HEX (42 page)

A few days later the townsfolk see the boy walking around the streets of New Beeck
.

Heartsick, Steve sat down at Tyler's desk and opened the MacBook. Of course he knew the password wouldn't work. Tyler had gotten the laptop only nine days before his death as an early Christmas gift because the old one had most likely been bugged with spyware. Of course he would have come up with a new password. Still, Steve gave his birthday a try … and immediately Tyler's desktop popped up.

For a moment he felt uneasy … and much like a trespasser, as if Tyler were looking over his shoulder. He suddenly heard his voice crystal clear in his head:
You were supposed to help me, Dad.
Steve saw his son's face before him, but it looked shockingly different than the way he remembered it. He couldn't put his finger on it exactly how … but death had changed him.
You were supposed to help me,
he said, his voice sad and reproachful.
Nothing was supposed to happen to me, and now I'm dead. How could you have let that happen?

It was too easy to shift all the responsibility onto Jaydon Holst. How strong were the seeds of hatred that Steve had sown in the heart of a boy who had been tortured before the whole town until he almost died—and all because Steve had tried to protect his son? How could he have been so stupid!

But it wasn't stupidity, Steve knew. He had done it out of love. But wasn't that almost the same thing?

I'm so sorry, Tyler. I'm so, so terribly sorry.…

Losing himself ever more deeply in that destructive web of guilt, Steve searched his son's computer. His hope soon diminished: There just wasn't that much there yet. He opened the Word documents and scanned through the browser's history. He looked at the latest vlogs on Tyler's YouTube channel and cried when he saw his son, TylerFlow95, as alive and cheerful as before. The GoPro memory card was empty except for a few old pics.

Harboring few illusions, Steve finally began browsing through the MP4 clips on Tyler's external hard drive. It wasn't until he was halfway through one of them that he found something he barely paid attention to at first … but that soon shocked him to the core.

*   *   *

IT'S A VIDEO.
Of course it's a video, because that's how Tyler tells his story. First Steve doesn't understand what it is he's watching, because all he sees is green-black darkness, and all he hears are stumbling and whispers. But then someone calls Fletcher's name, and it's as if the temperature in Tyler's room has dropped ten degrees. It's Lawrence and Tyler, they're in the woods, the night is a subterranean black, and Steve suddenly knows what it is that's sneaking around them in the dark.

“That's not Fletcher down there,” Lawrence whispers, “it's a deer or a fox or a fucking raccoon; it could be anything. I want to get the hell out of here.” As Steve stares at the vague images, a sense of horror steals over him like a swarm of insects and makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. “Oh, Jesus, it
is
him,” Lawrence moans, and Tyler screams, “Fletcher!”

With growing dismay, barely connected to the here and now, Steve clings to the voices from the past. The only thing he's able to see is the shaft of light from Tyler's flashlight touching the shapes of tree trunks. What he doesn't realize is that his sanity is swaying like a tightrope walker over a dangerous sea of madness and his rationality is dissolving, just as an ominous thought emerges from the beyond and moves stealthily through his mind:
Nibble, nibble like a mouse; tomorrow everyone will die
.

“They say Katherine raised her son from the dead, right?” Tyler says. “Isn't that why they hanged her? Do you believe that? Do you believe she can raise the dead?”

Oh, Jesus Christ!
Steve's thoughts take flight with a shriek.
Jesus Christ! He says it himself! Tyler says it himself! What's the point of denying it, you stupid coward? If Katherine was capable of resurrecting her son … can't she bring Tyler back, too?

“I don't know,” Lawrence says. “But I don't think it's Fletcher out there, man. If it
is
Fletcher, why doesn't he come?”

Now that it's finally come out—the idea that has been continuously percolating in the back of his mind since the viewing on Tuesday—Steve watches the rest of the video as if in a dream. He clutches the edge of the desk with white knuckles. It's pure madness, it's unacademic bullshit, but his days as an academic are gone forever. The slowly dying flame by which he was keeping Tyler alive flares up like a fiery spark of hope.

