The images are shaky, but images don’t lie. A hundred yards to the left near Deep Hollow Road are the fences, abandoned by the volunteers. The camera sweeps to the other side and we see who the volunteers are: Jaydon, Justin, and Burak, in heavy boots and State Reserve uniforms. Those sons of bitches have offered their services and Grim has fallen for it, Tyler thinks. Staggering in their midst is Katherine, unnaturally bent as if her spinal column had been broken, and they’re driving her forward the way you drive cattle, using broomsticks with the heads torn off. Judging from how the witch is moving, she’s in a panic. Her sewn-up mouth is a crooked grimace of horror and she’s desperately clutching the charred peacock feathers that are sticking out of her—This is unreal, Tyler thinks—Market & Deli shopping bag. She keeps trying to turn away and walk off, but they roughly push her back. Jaydon beats her with his broomstick and her body doubles over, forcing her to walk the other way. Why she’s so attached to that stupid peacock is a mystery to Tyler, but she is; desperately, she puts up with the abuse rather than vanish and have to leave her shopping bag behind.
Then the images blur; we see pink spots from Tyler’s fingers since he’s holding the GoPro out of sight, we hear running footsteps, we see the jolting forest floor. We also see splintered fragments of a security cam that’s been knocked out of a tree: no room for subtlety this time.
“Oh Jesus stop!” Tyler shouts in one breath. “Leave her alone!”
“Mind your own fucking business. Stay and watch or get the fuck out of here.”
“Don’t make it any worse than it is. You can still stop this thing!”
“She killed your dog. You should be grateful. Everybody just stands by and watches, but at least we’re doing something. Walk, whore!” A new blow and the witch sways on her feet, trying to keep her balance.
Stumbling. Khaki fatigues, suddenly very close. Sky spinning. Sewn-shut eyes and rapid, desperate steps in jangling chains. Hands grasping shoulders. A broom handle sweeping through the air like a whip; Jaydon means serious business. Tyler shrinks back and we see grass, we see the streambed, we see desperate faces overhead. Again Lawrence and Tyler jump forward and there’s fighting, there’s cursing. Then Lawrence is struck by a sickening blow from a stick and he hits his forehead against one of the boulders in the creek. Panting, Tyler turns him over and we see a deep cut in pale skin and dark hair smeared with blood.
“Lawrence, you all right?”
“No. Stop them.”
Burak looks down at them, hesitating, stick in his hand. “Bastard!” Tyler roars as he helps Lawrence up, and Burak runs back to the others.
Just when Tyler sees what they’re up to, the images reveal it as well, and we hear the smothered cry from Tyler’s throat, more animal than human. They’ve driven the witch to the lower reaches of the creek. Farther on we see the hole of the tank that once collected the creek water from the culvert running under Deep Hollow Road but is no longer in use. The hole is a little less than a square yard, and the metal plate that normally covers it, overrun with mold, is now lying on the nearby bank.
For the last time Tyler sprints up to them, screaming for them not to do it, to stop while they still can, but it’s too late. The wildly shaking images show Jaydon giving the witch a vicious push with his stick and her falling helplessly into the tank. It’s not deep; she knocks her head against the concrete edge and her attackers roar, her attackers gather rocks, her attackers stone the witch. Tyler sees it all; he sees how two sharp rocks hit her face at the same time and split it open, he sees how her headscarf is torn off and he sees blood and he sees more rocks. He vomits on the ground as Katherine finally gives in. The smell of burning shopping-bag plastic rises as she disappears. And still rocks are bouncing and tumbling, now against the concrete sides of the empty tank.
“He’s got a fucking camera!” someone bellows. A new rock whizzes in Tyler’s direction and he ducks just in time to avoid it. In a flash we see Jaydon’s face coming toward us, a mask of pure psychopathic rage, the kind of face that screams at you to run if you want to live and tell the tale, and that’s just what Tyler and Lawrence do. Their salvation is that they’re so close to home; if this drama had taken place farther into the woods, they easily would have been caught. But here there are more cameras, here there are people who might be home, and the chase is called off. Yet Tyler, unaware of this, slams the back door so hard behind him that the pane rattles in its frame, and he turns both latches before he and Lawrence fall to their knees on the kitchen floor and burst into tears.
