Hex

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Robert Grim slipped into his coat to get some pecan pie in town. His mood was spoiled for the rest of the day, but at least he’d be able to enjoy some state-subsidized pecan pie.

few thing better than subsidized pie...

but the Black Rock Witch is like Ms. Autism, unchallenged titleholder for three hundred fifty years running. Which is not, like, at all what witches are famous for. Makes you wonder if she ever gets dehydrated. Well, no. She’s like a Microsoft operating system: designed to sow death and destruction, and every time showing the same error message.

given the fact that he had been officially admonished by Colton Mathers earlier that day, it was all the more astonishing. The councilman’s poor conservative ego had felt locked out of that lamppost business. 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. And so were blue laws. And jihad.

“Colton Mathers appreciating practical jokes is as unlikely as a Disney movie where everybody dies in the end of internal hemorrhaging.”

To Robert Grim, they looked like a satyr and a maenad getting ready to make an offering to Dionysus.

“It’s a nice walk. Completely harmless these days, as long as you stay on the trail. But those omens … You have to see them as a primitive form of meteorology, except it’s not the weather they’re predicting; it’s impending disaster. 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. The connection wasn’t made until afterward, but that doesn’t matter. From then on, fear played an enormous role in the flow of rumors that preceded tragedies. People saw the signs everywhere. Stillbirths, strange natural phenomena, rapid putrefaction of the flesh, big birds…” Pete grinned. “The Dutch were somewhat more down-to-earth than the Puritans, but in 1653 there was this large bird that landed on the steeple cross of the harbor church in New Amsterdam every day at sunset for three weeks, causing a huge uproar. They said it was bigger than a goose and gray in color, and it preyed on dead bodies. Today, of course, you’d figure it was a vulture—they used to appear as vagrants in these parts every now and again. But how could the colonists know? So, soon enough, this mob gathers and makes all kinds of predictions based on the bird’s appearance. The city council has the poor thing shot, but it was too late: The next year, the population was devastated by smallpox. So they blamed it on the bird.”

presented as scientific fact that the ‘shroud eaters’ were the undead who fed on the living and spread curses along with the fever, so that more dead would come to life. Church ministers would shove bricks into their mouths so they would starve.”

“We hadn’t fallen asleep yet. We were … engaged with each other.” Elegant blushes appeared on her cheeks and both Steve and Grim bit their tongues. In all his years as a doctor, Steve didn’t think he had ever heard a more prudish description of the act, or one more aptly suited to the person uttering it. “I turned onto my back and suddenly there she was, at the foot of the bed. I saw her behind Burt.

In 1802, the U.S. Military Academy was established at West Point to help us cover it up. Don’t hold me to it, but it must have been toward the end of the Civil War that The Point was deemed trustworthy enough to be given exclusive authority over Black Spring. Probably on the orders of good old Abe himself. The matter is just too delicate. Later on, when the region got developed and the risk of leaks became higher, we got organized. We went pro. And so, HEX was born.” “What’s HEX?” “That’s us. We’re the ghostbusters. We hide the witch in plain sight.” Burt looked at Grim with visible difficulty. “What does the name stand for?” “Oh, it’s just some old acronym that stuck. No one really knows. It’s what we do that matters. Over there at The Point they let us take care of our own business, but we write up reports to keep them happy, so we have something to fall back on in case we have to close off roads or if we need a favor at the state reserve. How else do you think we could have succeeded in keeping it quiet? You can set up smoke screens all you want, but that takes money—and complete secrecy.

AS IN SO many fairy tales, the cruelest part is often overlooked: It’s not the depravity of the witch, but the mourning of the poor woodcutter over the loss of his children.

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.

The dishcloth stayed. So did the peacock.