Warren ushered them away to the hospital’s Hudson View Cafe. The large window overlooked the wooded parking lot with the river flowing lazily behind it. The enormous Christmas tree on the circular drive was waving back and forth as the daylight wound down to dark. The warm spell of the morning had been dispelled by a raw, cold December evening. Not so far away, in the mortuary in a different part of this building, was his son, naked and dissected, and by now the anatomical pathologist would be removing all his vital organs.
“I’m so terribly sorry,” Warren said, “but there are a few practical matters that we have to deal with before Knocks & Cramer show up and start organizing the funeral. Do you want Tyler cremated or buried?”
“Buried,” Steve said almost straight out, and Jocelyn stared at him, astounded.
“Steve…”
They didn’t have funeral insurance, although money was not a problem. Steve had always believed that they were not the kind of people who attached any symbolic value to the grave. They had told each other in the past that they wanted to be cremated after their death—hypothetically speaking, of course, the way you’d say these things when death seemed far away. But now he suddenly saw their friends and family coming home with them after the cremation ceremony and digging into the salads and quiches they had brought, just as Tyler was being shoved into an oven. The heat would scorch and blacken his soft skin, singe his hair, and in a matter of minutes break down the muscles that had formed the body of his son for so many years. Nothing would be left of Tyler but a pile of ash and smoke that whirled out of a chimney and was carried away into the cold, until his molecules settled on the roofs of a thousand houses. That was more than Steve could bear, and he knew that he wanted to keep his son close to him no matter what.
“We’re going to bury him,” he said again.
“Oh, Steve, I don’t know…” Jocelyn said. “Tyler always wanted to get away from Black Spring, to discover what’s out there. Wouldn’t it be better if we scattered his ashes, at some proper place…?”
But Steve refused to give in. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was a selfish choice, but it felt important, as if something from the outside was inspiring him and he was obeying that inner voice.
“I want to keep him with us, Jocelyn. I want to be able to visit him.”
“Okay, I’ll let you decide,” she said. It was Tyler, after all; if Matt had died, she would have made the decision.
“Where do you want to bury him?” Warren asked.
Next to Fletcher in the backyard, Steven thought suddenly, and he felt his body turn to ice.
“In Black Spring.”
“I was afraid of that,” Warren sighed.
“That a problem?”
“No. Of course not. You’ll get every opportunity to do it your way, you can count on it. We’re just worried—to say the least. Katherine’s patterns have changed and it’s freaking out everyone in town. We don’t know what to expect.”
“Warren, Tyler must have heard her whispering somehow. That’s the only reasonable explanation, right? It was a horrible accident.”
Warren lowered his voice. “She attacked Robert last night.”
Steve and Jocelyn stared at him in shock.
“Don’t worry, he’s fine. We’ve all been knocked for a loop, that’s all. We just don’t get it—it looked like a deliberate attack.”
“Why would she do something like that?” Jocelyn asked, and her voice, already quavering, now broke. “Why did she kill Tyler, Steve? I try not to think about it, but I keep seeing it over and over again, him hanging there … and then I see Matt stuffing those mushrooms into his mouth … That wasn’t him, you know; she made him do it, she wanted to take Matt away from us, too.… And every time I try to remember Tyler’s face, I can’t … all I can see is her face, and her eyes are open … and she’s looking at me…” Tears were spilling down her cheeks. “Oh, Steve, help me please, hold me now, would you?”
Help me, Dad.
Steve did. He took her in his arms and held her as she cried inconsolably into his shirt, but it did nothing for him. It felt like he was hugging a hunk of dough. All the while he kept looking out the window at the people walking down the circular drive in the howling wind, possessed by their own ghosts and evil memories. But they were going home, and their reasons for being in the hospital would slip away from them; at home, their children would be waiting for them under the Christmas tree. Steve suddenly saw before him a gruesomely clear image of children floating in big jars of formaldehyde under pine boughs; naked, swollen children’s corpses in yellowish water, and one of them was Tyler, his eyes bulging and reflecting the Christmas lights.