But now they’re not crying like the little boys they still were until two nights ago; this is the crying of boys who have just become adults because of events that are too big for them to bear on their own. And while they’re crying, the image goes black.
SEVENTEEN
LATER THE SAME afternoon Steve suggested they go get the horses and settle them back in their own stable, but Jocelyn’s face clouded over at the idea.
“I don’t know, Steve. I don’t have a good feeling about it, so close to the creek and the woods and all.… How can we know if it’s safe?” She looked outdoors through the new window. The air in the dining room was still heavy with the smell of fresh paint from the retouched window frame, but the fragrance of Jocelyn’s vegetarian quiche in the oven was slowly taking over.
Steve shrugged. “We stayed here, didn’t we? Nothing happened to us.”
“Yes, but it’s different with people,” Matt said, as simple as that. He laid down his pen on top of his homework. “I don’t want Nuala to end up hanging from a tree, too, Dad.”
“The creek’s been back to normal for two days now,” Steve said. “And there’s no indication that things are any different than they were before, or that the horses are in any kind of danger.”
“Unless a certain person forgets to shut the stable door,” Matt remarked. He seemed shocked by his own comment, but it was too late: Jocelyn’s expression changed into a mask of offended distress.
Steve was taken aback. “What kind of goddamn presumptuousness is that!” he exclaimed.
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Gramma can’t use her hands, and Fletcher didn’t unbolt his kennel by himself, you know!”
“We don’t know how Fletcher got out. But if your mom says she bolted the kennel, you have no right to doubt her. I want you to apologize.”
“I’m not going to apologize for something that—”
“Apologize!”
Matt slammed his book on the floor and jumped up from the table. “I’m sorry, all right? Sorry you guys can’t take it if somebody speaks the truth for once!”
“Matt!”
But he had already run upstairs and slammed his bedroom door. Steve was aghast. He looked at Jocelyn in the pale four o’clock light, but she lowered her eyes. “Well done,” she sighed.
“You should have said something yourself, then,” Steve snapped, nastier than he had intended. He understood that Matt’s irrational outburst was just his way of dealing with his grief, but it made Steve angry nonetheless. He didn’t know how to deal with Matt’s mood swings, especially when he got downright mean. Jocelyn was better at it. One of the things that had always held their marriage together in the Black Spring whirlwind was the natural division of roles they had settled into within the family, from which they rarely deviated. It created context and order in an environment where turmoil was all too common. And when it came to matters of the heart, reason was a virtue. One of the aspects of that role division was that Jocelyn took care of Matt while Steve was responsible for Tyler. It wasn’t entirely black-and-white, of course, but that’s what both of them—all four of them—knew to be true.
“I don’t mean just Matt,” Jocelyn said. “It’s affecting both of them. Tyler hasn’t come out of his room for days. This is going to leave scars, Steve.” She gestured angrily at the waning daylight. “There’s something out there that killed our dog, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“To be honest, Matt�
��s reaction seems like a perfectly natural expression of grief to me. Crude and unreasonable, but normal. His grief is seeking an outlet, and he’s not fighting it. He wants to blame people. He’ll come back and apologize, I’m sure.”
“That’s not the point. You’re trivializing the situation. Fletcher gets buried. Fine. We buy a new table, we get everything nicely painted, we make like none of it ever happened. But it did, and you see the traces right there in front of you.”
She pointed at the dark tiles that had the dents of Paladin’s hooves hammered into them. Steve stared at her and sighed calmly in an effort to salvage the situation. “What surprises me is that Matt got so worked up about the fact that we didn’t offer anything up at the festival. Remember how he went on about it on Saturday? We didn’t offer anything, so it’s our fault that Fletcher is dead. I hoped we had given Tyler and Matt a bit more reason than that. He almost sounded like the people from town.”
“What do you expect?” Jocelyn exclaimed. “What the hell does he know? Maybe that did cause it, maybe it is our fault. Are you trying to say that isn’t a natural reaction?”
