HEX (6 page)

“No, thank you, ma'am,” Jaydon said with a smile that rose up like a cloud of carbon monoxide.

She was about to take the open menu away from the table when Tyler quickly put his hand on it, more forcefully than he had intended. “Can I hold on to this? I might want to order something else later on.”

“Sure, Tyler,” Sue said. “You just holler, all right? And I'll let you know if I get any messages. It probably won't be necessary, though. They have the choir ready and waiting.” She carried the tray back inside.

All was silent for a moment, a silence in which the awkwardness of the situation seemed to thicken the air. Then, with a dim smile, Jaydon said, “Fucking hell.”

“Dude, really … d'you want to go to Doodletown or something?” Despite Tyler's relief, his heart was pounding in his throat. If Sue had discovered the GoPro under the menu they would have been in deep shit. The
REC
light was on and the sports cam was aimed at Deep Hollow Road to the south, where at that very moment two men were placing a red-and-white barrier across the road near St. Mary's Church. The same thing was happening to the north, past the place where Old Miners Road, coming in from The Point, opened out onto the main thoroughfare. The GoPro couldn't see it, but Tyler, Justin, and Lawrence could. And there was something else: Out of the Roseburgh Nursing Home next to Sue's came eight or nine warmly wrapped elderly women, fiercely scanning the road. They talked among themselves and then, with their arms linked, strolled past the patio and out toward the intersection.

“Showtime,” Justin remarked. “The crowds are going wild.”

“What time is it?” Tyler asked.

Lawrence peeked at his iPhone. “Nine-thirteen. One more minute. Turn your cam, dude.”

With great care, Tyler slid the GoPro, covered by the menu, to the other side of the small table and aimed the lens at Old Miners Road, which ran up the hill in a sharp S curve past the closed Popolopen Visitor Center. A couple of the old ladies sat down on the bench near the fountain and the bronze washerwoman. Others had ambled into the cemetery—to check out the accommodations, Tyler guessed.

“Omigod,” Justin said softly, and nodded. “There she is.”

“Right on time,” Tyler reported, too excited to be cool, calm, and collected. He licked his lips and pushed Lawrence's iPhone under the menu and held it in front of the lens. “Wednesday morning, nine-fourteen a.m. As usual, at exactly the right spot.”

From behind Old Miners Road a woman came walking out of the woods.

Why she follows
EXACTLY
the same pattern at the square and past the graveyard
EVERY
Wednesday morning is beyond me, but the Black Rock Witch is like Ms. Autism, unchallenged titleholder for three hundred fifty years running. Which is not, like, at all what witches are famous for. Makes you wonder if she ever gets dehydrated. Well, no. She's like a Microsoft operating system: designed to sow death and destruction, and every time showing the same error message.

So this behavioral pattern is mega interesting, of course, because: what's she doing there, and why is she coming back every week? Behold! I have two theories:

The first theory is that she's stuck in some kind of time warp and keeps repeating her past to the point of obsessive-compulsive neurosis (a.k.a. the Windows XP theory). Grim says that, long ago, they had this open market on the square in front of the church (I asked if it was right in front of the cemetery and he said they're not sure there even was a cemetery back then) and that she may have gone there to get bread and fish (which, like, totally makes no sense, because if the town had cast her off they wouldn't have been thrilled to let her shop there. Conclusion: Grim is cool, but he's just guessing). Anyway, it's not like she was going to church or anything, because heretics don't go to church (except the kind where they dance around the cross naked and smear themselves with the blood of Christ and chant psalms and stuff), otherwise we wouldn't be stuck with her now, right?

And then there's this: if you're dead (or should have been), what's the point of walking the same circuit week in and week out? Didn't they teach, like, variety in witch school? Makes as little sense as that old-fashioned, lights-on, lights-off poltergeist cliché (I mean, just speak up if you wanna say something, and don't do it in fucking Latin).

The second and more likely theory is
THAT SHE GOT THIS WAY BECAUSE HER EYES ARE SEWN SHUT
. What if we have a witch in Black Spring who
JUST COMPLETELY FROZE UP
(a.k.a. the Windows Vista theory)?

