HEX (48 page)

Little Naomi screamed, stamped her feet, and threw her arms around the witch's neck. The next bullet, meant to blow away Katherine's curse once and for all, tore away the greater part of the girl's skull. They heard the witch hoarsely gasp for breath as she lost the second child as well, staggering in a macabre waltz with the two little bodies.

This is a joke,
Grim thought.
Some kind of terrible misunderstanding that I cannot get my head around.

The witch looked up at Marty.

Marty began to scream. He tried to get away, but his feet wouldn't obey him. The witch came for him, crooked, calm, imprisoning his gaze in her attitude of contempt, grief, and merciless revenge.

She laid her hands on Marty's shoulders and looked up at him. For more than ten seconds she stared at the brand-new executioner, as the crowd backed farther and farther away. Then she coughed in his face.

Marty took one unsteady step backward and turned toward the crowd. He began to shiver and sweat as if he had suddenly been struck by a high fever, and blood spat furiously from his nose. He started hacking up blood, too, foaming on his lips.

“Help me…” he stammered, but his fellow townsfolk only shrank away, terrified of being contaminated by whatever it was that had seized him. Marty reached his hands toward them and fell to his knees. Grim saw dark, dimpled papules swelling up on his cheeks and neck to form a grotesque mask of flaky, depigmented scabs. His breathing faltered and he could no longer stop coughing, a hideous, rasping, croaking hiccup that sounded as if he were coughing up his lungs. Soon he fell to the street and started twitching, kicking his legs as his veins snapped beneath the skin and his gaping face turned a charred black. And while death took possession of him, he stared with blind, upturned, accusatory eyes at the bewildered onlookers, one of whom was Dr. Walt Stanton, whose lips formed a single dreadful word:
Smallpox.
…

Katherine threw herself down and struck the pavement with both fists. The earth seemed to tremble. Cracks appeared beneath her hands, and Grim knew that on this morning of retribution, there would be no restraint, no reason. Only penance. The people of Black Spring had brought this on themselves: It was
they
who were evil, a human evil.
They
had created the evil that was Katherine by allowing the doom and gloom in themselves to gain the upper hand, by punishing the innocent and glorying in their own sense of righteousness. She had given them a
choice.
Now it was too late, and as everyone around Robert Grim started running in a vain attempt to flee Katherine's evil eye, this realization gave rise to a primordial horror that could only be matched by his earliest memories in the womb: that first loss, that first irreversible departure from a safe haven, that first longing to cling to what lay behind you.

The infant's only answer to the cruel hallucination of birth was to scream … so that's what Grim did.

 

THIRTY-TWO

LATE IN THE
afternoon of Monday, December 24, Steve Grant woke up with water dripping on his face. He was lying on the frost-covered forest floor beneath an endless roof of skeletal branches. He tried to get up but fell back helplessly, rolled onto his side, and cracked through the paper-thin ice crust on the marshy undergrowth. Pain shot through his body, forcing his lips into a tight, white gash. Where the hell was he, and what was he doing there? His watch told him it was 4:30 on the twenty-fourth, but Steve couldn't grasp what that meant. Christ, he had been in the woods for four days and four nights.

He lay there apathetically for quite some time, listening to the unnatural silence of the woods. He was wet and numb from the cold and couldn't stop shivering. He was still wearing his funeral clothes. Stubble pricked his chin. His lips felt swollen and painful. His mouth was dry and sticky, coated with a layer of saliva that tasted like woodlands and pinecones. Steve tried to force his body back into the stupor from which he had awakened, but he stayed alert and clung … not to life, but to …

Tyler! Did she bring Tyler back?

That drove him to his feet. A sharp stab of pain in his back brought a grimace to his lips, and he leaned against a leaf-covered earthen wall. He looked around and saw groves of tall, ancient hemlocks on the slope, which he recognized without much emotion as the woods of Mount Misery behind his house. Apparently he had hidden himself in one of the overgrown trenches that the Military Academy had dug out when they used to drill in these parts—or maybe they dated back all the way to the Revolutionary War. Food for the minks and the rattlesnakes.

