HEX

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  “I saw it, darling. Four on the floor, okay? Or you’ll fall again.”

  Ignoring her, Matt turned his attention to Tyler’s lens. “I bet you don’t want to know what I think.”

  “No, I do not, brother-who-smells-like-horse. I’d rather you took a shower.”

  “It’s sweat, not horse,” Matt said imperturbably. “I think your question is too easy. I think it’s much more interesting to ask: If you had to let somebody die, who would it be: your own kid or all of Black Spring?”

  Fletcher started up a low growl. Steve looked out into the backyard and saw the dog pressing his head low to the ground behind the wire mesh and baring his teeth like a wild animal.

  “Jesus, what’s wrong with that dog?” Matt asked. “Apart from being a total nutcake.”

  “Gramma wouldn’t happen to be around, would she?” Steve asked innocently.

  Jocelyn dropped her shoulders and looked around the room. “I haven’t seen her at all today.” With feigned urgency, she glanced from the backyard to the split red oak at the end of their property, where the path led up the hill: the red oak with the three security cams mounted to the trunk, peering into various corners of Philosopher’s Deep.

  “Gramma wouldn’t happen to be around.” Matt grinned with his mouth full. “What’ll Tyler’s followers make of that?” Jocelyn’s mother, a long-term Alzheimer’s patient, had died of a lung infection a year and a half before; Steve’s had been dead eight years. Not that YouTube knew, but Matt was having fun.

  Steve turned to his oldest son and said, with a severity that was not at all like him, “Tyler, you’re cutting this out, right?”

  “Sure, Dad.” He switched voices to TylerFlow95. “Let’s bring the question closer to home. If you had to let somebody die, o padre mio, who would it be: your own kid or the rest of our town?”

  “Would that include my wife and my other child?” Steve asked.

  “Yes, Dad,” Matt said with a condescending laugh. “Who would you save, Tyler or me?”

  “Matthew!” Jocelyn cried. “That’s enough of that.”

  “I’d save you both,” Steve said solemnly.

  Tyler grinned. “That’s politically correct, Dad.”

  Just then, Matt leaned back too far on his chair legs. He flapped his arms wildly in an attempt to regain his balance, red sauce flying off his spoon, but the chair fell backward with a crash and Matt rolled onto the floor. Jocelyn jumped up, startling Tyler and causing the GoPro to slip out of his hands and fall into his plate of chicken chow mein. Steve saw that Matt, still with the flexibility of a child, had caught his fall with an outstretched elbow and was giggling hysterically, lying on his back and trying to hold the towel around his waist with one hand.

  “Little bro overboard!” Tyler whooped. He aimed the GoPro down to get a good shot, wiping off the chow mein.

  As if he’d received an electric shock, Matt began shaking: The expression on his face turned into a grimace of horror, he knocked his shin against the table leg, and he uttered a loud cry.

  * * *

  FIRST: NO ONE will ever see the images that Tyler’s GoPro is shooting at that moment. That’s unfortunate, because if anyone were to study them they’d be witness to something very odd, perhaps even unsettling—to put it mildly. The images are crystal clear, and images don’t lie. Even though it’s a small camera, the GoPro captures reality at an astonishing sixty frames per second, producing spectacular clips taken from Tyler’s mountain bike racing down Mount Misery, or when he goes snorkeling with his friends in Popolopen Lake, even when the water’s cloudy.

  The images show Jocelyn and Steve staring with bewilderment past their youngest son, still on the floor, and into the living room. In the middle of the image is a spot of congealed noodles and egg yolk. The camera jerks the other way and Matt is no longer lying on the floor; he rights himself with a spastic twist of his body and shrinks back, bumping into the table. Somehow he has managed to keep the towel around his waist. For a moment it feels as though we’re standing on the undulating deck of a ship, for everything we see is slanted, as if the whole dining room has come apart at the seams. Then the picture straightens up, and although the splotch of noodle hides most of our view, we see a gaunt woman making her way through the living room toward the open French doors to the kitchen. Until then, she has stood motionless in Jocelyn’s Limbo, but suddenly she’s right there, as if she has taken pity on the fallen Matt. The dishcloth has slid off her face, and in a fraction of a second—maybe it’s only a couple of frames—we see that her eyes are sewn shut, and so is her mouth. It all happens so fast that it’s over before we know it, but it’s the kind of image that burns itself into your brain, not just long enough to pull us out of our comfort zone but to completely disrupt it.

