HEX (17 page)

The Wicker Burning started at six. The surrounding stands had been cleared and taken down by order of the fire department, and The Point to Point Inn had collapsed its canopy. People crowded into the streets in endless rows behind the fence, which had been placed in a wide circle around the Wicker Woman. The audience spread out at least fifty yards in all directions to witness the spectacle. Steve and Matt had found a pretty good spot on Deep Hollow Road. Jocelyn texted that she was standing farther back. She had gone to the market with Mary VanderMeer, but Steve couldn't find them in the crowd. He had no idea where Tyler was.

The crowd observed a moment of silence and prayer. Then the executioner stepped forward with a leather hood over his head, holding a burning torch aloft. He roared gravely—
Ten points for character development,
Steve thought—and set fire to the gasoline-soaked mound of offerings at the foot of the Wicker Woman. The flames licked at the reeds for a few seconds but soon blazed upward, and a sigh of awe ran through the crowd. Simultaneously, the fiddlers struck up a rousing melody, and within the fences a group of folk dancers twirled around the burning witch like druids.

For eight minutes she burned, and, at their peak, the flames rose higher than the rooftops of the surrounding houses, reaching up like grasping fingers. Then the Woman tilted backward, her face to the sky as if in one last godless incantation, and collapsed. Sparks swirled in the cold October evening. When the fire department finally directed the crowds to move back in order to let the pile of blackened ash smolder, their clothes already stank of smoke.

The PA system switched on and Steve recognized the voice of Lucy Everett, one of the regular collaborators at HEX and chairman of the All Hallows Committee: “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, with this fantastic spectacle our wonderful celebration has come to an end! To make the cleanup easier, the bars and restaurants around the square will now close. You can go back to the parking lot on Route 293 by following the fire department's instructions. Your buses will be waiting for you there. Have a super duper Halloween and a safe trip home, and we'll see you next year!”

Steve hid his smile while the crowds of Outsiders slowly began to disperse for a night of trick-or-treating and Halloween parties in Highland Falls, Highland Mills, and Fort Montgomery. It was an ingenious diversion, but he detected the implicit order between the lines. The pretext of the fire department closing the town's bars and restaurants at 6:30 on the most lucrative day of the year … you may as well say:
Get in your bus and get the fuck out or we'll set our wild dogs on you
. But because Lucy managed to act like an overly enthusiastic employee of the local community center, no one doubted her integrity, and the crowds filed out neatly as they were told. Steve knew that coordinating the send-off was a detailed process meticulously organized by HEX. The surveillance cams ran overtime; nothing could be left to chance. The market closed, downtown died out. At about eight o'clock, the last bone-chilled teens making out in the woods would be chased away, and by nine Black Spring would be back in the hands of Black Spring.

And there was no trick-or-treating here.

On their way home, Steve and Matt bumped into Jocelyn and Pete and Mary VanderMeer. At the house they found Tyler, Lawrence, and Burak, and that's where Steve first heard the rumor that something serious had happened. Tyler read out a PM from Jaydon Holst: “Arthur Roth dead as a dodo. OMG all that blood, fucking sick!” The journalist in Tyler absorbed this information and went on a roll. “That means he saw it, right? He hasn't replied since, but maybe HEX is intercepting his messages.…” Steve and Pete exchanged glances, but refrained from theorizing for the time being. They kept an eye on the HEXApp for updates, and Steve went out to walk Fletcher.

At nine-twenty, HEX gave the green light and they all bundled into two cars for the traditional closing of the Halloween festivities: the public Council meeting at Town Hall. Only Matt stayed home, despite his fierce protests; the meeting was closed to anyone under sixteen.

In the slow procession of seven or eight hundred townspeople making its way through the ID checks, rumors ran rampant. Steve greeted a few friends, shook their hands, and shrugged when they asked him questions. He was surprised to spot Burt and Bammy Delarosa, hidden away in long, dark-gray coats, their arms wrapped around each other.