(Source:
Open Your Eyes
website, September 2012)

They watched as the woman with the sewn-shut eyes crossed Old Miners Road, passed behind the bus shelter, and came closer and closer. Her bare feet made circles in the puddles forming in the gutter. Perhaps it was instinct that propelled her, or perhaps something older and more primitive than instinct, but in any case Tyler knew it was
deliberate,
something that had no need of her blind eyes. He heard the dull clank of the chains that bound her arms and dress to her body. They made her look like one of these supermarket enchiladas rolled up in cellophane you'd rather not eat, wrapped and helpless. Tyler always found her less spooky when she walked, because then you didn't have to wonder what she was plotting behind those stitched-up eyes of hers. She was just like a rare insect, the kind you could study, but that wouldn't sting.

But when she stopped … she got a little freaky.

“You know what's funny about her?” Justin mused. “For a fairy-tale character she's, like, chronically ugly.”

“She isn't a friggin' fairy-tale character,” Burak said. “She's a supernatural phenomenon.”

“Hell yeah she is. Witches only appear in fairy tales. So she's a fairy-tale character.”

“Dafuq? What stone did your mother get knocked up under? That still doesn't make her a fairy-tale character. They're not real, anyway.”

“So what if Little Red Riding Hood appeared in front of you?” Justin said with a gravity that couldn't be denied, let alone ridiculed. “Would she suddenly be a supernatural phenomenon? Or a fairy-tale character?”

“No, just a chick with a sick Kotex fetish,” Jaydon said.

Burak snorted his cappuccino all over his shirt and Lawrence almost laughed himself into a coma.
A tad too much credit,
Tyler thought. “Aw, fuck!” Burak dabbed the stain with a stack of napkins. “Dude, you're sick.”

“By the way,” Lawrence said after he got himself back under control, “the Blair Witch wasn't a fairy-tale character, either.”

That was an argument Justin couldn't refute, and it more or less ended the debate.

A car approached St. Mary's Church. The elderly volunteers at the fountain stuck their necks out and looked at it, but the car stopped at the roadblock and turned left. The ladies relaxed. Probably someone from town. If any Outsiders had been spotted, the old ladies would already have gathered around Gramma to walk with her, busily chattering among themselves. And if she stopped, Tyler knew (and this, more than anything else, was what truly made him ashamed of being a Black Spring boy), they'd huddle around her and start practicing church hymns like a kind of
Glee
for the near dead. The deeper meaning behind this was beyond him, but it was a brilliant example of reverse psychology: No one would ever notice the gaunt women with the chains standing in their midst if they didn't know she was there already. And no one could stomach an old folks' choir long enough to find out.

The woman with the sewn-shut eyes went past the patio right in front of them and advanced to the square, watched closely by the ladies at the fountain. Tyler turned the GoPro. It was essential for the success of their experiment that no Outsiders be there. Just as he was about to bask in the luck of their good fortune, Sue came out and stood in the doorway as if suddenly struck by this public-spirited and hitherto unseen sense of responsibility for her underage guests.

“Got any pesticide?” Jaydon asked.

Sue laughed and said, “If that worked, we would have tried it long ago, Jaydon,” not realizing that it was her they needed it for, not the other witch. But Burak got the hint; he walked up to her with some lame excuse about planning his work schedule, and they both went inside together.

Justin grinned. “That woman would let you screw her even sideways, Jaydon.”

“Fuck off.”

“Guys, shut up,” Tyler said. “It's gonna happen.” He took the GoPro out from under the menu and shielded it with his body from the security cam that was mounted on The Point to Point Inn's façade across the intersection. To their hilarity, the camera was still hanging at a low, crooked angle, just as Jaydon had left it last night after hitting it with a long stick. Jaydon was like a living ordnance map when it came to the square and its surroundings, since he and his mom lived behind the butcher shop on the other side. He had said there were two other cameras that had a view of the lamppost on the eastern side of the cemetery. One was located in the bushes at the highest corner of Temple Hill, which they had neutralized by hanging a pine branch in front of it. The second camera was inaccessible. It was hidden in a window casing of Crystal Meth Church, but they had decided there were too many trees in front of it to cause real problems at night.