* * *
TYLER’S VIEWING WAS on Tuesday. Because the only funeral home in Black Spring was at the Roseburgh home for the elderly, they opted for the sun parlor at the back of the Quiet Man. Tyler had always enjoyed going there to have root beers with his friends, and the bartender told Steve with tears in his eyes that he had always been an exemplary and charming sight.
Jocelyn’s confusion hit an all-time high on Monday afternoon. She started imagining that none of these terrible things had really happened and having panic attacks. Steve had found her in her Limbo where she was pulling the strands out of the carpet one by one. Dr. Stanton had given her an antipsychotic in the evening and she had slept for the first time since Friday, which was at least a slight bit of progress.
Pete urged Steve to divide his attention among the remaining members of his family. He knew in his mind that his friend was right. Jocelyn was in a state of total collapse and Matt wasn’t getting any better. Although the cornea transplant had been a success, there was no real sign of awareness. Yet Steve was unable to give his youngest son or his wife the attention they needed and probably deserved; his mind was overwhelmed by thoughts of Tyler.
Earlier that morning, Tyler had been taken to the Quiet Man in a light-colored, modern, plywood coffin. Steve and Jocelyn were both there and had spent a moment alone with him before the closing of the coffin later in the day. Tyler was dressed just as they had wanted him to be, in jeans, a white V-neck T-shirt, and his favorite cardigan—the same clothes he would have worn in life. The mortician had really done a fine job on him. Even the bruises from the rope, which Steve knew ought to have been visible on his neck, were gone.
He was so beautiful. His son. His Tyler.
He looked as though he were sleeping. So peaceful. So alive. An uneasy feeling crept over him that Tyler was really asleep and just waiting to open his eyes, stretch, and step out of his coffin. But the gentle throbbing of the generator underneath the cooling bed shattered that illusion. Tyler was decomposing from the inside out, a process that could only be slowed down a little. If you were to pull up one of his eyelids, you’d see a Styrofoam ball staring back at you; the pathologist would have pushed it in to fill up the socket.
Laurie arrived. Her parents hadn’t been able to get off work for the viewing, she said, but they’d be at the funeral. Steve cried with her and then accompanied her inside.
“Can I … touch him?” she asked after a while.
“Of course, sweetheart,” Steve said. She carefully took Tyler’s hand in hers but quickly let go, startled perhaps by how cold and stiff it felt.
Yes, that’s how it is, Steve thought. You can let him go. It will hurt for a while, but your life will go on. Next summer you may have a new boyfriend, and Tyler will be nothing but a painful memory that gradually fades.
“I just don’t understand it,” Laurie sobbed, wiping the tears from her eyes with her sleeve.
Steve felt a sudden electrical charge in the room that seemed to be directed at him. Now was the time he was supposed to ask whether she had noticed anything strange about Tyler … something that could explain his unexpected suicide. He realized it was expected of him, and that perhaps Laurie was hurt that he didn’t involve her. But Steve couldn’t. That charade would have to come later, not in front of Tyler.
“Neithe
r do I, Laurie,” he finally said, trembling.
Then came all the others. Tyler’s death had hit like a bomb, both within the community of Black Spring and beyond. A strange, detached tension ricocheted across the back room of the Quiet Man that morning. It was about more than just the sharing of grief: It was the head-on collision of so many people from Black Spring with so many people from the outside, the people who knew and the people who didn’t. Even the upbeat Owl City tracks—Tyler’s favorite—playing in the background did nothing to ease the tension. It was as if the town borders were running straight through the tavern that morning, and those who lived on one side shunned those on the other. The townsfolk were frozen to the marrow. Tyler had been touched by Katherine. The witch’s curse was upon him. It was so subtle that Tyler’s extended family members, O’Neill buddies, Raiders teammates, and teachers from the outside didn’t even notice it, but the procession shuffling in from the main room and past his coffin moved with a certain haste and got no closer than three feet from the cooling bed. The townsfolk hardly dared to look at Tyler; they crossed themselves or made gestures to protect them from the evil eye. When they came out through the back room of the Quiet Man, they were greatly relieved. It was ludicrous; Steve was disgusted. If Tyler hadn’t been so well liked in town, the vast majority of these people wouldn’t even have worked up the courage to come and see him out.