“How's it going?” he asked.

“We're hanging in there,” Burt said. “We just came from the celebration. Quite memorable, I must say. So we figured we might as well take in the entire Black Spring experience.”

Steve smiled and leaned in. “Keep your eyes open,” he said with a muffled voice. It was the most sincere advice he could think of. “It may be pretty intense tonight, but don't get too involved. They know you're newbies. You've got a lot against you right from the start.”

Steve, Jocelyn, and Tyler found seats in the sixth row from the stage, to the left of the center aisle. Pete and Mary sat down beside them, the Delarosas one row back and a little to the left. Steve noticed that the sign advertising local businesses, which was usually right behind the podium, had been replaced by a placard that read:
LET US TRUST IN GOD AND EACH OTHER
. Struck by unbridled cynicism, he was suddenly reminded of the run-in he had had with Tyler.
Come out of the closet?
he thought.
Maybe if Easter and Halloween come to fall on the same day and Colton Mathers breaks into a lively round of “Walpurgis Night.”

A little before ten, the subdued buzzing died down and the mayor took the floor. He invited the members of the Council to take their places at the panel table—only six of them, as Griselda Holst was absent due to illness. Steve tried to catch Pete's eye, but his neighbor was looking with derision at the stage, where the mayor was helping Colton Mathers to his place behind the podium, and where Robert Grim had also found a seat. Pete had once confided in Steve, the two of them sitting on the sociologist's back porch, that in his humble opinion the administrative order of Black Spring was the greatest pantomime since the tribunal of Pontius Pilate that had convicted Jesus Christ.

“Good,” the mayor said. “I would like to turn the proceedings over to Mr. Mathers, who will open the meeting with the traditional passage from Psalm 91.”

It was so quiet in the auditorium you could hear a pin drop. The old councilman, patriarch of the community, began to speak in a solemn monotone. The man exuded a strange sort of magnetism; even Steve was aware of it. It was as if he were sucking all the available air out of the hall. Mathers was old, but not in a fragile way. He was massive, like a cathedral. “‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High,'” he intoned, “‘shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.' Ladies and gentlemen, it is my duty to inform you that Arthur Roth, detained beneath Little Methodist Church for repeatedly violating the Black Spring Emergency Decree, passed away earlier today of cardiac arrest. God rest his soul.”

There was a moment of charged silence, then a frenzied cheer rose up from the crowd. People began to applaud. Others looked around with contorted, uncertain faces. “He's finally dead, the swine!” someone yelled, and this was met with laughter.

Pete bent over to Steve and whispered, “He's lying through his teeth.”

“Right,” the mayor said. “Let this be the first item on the agenda. Since the case of Mr. Roth is a town matter and we've always treated it as such, I feel it would be good to continue to regard it as a town matter. As far as we know, Arthur Roth has no family or relatives, neither inside nor outside our community. Because of his unrelenting threats to pervert the day-to-day running of things here in Black Spring, we were forced to pass a ruling—democratically, of course—to sequester him from society. Unfortunately, his presumed brain fever was never cured. The question now is what to do with his body.”

“Burn the motherfucker!” someone yelled.

“Yeah, offer him up to the Wicker Woman!”

New laughter erupted.

“Well, we can't just go out and burn somebody, can we?” the mayor said, punctuating his words with the kind of pompous laugh reserved for government officials after telling a not-quite-successful joke that's doomed to die a painful death. Yet the people in the audience didn't care. In the glow of the lights hanging from the roof beams, they looked feverish and forbidding, like obsessed townsfolk from times past. Steve saw Robert Grim looking at the audience with deep revulsion and was suddenly filled with a similar horror.

Gripped by an impulse, Steve stood up and said, “Was he seen by a doctor?”

The murmuring stopped and the mayor looked at him quizzically, clearly thrown off-balance. Steve felt the gaze of hundreds of townspeople focus on him and he cleared his throat. “I mean, I was just wondering whether his death has been officially recorded on a death certificate.”