The events of the past days began to come back to him now, slow and fragmented, like pieces of driftwood washing ashore in the aftermath of a shipwreck. He remembered being home alone after Tyler's funeral, and that he …

Oh, God.
The owl pellet. Tyler's hair.
She
had come to him and he had cut her eyes open. What in God's name had he done?

His memory of what had happened between fleeing into the woods and now was shaky. Was it possible that he had been in a state of delirium all that time? That his mind had been so paralyzed by the premonition of what he had brought upon himself that it had simply shut itself down? Apparently he had wandered around unawares and had slept for hours unawakened by his physical needs. Although you really couldn't call it sleep; more a state of semiconsciousness in which nightmares and reality merged like a double image in a stereopticon. And it
must
have been delirium. Why else would he seem to recall seeing a procession of chanting flagellants making their way through the woods and whipping their naked backs with knotted ropes as a cynical expiation? That must have been a delusion, right?

Somewhere a branch snapped, and Steve froze, his scalp crawling. Once again he noticed the unnatural stillness. No birds, no living things scurrying in the underbrush. Only the gentle whisper of the wind through the treetops and the occasional crunch of frosty leaves. But what had caused that branch to pop? Was it Katherine?
Had she been with him in the dark as he lay sleeping?
Or … could it be Tyler?

“Cut it out,” he said hoarsely. The realization that, although in full possession of his faculties, he was considering the possibility that his dead son was trailing him in these woods caused the skin on his skull to tighten and sent shivers down his spine.

It has to happen one way or another, right? The promised resurrection—let's call it what it is.

But he didn't dare—he
couldn't
—invest his hope in … in what, really? Steve shuddered and tried to erase the possibility from his thoughts, but it refused to go away. Everything felt dreadfully wrong. The silence was wrong; the way the gathering twilight sank through the trees was wrong. What he had done pressed down on him like a deadweight. He groped in his pockets for his cell phone, but apparently he had left it at home.

Steve didn't need a crystal ball to see what now lay ahead of him: He'd follow the trail back home and face the consequences of his actions. It was probably expected of him, and he felt the obligation.…

But the hell with it. The fact was that he didn't dare face it just yet. He prayed that Jocelyn, for whatever reason, had stayed at St. Luke's with Matt. Or that she had turned around at the first sign of … of whatever indication there was that Katherine's eyes were open, and had fled back to the safety of a Newburgh motel.

That's why the plan was so doggone perfect, right? Jocelyn had been in Newburgh with Matt … out of the way, safe and sound. Maybe it was Katherine herself who had waited for the right circumstances to be in place … so we could be kept out of harm's way.

He prayed this was true, but he didn't allow himself the luxury of believing it.

He would walk down the trail, but not the trail that zigzagged through Philosopher's Deep and back to his house. He would go farther south, across Ackerman's Corner where Spy Rock Valley switchbacked into town. And he would make a judgment. Size up the situation. If it could reasonably be assumed that everything was more or less all right, he would go home to see if Jocelyn was there. But not before. Because if the blood of Black Spring was on his hands, there was a terrible chance he was also responsible for the fate of his wife … and he didn't know if he was ready to face that.

Steve began to walk downhill in the last light of day. His body hurt all over and his stomach rose up in revolt, but after a little while he seemed to settle into a rhythm. Even if he hit Philosopher's Trail, he'd keep strictly to the right—he wouldn't even look down that way.

What were those sounds coming from town last night?