  Then Steve rushes forward and slides the French doors to the living room shut. Behind the half-translucent stained glass we see the gaunt woman come to a halt. We even hear the slight vibration of the glass as she bumps up against the pane.

  Steve’s good humor has vanished. “Turn that thing off,” he says. “Now.” He’s deadly serious, and although his face is hidden from view (all we can see is his T-shirt and jeans, and the finger of his free hand stabbing at the lens), we can all imagine what it must look like. Then everything goes black.

  * * *

  “SHE CAME RIGHT for me!” Matt shouted. “She’s never done that before!” He was still standing next to the fallen chair, holding the towel around his waist to keep it from sliding down.

  Tyler started laughing—mostly from relief, Steve thought. “Maybe she’s got the hots for you.”

  “Ew, gross, are you kidding me? She’s ancient!”

  Jocelyn burst out laughing, too. She took a mouthful of noodles but didn’t notice how much hot sauce she had put on her spoon. Tears sprang from her eyes. “Sorry, darling. We just wanted to shake you up a little, but I think you shook her up. It really was strange how she came walking up to you. She never does that.”

  “How long was she standing there?” Matt asked indignantly.

  “The whole time.” Tyler grinned.

  Matt’s jaw dropped. “Now she’s seen me naked!”

  Tyler looked at him with a mixture of absolute amazement and the kind of disgust that borders on a sympathetic sort of love, reserved only for big brothers toward their younger, dim-witted siblings. “She can’t see, you idiot,” he said. He wiped off the lens of his GoPro and looked at the blind woman behind the stained glass.

  “Sit down, Matt,” Steve said, his face stiffening. “Dinner’s getting cold.” Sulkily, Matt did what he was told. “And I want you to erase those images now, Tyler.”

  “Aw, come on! I can just cut her out.…”

  “Now, and I want to see you do it. You know the rules.”

  “What is this, Pyongyang?”

  “Don’t make me say it again.”

  “But there was some kick-ass material in there,” Tyler muttered without much hope. He knew when his father meant it. And he did indeed know the rules. Reluctantly, he held up the display at an angle toward Steve, selected the video file, and clicked ERASE, then OK.

  “Good boy.”

  “Tyler, report her in the app, would you?” Jocelyn asked. “I wanted to do it earlier, but you know I’m hopeless at these things.”

  Cautiously, Steve walked around to the living room via the hallway. The woman hadn’t budged. There she stood, right in front of the French doors with her face pressed against the glass, like something that had been put there as a macabre joke, to replace a floor lamp or a houseplant. Her lank hair hung motionless and dirty under her headscarf. If she knew there was someone else in the room, she didn’t let on. Steve came closer but deliberately avoided looking at her, sensing her shape from the corner of his eye. It felt better not to look at her up close like this. He could smell her now, though: the stench of another era, of mud and cattle in the streets, of disease. She swayed gently, so that the wrought-iron chain shackling her ar
ms tightly to her shrunken body tapped against the varnished doorpost with a dull clank.

  “She was last seen at five twenty-four p.m. by the cameras behind the Market and Deli,” he heard Tyler’s muffled voice say from the other room. Steve could also hear that the woman was whispering. He knew that not listening to her whispering was a matter of life and death, so he concentrated on the voice of his son, and on Johnny Cash. “There are four reports from people who saw her, but nothing after that. Something about a barrel organ. Dad … are you okay?”

  His heart pounding, Steve knelt down next to the woman with the stitched-up eyes and picked up the dishcloth. Then he stood up. As his elbow brushed against the woman’s chain, she turned her maimed face toward him. Steve dropped the dishcloth over her head and scrambled away from her and back to the dining room, his forehead drenched in sweat, as Fletcher’s fierce, alarmed barking came from the backyard.

  “Dishcloth,” he said to Jocelyn. “Good idea.”

