HEX (37 page)

Past the golf course, bearing off to the right up Deep Hollow Road. Crossing the creek, into the driveway. The house stood empty in the December sunshine, holding its breath. They carried the bags to the front door and Jocelyn laughed at his awkward struggle to haul all the bags and stick the key in the lock at the same time. Steve knew what was coming now. She kissed him, and the Walmart bag slipped from under his left arm and hit the ground, out of reach. Jocelyn leaned over to help him, said he was lucky it hadn't been the Christmas tree balls. Laughter broke the silence in the house—a silence they had become accustomed to since Fletcher wasn't there to jump all over them, wagging his tail and barking like the good dog he was.

The hallway; the stairs. Oh, God, the stairs.

What waited for them upstairs, now only forty seconds away.

Jocelyn went on to the dining room to open the mail, Steve to the kitchen to fill up the freezer. At that moment, a sudden draft stopped him dead in his tracks, and he looked up. Steve wasn't superstitious, but he knew that everyone was endowed with certain biorhythmic qualities that functioned like premonitions, and it was as if he could already hear the distant shrieks from the torture chamber. That draft, that gust of whirling air, was the steady swing of the pendulum, now just inches above him, and only seven hours later Steve would lie in Tyler's bedroom wrestling and writhing to free himself from the leather straps that bound him to the rack.

He closed the freezer door and picked up the bags of presents. Back to the hallway, up the stairs. Steve tried to cry out to him:
Get the fuck away from there, only twelve more seconds, twelve seconds and everything is going to come to an end, now only ten, ten seconds and the blade will have descended far enough to …

But he didn't listen. He walked up the stairs … because he didn't know.

He had thought there would be enough time before dinner to go for a short run.

The door to the bedroom opened and Pete VanderMeer came in. He was startled when he saw Steve sitting on the floor beside Tyler's bed. What Steve didn't know was that most of the blood vessels in his eyeballs had burst, shrouding his eyes in a red film.

“No, get the hell out of here, this is bullshit,” Pete said. He pulled Steve up by the arm. Steve wanted to protest, wanted to keep the air that Tyler's lungs had exhaled that same morning from entering Pete's lungs, or worse, from escaping through the door; because Tyler was
his, he
wanted to make sure that air was preserved. He wanted to keep Tyler alive.

“Now, listen to me: You're in no condition to make decisions, so you're going to do as I say. We're going to the hospital. Your wife is in bad shape. Mary is doing all she can, but you need each other, now more than ever.”

He directed him out of Tyler's room, touching Tyler's door where Tyler had left his fingerprints. Steve willingly let himself be led out, mainly because Pete had to be removed before he erased all traces of Tyler's presence.

“I'll stay with you guys so Mary can come home and get some sleep. Lawrence is with Mary's parents in Poughkeepsie. She didn't want him…”

 …
to be here in Black Spring,
Steve heard himself completing the sentence. A vicious jolt shot right through his heart.
Good idea. If she got Tyler, it stands to reason that Lawrence is next, right?

Pete took him to the landing, and for the second time that day, Steve was confronted with the sight of his youngest, that delightfully happy kid who could sometimes drive him up the wall, but who was now halfway down the hallway, sitting on the floor, his head thrown back. He had sealed his own eyes with Liquid Nails construction adhesive and his mouth was twisted in a horrible, silver smile. That was because it was stuffed with death caps. Matt was drooling. Chunks of the poisonous toadstool were dribbling down his shirt. He was trapped in the middle of a fairy ring that was growing through the cracks in the floorboards, and it was as if he thought the only way to free himself was to eat them all.
But every time he picked one, a new toadstool popped up in its place and the ring closed around him once again.

The caulking gun lay outside the ring on the floor.

Matt had witnessed something that had stripped him of his sanity in a single, dazzling stroke.

Steve turned around and, quite consciously, felt the steel of the pendulum slice his body in half. He felt himself voiding, as if his intestines had fallen out through the hole, but it wasn't anything physical that slid away from him; it was everything he had ever been up to this point. The sensation was so real that it almost made him laugh.