Halfway through the viewing, he took Jocelyn aside. She was as pale as a sheet and looked as if she were about to have a nervous breakdown. Her cheeks hung slack and her hands were trembling. “Are you going to make it?” he asked softly.
“I don’t know, Steve. If I hear one more fucking cliché, I think I’m going to scream.” She had obviously been overwhelmed by all the condolences, each one cutting deeper and deeper wounds, from the meaningless “Time heals all wounds” and “Life isn’t always fair” to the not-very-promising “Seven lean years will be followed by seven fat years,” and the utterly incomprehensible “On the one end they come, on the other they go.”
“I mean, what are they trying to tell me, for God’s sake?” Jocelyn asked, profoundly upset. “Do they really think I’m going to jump up, all better, and say, ‘Oh, thank you, ma’am, I really didn’t know that. In that case, it’s not so bad after all then, is it?’”
“Hush now,” he said, taking her in his arms. She started crying again, and when Mary saw how uncomfortable he was, she hesitantly took over. Steve wanted to show his gratitude, but Mary turned her eyes down with slight reproach. No one was good at this, he decided. They could only try and do the best they could.
Griselda Holst had brought an impressive meat pie. Steve didn’t know what to do with it, but he didn’t have the heart to reject the gift. Until Pete took it from him, he stood there clumsily with the pie in his hands. “I feel so terrible for you all,” Griselda said, briefly touching Steve’s arm. She kept glancing up at him and then looking down, as if she felt guilty just being a resident of the place that had cost Tyler his life.
“Thank you for coming, Mrs. Holst,” Steve said coolly.
“I pray every night for your other son.” She looked around and said in a muted voice, “I can’t understand why Katherine would do something like this. He just wanted to help her, right? We’ve all seen that he was on her side.”
Steve didn’t know what to say. Speaking of sides struck him as absurd at best. “Thank you, Mrs. Holst. How is Jaydon doing?”
Again, those nervous, downcast eyes. “Not so well. But he’ll pull through.”
“I’m sorry about what happened. I want you to know that I was against it—against the way the whole thing was handled.”
“That’s nice of you to say. I have never held anything against you.”
Held anything against me? Steve wanted to ask, but suddenly he understood, and for one brief moment a terrible insight shot through his head with sharp, paralyzing fear … and disappeared just as quickly, like a tidal wave that had exposed something in the shoreline and then washed over it again. Steve tried to hang on to it, but it got the better of him. All those people. All those words. How much pain could a man bear in his heart? Why did it all feel so meaningless? Right there and then, his grief seized him more intensely than ever, and Steve would have given anything, literally anything in the world, to undo it all, to go back a week and stay with his son for those last few days to prevent what had happened to him.
Perhaps that could have been the end of it: that intense, personal sorrow that would cripple their lives for a long time to come but eventually evolve into something bearable, until it became a memory at last. And perhaps the day would come when they as a family would be able to resume life without Tyler. But Griselda Holst had to be the first to say the witch’s name out loud, so he focused his sorrow on Katherine van Wyler. And all Steve could think was: Why? Why would someone bear so much malice and make innocent parents suffer so terribly? The butcher’s wife may have been a little eccentric, but she was right: Tyler had been on her side, goddamn it. He had wanted to protect her from those sons of bitches who had set all this in motion with their sick plot to throw stones at her. Tyler had wanted to help her; couldn’t she have shown any mercy? After all, Katherine herself had been forced to kill her own, resurrected son, so how could she—
It hit him like a landslide. Before Steve’s very eyes, the town café began to topple, and the black-clad people dissolved from his field of vision. As if from a distance he heard Griselda Holst say, He just wanted to help her, right? We’ve all seen that he was on her side.