There's a scream from the MacBook's built-in speakers and the image begins to shake. They're running down the hill in a panic. Flashes of light and darkness alternate in a nightmarish escape scene. And it is at some point during that flight through the darkness that the jolting camera lunges backward and captures a few frames of something that completely wipes out Steve's notion of normality. Steve has no way of knowing that he's staring at the same frames that haunted his son's nightmares during the last month of his life. Nor does he know that outside the window his son's murderer entered on that fateful night to make him listen to Katherine's whispering, three owls have landed on a branch and are staring into the room. The only thing Steve can think is:
So it's true. Oh, dear God, it's true
.

Is it a dog? In all fairness, Steve wouldn't bet his life on that, not even when he freezes the image. But it looks suspiciously like some sort of animal form. A squat animal form. Black and white. Something is glittering. Maybe it's an eye, or a gleaming tooth. The buckle of a dog collar, perhaps. If you're willing to believe that this vague, blurry video image is a dog, then it's a dog.

And Steve is willing … if it can bring Tyler back to him, he's
more
than willing.

Then one of the owls crash-bangs against the window and Steve jumps to his feet with a shout.

*   *   *

SPLINTERS OF GLASS
scattered across the desk, and the sheer curtain billowed out with a gust of cold December air. Lying amid the jagged shards of glass was the owl, thrashing its broken wing about as it kept hooting and trying to raise its head, staring at him maliciously. All at once, in a delayed shock reaction, Steve's eyes snapped open. He had become aware of the other owls. There were no longer three now, but eight or nine. The sight was so unnatural that it took a second for the truth to sink in:
It's her
.

Something was blocking his windpipe.

Steve clutched at his throat and tried to breathe, but he couldn't get any air in his lungs. The only sounds he could make were muffled squeaks. He broke out in a cold sweat. Stumbling backward into the hallway, he bumped into the door, turned around, and cupped his hands over his mouth in an effort to fight the hyperventilation.

Suddenly the sound of fluttering filled the house. It was everywhere. A powerful and malignant flapping, as if entire flocks of owls were swooping around the roof. Then a loud crunch, and the thumpety-thumping of something tumbling down overhead. Steve tried to scream but wasn't able; he couldn't get any air. His face turned a fiery red and tears sprang to his eyes.

He managed to get halfway down the stairs and then began to slide, painfully bouncing down the last few steps before slamming headlong onto the floor. Although he was able to break his fall, his elbows gave way and his cheek smashed against the cold tiles. A sharp pain shot through his jaw, followed by a dizzying wave of nausea that made his whole body writhe. Drenched with sweat, he suddenly realized that he wasn't hyperventilating at all … there really
was
something in his throat squeezing his windpipe shut.

I'm choking.…

As he dragged himself over the doorsill into the dining room, his stomach took a dive and his esophagus began contracting uncontrollably. His body went into convulsions. Steve felt like he was spinning around, turning somersaults. Whatever it was that was blocking his windpipe came up along with several stinking burps and stale stomach acid and the awful sensation that his mouth was full of hair. There was another stab of pain, excruciating this time, and Steve threw up slimy strands of bile and an undigested plug-shaped tangle of hair the size of a plum. It rolled across his tongue and dropped onto the floor with a wet plop. At long last, the oxygen rushed into his windpipe.

With a wildly racing heart, he hoisted himself onto one knee in front of the thing he had regurgitated. Steve had lived at the edge of Black Rock Forest for eighteen years, and he knew exactly what it was: an owl pellet. Except …

Except the hairs in it weren't gray, like the fur of a field mouse, but blond.

Flaxen hair, straggly, and of the same thickness as Tyler's.

If you throw up the remains of your son,
he thought, so consciously that it made him giggle,
it's a good sign you ought to be losing your mind.
His giggle swelled to a high-pitched, hollow laugh that reverberated throughout the empty house, shrill and insane.