Tyler had hanged himself with a length of rope from the stable. He had thrown it over the crossbeam, wrapped it around his neck, and kicked the stool away. The fall had had little effect and had not broken his neck. Instead, death had come slowly and painfully, had taken him with his full consciousness intact.

Dry traces of tears ran from his glazed, swollen eyes. There was horror on his death mask, and a deep, dark sorrow.

And only now did Steve see Katherine van Wyler standing erect and gaunt behind the dangling corpse—the Black Rock Witch, who, like the Red Death, had come like a thief in the night, and now he knew, now he knew for sure: Tyler, his son, his Tyler, was dead.

As Pete VanderMeer led him across the landing seven hours later, he began to scream.

 

TWENTY-FOUR

NOT SENDING MATTHEW
Grant straight to St. Luke's in Newburgh was the most difficult decision of his career, but Robert Grim took the responsibility and accepted the consequences. The absolute low in a nightmare of already unprecedented proportions was only reached when Jocelyn, screaming, was pulled from the stairway over and over again while Steve sat downstairs at the dining room table and stared into the void with such ghastly concentration that it seemed as if his entire brain had simply been erased.

It was Mary VanderMeer who had called Grim. He and Warren arrived at the Grant house only three minutes later, just as Walt Stanton, the GP, was pulling up—
Here again,
he thought with a shiver, as if the curse was somehow concentrated on that particular place and had now reached full power. Pete told him that he and his wife had been startled by the terrible screaming and had immediately come over to help out. Not that there was much they could do, but at least they had pulled the parents away from their dead son, and that was good.

Matt was lying on his back on the marble countertop and Mary and Jocelyn were pouring cold water from the tap over his face. When Stanton saw the remains of the toadstools in the sink he asked sharply whether Matt had ingested them. Without waiting for an answer he flipped the boy on his belly and stuck his finger down his throat to make him vomit.

In a flash, Grim saw Matt's eyes.

Oh, Jesus, those eyes.

The opaque, ivory-colored plastic layer made it seem as if his eyeballs had been punctured with needles, had drained out, and then congealed again in their sockets.

While Warren helped with Matt, Grim ran up the stairs, and that's where his emotions set out on their flight of madness. Tyler Grant, that charming, sympathetic local boy, a mere teenager, had hanged himself from the crossbeam. The reason was instantly clear: She was standing right behind the dangling body. Abruptly Grim's field of vision turned pearl gray. All sound was muted; Jocelyn's wailing faded into the distance. He bit his tongue viciously and waited for the world to swim back into focus. He forced himself to flip the switch. Grief would have to wait; right now the important thing was to secure everyone's safety.

Stanton climbed the stairs two steps at a time and slapped his hand over his mouth. “Sweet Jesus. Oh, sweet Jesus.”

Tyler's bare feet hung a yard above the floorboards, toes down, Katherine's dirty, bedraggled dress behind them.

“What do you usually do in cases like this?” Grim asked.

Stanton looked at him, shocked, failing to grasp what he was saying.

“Suicide, I mean.”

“Oh.” Stanton shook his head vacantly, running his hand through his hair. “I'll have to report it to the district attorney. The state troopers will want to carry out an investigation, certainly after what happened to his brother.”

“Right, but
she'll
have to be gone first.”

Stanton looked with loathing at the perfect fairy ring of toadstools, which were growing from the cracks between the floorboards halfway across the landing. Grim hadn't even noticed them … and the sight so horrified him that his flesh began to creep and his legs began to stagger. He summoned all his strength to force his reason and intuition to focus on what needed to be done.

“Those are death caps,” Stanton said. “Robert, I've got to get that boy to the hospital.”

“Impossible. If you take him in like this they'll call in the troopers right away. If we don't report it along with Tyler's suicide, they'll suspect parental abuse and start making inquiries.”

“But he's got to go to the hospital!” Stanton almost shouted. “I don't know how much he's eaten, but that fungus is deadly. And those eyes—”

“Take him to your office and do the best you can do for him.”