  The family continued eating, and all during dinner the woman with the stitched-up eyes stood motionless behind the stained glass.

  She only moved once: When Matt’s high-pitched laugh sounded through the dining room, she tilted her head.

  As if she were listening.

  After dinner, Tyler loaded the dishwasher and Steve cleaned the table. “Show me what you sent them.”

  Tyler held up his iPhone with the HEXApp logbook on display. The last entry read as follows:

  Wed. 09.19.12, 7:03 P.M., 16M ago

  Tyler Grant @gps 41.22890 N, 73.61831 W

  #K @ living room, 188 Deep Hollow Road

  omg i think she digs my little bro

  * * *

  LATER THAT EVENING, Steve and Jocelyn were both sprawled in the living room—not in their regular spot on the couch but on the divan on the other side of the room—watching The Late Show on CBS. Matt was in bed; Tyler was upstairs working on his laptop. The pale TV light flickered on the metal chains around the blind woman’s body—or at least on the links that weren’t rusted. Beneath the dishcloth, the dead flesh at the open corner of her mouth twitched, barely visible. It pulled on the jagged black stitches that sewed her mouth tight, except for that one loose stitch in the corner that stuck out like a bent piece of wire. Jocelyn yawned and stretched herself against Steve. He guessed it wouldn’t be long before she dropped off to sleep.

  When they went upstairs half an hour later, the blind woman was still there, something of the night that the night had now recovered.

  TWO

  ROBERT GRIM WATCHED the screen with distress as movers lugged furniture, wrapped in canvas and plastic, out of the moving van, and carried it into the residence on Upper Reservoir Road, following instructions of the harebrained yuppie bitch. It was camera D19-063—the late Mrs. Barphwell’s plot—although he didn’t need the camera number to tell him that. The image occupied the greater part of the western wall in the HEX control center as well as the greater part of Grim’s tormented night’s sleep. He shut his eyes and, with a huge amount of willpower, conjured up a new image, a sublime image: Robert Grim saw barbed wire.

  Apartheid is an underrated system, Grim thought. He was no supporter of racial segregation in South Africa, or of the strict purdah that separated men from women in Saudi Arabia, but a revolutionary and disturbingly altruistic part of him saw the world as divided into people from Black Spring and people outside Black Spring. Preferably with lots of rusty barbed wire in between. Under ten thousand volts, if possible. Colton Mathers, head of the Council, denounced that attitude and, in accordance with The Point’s demands, called for a controlled integration project—because without new growth, Black Spring would either die out or evolve into some inbred commune that would make Amishville, Pennsylvania, look like a hippie Mecca. But Colton Mathers’s expansionism was no match for damn near three hundred fifty years of cover-up policy, which was a relief for everyone. Robert Grim pictured the councilman’s ego as a particularly fat head. He hated it.

  Grim sighed and rolled his chair along the edge of the desk in order to glance at the statistics, tables, and measurements on the monitor in front of Warren Castillo, who was drinking coffee and reading the Wall Street Journal, feet up on the desk.

  “Neurotic,” Warren said, without looking up.

  Grim’s hands tightened into a cramp. He stared at the moving van once again.

  Last month things had looked so promising. The real estate agent had taken the yuppie couple to visit the house, and Grim had prepared for the operation down to every last detail, referring to it as “Operation Barphwell” out of respect for the elderly former occupant. Operation Barphwell consisted of a provisional fence right behind the property, a truck full of sand, a few concrete slabs, a large contractor sign with POPOLOPEN NIGHT BAZAAR & CLUB, READY MID–2015 written on it, and hidden concert speakers with subwoofers playing pile-driver sounds from the iTunes New Age & Mindfulness section. And, indeed, after the security cams showed the Realtor’s car approaching the town on Route 293 and Grim gave the signal to start the sound track, the pounding was hard to ignore. Together with Butch Heller’s hammer drill, which the tile setter haphazardly drilled into the concrete slabs, it suggested the construction of castles in the air.

  Delarosa was their name and New York City was their game. According to information Grim had received from The Point, the husband had won a seat on the Newburgh City Council and the wife was a communications advisor and heiress to a men’s clothing fortune. They would wax lyrical to their Upper East Side buddies about their rediscovery of country life, excrete two point three bloated babies, and decide to return to the city in about six years.