Far away, as in a dream, Pete VanderMeer's voice spoke up in his mind like a mantra:
Later I stopped believing in witches, so I did it as a balancing exercise
.

“Please,” Steve whispered with a voice that was barely his own. “Bring back my Tyler. Bring back my Tyler and I'll do anything for you.”

He looked up, straight into the mud-stained rags of Katherine van Wyler.

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

STEVE CLOSED THE
curtains and maneuvered himself out of Jocelyn's Limbo. His thigh bumped into the arm of the sofa, and when he crossed to the middle of the room he stumbled against the coffee table. His whole body was trembling. Outside, the wind was shrieking around the house. The street had been empty … nobody there to have seen Steve peeking out the window at that critical moment, as if the stars had been favorably aligned for the execution of some obscure destiny.

Katherine van Wyler was standing beside the dining room table, her figure emaciated and drooping as if her spinal column had been horribly deformed. She came with a foul, low smell of age and corruption. Decay had taken the dignity from her face, but beneath that etched layer of dirt something seemed to be waiting
.
She followed Steve's every movement. Behind the stitched-up lids, her eyes were fixed on him—he felt her gaze in every cell of his body. He wondered if he was under some sort of a spell or hypnosis that dominated his will, but felt no indication that he was. If he chose to do so, he could flee the house that very moment, jump in the car, and drive to Newburgh to join Jocelyn and Matt. For a brief moment, he actually considered it—he felt the car keys in his pocket as a tempting way out.

But even now Steve knew that what was driving him was not hypnosis but something far more dangerous: it was love. Steve was following his heart, which bled with longing for his son.

He stopped in the open French doors, retching from the overwhelming smell of death. Katherine nodded. It was a forced, animal-like movement, barely human at all. Now she had finally come to his home … as if part of him had known this was coming, ever since he had found Tyler dead last Friday. The compulsion to go to her was powerful, but so was the fear, trickling with hesitation from the chambers of his heart.
My God, what are you contemplating, Steve? Do you really want to go through with this?

Yes, he thought, he would go through with this … because Katherine was welcoming him. She wasn't whispering. She just nodded at the human hair that made up the owl pellet. And when she turned around and crossed to the kitchen, he followed submissively.

Her bare feet left tracks of mud on the tiles, and Steve thought,
If you had them examined in a lab, you'd find sediments and bacteria that haven't been seen in these parts for over three hundred years
.

When she got to the kitchen door, she stopped and looked up at him. Of course—he was expected to open the door. She was prevented from doing so by the iron chains that clung to her body. But getting so close to her inhuman presence made him feel giddy, as if he were standing on the edge of an abyss … a chasm to which
she
was seductively tempting him. Without taking a breath, he pressed himself against the doorpost, reached behind her past the cold window, twisted the key in the lock, and turned the knob. The door opened a crack and he gave it a gentle push. Heart pounding, he pulled his arm back …

 … and brushed her hand.

Oh, Jesus! I touched her! I fucking touched her!

He felt as if he were going to lose it … but nothing happened, and he calmed down a bit. The witch walked placidly onto the patio and Steve followed. The hem of her dress fluttered in the chilly wind.

As they crossed the lawn, he did not look around to see if they were being observed. He knew they were walking in full view of the VanderMeers' upstairs windows, but Steve trusted that his neighbors wouldn't look outside. The circumstances were bewitched, as it were.

Halfway across the lawn on the way to the stable, he suddenly halted. The part of his crumbling mind that realized what road he was going down, and where it was leading, tried to guide him away from it, confronting him with a horror far beyond anything he could physically cope with. He felt something snap behind his eyeballs. His muscles tensed up. His hair was literally standing on end, and he jammed his clenched fists to his mouth. Everything he had feared for the past eighteen years was now manifesting itself in a climax of total terror. He was barely able to suppress a scream.

Turn around! Turn around! You can still go back! Do you really believe that anything good can come of this? That whatever forces you will arouse have your best interests at heart? This is madness!