HEX (22 page)

He dismissed the thought. Jocelyn took the boys inside and Steve walked to the stable to get the shovel. Paladin and Nuala snorted restlessly when he came in—quietly and consolingly in a strangely nostalgic way, as horses do. He hugged them and went back out to fill in the grave.

*   *   *

IT'S A LITTLE
after four when Robert Grim returns, bearing bad news like the prophet of doom from an ancient Greek tragedy. Except this bad news comes in the form of a video fragment. “The only fragment we've been able to find from all the Mount Misery security cams,” Grim says, “but it tells it all. I thought you guys ought to see it.”

They gather around the coffee table with the MacBook in front of them and Grim clicks
PLAY
. First it's hard to make out what we're seeing; we seem to be looking at a hazy photo negative. Then Steve realizes that these are infrared images. There's moisture on the lens, which blurs the image somewhat, yet in the dark anthracite tints he can still distinguish trees, and something that's clearly a trail. At the bottom of the image are the numbers: 2012/11/02, 8:57 p.m.
Yesterday,
Steve says to himself.

What the footage shows next is so frightening that his whole body turns ice cold. Everyone is startled, but Tyler most of all: He recoils, biting the palm of his hand, and tears fill his eyes. Two figures appear, pale white and luminous in night vision: the witch, striding like a phantom at a masked ball, with Fletcher at her side. The dog sniffs here and there, even wagging his tail a little. Steve realizes why this seemingly innocent image is so appalling: None of them has ever seen Katherine acting
determined
before. Until this image, showing the two walking together into the night, side by side, to meet Fletcher's death.

“This is extremely alarming, you understand,” Grim says. “I've consulted with the Council and we're trying to keep this under wraps to avoid public unrest, but we're baffled. This is something completely new. Did anything happen to Fletcher that could have provoked this? If so, I need to know, guys.”

Jocelyn and Steve slowly shake their heads. “He's usually scared stiff of her,” Jocelyn says, deeply shocked. “Look at how he just walks along with her.…”

“It's all
your
fault!” Matt suddenly explodes. “You didn't give her anything!” As Steve looks at him in bewilderment, he adds, “At the Wicker Burning! You didn't want to offer anything to her, and now she's taken Fletcher!”

“That's completely unrelated,” Steve says. “How can you even think something like that?”

“What do
you
know?” Matt is crying, and he pulls himself away from his mother. Steve sees Grim's distressed expression and he thinks,
This is only the beginning. We'll be hearing a lot more of this crap reasoning in the days to come. The impulse to point the finger, to assign a scapegoat. If this gets out, we're in deep shit. You know that, don't you?

“Tyler? Did anything happen with Fletcher that you know of?”

Tyler shakes his head rapidly, lips trembling.

“You didn't run across
her
while you were taking him out?”

“No.”

Steve gives him a probing look and says, “If anything bad happened, please tell us, okay? This is about our safety.”

“He's right,” Grim chimes in. “Don't worry. If you guys have been messing around like you did with that video you made, I won't tell the Council. Of course you never wanted this to happen. I just have to know about it. Something very serious is going on, do you understand that?”

There are tears in Tyler's eyes and his lips are trembling even more, and maybe, just maybe, they've pushed him so far that he's going to say something—but then there's a loud crash, and it will be a very long time before anyone thinks back to this moment again, the moment
before
the moment that would cause all the others to be forgotten. Steve has just enough time to turn his head toward where the noise came from—the sound of heavy wood violently slamming into the ground—and he sees, through the French dining room doors, through the window to the backyard, something that his brain cannot fully comprehend. He sees a horse stampeding toward him. He sees straining muscles. He sees foam on black flanks, he sees rolling eyes, he sees flailing hooves. Like exploding crystal, the window is pulverized, and through the curtain of glass shards Paladin comes leaping into the dining room. The horse skids across the dining room table, which crashes to the floor as its legs give way. Paladin's legs also collapse and the horse rolls over on his flank, mad with fear. His hooves trample splinters from the interior French doors.

