Free HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

reference.
    On the right side of the screen, a square of light appeared in the darkness of the house next door and soon Mrs. Soderson came outside. More worried neighbors arrived from across the street and tried to calm the newbies down.
    â€œYup, a home encounter,” Grim said. “Congratulations, Warren. You can split the kitty.”
    â€œNow the phone rings,” Claire said. Sure enough, one second later, it did. Claire answered and began talking to one of the Delarosas’ neighbors.
    Warren stood next to Grim, staring pensively at the screen. “Now they’re going to find out that they’re stuck with us for the rest of their lives.”
    â€œSuch a tragedy. Couldn’t happen to nicer people.”
    â€œWho’s going to do it?”
    â€œI will,” said Grim without a second thought. Although he knew that blew his chance of getting any sleep tonight, he accepted it without complaint. Having to inform newbies was no easy task and charity wasn’t exactly his forte, but Grim felt sympathy for the Delarosas. They would have to revise their perception of the spiritual and the supernatural in ways that were subtle, but drastic nonetheless. Grim, born and bred in Black Spring, had never had that experience, but he had witnessed it often enough from the sidelines to know its traumatizing effects. He was a lapsed Methodist, and outside his job he would have nothing whatsoever to do with the paranormal. Yet somewhere in his indeterminate notions of the whole spiritus mundi he simply accepted the fact that inexplicable things happened, bewildering things, even in a world that regarded itself as fully enlightened. Still, that wasn’t what was most painful: For many newcomers in Black Spring, the irreversibility of their fate, its finality, was their first uncanny confrontation with their own mortality. People desperately resisted the idea of their own death by looking away for as long as they could and avoiding the subject. But in Black Spring, they lived with death. They took her into their homes and hid her from the outside world … and sometimes they put a lamppost in her path.
    The Delarosas, however … irreversibility and death didn’t fit in with their cosmopolitan life of cool sophistication and postmenopausal career switches. Black Spring was the arsenic pill they had accidentally discovered under their tongues and had bitten into before they knew it. If Robert Grim hadn’t just lost his bet, he might have felt sorry for them.
    They watched on the big screen as the Delarosas were taken by their neighbors to Mrs. Soderson’s house. Claire hung up and said, “They’re in good hands. I promised to have a team ready in ten minutes. Who’s going?”
    â€œMe,” Grim said. “Are they religious?”
    â€œNo. If I remember correctly, he was a Methodist as a boy, but he’s not practicing.”
    â€œThen let’s leave the church out of it.”
    â€œâ€˜Thy rod and thy staff they comfort them,’” Warren recited solemnly.
    â€œShould you really be going, Robert? After our last run-in with them, you’re probably the last person to ease their minds.”
    We’re not going to ease their minds, Grim thought. We’re going to shake up their world even more . “They’re in too much shock to realize that. I’ll take Pete VanderMeer and Steve Grant. They’re on call this month. A sociologist and a doctor, and cool enough to know how to thread that needle. Oh, and one of their wives, for Bammy. That ought to do it.” He threw on his coat and added, “You’ll be getting them out of bed when you call, angel.”
    He left Warren and Claire behind in the control center and prepared for a long night.

 
    SIX
    â€œHER NAME IS Katherine van Wyler, but most of us call her the Black Rock Witch,” Pete VanderMeer said. He took a long drag on his cigarette and fell thoughtfully