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The argument was bogus, of course. The truth was much more primitive: The ritual itself was woven into the community's soul, and no one wanted to do away with it. Whether Christian, Jew, Muslim, or atheist, all the people of Black Spring were equally eager to lawfully circumvent the ban on meddling with Katherine van Wyler at least once a year. That morning, townspeople brought in gifts from every corner of town, each one bigger than the next, and silently shoved them into the opening under the giant Wicker Woman's skirt. Many would touch the dummy nervously as they did so, falling to their knees for a moment or making a sign to ward off the evil eye. Some brought food: Children tossed candy and apples between the woven reeds, parents brought plates of their favorite dishes or baked pies, and there were those who hung strings of garlic from the iron chains. Others brought objects: candles, homemade wickerwork, guest towels, soap, curling tongs, an old Bernette sewing machine, everything that could be sacrificed to Katherine to ensure another year free from doom. There were also gifts of more dubious quality: John Blanchard, the sheep farmer from Ackerman's Corner, showed up with a dead lamb; a young mother from town insisted on burning a plastic bag full of her newborn baby's dirty diapers; and Griselda Holst donated a calf's head, a delicacy especially ordered from the slaughterhouse for the occasion. These artifacts would be provisionally concealed by gifts of a more mundane nature before the first Outsiders arrived.

Steve and Jocelyn Grant were too practical to engage in that sort of idolatry. They had let Matt and Tyler dutifully add a drawing or a carrot to the stake every year when they were younger and watched from the crowd as the Wicker Woman went up in flames. Now the boys were too old to work up any enthusiasm, so the ritual had been shelved along with so many other childhood customs. Steve had always felt a bit uneasy about the symbolism of the burning witch. And even worse, the smoke clung to your clothes for days. He attended the Wicker Burning only for the same reason that he had always been fascinated by the early January Christmas tree bonfires of his youth: because every man gets hypnotized by big fires, and a column of heat in your face was a welcome finish to a bleak fall night.

But that part was yet to come. Black Spring had a lot more in store than just the offering ritual that day.

The kitchen of Griselda's Butchery & Delicacies was a hive of activity that morning. Griselda had hired six extra people to get her traditional goodies delivered to the food stand on the town square on time: potato salad, tapas, roasted meat on the spit, special green witch's stew (pea soup with meatballs) served from a real copper kettle, and, of course, large plates of Griselda's own sour Holst pâté. Griselda wasn't the least bit interested in making money from the event, but any local entrepreneur would have been crazy not to profit from the two-thousand-plus outside visitors that the festival attracted.

After all, she said to herself, it was all in honor of Katherine.

At around three o'clock in the afternoon, when it really started getting crowded, the main streets of Black Spring were closed off and the stands with candy and geegaws formed a horseshoe around Crystal Meth Church and the cemetery. Orange and black ribbons hung from the trees, and carved jack-o'-lanterns were planted on stakes below. The square was full of people dressed as the Black Rock Witch: some with pointy hats and waving broomsticks, others with the more traditional sewn-up eyes. Children got their faces painted and had a ball on the bouncy castle in front of Sue's Highland Diner. Shrieking with delight, they took swings at the papier-mâché witch piñatas that were hanging from the trees and ended up buried in candy, or had themselves weighed on the special witch scales set up on the church square. If a child weighed no more than two ducks—which happened every now and then—he or she would be declared a witch and chased around by a group of pitchfork-brandishing actors from Black Spring dressed in seventeenth-century rags.

Robert Grim found this popular amusement rather corny. A few years ago, by way of experiment, he had submitted a proposal to reintroduce medieval torture games like goose pulling and cat burning (because everybody knew that charred cat cinders were lucky), but it was rejected due to legislation against animal abuse and crude morals. The committee was not amused.

