HEX

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  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.

  As the woods opened before him, the sky was a blue-almost-black, the clouds a scalding shade of crimson. With a peculiar sense of homecoming, Steve realized where he was. Behind the barbed wire that ran along the path were the steep frozen pastures of Ackerman’s Corner, where John Blanchard always put his sheep out to graze. The landscape had a strange dead look. He was surrounded by Highland Woods on three sides, and Black Spring lay below, invisible beyond the ridge. Farther southeast, the land fell away into the Hudson Valley and he could make out the glistening lights of Fort Montgomery and Peekskill. Families would be gathering for Christmas Eve dinners by now, the gifts already wrapped, the fireplace lit. The thought filled him with a strong sense of melancholy: The towns of the Valley seemed like exotic destinations, as tempting as they were unreachable.

  Not unreachable. This is my Purgatory, Steve thought. If you pass your test, Paradise awaits you, right?

  That brought him back to last night’s vision, and a sour weight dropped onto him like a stone.

  Sick fuck, he thought stupidly. Suppressing that, he began walking down the hillside toward Black Spring.

  * * *

  THERE WAS PROBABLY nothing in the world that could have prepared Steve Grant for his confrontation with the town in which he had raised his children.

  Chaos had come to Black Spring. Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises that rose in the radiant sky, even when he passed the historic waterwheel at the town hall and ran down Upper Reservoir Road. A thick, suffocating smoke issuing from the center of town pricked his eyes and made it difficult for Steve to breathe. But only when he came around the final curve and reached the top corner of Temple Hill did the spectacle fully reveal itself to him.

  The town square was a surging horde of human abnormality. Now not hundreds but two or three thousand people were participating in the total pandemonium of bellowing, wailing, and brawling people. Everyone was there—all of Black Spring. And it was impossible to tell who was fighting what cause. Griselda’s Butchery & Delicacies lay in ashes; other buildings were burning as well, billowing fires that lit the mob, grazed the treetops, colored the bronze statue of the washerwoman at the fountain with a reddish glare, and reflected in the odd-shaped windows of Crystal Meth Church, giving it the surreal appearance of rising even higher and looking out over the unholy throng with the eyes of the inferno. Steve tried to recognize his fellow townsfolk in the features of individuals, but realized it was impossible: Their faces seemed rubbed out, without eyes and without mouths, and not a single madman’s face deviated from that of another. These were the faces of Black Spring, and Black Spring was at its darkest hour.

  Something caused him to turn then, some force that seemed to come from outside him, and Steve could barely suppress a scream. It was Katherine van Wyler. She was standing on one of the hilltop driveways taking in the vista below, right in front of a twin chrome-tailpiped Grand Am that looked like it wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Its hood and all its windows were smashed, and Katherine was standing barefoot amid a litter of broken glass. She didn’t seem to mind, though: The witch observed the anarchy unfolding in front of her with a look of total impassivity.

  “Stop it!” Steve screamed. He took a few reeling steps toward her on legs that had lost all feeling. When he was close enough, he lowered his voice, because that, too, seemed to have lost its power. “Please, make them stop. Don’t do this anymore. It’s enough. Please.”

  But then Katherine slowly turned her head toward him. And as soon as he saw her face, he understood that what he had mistaken for impassivity was in fact a hollow shock closely mirroring his own. Then he knew. Of course; then he knew. It wasn’t the witch who was doing this.

  This was no penance, no retaliation. It was Black Spring itself.

  Katherine raised her arm and pointed at the church.

  Jocelyn and Matt, he thought … and suddenly he found himself staring at the crystal-clear image from his delirium, the image of the church burning. Inside it was teeming with ghosts, except now his wife and his youngest were among them. Matt’s one eye patch was damp and ashen and Jocelyn’s hair was tangled and dirty. Matt desperately clung to his mom, but Jocelyn screamed when an overhead arch exploded in sizzling cinders that whirled down on both of them.

  It wasn’t so much a recollection of last night’s fever dream as an image being projected onto his mind. Katherine was showing it to him.<
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  And Steve knew with a sudden sickening certainty that Jocelyn and Matt were indeed in the church, and that something terrible was about to happen, something he had to prevent.

  “Matt’s in the hospital,” he muttered. All the color drained from his face. He seemed to lose control of his muscles. His mouth dropped open in a scream, “Matt’s in the hospital, he can’t be there!”

