HEX

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  Even here, he had been found guilty.

  But was he? Was this really a hell of his making? His decision to cut open Katherine’s eyes had only been a catalysis caused by his grief over the death of his son, and who was responsible for that? Jaydon Holst had made Tyler listen to Katherine’s whispering. But could Jaydon himself be held responsible, after what the town had done to him? Could Katherine, after what they had done to her?

  One evil spawned another, greater evil, and ultimately everything could be traced back to Black Spring.

  Black Spring had brought this upon itself.

  A chill overcame him of a nature so dark and primal that Steve began to shudder all over despite the terrifying heat. He loathed them. Loathed them. All of them. The ones inside the church and the ones out there. They were all the same. He saw that now.

  His eyes had been stitched shut for all these years, but not anymore.

  All those gaping mouths and bulbous eyes just shrieking at him with derision!

  Let him be their pariah.

  They couldn’t blind him anymore—not him.

  And as he reached the chancel, he cursed them all. His upturned face was blasted by scintillating gusts of embers that came down from the almost transparent membrane of fire devouring the roof, but he didn’t mind: It was his fire. Damn those people. Damn their never-ending chain of selfish choices. Damn their refusal to seek reconciliation, damn their inability to love, damn their sick insistence to see the ugly, not the good. Tyler had been different; Tyler had had dreams. Damn, damn, damn; cursed be them who had taken his Tyler away from him!

  “Dad?”

  Steve had found the door that everyone else had forgotten, hidden in a recess behind the lectern. It was as if his feet had taken him there. But now he stopped abruptly. He was still trembling, not from the cold but from a feverish heat born of rage. He had already snatched the key ring from the peg, and clutching it tightly, he turned around.

  It was them.

  All the way across the church, through a haze of thickening smoke: Jocelyn shielding Matt from the flaming cascade with her body. Her naked back and buttocks were scorched and festering with blisters, but when she looked up, the face was undeniably hers. Steve saw her lips move and absently realized she was whispering his name, as if she were dreaming of seeing an angel. Soon her voice swelled to a husky screech: “Steve, is that you? Oh, God, Steve, help us!”

  But it was Matt who had spotted him first: He had awakened from his catatonic state, and now he tore himself loose and started running toward him.

  And Steve felt his face darken.

  The sight of his youngest son, pale skinned from the hospital and still wearing one stained eye patch, finally brought home the full meaning of his family’s eternal dichotomy and his grief over Tyler … Tyler, where all this had started. Those few paralyzing seconds robbed him of whatever defenses remained. He felt the eyes of the damned upon him. They had been drawn by Matt’s ardor and came rushing down the nave in a frenzy, and he shrank back against the heavy door, opening it with trembling hands.

  “Dad, wait!”

  He looked down the spiral staircase. A deep, dark hole. Total darkness.

  Some of the paths you set out on lead through such a darkness, and to walk them would be immoral or madness.

  Not madness, Steve knew. Love.

  Katherine had been forced to sacrifice her one child to save the other. What else could that be but love?

  Steve drew back in the doorway and put the key in the lock. He closed the door behind him, twisted the key, and slammed the bolt shut, just before the first hands could reach him.

  * * *

  HE TUMBLED DOWN the steep flight of steps.

  He hit rock bottom with a thud and lay there just as he had landed, curled up on the cooling stones and groaning with pain. The vault was a pitch-dark, the kind of dark your eyes would never become accustomed to. But what it lacked in sights, it made up for in sounds. He heard the door rumble, a ceaseless pounding on unyielding wood, rising over the roar of the fire. And he heard people screaming. They sounded just like ghosts. Once, he thought he heard his own name—a tormented cry of sorrow and pain. A thought threatened to surface, but he violently repressed it.

  He rolled onto his back. Opened his eyes, closed them, opened them again.

  It was rather comfortable here. This darkness suited him well.

  It turned his thoughts to love. Somewhere, in another world, he could hear dying screams, and he imagined the damned were singing. Steve rolled himself up into a ball, making himself as small as he could, and stuck his fingers in his ears. He began to sing along.

  Just before he had sung himself to sleep, he whispered, “I love you, Tyler.”

  But in that darkness, no one answered.

  * * *

  AND AT THE same time, Katherine van Wyler arose, and she arose looking just like every child of Black Spring had seen her in their worst nightmares. A misbegotten witch appealing to forces that were older than mankind itself, forces from parts of the universe that were old before the earth was born. She stood there on Temple Hill facing the burning church and made druidic arm gestures toward the heavens, murmuring corrupted words and sounds in a language that none of her flock could identify, but made their every hair stand on end. The few who saw her began to scream, but Katherine continued with her underworld incantation to the skies …

  … and all the while, she was crying.

  The people of Black Spring started walking eastward: an everlasting procession of broken souls, some of them naked, all with the same dazed, blank look on their faces. They all walked away from the burning church, as in a dream. When they reached Route 293, they didn’t follow it, but simply disappeared into the forest on the other side. It was almost three hours before the first of them emerged on a sleepy town road south of Fort Montgomery. Behind the windows of clean-limned upstate colonials, parents stole downstairs from their attics with armfuls of colorfully wrapped gifts. They laid them out in the glow of dying hearth fires, while outside on the road the nightmarish parade passed endlessly by, unseen. The people of Black Spring faded away underneath the highway overpass and headed straight for the Hudson.

