said. “That is so wrong.”

“Oh, come on,” Jaydon laughed. “I'm sure she wouldn't mind, would you, Katherine? You don't mind, do you?” He scurried around behind her and continued with a high little voice: “No, Tyler, I don't mind at all! In fact I'm getting a little wet just talking about it! You want to come and see for yourself, Tyler? You want to feel how wet my panties are?”

More laughter. Katherine van Wyler endured the humiliation silently, seemingly unaware. Maybe there was no awareness behind those closed eyes, Tyler thought—no human awareness, at any rate. But you couldn't be sure. Maybe Katherine was waiting for her moment, as she had been waiting for centuries in this dormant state. The very idea made Tyler's insides churn.

Jaydon had gone back to the HEXApp on his iPhone when Lawrence suddenly said, “Wait. We can record her.”

They looked at each other. It took three seconds for Tyler to consider the possibility: The dense silence of the woods and the fact that they were out of camera range created an opportunity that wouldn't come again anytime soon. The excitement ignited a blazing flash in him, and he said, “Oh, fuck. Okay, but make it quick.”

They used Fletcher's leash. Tyler let him loose and Lawrence led the dog farther downstream, holding him firmly by the collar. Jaydon handed over his iPhone and, without stopping to think about it, Tyler wrapped the leash around the phone several times and tied it off. Then they knotted it at the far end of the long stick that Jaydon had used to poke the witch.

In the distance they heard the cackling laughter of children. The boys looked around, startled. The sound was coming from the south but carried in a strange way beneath the leaf canopy. Probably hikers. They listened for a while but heard nothing more.

“Come on, quick,” Burak said, and he took the stick from Tyler. “You got this?”

Tyler took the GoPro out of his pocket and began shooting. “Okay, Sunday, October 21. This is the whisper test. Wait…” He took a few steps back. “All right. Go.”

Jaydon turned on the voice recorder on his iPhone and whispered, “Okay, everybody quiet…” Burak raised the stick in the air like a fishing pole and the iPhone swung forward on Fletcher's leash. Moving cautiously, he held it in front of the Black Rock Witch's face. Tyler saw that Burak's hands were trembling and that he was having a hard time keeping the phone still. Then he shifted the fishing pole to the left so the phone smacked into Katherine's cheek with a fleshy thud, right in front of the corner of her mouth with the severed stitch.

For a full minute, no one made a sound. When Burak finally reeled in the fishing pole and Jaydon plucked his iPhone from the air, they all cheered and clapped their hands for another successfully completed stage in their experiment. Yet Tyler was only lukewarm in his enthusiasm; while the others shared their excitement, he had turned off the GoPro. He walked over to Jaydon and they all bowed over his phone with appropriate respect. On the display, the voice recorder asked if he wanted to
PLAY
the file or make a
NEW SAMPLE
.

“This is Katherine's dead-whisper,” Jaydon said, as he gave the phone a portentous shake. His thumb hovered over the touch screen, as if to demonstrate that he had the guts to play the sound file. “This may well be the most dangerous recording in the world. You could kill somebody with this.”

“Yeah, so who's sacrificing himself?” Justin asked. The others laughed, but not convincingly. No one was willing to volunteer for this one.

“Not yet,” Tyler said. “First we find somebody from outside. Then we'll listen, in a secure environment. Jaydon, can you send it to me by Bluetooth? That's a signal they can't pick up.”

“Sure,” Jaydon said, and he sent the sound file. Tyler accepted it on his own phone.

“You gonna put it online?” Burak asked.

“Of course not. This shit is fatal. You don't fuck with it. Delete the file as soon as it's finished sending, okay? I don't want any accidents to happen.”

He glanced sharply at Jaydon and Jaydon grinned back. Then their phones indicated that the file had been transferred. Jaydon tapped his thumb on his screen a few times and said, “Okay, it's gone.”

Jaydon's face brightened and he slipped his phone into his pocket. Tyler imagined himself reaching his hand into that face and feeling nothing but darkness.

*   *   *

A FEW DAYS
later, a new clip is launched on
OYE
. We see the camera zooming in on Tyler's iPhone, making its way through a noisy school auditorium until it stops on a cheerful, strapping seventeen-year-old in a baseball cap and headphones. “Hey, what's up, dude?” he asks, and Tyler says, “Hey, Mike, wanna do me a favor?” Mike smiles at the camera and says, “Sure, we'll pretend you didn't just ask me to listen to your little music clip and that I hadn't already agreed to say, ‘Hey, what's up, dude?'” His friends crack up and Tyler says, “Cool. Let's do it one more time.”

“Hey, what's up, dude?” Mike says, and Tyler says, “Hey, Mike, wanna do me a favor?” Mike grins. “Sure. Is this spontaneous or what?” “Yeah, it really is,” Tyler says. “Hey, Mike, what's up, dude?” “Hey, Tyler, can I do you a favor?”

Everybody is in stitches again, but let's skip to the next shot, where Mike has taken off his headphones and exchanged them for two earbuds attached to Tyler's iPhone. “Mike here, from Highland Falls,” Tyler points out, “is now going to listen to the sound file. You ready for it, Mike?” Mike gives him a thumbs-up and Tyler clicks
PLAY
.

At first, nothing happens. Then Mike winces and pushes the plugs deeper into his ears, as if he has to strain to hear what's being said. Tyler looks on, mesmerized. “What is this, anyway?” Mike asks, but Tyler gestures for him to be quiet and keep on listening.

“So what did you hear?” he asks when the file has played completely and Mike has taken out the earbuds.

“Just some whispers,” Mike says. He looks a little flustered.

“But what did they say?” Tyler presses.

“How should I know? It wasn't English. It wasn't any language I knew. Just jabbering. What is this, one of those messages you play backward and when it enters into your subconscious it actually says, ‘
DIE, MOTHERFUCKER, WORSHIP THE DEVIL, MOTHERFUCKER!
'” He bellows out these last words, to his friends' hysterical laughter. Tyler says, “Yeah, something like that. But … what did you
feel
?” Mike's expression changes to one of contempt, and he says, “What did I feel? Man, what have you been sniffing?”

Tyler turns the camera on himself and says, “Theory confirmed. Subject unharmed—mission accomplished.”

 

TEN

AUTUMN HAD BEEN
mild, but two days before Halloween it suddenly got cold. The old-fashioned mercury thermometer outside the Quiet Man indicated a mere forty degrees, the kind of biting fall chill that hits unexpectedly after a relatively long transitional period of milder temperatures and sinks right into your bones. On October 31 the sky over Black Spring was steely gray and pregnant with rain, which blew around in the upper atmosphere but never really fell.

Early that morning, at the closed-off intersection of Deep Hollow Road and Lower Reservoir Road, along the lower corner of Temple Hill Cemetery, the Wicker Woman was set up: a gigantic reed dummy that would be set afire that night during the festival. People had to climb tall ladders to festoon the dummy with blackened iron chains, which were fished out of the smoldering ashes with pokers every year to be reused the next. Liza Belt's sewing studio donated a tailor-made scarf to tie around the dummy's head, and bunches of straw were stuck into its eyes and mouth. The ritual was older than the residents of Black Spring themselves and due to its heathen character, it was challenged year after year by Colton Mathers and the parish councils of both the Little Methodist Church and St. Mary's Church. And each year the All Hallows Committee triumphed by arguing that they couldn't break with tradition, as burning the Wicker Woman was the highlight of the annual Celebration of the Witch: Black Spring's cover for Katherine in plain sight of the Outsiders who'd flock to the town from all over the county.