The Grant family and Robert Grim dive for cover as if bombs are falling. No one screams; the violence with which the bolting horse has appeared seems to have sucked all the oxygen from the room. Then the animal rears up, graceful, surreal, decapitating the dining room lamp, and Jocelyn and Matt dart forward in a spontaneous effort to rein the stallion in. But Paladin isn't the only one who has broken out of the stables; at that very moment, and in a blind panic, Nuala gallops through the backyard gate, around the house, and heads in a westerly direction down Deep Hollow Road. It's sheer luck that there isn't any traffic—lucky for the traffic and lucky for Nuala. Several surveillance cameras record her movements: first the one near the parking lot at the trailhead where Philosopher's Creek ends, then the one on the corner of Patton Street. Inside the house, Jocelyn and Matt are finally able to calm down the confused stallion. The animal snorts and knocks over chairs, but Jocelyn's stern voice is getting through. Steve helps Robert Grim to his feet, and he is convinced that if his heart were to go any faster, his rib cage would burst apart.

All around them, people come out of their houses. The VanderMeers—Pete, Mary, and Lawrence—hurry over, and so do the Wilsons across the street, and many others. The HEX cams show how they're drawn to the Grant home like a magnet, then to the area behind it. In the control center, Warren Castillo and Claire Hammer look at the screen with open mouths. They watch as Steve, Tyler, and Grim emerge, too, to see what it was that spooked the horses so badly. Claire quickly switches over to a new camera and feels herself becoming sick.

The image shows a small group crowded together on the sandy bed of Philosopher's Creek.

Swirling in the dark oozing water are unmistakable trails of blood.

 

FOURTEEN

THAT SUNDAY THE
silver bell over the door of Griselda's Butchery & Delicacies didn't stop ringing. Usually Griselda was closed on Sundays, but today she got it in her mind to do her community duty and open the lunchroom for the anxious townsfolk who had attended church services in droves and now needed to talk about what was going on.

It was a sunny autumn day, refreshingly cold and with a pale but intense light that was reflected in the puddles along the streets. Yet a gloominess had fallen over Black Spring that could be read in people's faces. They shied away from the hills that morning, haunted by the polluted smell of the woods and streams that hung so heavily in the air. To Griselda they looked like people on the run: making their way to Crystal Meth or St. Mary's, drawn by the sound of the carillon and compelled by the need to share their fear and faith with one another. Rules strictly prohibited both the Reverend and the Father from preaching about Katherine—there might be Outsiders in attendance—but they got around the rules by encouraging their parishioners not to give in to the “terror by night” and to “put their trust in the Lord God.” At least that's what Mrs. Talbot, one of Griselda's early customers, said, because Griselda and God weren't really on the same wavelength and she had spent the entire morning in the kitchen making preparations for a busy lunchtime. According to Mrs. Talbot, someone in the church choir had risen up from the pew when Reverend Newman was pronouncing the benediction and shouted, “This is hogwash! Why don't you talk about what's really goin' on and what we oughta do about it?” The voice had broken off and dissolved into a sob, and the people had exchanged anxious glances and kept their thoughts to themselves.

But at Griselda's, they were eager to speak their minds. The bloody creek and the death of the dog were the talk of the day, but even in that intense climate the townsfolk didn't forget what the poor butcher's wife had had to put up with recently, and they all came over to buy her meat. They bought it and they ate it. It was as if they were saying:
Give us your meat, Griselda, and let us eat; give us your meat and we will share your burden.…

“Who the hell could have rattled Katherine so much?” Mrs. Strauss asked out loud while munching on her warm mutton sandwich.

Some of the guests muttered distractedly and whispered names. Old Mr. Pierson's frail but firm hand grabbed Griselda as she passed by. “It's that damn Internet,” he said, his masticating jaws pulverizing the meatball on his fork. “I always told you: nothing good will come of it. What are we going to do when it's not a dog but one of us, next time?”

A number of old folks nodded in agreement, but there was sneering laughter as well. Griselda handed the old man a napkin (after unconsciously dabbing at the sweat on her forehead), as there was thick gravy dripping down his chin.