It was 2:57 a.m. when they hung Burak's long black cloth like a curtain from the branches of the oak tree that forked over the cemetery hedge. It was 3:36 when they wrung out the soaked curtain and rolled it up. And in all that time only one car had come down Deep Hollow Road, and it had passed without slowing down.

The only visible evidence of their operation was that the streetlight behind the curtain had gone out at 3:17, just when Jaydon cut through the exposed electrical cable that ran to the underground power box. Fortunately, the lamppost itself was not too tall, and its classical-looking fitting was aluminum, not cast iron. Easy-peasy. By the time they had cleaned everything up and had raised their toast to science, the lamppost was no longer standing against the cemetery hedge, but was neatly planted in the middle of the sidewalk, a foot and a half to the left.

Ground Zero.

So. As you can see in the clips below, she comes straight out of the woods and walks west down Deep Hollow Road. She arrives at the square, walks along the creek, up over the sidewalk, turns a kind of three-quarter pirouette at the cemetery hedge as if she's the Ballet Princess or something, and stands facing the street, as if someone had pulled her plug. I mean, we're talking serious runtime error here. A wisp of smoke rising from her hair would add to the dramatic effect. Exactly eight minutes and thirty-six seconds later, it's as if someone had pushed Ctrl+Alt+Del, because she starts walking again and disappears behind the houses on Hilltop Drive. And she does this every week, in exactly the same way (except the stupid thing is that no one knows exactly where and how she disappears—ideas, guys?).

It all happened in a flash.

When the woman with the sewn-shut eyes walked up along the creek and passed the
SLOW—CHILDREN
sign, the boys on the patio forgot their boredom and became so excited that they left their seats and rocked from one leg to another. They couldn't help it. It felt as if they were witnessing one of those rare significant moments in human history that would outlive even Wikipedia, like the invention of penicillin or the first explosion of the silicone breast implant. Tyler forgot his fear of Doodletown and no longer bothered to keep his GoPro out of sight of the surveillance cam. This
had
to be captured.

“O-M-F-G,” Justin said, without taking a breath.

“She's gonna see it … she's gonna see it …
she's gonna see it
…”

She didn't see it. With an audible thud, the Black Rock Witch walked straight into the lamppost and fell backward on her butt.

The ladies at the fountain jumped up, all shrieks and hands covering mouths. Tyler and his friends looked at one another in silent, speechless amazement, their jaws down on the sidewalk. Burak had appeared in the restaurant doorway. It was as if the impact had sucked all the oxygen out of the air. It exceeded their wildest dreams. They had just floored a three-hundred-year-old supernatural phenomenon, and they had it on fucking video.

Gramma was squirming on the drying sidewalk at the foot of the lamppost, as you might imagine an enchilada squirming in cellophane. All the creepiness her mutilated face and reputation had bestowed on her had been knocked for a loop. Now she just looked helpless, like a baby bird fallen from its nest. There was no way she'd be able to stand up on her own. One of the elderly women approached her, hand on cheek, and for a moment Tyler was afraid the woman had made the suicidal decision to help her up when something totally freaky happened. In a flash, the witch was back on her feet. The elderly woman recoiled with a scream. One moment Gramma had been lying there, helpless and twitching on the sidewalk; the next moment, like in a stop-motion video, she was up and chafing against the lamppost with her chains, as if she were trying to walk straight through it.

“Jesus fuck…” was all Jaydon could manage.

“Did you get that?” Lawrence asked. Tyler looked down and discovered that he had just made the most dire mistake of his budding career as a reporter: In his consternation, he had let his camera dangle and shoot some super-interesting footage of the sidewalk, and had missed the witch's stop-motion trick. He felt his cheeks turn purple and cursed himself, but the others were much too engrossed in what
she
was doing to pay any attention to him.

“What's going on?” Sue asked as she struggled to see something from the doorway behind Burak. No one took the trouble to inform her.