HEX (40 page)

Steve felt a sudden electrical charge in the room that seemed to be directed at him. Now was the time he was supposed to ask whether she had noticed anything strange about Tyler … something that could explain his unexpected suicide. He realized it was expected of him, and that perhaps Laurie was hurt that he didn't involve her. But Steve couldn't. That charade would have to come later, not in front of Tyler.

“Neither do I, Laurie,” he finally said, trembling.

Then came all the others. Tyler's death had hit like a bomb, both within the community of Black Spring and beyond. A strange, detached tension ricocheted across the back room of the Quiet Man that morning. It was about more than just the sharing of grief: It was the head-on collision of so many people from Black Spring with so many people from the outside, the people who knew and the people who didn't. Even the upbeat Owl City tracks—Tyler's favorite—playing in the background did nothing to ease the tension. It was as if the town borders were running straight through the tavern that morning, and those who lived on one side shunned those on the other. The townsfolk were frozen to the marrow. Tyler had been touched by Katherine. The witch's curse was upon him. It was so subtle that Tyler's extended family members, O'Neill buddies, Raiders teammates, and teachers from the outside didn't even notice it, but the procession shuffling in from the main room and past his coffin moved with a certain haste and got no closer than three feet from the cooling bed. The townsfolk hardly dared to look at Tyler; they crossed themselves or made gestures to protect them from the evil eye. When they came out through the back room of the Quiet Man, they were greatly relieved. It was ludicrous; Steve was disgusted. If Tyler hadn't been so well liked in town, the vast majority of these people wouldn't even have worked up the courage to come and see him out.

Halfway through the viewing, he took Jocelyn aside. She was as pale as a sheet and looked as if she were about to have a nervous breakdown. Her cheeks hung slack and her hands were trembling. “Are you going to make it?” he asked softly.

“I don't know, Steve. If I hear one more fucking cliché, I think I'm going to scream.” She had obviously been overwhelmed by all the condolences, each one cutting deeper and deeper wounds, from the meaningless “Time heals all wounds” and “Life isn't always fair” to the not-very-promising “Seven lean years will be followed by seven fat years,” and the utterly incomprehensible “On the one end they come, on the other they go.”

“I mean, what are they trying to tell me, for God's sake?” Jocelyn asked, profoundly upset. “Do they really think I'm going to jump up, all better, and say, ‘Oh, thank you, ma'am, I really didn't know that. In that case, it's not so bad after all then, is it?'”

“Hush now,” he said, taking her in his arms. She started crying again, and when Mary saw how uncomfortable he was, she hesitantly took over. Steve wanted to show his gratitude, but Mary turned her eyes down with slight reproach. No one was good at this, he decided. They could only try and do the best they could.

Griselda Holst had brought an impressive meat pie. Steve didn't know what to do with it, but he didn't have the heart to reject the gift. Until Pete took it from him, he stood there clumsily with the pie in his hands. “I feel so terrible for you all,” Griselda said, briefly touching Steve's arm. She kept glancing up at him and then looking down, as if she felt guilty just being a resident of the place that had cost Tyler his life.

“Thank you for coming, Mrs. Holst,” Steve said coolly.

“I pray every night for your other son.” She looked around and said in a muted voice, “I can't understand why Katherine would do something like this. He just wanted to help her, right? We've all seen that he was on her side.”

Steve didn't know what to say. Speaking of sides struck him as absurd at best. “Thank you, Mrs. Holst. How is Jaydon doing?”

Again, those nervous, downcast eyes. “Not so well. But he'll pull through.”

“I'm sorry about what happened. I want you to know that I was against it—against the way the whole thing was handled.”

“That's nice of you to say. I have never held anything against you.”

Held anything against me?
Steve wanted to ask, but suddenly he understood, and for one brief moment a terrible insight shot through his head with sharp, paralyzing fear … and disappeared just as quickly, like a tidal wave that had exposed something in the shoreline and then washed over it again. Steve tried to hang on to it, but it got the better of him. All those people. All those words. How much pain could a man bear in his heart? Why did it all feel so meaningless? Right there and then, his grief seized him more intensely than ever, and Steve would have given anything, literally anything in the world, to undo it all, to go back a week and stay with his son for those last few days to prevent what had happened to him.