The Schaeffer woman, wife of the surgeon, was already waiting at the counter. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, “you have so much to put up with. Such a brave soul. Gimme a slice of that Holst pâté, and make it a nice thick one today.” Usually Griselda loathed Mrs. Schaeffer, but she noticed that the woman was clutching her little bag with white knuckles and that her fingers were trembling as she handed over the money. The poor creature was scared to death.

Give us your meat, Griselda, and let us eat; give us your meat and we'll all get through this together,…

Griselda was also out of sorts, and all those folks in her lunchroom just made her more jittery. It had only been four days since that Arthur Roth mess and she hadn't yet recovered from the shock. And now there was this new rumpus.

They held a crisis meeting of the Council. The last time she had seen Colton Mathers, he had taken her in hand and whispered gently but urgently, “Calm down, Griselda. You've done well. It was a natural death. No one ever has to know.” This time they were on the bank of Philosopher's Creek, the entire Council along with a number of the HEX staff looking silently at the stream, afraid to get even one step closer to the cursed water. Blood welled up from the bottom of the creek in several places and swirled around lazily like trails of red ink. There was too little to saturate the water, but rusty deposits were already forming on the banks. The phenomenon, unnatural and blasphemous, possessed a dark magnetism, and the sight of it made Griselda shiver.

What had happened that had caused Katherine to express her dissatisfaction so strongly? Like many of the townsfolk, Griselda was obsessed with the idea that she herself was at the root of it. The difference was that, in Griselda's case, it had to be true. Last night she lay awake, tossing and turning. The sheet had irritatingly crept up between her buttocks and she was surrounded by the penetrating smell of her own sweat. More and more she had convinced herself that she was failing somehow, that Katherine was personally singling her out and might appear in her bedroom at any moment with open, milky eyes, silently pointing her finger at her.…

Even now, while she cleaned the coffee machine in broad daylight, the thought made her feel queasy.

There was a disturbance in the street and the whispering in the lunchroom died down. Griselda peeked outside. In front of the cemetery, a small group of people were swarming around sheep farmer John Blanchard, who was making wide gestures with one hand and holding one of those small, flat computer thingies with the other—a tablet, they called it. Griselda slapped her dishtowel over her shoulder and stood in the doorway. The little bell jingled over her head.

Believe it or not, the sheep farmer was actually preaching. “Damnation! Damnation! Didn't I warn you all when lights appeared in the night sky earlier this month, and isn't it true that the witch has now killed the doctor's dog? I told you, but you wouldn't listen. Isn't it true that owls have been flying during the day, that she made the earth bleed, and that the doctor's horses have run wild?”

“Yeah,” one of his listeners chimed in. “Isn't this all the fault of that Dr. Grant with that blarney he talks?”

“No,” said John Blanchard, “for the wrath is not his alone to bear. My sheep have been restless since the birth of the Two-Headed Lamb. They refuse to eat. Didn't the Lord say to Jeremiah that the people would be punished because their ancestors had forsaken Him? And didn't He say that the punishment would have four faces: the plague, the sword, famine, and, uh … eh…” The sheep farmer touched the screen of his tablet. When it didn't respond, he tapped it several more times irritably. “Exile!”

Liza Belt, the tailor, came over to Griselda and said, “If they've gone and published the Old Testament as an e-book, too, I will personally eat my mother's big family Bible. Good grief, is that John Blanchard?”

“Yes,” Griselda said, “and he has followers.”

Blanchard's voice was vigorous and resonant, and the fact that he was preaching doom with the local, trusted Highland accent made it more uncanny than corny. “Confess your sins and glorify Him—that's the only way to ward off the Evil Eye, good people. Adulterers, reveal yourselves! Homosexuals, reveal yourselves! Pedophiles, foreigners, brother-killers, reveal yourselves and confess thy sins! Let us sing together…” He tapped the screen a few more times and lost his temper. “Does anybody know how this cocksuckin' thing works?”

“You have to get a real one, not some garbage from Best Buy,” somebody from the crowd said.