HEX

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

They’re faces with too much skin on them, too many wrinkles for their years. They’re faces that are leading lives of their own, and every day they sag a little further. They’re flattened faces, grim faces, faces under insurmountable stress. They’re the faces of Black Spring. And when they try to smile, it looks like they’re screaming.

“HER NAME IS Katherine van Wyler, but most of us call her the Black Rock Witch,”

Humanity has proven time and time again that it has a tendency to cross boundaries it shouldn’t.

That’s why we keep her out of sight. She doesn’t want to be understood—she must not be understood. Katherine is a paranormal time bomb.”

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

It’s cats that always come home. Cats are drifters, gangsters. If a dog runs away from home, it turns into one of those dramatic episodes that almost never has a happy ending.

Griselda, who had her stature and overtaxed arms working against her, but the power of the simpleminded to her advantage, somehow succeeded and landed in the bird droppings with a thud.

“You’ll do no such thing, Robert,” the old councilman said with the kind of dogged passion only seen in very small children and dangerous religious fanatics.

And then—what next? What do you think the officials at The Point can do … Avada Kedavra and the witch is gone?

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

She wasn’t an abomination—they had turned her into an abomination.

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.

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

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.