Perhaps that could have been the end of it: that intense, personal sorrow that would cripple their lives for a long time to come but eventually evolve into something bearable, until it became a memory at last. And perhaps the day would come when they as a family would be able to resume life without Tyler. But Griselda Holst had to be the first to say the witch's name out loud, so he focused his sorrow on Katherine van Wyler. And all Steve could think was: Why? Why would someone bear so much malice and make innocent parents suffer so terribly? The butcher's wife may have been a little eccentric, but she was right: Tyler had been on
her
side, goddamn it. He had wanted to protect her from those sons of bitches who had set all this in motion with their sick plot to throw stones at her. Tyler had wanted to help her; couldn't she have shown any mercy? After all, Katherine herself had been forced to kill her own, resurrected son, so how could she—

It hit him like a landslide. Before Steve's very eyes, the town café began to topple, and the black-clad people dissolved from his field of vision. As if from a distance he heard Griselda Holst say,
He just wanted to help her, right? We've all seen that he was on her side.

Pete VanderMeer, on the night they had apprised the Delarosas of the situation:
It's October 1664 when Katherine's nine-year-old son dies of smallpox. Witnesses testify that they've seen her, dressed in full mourning, burying his body up in the woods. But a few days later, the townsfolk see the boy walking around the streets of New Beeck as if Katherine had raised him from the dead, like Jesus did with Lazarus.

He just wanted to help her, right?

If raising the dead isn't the ultimate proof that you're messing with stuff you shouldn't be messing with, I don't know what is.

After being tortured, she confessed, but they all did.

After being tortured, she confessed.

He just wanted to help her, right?

Raising the dead …

A shudder of primitive comprehension ran down Steve's spine, and in the distance he could hear the barking of a dog, on that cold night in November only a month and a half ago, a dog that had sounded so much like Fletcher.

 

TWENTY-SIX

TYLER WAS BURIED
on Thursday morning in St. Mary's Cemetery behind the church, the larger of the two cemeteries in Black Spring. The weather was bleak, and a dull, flat December light welcomed the mourners, who had come in droves. Two people who attended only part of the ceremony, each for their own reasons, were Robert Grim and Griselda Holst.

Griselda had sat in the back of the church during the service. Now she walked over to a rise on the edge of the cemetery behind the crowd of mourners, who had gathered on the paths and between the graves all the way to the wrought-iron gate and beyond. She didn't dare mingle with them. Since Jaydon's trial and torture, they had made her an outcast. The townsfolk avoided her like the plague. Black Spring had never fully recovered from November 15. People simply didn't seem to know how to relate to each other anymore. For many, the excessive, appalling events at the crossroads had been so horrifying and inconsistent with their moral ideas that they had literally erased them from their memories. On the streets, people exchanged mere perfunctory greetings, and not a word was spoken about what had happened. Each wore the same shamefaced expression, for each bore the guilt for this infamy.

From the day in late November when Griselda had reopened her shop, the townsfolk had shunned Griselda's Butchery & Delicacies. The clientele was reduced to a sporadic dribble, far too few to cover expenses, and Griselda had started to worry about her future. Ironically enough, she understood more than ever how poor Katherine must feel. Katherine was an outcast, too, the vermin of society. Griselda felt intensely that they were kindred spirits, but since she had been ejected from the Council, she no longer dared to call on her. It was agony, but Griselda was terrified that she'd be caught by the security cams. And more than anything, she was terrified of Katherine's wrath.