  One by one they walked into the river, disappearing under the icy cold water where they were seized by the current.

  Many hours later, the sky over the Highlands flushed a blood red.

  And when daybreak finally arrived, hundreds of swollen bodies were seen floating languidly under the Tappan Zee Bridge on their way toward New York … giving the earliest risers a glimpse of somebody else’s nightmare.

  It was Christmas Day.

  EPILOGUE

  STEVE GRANT WOKE up with pale sunlight in his face and the foul taste of copper in his swollen mouth. His eyes were stinging, silty and inflamed, and he had to get them adjusted to the light before he could fully open them. He was lying on the slate tiles of his dining room floor.

  So he had come home. He tried to piece together how or when he had left the burning church, but he couldn’t. The time that had lapsed between shutting the chancel door behind him and now was one big, black hole. Like a vault in the earth.

  He heaved himself up and clenched his teeth from the pain. What remained of his clothes were full of scorch marks and stank of smoke. The skin on his hands was glowing a fiery red. He had twisted something in his back and his knee throbbed like a bad tooth. But his face was the worst: The left side was puffed up like a balloon, as if there was a terrible deformation of the jaw under the skin. Yep, broken, no doubt about it. Probably gone septic by now. If you had any hopes for running for America’s Next Top Model this season, he thought without emotion, you probably need to reconsider.

  He hoisted himself to his feet and gazed dully around. Everything looked the same, but it wasn’t; it felt disorientingly different. The silence in the house crept up on him. It was so oppressive that he could hear the blood ringing in his ears. Something felt wrong. Very wrong. The Christmas tree
was still standing in Jocelyn’s Limbo, undecorated. They had set it up so they could decorate it the afternoon they came back from the mall. But that’s when they had found Tyler.

  Now it had started to lose needles.

  Something caught his eye under the dining room table: a frayed black piece of thread. A stitch cut from Katherine’s eye.

  But where was she now? And where was Tyler?

  Steve lurched into the hallway. On the way, he glanced in the mirror and immediately wished he hadn’t. The face staring back at him—with its deep grooves, sinister red glow, and haunted, bulging eyes—was an atrocity in which he recognized nothing of his old self. His left cheek and lower lip were a bulbous purple-going-black, and there was a dark beard of crusted blood all over his lower face. That jaw was going to need wiring. He had a suturing needle in the medicine cabinet, but that wouldn’t do the job.

  He limped to the front door and drew the panel curtain aside with his thumb, then peeked out. The lawn was wet with dew and glistened in the bleak sunlight. It was going to be a nice day. Yet the outside also felt wrong, and the air was heavy with that same oppressive silence. He gazed westward down Deep Hollow Road, but all he could see were the wooden and brick houses waiting in the morning sunshine for people to come out. But they never would, he realized. Even from here, he could sense that the houses were empty. Steve wondered what he would see if he were to walk farther into town. The air smelled clean; there was no trace of smoke. There was just … nothing. Only that eerie silence.

  The authorities would probably come before too long. And then what? It would be just like in February 1665. When they came, they would find nothing but this silence. Three thousand people gone without a trace. A ghost town.

  That’s right, he thought. And I’m the mayor.

  Steve started to laugh—in fact, he roared with laughter. His laughter came in odd, hollow bursts and resounded obsessively through the abandoned house, like the laughter of a dead man. It brought to mind the pendulum, that mighty, medieval torture machine that had hung over their lives the day he and Jocelyn came home and found Tyler dead: razor-sharp, swinging back and forth, back and forth, uttering its merciless sentence. Well, the judgment had been passed; the sentence had been executed. Now he was nothing but a pile of stinking body parts laughing in the corner of the hallway.

  Soon his laughter turned to screaming.

  Steve had no clear recollection of the next minutes, except that he was cold to the marrow of his bones, so cold that he knew he would never be warm again.

  When he came to, he found himself sitting halfway down the hall, back slumped against the wall and legs splayed out. On the floor next to him was a selection of items from his suturing kit: catgut, a scalpel, tweezers, a curved needle. It vaguely alarmed him that he couldn’t remember getting it from the cabinet, nor what his intention had been. His face needed metal, not cotton.

  He lay there empty-headed until a thought finally erupted: Jocelyn and Matt are dead. I hope you’re aware of the fact that you let them burn last night? They’re dead, just like Tyler.

  His arm slammed against the wall as if it had a life of its own, clawing in vain for something to hold on to, then sank back down. He was trembling all over—so cold!

  Here, at the end of everything, the paralyzing, almost unbearable certainty dawned on him that he had made the wrong decision. Steve had escaped from the darkness, but it was the light, that damned light, that made him see it. Sacrificing one child to save the other hadn’t been Katherine’s choice, it had been the decision made by the judges. And was he so naïve as to think they would have let her daughter live after having flung Katherine’s body into the witch’s pool?