“You know I can't do that. I've sworn an oath as a physician.”

“And I've sworn an oath as the HEX chief of security. I'm taking responsibility. Do what I say: Help his little brother.”

“I
can't
do anything for him at home! What if it takes three hours for her to go away? That kid is in mortal danger! These people have already lost one son, Robert.”

Grim's eyes passed over the dark spot in the crotch of Tyler's jeans. In dying, the boy had released his bladder. Grim turned away. Why did it have to be so cruel, so undignified? It was beyond him. Nevertheless, he finally felt the familiar calm descend on him that he recognized from his years of dealing with fucked-up, hectic situations, which allowed him to turn off his morality with only a dim, oppressive sense of pain, like anesthesia wearing off. Stanton couldn't do that. What bothered him probably wasn't the idea of breaking his oath with the AMA—risky as that was—but the terrible truth of what had happened. Grim grabbed his shoulders. “Listen, Walt. Don't you think I wish there was another way out of this mess? But in emergency situations, the interest of the town comes before the interest of individuals, you know that. We have no choice. We can only hope that the parents don't catch on. I'll let you know as soon as we're done here. Now, hurry up and get going. I don't care how you do it, but save the boy, for God's sake.”

Stanton remained where he was for two seconds, torn by doubt, but then he did something unexpected: He walked up to Tyler, reached up, and closed his eyes. It was a tender, compassionate gesture, and Grim was glad he had done it. Then he ran down the stairs and Grim called after him, “Make sure the parents don't notice!”

Stanton left with Matt, and soon Grim heard his car in the driveway. That was one less thing to worry about. Yet the next few minutes were a succession of chaotic fragments. Jocelyn's initial hysteria had turned into confusion. She wanted to start calling people, and Grim had to tell her that the calls would have to wait. Mary sat down with her on the couch. At one point she said she had to take the chicken breasts out of the freezer for tonight, and Mary assured her that it had been taken care of. Grim grew worried. He looked to Steve for help, but Steve was still sitting at the dining room table, numb and not able to move. It was twenty minutes before Jocelyn noticed that Matt was gone, and Grim told her that Stanton had taken him to the hospital. Jocelyn began to cry and wanted to go back to Tyler. It was a fucking mess.

While the VanderMeers took care of their neighbors, Grim took Warren upstairs. They discussed their options. Katherine stood motionless behind her prey, like a lioness guarding a carcass from a pack of rapacious hyenas eager to gnaw on the remains. With growing horror, Grim sensed that she wasn't going to leave. This was not uncalculated. This was an ordeal.

She wanted Tyler's parents to suffer.

Just as she had once suffered.

At least her intentions are clear now, right?

Warren shook his head. “I don't know, Robert. We've never had to move her before.”

That was true. HEX was endlessly creative when it came to hiding Katherine, but protocol told them never to touch her. If they were to provoke the witch, someone else in town could die, someone with a weak heart or a thin cerebral cortex … someone who would sense her vibrations and simply drop down dead.

Across the landing, Katherine stood motionless.

She was whispering her depraved words.

She was challenging them.

Come and touch me, fellas. Come and touch me. Let's see who's going to die this time?

Suddenly Warren ferociously kicked the death caps, breaking the fairy ring. One of the buttons rolled right up to her corpselike feet.

It came to halt touching her gnarled, brown toenails.

“Katherine,” Warren said, and he cleared his throat. “Hey, Katherine.”

Grim's mouth became as dry as parchment and a choked, nerve-jangling moan escaped his lips. He wanted to pull Warren back, but he felt nailed to the floor. It was tacitly understood that they would
never
speak to the witch. The fact that Warren was doing that now was almost more ghastly than everything else.

“You got what you wanted. The boy is dead.” Warren's voice sounded gurgly and trapped, as if there were a glob of petroleum jelly stuck in his throat. “Let us do our work now and get the hell out of here.”

Katherine stood there motionless.

No: The fingers of her right hand twitched.

Something was going on behind those stitched-up eyes.

She was mocking them
.