  But Katherine’s finger pointed mercilessly.

  There were gunshots on the other side of the square and a woman started screaming, a harrowing scream that rose out over the rabble: My baby, not my baby! But Steve could hardly take it in.

  Oh, Jesus. Matt’s here; Jocelyn’s here. Are you happy now with what you’ve brought about, you damn fucking fool? How’s it even possible that Matt’s here?

  But was he really so stupid as to believe that they could have stayed in Newburgh, to escape a climax in a play as dark as this? That’s not how tragedies were supposed to end, not even if you wished them to be untrue. So exactly who was he kidding?

  He turned to the witch. “Where’s Tyler?”

  Katherine pointed unrelentingly toward the church.

  That finger, that pointing, the full implication of what he had heard himself asking; those things frightened him even more than the hoarse, shaky quality of his voice.

  “I have to know. Is Tyler in there?”

  Nothing, only that finger.

  Hurry up, you fuck; this is out of her control. It was never hers to begin with. The town’s gone crazy and Jocelyn and Matt are probably in the middle of it. She’s offering you a chance.…

  Steve hesitated, torn at the sight of sadness, not evil, in the witch’s eyes … and then he started running.

  Steve plunged into the maelstrom.

  * * *

  HE STARTED OUT by making his way through the mob unseen. Once he got down to the middle of the slope, his view was entirely blocked by the confusion before him, and he soon lost his sense of direction. He was being jostled on all sides by filthy, sweaty bodies whose smell was sickening: a degenerated stench of fear, barely short of toxic.

  Steve saw things he would never forget as long as he lived.

  Eve Modjeski, the now former clerk at the Market & Deli, was staggering around, her face painted with blood from a huge gash on her forehead, droning a singsong jump-rope rhyme with eyes that seemed to have rolled back in her head. A man whose name he did not know but who used to work as a clerk at Marnell’s Hardware was making his way through the hubbub with two naked toddlers in his arms whom he recognized as Claire Hammer’s children. And there were dead bodies, too. Some had been shot—they were the lucky ones.

  Struggling against the panic that seized him, Steve began screaming the names of his wife and son, but then he realized his mistake: His shrill voice inevitably drew the attention of those in his vicinity, who now saw him. People shrank from him on every side. Their eyes, in which he had until now only seen the dull luster of ignorance, gleamed with a sudden superstitious horror … and accusation.

  “It’s him!” a high-pitched voice shrieked, and Steve was shocked to see none other than Bammy Delarosa pointing her finger at him. “He’s the one who brought the evil eye upon us!”

  A frenzy of terror immediately seized hold of the crowd. While the woman who’d begun this furor shrieked the same accusation over and over—and that couldn’t be Bammy, he must be mistaken, right?—others began to gabble prayers, giving him the sign of the horned hand or crossing themselves in a desperate attempt to protect themselves from their culprit. Incredulously, Steve stared back at them, recoiling slowly but bumping into others who reached out for him and clawed at his clothes.

  They knew.

  They knew he was the one who had opened the witch’s eyes. He was like the scapegoat in a seventeenth-century trapper’s colony … and you know how these stories went.

  He yanked himself loose and started to run. The crowd parted before him and Steve took advantage of their terrified state, but the cry for his execution spread quicker than his ability to make his way through this impregnable lunacy. The only reason why he stopped when he recognized Warren Castillo was because he knew with an irrational clarity he wasn’t meant to flee. Don’t ask how, but it was true.

  “Warren!” He hesitated, then touched the man’s arm. “What the hell is going on here?”

  Warren turned around and Steve saw that he was carrying the biggest cleaver he had ever seen. “Steve,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a while. How was the funeral?”

  Steve took a step back. He could smell a foul odor in Warren’s sweat. There was something about his voice that was off. He didn’t like the tone of it. Not at all. Warren seemed heavily intoxicated, but Steve couldn’t smell alcohol on his breath, only advanced decay.

  “Have you seen Jocelyn?”

  “Who’s Jocelyn?”

  Silence. “My wife.”

  “My wife?” Again that strange tone in Warren’s voice. “My wife picked a bunch of juniper berries and ragwort in the woods this morning. Says it purifies the air. Don’t know who taught her that but…” He stopped mid-sentence and slid his thumb along the blade of his cleaver. “Why did you do it, Steve? Why did you have to open her eyes?”