For Grim, October 31 was traditionally the most hectic and exasperating day of the year. Trying to supervise the arrival of so many Outsiders required a good dose of empathy and patience, traits that Robert Grim possessed in scant quantities. In Grim's humble opinion, the people of the Hudson Valley were ill-bred, loud, beer-swilling wife beaters and, worst of all, they lacked the common sense to take full advantage of their geographic location. To the east they had the Hudson to collectively drown themselves in, and to the south they had Bear Mountain State Park, where they could mate unashamedly with beavers and white-tailed deer and effectively implement their own extinction. But so far no one had seized these golden opportunities. For these and other reasons, after doing the obligatory round of inspections with the officials from The Point, Robert Grim spent the rest of the day at his post in the control center, which in turn meant a day of suffering for his colleagues.

The witch—the real one—had decided to stand in the disabled parking space behind Town Hall at a little after eleven-thirty, and there she stayed. The parking space was less than three hundred yards from the center of all the activities as the crow flies, but it was a perfectly workable location. Grim had had the approach to Deep Hollow Road fenced off. Behind Town Hall he had created a fake building site, guarded on all sides by a battery of well-instructed workmen. Katherine herself was enclosed in a toolshed. In the unlikely event that she should join the festivities that day, there were six possible scenarios at hand. The last time something like that had happened was in 2003, before they had acquired the barrel organ. The wench had spent the entire celebration standing imperiously on the town square in front of Sue's. After a heated debate, they had decided to set up a Black Spring billboard behind her and hang a banner that read:
GET YOUR PICTURE TAKEN WITH THE
REAL
WITCH!
After they pinned a button on her that said:
WELCOME TO BLACK SPRING
, no one believed she was real. All the children wanted to have their pictures taken with the funny lady. It turned out to be a relatively safe and especially lucrative business: All the parents gladly paid five bucks to get a shot.

A number of babies had cried pitifully, but that's what babies are for.

Today, however, the festival was smooth sailing. The inspectors from The Point had left, Grim thought of reinforced concrete, and the people partied, the people partied.

At four-fifteen Tyler Grant and his friends sat in the shelter of the hedge near the fountain and the bronze washerwoman statue. They ate cotton candy and stared with unspoken envy at the passing stream of Outsiders. Jaydon was helping out at his mom's food stand that day, but he was on his break and had joined them for a minute.

Lawrence held up five matches. Each drew one and they all revealed them at the same time. Burak had the one with the burned end. It took a few seconds for the truth to sink in: He had been chosen for the whisper test. He cursed. “Right. Let the Turk do the dirty work.”

The others laughed, but their hearts weren't in it. The laughter sounded nervous to Tyler—affected, filled with relief that they hadn't been chosen for the test. A chilly gust of wind stirred the leaves at his feet and the leaden sky seemed like a dome descending over Black Spring. Tyler shivered and pulled his head down into his collar.
All this is going to change real soon now,
he thought.

And it would, but not the way Tyler expected.

At a little before five, as Katherine van Wyler was continuously whispering corrupted words in ancient languages inside the toolshed behind Town Hall, and Fletcher moved restlessly in his sleep two miles away in his kennel, Griselda Holst stealthily withdrew from the festivities. She hurried across the cemetery to the back of Crystal Meth Church. No one noticed when she opened the heavy wooden door to the chancel with a skeleton key, slipped inside, and shut out the din of the celebrations. Hands on the cold walls, Griselda went down the spiral staircase, descending deeper and deeper into the foul smell of old stone, moldering wood, seeping water, and human disease. An unpleasant chill crept from the walls into Griselda's joints: In the vaults beneath the church it was always winter, and always night.

Arthur Roth was slumped against the bars of his cell, and Griselda knew in an instant that he was dead. He was naked, and in the light of the bulbs on the wall, his skin had taken on the purple, pallid color of dead fish, stretched taut across his emaciated rib cage. Roth lay in his own excrement, one hand limply cuffed to the bars, the veins on his arm like exposed power cables.

Griselda's heart was racing, but even so, she was strangely relieved. Now that her ordeal was finally over, she wouldn't have to go down that ghastly stairway anymore to feed him or hose him off or listen to his insane cackling echoing from the vaulted ceiling, as if the space beneath the church were teeming with lost souls. Griselda felt no shame, only the slow, endless drizzle that always saturated her mind. She hadn't starved him; she had only followed Mathers's orders. She had done her duty to serve Katherine.