The thought came to him unbidden and he braced himself to withstand it—it had the power to almost knock him off his feet. Yes, there had been cold and pain, he now recalled. There had been hunger and cramps, and there had been uncontrolled shivering, but the physical suffering was nothing compared with the mental torture he had had to endure. The annihilating fear of the darkness he had unleashed had lent his stupor some seriously sick hallucinatory effects, probably boosted by a severe case of panic-induced oxygen deprivation. It had started with the noises. Along with the noises came the smells. And inspired by the noises and the smells came hideous images that should have robbed him of his sanity … and maybe they had. As he heard moaning, he saw people suffering, writhing and black-faced with swollen buboes in their armpits and necks. Not from smallpox, though: This was the disease of the Old World. As he smelled the stench of melting asphalt, he saw tar barrels being burned on the street corners in an effort to purify the miasmatic air; for some reason it was Pete VanderMeer who set them afire, with a homemade torch made from a pair of gasoline-soaked Levi's wrapped around a Rubbermaid mop, while bundles of straw hung from derelict façades to show which houses were infected. And as he smelled fire, he saw Crystal Meth Church ablaze. Behind the stained glass were the sick and the dead, and all of them were screaming. The faces in his vision were gaping masks of horror, and Steve turned away as if he didn't want to acknowledge the fact—not even in his dream—that his friends and fellow townsfolk were burning.

But always there was Katherine. Always she was standing there, motionless, looking on.

At a certain point, a totally surreal illusion had appeared before his eyes. In the middle of the town square, all the children of Black Spring were tightly swaddled in cocoons of white linen, some small, some a little bigger, and bound together in an enormous, upright network of tightly stretched sheets. The structure reached high in the sky and was shaped like a rounded cone, much like a female breast. You could see rosy-cheeked faces sticking out of the linen: the four hundred children of Black Spring, remarkably
alive,
dreamy luster in their glazy-dazed eyes. The true ordeal was for the parents, who were clamoring in the streets at the foot of the magnificent tower but collectively holding each other back, since it was clear that if one of them were unable to resist the temptation to take away their swaddled child the whole design would collapse, with all that would entail. On top of the breast was Katherine, like a gracious maternal nipple, pouring warm milk from a silver jug. It trickled down on all sides like a perfectly symmetrical fountain and was licked up by hundreds of eager children's tongues.

She's sparing the children,
Steve thought, staring at the scene in his delirium.
Don't they get it? Don't let them ruin it; she's sparing the children.
…

Exactly where this grotesque image had come from, he did not know. In his most bizarre fantasies, he had never pictured such sinister madness combined with such a disconcerting, natural beauty. Steve had lain there, breathlessly staring, as if he were witnessing a miracle. But then the image had flickered, and it wasn't Katherine with her milk jug who crowned the nipple on the woven breast but Griselda Holst, the butcher's wife, naked as the day she was born. Fat and fleshy, she towered over the parents of Black Spring. Just as she had always offered them her meat, now she was feeding it to their children. She was giving birth to it. Streams of pâté gushed endlessly from her womb like afterbirth and dripped down the sides of the fountain, staining the perfect linen and sticking in globs to the children's faces.

I'm not really seeing this,
Steve thought.
No fucking way. I'm still in some kind of delirium. Must be. I'll wake up in a minute, just you wait and see.

Again the image seemed to flutter—and now it was Katherine again, or maybe it had been her all along. And suddenly Steve understood that the townsfolk only saw what they
chose
to see: the obscene, the bad, the ugly. Whereas Katherine had created a vision of bliss, the parents knew only cruelty. And therefore they had to destroy it.

It was a well-thrown rock, and it hit Griselda-Katherine in the forehead, slicing the nipple like a box cutter. She flipped backward with flailing arms and tumbled into the web of swaddled children. A low
zinnng!
could be heard like the breaking string of a double bass, and suddenly children were being spewed from unwrapped cloths where the breast's flank had been destroyed. Soon the entire structure gave way and the masterpiece crumbled. Four hundred children flew into the air as if they had been shot from catapults. Steve's mouth fell open in a quaking hole of horror as he saw the sudden realization on their faces, heard their pitiful cries of fear and bewilderment. Their parents had failed their test, and now their children were crashing down on them in a rain of broken bones and clattering limbs. The lamentation that arose was not human and was far beyond the limits of madness, and even in his delirium, Steve knew that if he wasn't insane yet, it wouldn't be long before he was. Then the image faded from his mind and he sank again into darkness. The only thing it had left behind was the vague certainty that he held the outcome of this agony in his own hands.