Pete VanderMeer, on the night they had apprised the Delarosas of the situation: It’s October 1664 when Katherine’s nine-year-old son dies of smallpox. Witnesses testify that they’ve seen her, dressed in full mourning, burying his body up in the woods. But a few days later, the townsfolk see the boy walking around the streets of New Beeck as if Katherine had raised him from the dead, like Jesus did with Lazarus.
He just wanted to help her, right?
If raising the dead isn’t the ultimate proof that you’re messing with stuff you shouldn’t be messing with, I don’t know what is.
After being tortured, she confessed, but they all did.
After being tortured, she confessed.
He just wanted to help her, right?
Raising the dead …
A shudder of primitive comprehension ran down Steve’s spine, and in the distance he could hear the barking of a dog, on that cold night in November only a month and a half ago, a dog that had sounded so much like Fletcher.
TWENTY-SIX
TYLER WAS BURIED on Thursday morning in St. Mary’s Cemetery behind the church, the larger of the two cemeteries in Black Spring. The weather was bleak, and a dull, flat December light welcomed the mourners, who had come in droves. Two people who attended only part of the ceremony, each for their own reasons, were Robert Grim and Griselda Holst.
Griselda had sat in the back of the church during the service. Now she walked over to a rise on the edge of the cemetery behind the crowd of mourners, who had gathered on the paths and between the graves all the way to the wrought-iron gate and beyond. She didn’t dare mingle with them. Since Jaydon’s trial and torture, they had made her an outcast. The townsfolk avoided her like the plague. Black Spring had never fully recovered from November 15. People simply didn’t seem to know how to relate to each other anymore. For many, the excessive, appalling events at the crossroads had been so horrifying and inconsistent with their moral ideas that they had literally erased them from their memories. On the streets, people exchanged mere perfunctory greetings, and not a word was spoken about what had happened. Each wore the same shamefaced expression, for each bore the guilt for this infamy.
From the day in late November when Griselda had reopened her shop, the townsfolk had shunned Griselda’s Butchery & Delicacies. The clientele was reduced to a sporadic dribble, far too few to cover expenses, and Griselda had started to worry about her future. Ironically enough, she understood more tha
n ever how poor Katherine must feel. Katherine was an outcast, too, the vermin of society. Griselda felt intensely that they were kindred spirits, but since she had been ejected from the Council, she no longer dared to call on her. It was agony, but Griselda was terrified that she’d be caught by the security cams. And more than anything, she was terrified of Katherine’s wrath.
Tyler Grant’s mother, dressed in a black coat, looked to Griselda as if she had aged six years in six days. She was supported by her father, a hearty Outsider in his seventies, and kept glancing around in increasing disbelief, as if to confirm that her youngest son really was not present at his brother’s funeral. It was so tragic: that poor kid lying in the hospital in Newburgh. Rumor had it that he had slipped into a psychosis from which he would never awaken. Steve Grant was standing next to his wife, but Griselda didn’t fail to notice that he hadn’t touched her once during the entire service. He looked lost and obsessed, like a man who was no longer capable of recognizing reality.
The Grant family was not religious, but because of the impact of the death on the community, the pastor had agreed to say a few words … discreet, as usual, when there were Outsiders present. Griselda’s eyes passed over the crowd. She was shocked to see Colton Mathers hidden in the shadow of the crucifix over at the iron gates. His face was as emotionless as pale marble and his grasping, blue-veined man’s hands were thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat. Griselda felt a flash of cold-blooded hatred toward the councilman, who had dropped her like a ton of bricks, just as all the others had done.
She was a pariah. She, Griselda Holst, who had done all the dirty work in that Arthur Roth business and whose mediation with Katherine all those years had prevented something—something like this—from happening.
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