She took a broom from the utility room and stuck the handle through the bars, poking Roth's body. He remained limp. Griselda looked around, seized by a sudden panic. She froze, realizing she was alone in the dark below the church with the dead body of Arthur Roth—his
presumably
dead body. Common sense told her she ought to make sure, but doubt made her thoughts run wild, turned reason into foolishness and logic into a dream. It was the same irrational doubt she had felt years ago, in the silent echoes after Jim had beaten her up or forced himself on her. She groped for the key ring, and that simple act helped her to get a grip on herself.

Griselda opened the cell and warily knelt beside the cold, starved body, pressing her scarf to her mouth against the stench. It was not anxiety she felt when she realized the man was still breathing, but a vulnerable kind of wonder.
He's still alive,
she thought. And when Arthur Roth opened his eyes and his hand snapped around her wrist like a trap, she didn't even have time to scream.

Oh, there was screaming, all right: children being chased by witches and carny folk, teenagers being thrown from the bucking rodeo bronco, the elderly competing at horseshoes, and all their shrill screams rose high above the streets of Black Spring, where the low-hanging mist distorted it into dissonant whispers. “You filthy slut,” whispered Arthur Roth, hypothermic and starving, but far from dead. “I'm going to screw you,” he whispered, and he clasped Griselda to him with his legs and pinched her breast hard with his free hand. Aboveground, people danced to the old folk tunes played by the fiddlers' quartet—Griselda could hear the muted sounds make their way through the air vent as she faintly, distantly calculated her chances, no matter how slight. She found herself outside time, and his eager hand, tearing at her blouse, could hurt her no more; Jim's hands could hurt her no more; he was dead and she smelled cotton candy and popcorn, roasted poultry, and sausages in oil.

And at ten past five, as Steve Grant and his youngest son, Matt, ambled among the throngs of people at the fair and ate freshly baked churros from grease-stained paper bags; and as Griselda Holst grabbed the broomstick in a supreme effort and brought it down again and again on Arthur Roth's bleeding head in the vault beneath Crystal Meth Church, screaming the name of her husband with every blow, an unusually large owl descended on the church's spire. It was a magnificent bird, and from its great height it spied on the crowds with superhuman concentration, as if it were observing rats in a trap. Not many people saw the bird in the gathering dusk, but those who did would later claim to have heard the sound of mighty wings as it flew away, and they identified the owl on the Cross of God as an omen of impending disaster.

 

ELEVEN

MATT ASTOUNDED STEVE
by leaving an offering after all; when they crossed the intersection, he walked up to the Wicker Woman, took a pennant out of his coat, and put it on the pyre with all the other gifts. Though not condemning Matt's action, Steve was shocked. If Matt had tossed a couple of churros under her skirt, it would have been an impulsive adolescent prank, but he had brought the pennant from home.

“What did you do that for?” he asked when Matt came back.

“No reason,” Matt said matter-of-factly. “Just wanted to give Gramma something.”

“But why one of your pennants? You won it in a contest; it's a keepsake for later on.”

Matt shrugged. “This is the one from preliminaries, when I had just come back from that injury, remember? Nuala wasn't broken in yet and I came in fourteenth. Then it was summer vacation, and after that I went to junior high, and things got a lot better.” He hesitated, then added, “Besides, if you sacrifice something that isn't important to you, what's the point?”

Steve looked at him in amazement. He wondered what had driven Matt to this sudden, foolish expression of superstition. Apparently the pennant symbolized the low Matt had hit a year and a half ago; by burning it he would gain closure and ward off similar bad luck for the future. Steve got the idea, and strictly speaking, he shouldn't have been surprised that such superstition had cropped up in his own family, considering where they lived. He had just never noticed it before.

“
Is
there a point?” he finally asked, raising an eyebrow.

But Matt surprised him again by saying, “Does it matter?”

No,
thought Steve.
Not as long as it means something to you. People find hope, comfort, or confidence in making the sign of the cross or not walking under a ladder, just as you find hope and confidence in offering a pennant to the witch. Magic exists in the minds of those who believe in it, not in its actual influence on reality. Even my thirteen-year-old son, who has to accept the fact that reality in Black Spring bends just a little differently than it does anywhere else, seems to understand that. Who can claim to know his own children?