HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt Page B

chains, as if she were trying to walk straight through it.
    â€œJesus fuck…” was all Jaydon could manage.
    â€œDid you get that?” Lawrence asked. Tyler looked down and discovered that he had just made the most dire mistake of his budding career as a reporter: In his consternation, he had let his camera dangle and shoot some super-interesting footage of the sidewalk, and had missed the witch’s stop-motion trick. He felt his cheeks turn purple and cursed himself, but the others were much too engrossed in what she was doing to pay any attention to him.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” Sue asked as she struggled to see something from the doorway behind Burak. No one took the trouble to inform her.
    â€œLook at that,” Justin said. “She’s trying to push right through it.”
    It was true. For three hundred years the witch had been passing through that very spot, and today was no exception, lamppost or no lamppost.
    â€œShe’s, like, preprogrammed,” Lawrence said.
    â€œShe’s, like, fucking the lamppost,” Jaydon said.
    After half a minute of metal grating against metal, she suddenly slipped past it, did her three-quarter pirouette, and disconnected.
    Justin was the first to laugh.
    Burak was the second.
    Then they all laughed, wild, uncontrollable laughter, and they slapped each other on the shoulders and punched each other on the arms. The humorless crones at the fountain turned around and fixed their eyes on the group of boys. They saw the GoPro and one of them shouted, “Hey, what have you got there? What are you doing with that camera, young man?”
    â€œBusted!” Jaydon roared. “Which one of you pushed her over?”
    This caused general confusion among the women, as if they were seriously considering the possibility that one of them had pushed her (that, or people over seventy lost all their talent for clever comebacks), and that made the boys laugh even harder. They were still laughing when they slid past the roadblock a minute later and ran down Deep Hollow Road, and they were laughing even harder when, two hundred yards farther on, they could no longer suppress their curiosity and stopped on the shoulder to watch the footage on the GoPro’s LCD screen.
    *   *   *
    THE IMAGES SHOULD hold no surprises; you know what’s there. These are the first pictures in journalistic history to feature a supernatural phenomenon going for a nosedive. They’re so unique that they go viral on YouTube in a matter of minutes and are celebrated and debunked on hundreds of blogs, not to mention being endlessly repeated on Jimmy Fallon. But of course that doesn’t happen; of course the images are kept secret. Still, that same evening they do achieve a certain cult status.
    The boys weren’t born yesterday and they know they’re in for it. They figure there’s only one way to escape Doodletown: to step forward on their own and play the holy innocent.
    â€œWe were just fooling around,” Tyler says when they show Robert Grim a director’s cut of the clip. In this version, you only see the witch walk up along the creek, bump into the lamppost, and topple over. Grim plays the images directly from the memory card. They’re the only recordings from that morning still in the camera—Tyler fixed it that way. The rest is safely tucked away on his MacBook, password protected. Tyler tries to add a contrite quality to his voice by imagining a halo hanging over his head, but at a certain point he can’t hold back his laughter.
    Robert Grim is laughing, too. In fact, tears stream down his cheeks when he sees what a trick the kids have pulled. He laughs for the same reason the boys laugh, and for the same reason the regulars at the Quiet Man Tavern laugh when they crowd around Grim’s laptop that night. None of them realizes that this is more than a bit of amusement over the witch’s vaudevillian