  He tried to reply, but when he opened his mouth he found his throat too constricted to force any air up. A second later, something exploded in his upper back and this time the air did come out; the blow literally pounded it out of his lungs. Steve was knocked down onto his chin. His teeth banged together and a blackness leaped up from the sneakers, boots, and slip-ons that were suddenly closing in on his vision. Groaning, he rolled over onto his back and stared straight into the upside-down face of Rey Darrel and the black-eyed barrels of the rifle he had been struck with.

  “Well, look at you, boy,” Darrel said. “Ain’t you a sight to make a proud American weep?”

  “Rey,” he hissed. “Don’t…”

  “Fucking traitor.”

  And with that, Rey leaned back and booted him in the face. Steve heard a bony crunch and felt an excruciating flash shoot through his jaw. His head lolled loosely on his neck, his skull thudding on the cobblestones, and blood sprayed from his mouth in a vertical curtain.

  Steve must have passed out for a minute then, maybe even for just a few seconds, because the next thing he knew he was being dragged, then lifted, as cries of incitement rose from the mob. He smelled pavement, smoke, madness. He choked on blood, coughed out a tooth. The world toppled over as he was raised over their heads, and Steve had the nauseating but intense sensation that he was flying and would never come back down. As the crowd carried him through the graveyard to his trial-less conviction, his face burned from the horrors, and his tightly stretched skin crawled over his skull as if it were preparing his mauled jaws for the scream that would herald the end of everything.

  But then something peculiar happened.

  The periphery of his vision swelled and wavered, and he had the sudden realization that he could see the faces of the townsfolk through the very eyes he had feared for so long … the eyes he had cut the stitches from. Maybe it was because, like Katherine, he now knew what it was like to be marked as a pariah. Maybe it was because, like Katherine, he was now the target of their anger. Or maybe it was just that only in the face of his impending death could he allow himself the freedom to embrace what had always seemed like his greatest fear in Black Spring but now felt strangely like coming home.

  This revelation came as they got closer to the church and the nightmare around him grew darker. He felt intimately connected to Katherine, and there was an odd sense of relief in that, a sense of belonging. Steve relaxed into the hands of his inquisitors and felt their soothing touch on his body. He closed his eyes but still saw with Katherine’s: Forced out of a merciful darkness, she was made to behold what three hundred fifty years of progressive civilization had done to her fellow townsfolk. Women being dragged along by their legs or their hair and thrown into the church. A chorus ris
ing: “Witch! Witch! Witch!” Gasoline-drenched stacks of hay and rubber tires being piled up against the church walls. Theo Stackhouse, the now unmasked executioner of Temple Hill, raising a torch over his head. A woman with a baby in her arms trying to flee and being shot in the back of the head, after which her body was dragged into the church with the baby, alive, still clutched to her.

  Then Steve, too, was thrown into Crystal Meth’s narthex. He landed on a human pile and the church doors were slammed in his face.

  He crawled away over limbs and skin and was nearly trampled underfoot himself, until he felt the cold ground beneath his hands. Steve pushed himself along on all fours, then hoisted himself to his feet. He took a few drunken steps, almost swaying back to the floor. The pain was a dull but dizzying pressure in his swollen face. His lower lip felt if it were hanging loose. His jaw was probably broken.

  It wasn’t long before the soft, gathering whisper of the fire outside became a roar that drowned out even the fury of howls and squeals from the townsfolk trapped in the church. And it wasn’t long before one of the crystal-shaped glass panes blew in and a Molotov cocktail sailed through the dim arcade, exploding amid the pews halfway down the nave.

  The blast of the heat was immediate and savage and illumined the desecrated church in a hellish glare. In that light he saw the church was full of people desperately throwing themselves at the barred doors, crashing into walls, trying to reach for the stained-glass windows, and ducking as the panes were blown in and flames boiled through the openings. He saw two people on fire—men, women, impossible to say. As he started down the center aisle to get away from the walls where the heat was building fastest, many reached out for him, begging him, asking him, why had he done it? He saw people he had once called his friends—Pete VanderMeer, who knelt with a dead child in his arms. When Pete looked up, their gazes met in a paralyzing moment, and the blank expression on his best friend’s face turned into a mask of despair … and reproach.