“Oh, he's dead, all right, I guarantee it,” said the mayor.

That's not the same thing,
Steve thought. “I understand that, but only a doctor can determine the cause of death with any certainty. I've heard from someone directly involved that the way he died was rather bloody.” A disconcerted sigh rose from the audience, which gave Steve the self-confidence to continue. “As a doctor, I don't see how that would be consistent with cardiac arrest. The person directly involved is Jaydon Holst, son of Council member Griselda Holst, who was given the task of taking care of Roth. And who now, on the day of his death, appears to be sick. Given the fact that this is a town matter, I'm sure you won't mind telling us exactly what happened?”

A buzzing of approval. Tyler gazed up at his dad with something close to idolization, which did not leave Steve unmoved. Meanwhile, up on the stage, the mayor was looking to Colton Mathers for help.

Mathers chose his words carefully: “Mrs. Holst did indeed find him dead in his cell. She is extremely upset, which is why she is not with us tonight, and I don't think anyone can fault her for that. Mr. Roth had undressed himself and had inflicted serious injuries upon himself in several places, but I will not elaborate on the details. Mrs. Holst panicked and first called her son, then me. When I arrived, I determined that a combination of blood loss and hypothermia had led to cardiac arrest, which resulted in death.”

A pretty fucking obvious example of quackery,
Steve thought. He, too, had put all the pieces together, and had come up with a similar scenario, except his differed from Mathers's account on one significant point: If Griselda Holst had just found Roth dead, it wouldn't have made sense for her to call her son first. Griselda was a strong woman, toughened by her sad history of domestic violence, and it was hard for Steve to imagine her panicking. If she had been thinking rationally, she would have called Mathers and never involved her son. But that's exactly what she
did
do, and so she
had
panicked. Something else must have happened down there.

And besides, if hypothermia had played a role, under what conditions were you keeping him prisoner beneath the house of God?

Steve's hands went moist and clammy and he noticed the sour taste of doubt in his mouth. He was still on his feet when the truth suddenly got through to him. The vast majority of townsfolk looking up at him from their seats were living under constant pressure and in unbridled fear of what was out there on the streets.
How far will they go?
Steve thought.
What might they be capable of if the pressure builds too much?
Maybe the rumors were true and they
had
starved Roth to death. Maybe things had gotten nasty in some other way today, even before such a stage had been reached. Did it matter? It was still a Black Spring affair, and the consequences were the same.

No,
a headstrong and idealistic part of him insisted.
We still have human dignity. That stays intact, even if everything around us falls apart.

“I just think he deserves a proper autopsy like anybody else. That's all,” Steve said, and he sat down. Jocelyn grabbed his hand and squeezed it gently.

“Duly noted,” the mayor said. “The problem is that we cannot declare Arthur Roth legally dead because he no longer legally exists. It would only raise a host of questions. The Council has passed a resolution—six yeas and one nay—to bury him anonymously and dishonorably, without a tombstone and outside the cemetery grounds.” An outburst of exultant cheering. “However, as behooves a democratic community, I would like to put this to the vote by means of—”

“Doctor Grant is right!” Pete VanderMeer shouted suddenly, rising from his seat. The mayor frowned, but despite the power of his office, he was not able to muster the authority to quell the interruption. “Are you really asking us, in the name of democracy, to vote to whisk away a dead body so we can all wash our hands in innocence? That's not democracy, that's a popular tribunal.”

“What difference does it make?” a surly-looking man on the other side of the aisle said. “We need to get rid of him one way or another. And he doesn't deserve any better.”

“But it's a farce!” Pete said. “Come on, people, we're not barbarians, are we? If we go down that road, we're one step away from a lynch mob.”

“So what do you want to do with him?” the man on the other side of the aisle yelled contemptuously. “Hand him over to the authorities?”