Tyler Grant's mother, dressed in a black coat, looked to Griselda as if she had aged six years in six days. She was supported by her father, a hearty Outsider in his seventies, and kept glancing around in increasing disbelief, as if to confirm that her youngest son really was not present at his brother's funeral. It was so tragic: that poor kid lying in the hospital in Newburgh. Rumor had it that he had slipped into a psychosis from which he would never awaken. Steve Grant was standing next to his wife, but Griselda didn't fail to notice that he hadn't touched her once during the entire service. He looked lost and obsessed, like a man who was no longer capable of recognizing reality.

The Grant family was not religious, but because of the impact of the death on the community, the pastor had agreed to say a few words … discreet, as usual, when there were Outsiders present. Griselda's eyes passed over the crowd. She was shocked to see Colton Mathers hidden in the shadow of the crucifix over at the iron gates. His face was as emotionless as pale marble and his grasping, blue-veined man's hands were thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat. Griselda felt a flash of cold-blooded hatred toward the councilman, who had dropped her like a ton of bricks, just as all the others had done.

She was a pariah. She, Griselda Holst, who had done all the dirty work in that Arthur Roth business and whose mediation with Katherine all those years had prevented something—something like
this
—from happening.

Griselda pressed her hankie against her nose and gave a wicked blow as she left the cemetery in a state of rage.

*   *   *

JUST OUTSIDE THE
gate, mumbling some vicious profanity, she almost bumped into Robert Grim. It was no wonder that she didn't recognize him, for Robert Grim was a mere shadow of the man he had once been—until late Friday night, to be precise. He was bundled up in his parka, and there was no trace of that cynical sparkle in his eyes. His face was contorted, and with trembling fingers he kept jabbing the stub of a cigarette between his lips, a habit he had kicked twenty years before, but had resumed on Saturday morning.

He smoked mainly to erase the stench from his memory.

That evil, dark stench of the witch.

Grim had concealed it from his coworkers and had forced himself to do his job, but the truth was that he had had a nervous breakdown. Katherine's targeted attack had confirmed his premonition. The inner voice that had warned him of an approaching storm now sounded deeper, not just ominous but downright obsessive and malevolent. The townsfolk seemed to feel it, too. They kept looking up at the sky for no apparent reason, or peeking beyond the graves, wishing they could go back home and lock themselves away behind the deceptive security of bolted doors. They were sick with fear, and so was Robert Grim. If he had been able to run away from it, he would have done so. But there was no running away from Black Spring. Besides, he felt responsible. Maybe he could keep one step ahead of her.

Grim turned away from the ceremony and looked at the Outsiders' parked cars, forming an endless, melancholy row starting at the town square and running all the way along Lower Reservoir Road and up the hill. His right hand nervously fumbled with his cell phone, waiting for bad news. Katherine was up in the woods half a mile to the west and the entire HEX crew was on standby, ready to step in if the situation called for it. Volunteers had taken their positions all around the cemetery in case she decided to show herself here in an excess of bad taste. Grim half expected it to happen.
And what then?
he thought.
If she's planning to put on a show, we're going to dance to her tune like fucking puppets.

His fingers froze in a cramp. Katherine had attacked him just when it had begun to dawn on him that this all was part of some preconceived plan. Could that be a coincidence?

Oh, come on.

But what did it mean if she really had calculated all this? Ah, if only he could see what lay within this ever-narrowing circle of related events, this chain that had been forged link by link … and if only he, by God, was strong enough to head it off at the pass.

*   *   *

A LITTLE FARTHER
downhill, Griselda Holst was heading back to the shop, bent into the wind. She wanted to see how Jaydon was doing. Doodletown had broken him, and he had not wanted to attend the funeral of his former friend.

Since his release almost two weeks earlier, Griselda had become a little scared—not of Jaydon, but of herself. She remembered sitting on the couch with her son the evening he was brought home. Jaydon, who now moved like a frail old man, had curled up against her like a baby, his head in her lap. He fell asleep almost immediately. Griselda stroked his hair, humming softly. It was a moment of intense confusion and internal conflict: She cradled her son with love, something she hadn't been able to do since Jim left … but it was still her son who had stoned Katherine. Her Katherine. She hated him at the same time.