  Now he was the judge. In his final ordeal he, too, hadn’t shown any desire for reconciliation; had presumed only the worst of people, like all the townsfolk of Black Spring. Did he really believe that he deserved to welcome Tyler with hands that were filthy with the blood of his wife and second son? And even if Tyler did return, that he would be anything but a revolting abomination?

  Oh, the darkness. If only he could enter back into it! If only he could undo his deeds! He didn’t want to see what awaited him at the end of this unforgiving light. All he could do was cling to the dwindling hope that his obsession with Tyler’s death had been based on reason.

  Not reason, he thought. Love.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Steve gasped.

  He looked up.

  In the sunlight, behind the panel curtain, was a shadow. Only its silhouette was visible, waiting, motionless.

  The silhouette … of a boy?

  Steve sat in the hallway, paralyzed with fear.

  And he wished it would go away. Oh, God, please—if only he could make it go away. What awaited him there was not his son, and what he felt was not love, but a fathomless abyss that was opening beneath him and was much, much deeper than love.

  The knock came again.

  A slow, loud thud—only one.

  He saw the shadow of knuckles resting on the windowpane.

  Steve Grant picked up the needle and the catgut, and as the thing at the door kept knocking and knocking, he started on his eyes, hoping the loneliness of the eternal darkness would offer him a bit of comfort from the cold.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sorry for that—I got a bit carried away.

  When I think about the people that scared me when I was younger, I have to start with my babysitter. Her name was Margot, and each time she watched me and my sister, she used to tell us a bedtime story. I was seven years old when Margot told us the story of Roald Dahl’s The Witches in a detailed episodic style, like the TV series you watch on Netflix today. After each cliff-hanger she turned off the lights, and there I was, lying paralyzed underneath the covers, bulging eyes staring into the dark, watching her words come to life in my mind’s eye.

  It must have been around the same time that my uncle Manus took me out for a hike in the woods and told me about the fairy rings we ran into on the trail. You had to walk past them with your eyes closed if you wanted to live to tell the tale.

  That same year—1990—the film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book played in Dutch cinemas, starring Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch. Bless my innocent pre-CGI heart … but, damn, that movie is scary for a seven-year-old.

  I found out the hard way.

  Each night for the next six months, I screamed for my mom, seeing witches in every shadow on the landing outside my bedroom door. By day, I was terrified to walk the streets by myself … let alone cross the woods near my home. There could be witches anywhere. Every woman was a suspect. The book and movie had left me severely traumatized. The witches in Roald Dahl’s tale wear gloves to hide their hideous claws, so you can imagine how slowly winter passed that year.

  And each time I came across a fairy ring, I walked past it with my eyes closed.

  Later I stopped believing in witches, so I did it as a balancing exercise.

  Like most people, all great writers die at some point, but I bet if Roald Dahl could have been around to read what he did to me, he would have leaned back in his chair with a wide, contented grin on his face. He was the kind of writer who secretly rejoiced in traumatizing innocent little children … and their parents, for that matter.

  Let me tell you a secret: I turned out the same way. When HEX first came out in the Netherlands, I started getting hundreds of messages from readers whose nightmares had been haunted by Katherine and who had to leave the lights on at night. Ah, that silly grin on my face! It’s still there. And now this book is in your hands, wherever in the world you are. If you’re one of the readers who this story managed to scare, drop me a note on Facebook or Twitter. I’d love to grin some more.

  So thank you, Roald Dahl. Thank you, Margot and Manus. Thank you for my traumatized childhood. Without you, this book couldn’t have been written.

  The book you’ve just finished is different from the original novel HEX, which appeared in
the Netherlands and Belgium in 2013. That book was set in a small Dutch village and ended on a rather different note. As an author, you rarely get the chance to rewrite a book after its publication. But when my agents sold the English language rights to publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, I was suddenly presented with the opportunity to make the original book work in a wholly new environment, with a fresh backstory.

  Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I didn’t like the Dutch setting. I loved the Dutch setting, and I loved the utter Dutchness of the book. Not in the sense that the witch smoked pot or stood behind some Amsterdam red-framed window; I’m talking about the secular nature of small-town Dutch communities and the down-to-earthness of its people. If a sane person sees a disfigured seventeenth-century witch appear in a corner of the living room, he runs for his life. If a Dutch person sees a disfigured seventeenth-century witch appear in a corner of the living room, he hangs a dishcloth over her face, sits on the couch, and reads the paper. And maybe sacrifices a peacock.

  But when I see a creative challenge, I take it. And what fun it would be! I had a book that I loved, featuring characters whom I loved, and here I had the opportunity to relive it all without having to face the horrors of a sequel. Instead, I could create an enhanced version—a HEX 2.0, if you will—with new rich and layered details, culturally specific legends and superstitions, all without losing touch with the Dutch elements of the original. Katherine Van Wyler came to the new land on one of Peter Stuyvesant’s early ships. The rural town of Beek became the Dutch trapper’s colony of New Beeck, later renamed Black Spring. The Dutch characters became Americans, but with the down-to-earth quality of the Dutch. The dishcloth stayed. So did the peacock. And the public flogging of minors, a common and fun tradition we celebrate annually in many a small town all over the Netherlands.