  But that’s where things got sticky. Once they had settled in Black Spring, there was no going back.

  It was essential that they be kept from coming to Black Spring.

  The effectiveness of the fake construction site should have been beyond question, but just to make sure, Grim had stationed three local kids on Upper Reservoir Road. There were always teens in Black Spring willing to take on a job for some cigarettes or a crate of Bud. This time it was Justin Walker, Burak Şayer, and Jaydon Holst, the butcher’s son. The real estate agent watched his commission go up in smoke when the local youths accused Bammy Delarosa of working the night shift as soon as she got out of the car, and invited her for a circle jerk to the hydraulic stomp of the pile driver.

  That should have ended the matter. When Grim contentedly settled into his bed that night, he congratulated himself on his ingenuity and quickly fell asleep. He caught himself dreaming about Bammy Delarosa, who in his dream had a humpback. The humpback had a mouth that tried to open and scream, but it couldn’t, as it was stitched shut with barbed wire.

  “Brace yourself,” Claire Hammer said the following morning when Grim entered the control center. She held up a piece of paper. “You’re not going to believe this.”

  Grim did not brace himself. He read the mail. Colton Mathers was furious. He accused HEX of a serious error of judgment. The real estate agent had started asking questions about the sign reading POPOLEN NIGHT BAZAAR & CLUB, READY MID–2015. Grim cursed Mrs. Barphwell’s death, but her next of kin had called in a real estate agent from Newburgh instead of Donna Ross Hometown Realty from Black Spring, who was paid by Grim to pursue a policy of discouraging people rather than attracting them. One way or the other, you’re dealing with Outsiders here, Mathers wrote. And once again, you’re being far too creative in the execution of your duties. How in heaven’s name am I supposed to get out of this mess?

  That was the councilman’s worry. Grim’s worry was that the Delarosas had fallen in love with the property and had made an offer. Grim immediately made a counteroffer using a false identity. Delarosa bid again. So did Grim. Wasting time until buyers lost interest was crucial in these matters—Black Spring fared well in the real-estate bubble.

  A week later, Warren Castillo called him at lunchtime from the control center just as he was about to start in on a mutton sandwi
ch from Griselda’s Butchery & Delicacies. The Delarosas’ Mercedes had been spotted in town. Claire was already on her way. The risk of a Code Red—a sighting by Outsiders—was next to zero, and Warren already had two people on alert. Moving as fast as he could and fuming about his unfinished mutton sandwich, Grim raced up the hill. He was out of breath by the time he ran into Claire near the Memorial Footbridge on Upper Reservoir Road.

  “You want what?” the New Yorker asked in disbelief after they had accosted him and his unnaturally tanned wife in front of Mrs. Barphwell’s bungalow. The Delarosas had come without their real estate agent, probably to convince themselves one more time of the extraordinary character of the house and its surroundings.

  “I want you to terminate the purchase of this house,” Grim repeated. “You’re not making any more offers, here or on any other property in Black Spring. The town is prepared to compensate you for the inconvenience by paying you five thousand dollars toward the purchase of any other plot, at any other location—as long as it isn’t in Black Spring.”

  The Delarosas looked at the two HEX officers with frank incredulity. It was a hot day, and even here in the shelter of the Black Rock Forest, Grim felt a drop of sweat run down his balding temple. His baldness set him apart somehow, he thought. A bald head inspired yuppies and women. Robert Grim, despite being in his mid-fifties, was an intimidating presence due to his height, his horn-rimmed glasses, and his natty tie, and Claire Hammer was an intimidatingly beautiful woman, except for a rather high forehead that she shouldn’t emphasize so much.

  On the way to the property they had talked about how to tackle the situation. Claire preferred an emotional approach and some sissy story about family ties and childhood memories. Grim was convinced that when dealing with these kinds of career geeks it was best to shoot straight from the hip, and he didn’t listen to her. It was because of her forehead. It distracted him. There was something expendable about a woman with an overly high forehead—especially if she emphasized it like that.