“Jocelyn,” he said, “you’re talking nonsense.”
“Not at all. I’m not saying that’s how it happened; I’m just saying that we don’t know how Fletcher ended up in that tree. And we’ll never know. That’s why Matt is scared, Steve. And Tyler … have you even sat down and talked to Tyler in the past few days? Aren’t you worried about how he’s distancing himself from everything?”
“I did ask him about it.”
“That’s not the same as talking.”
“Sweetheart, he prefers to solve his problems himself, now. That, too, is perfectly normal for his age.”
“Nothing’s normal here. This town is bewitched, Steve. And it’s not just Katherine. It’s everything, it’s the sounds we hear at night and it’s that creek behind our house that was full of blood for three days—blood, do you realize that? And it’s the people. Do you really believe this won’t have a lasting influence on the children? Or on us?”
He looked at her, nonplussed. “Jocelyn, I’m not pretending it never happened. I’m just trying to preserve the peace. That’s the only reasonable way to deal with this. Just like we’ve always done.”
She was standing directly across from him now, and she was hopping mad. “But everything’s changed now, don’t you get that? We’ve lived here in relative peace for eighteen years and we could stand it because we weren’t in any immediate danger. But now Fletcher’s dead, so don’t you say we’re not in danger, Steve! Don’t you dare say that!”
“It seems like everything’s back to normal, and—”
“Nothing’s back to normal, and I don’t want you to pretend it is! It’s your fault that we…”
She didn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t have to. So there we have it, he thought. The sly dig, the final argument to chasten Steve when all others had failed, because no matter how much time had passed, this was still what could strike him at the core. He knew what Jocelyn had wanted to say: It’s your fault that we live here, so you do something about it. Steve felt shaken, as if he had bumped into an invisible pane of glass. Was this still the issue? How was it possible to live together in perfect harmony for years and years, only for something like this to come barreling out of the blue and put them in a zone of full-fledged alienation? Boulders or no boulders, it was for Steve’s career that they had moved to Black Spring, while Jocelyn had given up her own. The old wound had lain buried for more than fifteen years—In a hole in the backyard, just like Fletcher, he thought absentmindedly. But sometimes what lay buried came back … because buried wasn’t always buried.
She read the indignation in his face and touched his arm, but he pulled away and grabbed her wrist. “Just remember,” he said, “that I was the one who argued against having a second baby. If you aren’t pleased with the way they’ve grown up, think about the fact that you could have avoided half of it.”
Of course that wasn’t fair; of course he shouldn’t have said it. Jocelyn’s lips quivered, then she tore away from him and went to the kitchen without saying a word. Steve was left behind in the dining room, which felt more abandoned than ever.
Christ, how could I have thought that everything was all right? he said to himself. Katherine, what on earth have you done to our family?
From the kitchen came a stifled cry, then the rattling of the baking sheet in the oven. Soon the smell of burned pastry filled the room. Steve closed his eyes as Jocelyn noisily shook the failed quiche into the trash can and let the pie plate clatter into the sink. Her face stained with tears, she pushed by him and went upstairs. Steve entered the kitchen and looked into the trash can. There was little left of the edges, but the center of the quiche still looked pretty good. He slid it cautiously onto a plate, cut the burned pieces away, covered it with aluminum foil, and left it on the counter. Then he went outside. He caught himself about to take Fletcher’s leash from the hook out of habit, then remembered he had stored it in the shed along with his basket yesterday.
He walked briskly, hands in his pockets, straight into a howling wind that numbed his cheekbones. He crossed the golf course and continued a few miles past the tall fence enclosing West Point, away from Black Spring. Fuck, maybe Jocelyn was right—maybe he had been too quick to shrug it all off. He sincerely tried to recall what had gotten into them two nights before when they thought they’d heard Fletcher barking—even if only for a minute or two. Bullshit, of course; he refused to believe it. It seemed far away now, blurry, like the chill that had overtaken him in the woods when he found Fletcher dead, or when he’d damaged the fairy ring. These were irrational moments that weren’t at all like him. It felt foolish, embarrassing. Buried is buried, he thought. And that’s the end of it.
