Hex

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

She looked like something that didn’t belong in the clear golden light of the afternoon: dark, dirty, nocturnal. Jocelyn had hung an old dishcloth over her head so you couldn’t see her face.

It had been quite some time since Gramma had dropped in on them, but no matter how often she came, Fletcher never seemed to get used to her.

I’m living in a dictatorship. Freedom of speech is seriously jeopardized in the hands of the older generation.”

If you had to let somebody die, who would it be: your own kid or all of Black Spring?”

Jocelyn’s mother, a long-term Alzheimer’s patient, had died of a lung infection a year and a half before; Steve’s had been dead eight years.

As if he’d received an electric shock, Matt began shaking: The expression on his face turned into a grimace of horror, he knocked his shin against the table leg, and he uttered a loud cry.

That’s unfortunate, because if anyone were to study them they’d be witness to something very odd, perhaps even unsettling—to put it mildly.

Until then, she has stood motionless in Jocelyn’s Limbo, but suddenly she’s right there, as if she has taken pity on the fallen Matt. The dishcloth has slid off her face, and in a fraction of a second—maybe it’s only a couple of frames—we see that her eyes are sewn shut, and so is her mouth.

“Tyler, report her in the app, would you?” Jocelyn asked. “I wanted to do it earlier, but you know I’m hopeless at these things.”

She swayed gently, so that the wrought-iron chain shackling her arms tightly to her shrunken body tapped against the varnished doorpost with a dull clank.

The real estate agent had taken the yuppie couple to visit the house, and Grim had prepared for the operation down to every last detail, referring to it as “Operation Barphwell” out of respect for the elderly former occupant.

When the man asked him why he was going to so much trouble, Grim told him that Black Spring suffered from a three-hundred-year-old curse, and that it would infect them, too, if they decided to settle in town, and that they’d be doomed until their death, and that there was a wicked witch living in Black Spring. Delarosa hung up.

“Two-headed?” Grim asked incredulously. “That’s horrible! That hasn’t happened since Henrietta Russo’s baby in ‘91.”

And we’re growing old. No one’s making an exception for us. We’re all going to get old … and it will be in Black Spring.

the Dutch and English colonists moved in and drove the River Indians away from this area, the cultivated wilderness retained its character and the hills were used by heathen and pagan cults for their rituals. Steve knew the history …

That connection was irrational and only existed if you lived here … and it took hold of you.

Steve absolutely refused to admit that it could have anything to do with the Council’s warning that the length of their vacation was foolish—life threatening, even—until, after less than a week and a half away from home, he began playing with the idea of hanging himself from the bamboo ceiling using the bungalow’s bedsheets.

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.

brilliant example of reverse psychology: No one would ever notice the gaunt women with the chains standing in their midst if they didn’t know she was there already. And no one could stomach an old folks’ choir long enough to find out.

To call Robert Grim progressive was like calling Auschwitz a Boy Scout camp, but Colton Mathers’s conservatism had fallen to an altogether different, amphibian low, as if it had been scorned by evolution itself after crawling out of the primordial swamp and, out of pure misery, had turned around and crept right back in. Mathers’s excuse was God; but then the Crusades were God’s work, too, Grim reasoned.

It was in Black Spring that she was sentenced to death for witchcraft in 1664—although they didn’t call it Black Spring back then; it was a Dutch trappers’ colony known as New Beeck—

You know the Salem witch trials, of course, which happened some twenty or thirty years later in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were preceded by a failed harvest, a smallpox epidemic, and the constant threat of attack by native tribes.

“Been there, done that,” Grim said. “Ouija boards are out of the question—don’t mess with those fuckers, they’ll kill you. Airy-fairy pagan shit simply doesn’t work on her. Tried it all before. We’ve had exorcists from the Vatican who concluded she was godless, so they couldn’t help us.

Children took in the commandments of the Emergency Decree with their mothers’ milk:

Tyler’s idea of coming out of the closet was antithetical to the town’s puritanical soul. It was an idealistic, rebellious idea, and in a community like Black Spring, which was governed by fear, rebellion was a dangerous thing. Every last grain of idealism would be sacrificed on the altar of safety. And Steve would do anything to keep Tyler from ending up on that altar.

“That’s not fair,” he said softly. The agitation in his voice was supplanted by pain. “What were we supposed to do? Abort you?”

Robert Grim works hard with the real estate agent to keep people away. But the Council, led by good ol’ Colton Mathers, is hell-bent on keeping the town healthy and resisting the unavoidable problems of aging. Allowing an influx of new people is the lesser of two evils, they say.

But it wasn’t his idea, he says. Jaydon is so easily influenced by his friends. It was probably that Muslim boy he hangs out with, that Buran. I bet it was him—it’s just the kind of thing his kind would do, right?