Hex

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Steve was too scientifically minded to believe in something spiritual such as the power of place, but even so, there was a more primitive, intuitive part of him that knew his neighbor was right. This place owned them. And even now, in the lee of the late summer night, you could feel that the place itself belonged to something older.

It had broken their hearts, just as every unfulfilled dream breaks the human heart, but that was life.

You adapted, and you made sacrifices. You did it for your children or for love. You did it because of illness or because of an accident. You did it because you had new dreams … and sometimes you did it because of Black Spring.

Born in Black Spring, you knew each other from early on and feared the adults, not your allies.

It’s a triumph, small and inconsequential though it may seem, over the very thing that has cast a shadow over their lives for as long as they can remember. Within the laughter lies a collective relief so deep-seated that it becomes a little uncanny. And later on, when Tyler realizes why, it scares him to the marrow.

inexplicable things happened, bewildering things, even in a world that regarded itself as fully enlightened.

Your generation may be indoctrinated, but we want change.”

Magic exists in the minds of those who believe in it, not in its actual influence on reality.

Does it make any difference, Steve thought, that three hundred fifty years have passed and we now have what we like to call civilization?

People have always stirred up trouble, and that’s something that’ll never change—it comes in waves.

“Fletcher is dead, Matt,” Tyler said. “And, anyway, he sounded really different. Did you ever hear Fletcher howl like that before?” “No, but he’s never been dead before, either.”

But sometimes what lay buried came back … because buried wasn’t always buried.

This is all it takes for people to plunge into insanity: one night alone with themselves and what they fear the most.

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.