But maybe it wasn’t foolish for the rest of the family. And despite the fact that it hurt Steve more than he was willing to admit, didn’t that make him responsible?
Later I stopped believing in witches, so I did it as a balancing exercise.
Steve decided to talk to Tyler as soon as the opportunity arose.
* * *
THE LOW-PRESSURE SYSTEM in the house lasted all evening long, but at least Jocelyn and Matt ate some of the quiche. Tyler didn’t even come downstairs; he muttered something about having to study for an exam and wanting to be left alone. That night Jocelyn and Steve each lay facing the wall on their own side of the big bed, unspoken words trembling in the empty space between them. He lay awake for a long time but finally fell asleep from exhaustion.
The next morning at breakfast Jocelyn said, “Maybe I will bring the horses back after we’re finished riding this afternoon. I think you’re right. It probably won’t hurt them.”
Steve nodded and felt something relax inside. “You want me to come along with the trailer?”
She shook her head. “Matt and I can manage.”
Nothing else was articulated, but at least it was a start, and he didn’t want to force anything. Times of tension between them never lasted long, but this had been different, more delicate, and it required careful treatment. He thought about it during the day at the university, and as he was raking the leaves in the backyard that afternoon he came to the conclusion that they weren’t so bad off after all. Jocelyn and Matt were hooking up the trailer to the car in the driveway. Steve inhaled the cold autumn air deep into his lungs—it was one of those November days that held the first subtle traces of winter—and comforted himself with the thought that there must be people in town who had done much worse than they had.
He was still working in the backyard when Jocelyn came outside in her riding gear and screamed, “Steve!” She sounded anxious. “Steve, right away!”
He dropped the rake into the pile of leaves and ran to the kitchen door. “Something’s wrong with Tyler,” she said. “He’s not responding … I can’t get through to him.”
She took him to the living room. Tyler was sitting on the couch in the twili
ght with his legs drawn up close to his body. It took Steve less than three seconds to come to a diagnosis: The boy seemed about to drop into a psychotic episode, or was already having one. The toes of his bare feet were curled up and cramped, his hair was tousled, his knuckles were white. He was staring into the far distance with big, unseeing eyes. Steve recognized that expression from psychiatric patients who were willfully struggling to disengage themselves from reality. It was the expression of someone moving from the light into the darkness, and Steve suppressed a sudden burst of staggering fear.
He lowered himself to his knees in front of Tyler and put his hands on his shoulders. “Hey, Tyler, look at me…” He shook him gently to awaken him from his stupor. Tyler yielded to his movements immediately, which alarmed Steve even more. He had expected his body to be as constricted as his fingers and toes. Resistance would have been a sign of consciousness. But Tyler’s body was behaving like a doll filled with straw. Steve put his hand on the back of his neck and squeezed his vertebrae tightly with his thumb and forefinger.
“What’s wrong with him?” Jocelyn asked, aghast. She knelt beside him as well. Matt had popped up in the open French doors and was peering at them in terror.
“Shock,” Steve said. “Get me some water, Jocelyn.”
Jocelyn did as he asked and Steve sat down on the couch next to his son. He took him in his arms and rocked him gently back and forth. Tyler’s body felt cold and clammy. “Hey, son, it’s going to be all right; everything’s going to be all right,” he murmured, and he kept on repeating the words like a mantra. But inside he cursed himself: He had known that it wasn’t all right from the moment Robert Grim had questioned Tyler, right before the horses had gone crazy. He had seen it in his eyes. Why hadn’t he tried harder to fish it out of him? Idiot. “What are you doing, son? Scaring the daylights out of us.” He held his son even tighter. “I’m here with you, Tyler. No matter what happens, I’m always with you. It’s going to be all right.”
Finally, his attempts bore fruit and Tyler began shuddering in his arms. The blind, boneless expression on his face began to thaw. His lips quivered and released a soft, stifled moan. His eyes opened wider and became moist. His hands moved upward, trembling, and fell helplessly back down.
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