Hemlock Grove

by Brian McGreevy

  “Where’s my—” He saw her foot waving to and fro and his tie dangling between her toes. He reached for it but her foot darted away. He seized her ankle and took his tie and moved to the window, looping it around his neck. Visible across the river on the Hemlock Grove side was the lancing flame burning waste gas from a chimney of the coke works, now operated by a Luxembourg steel company but once a part of the Godfrey dynasty of polluting vulgarity that like so much else was lives ago.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled his socks on. Olivia exhaled smoke and steepled her fingers.

  “I was afraid you meant it,” she said. “Last time.”

  Last time, which had been in the spring, he had said not to expect him to call again. It was news to both of them, his saying it had surprised him maybe even more than her. The way the most obvious thing can be the least thinkable. Atlas shrugged.

  “I see,” she’d said eventually.

  “Because I just don’t have the energy anymore,” he answered in explanation to himself.

  “The energy for what?” she said. It was a rhetorical point, and a correct one. Their arrangement required none. It was a perpetual motion machine by now, older than the tides. He knew married men who would kill for it. Men who would kill for her. It occurred to him he had once been a man so worthy of envy and pity.

  He said nothing. His face was a much-used sponge that had not actually held moisture in years.

  “Please,” she said. The quiet dignity with which she said this word belying how infrequently she used it. “Please … think about it.”

  He lied without charity that he would and in the interim had not. He had instead taken up drink as affective novocaine. If the point of novocaine was the numbing of a numbness. In his last loveless years Jacob Godfrey was known to spend hours on end standing in the front yard of the house he had constructed at the summit of the highest hill in the valley. He would survey the land of his sovereignty, a land he had forged into his own vision through blood and fire, and know at his life’s epilogue that it was all a petty, transient thing, nothing about it transubstantial, and that here he was just a lone and useless rich man at the house on the hill, visible and still forgotten. Dr. Godfrey had spent his entire life terrified of this fate and taking every step to rebel against it by throwing himself into a vocation that was as antithetical as he could imagine: compassion. Hence his calling to psychiatry, the meeting place of matter and spirit. He had helped people, so many people, and what more can be said than that? I helped. Tell me what else there is to be said.

  Presently he stood and said, “I meant it. I didn’t want this to happen. This was—”

  “Spiteful,” she said.

  “Weak,” he said.

  “We’ll agree to agree,” she said.

  She held out the butt of her cigarette. He took it into the bathroom and dropped it in the toilet, then stood in front of the mirror and smoothed his hair. Olivia rested her face in her hands.

  “Frightful business,” she said. “This Penrose girl.”

  “Your daughter thinks it was a werewolf.”

  “My daughter has an impressive imagination.” She rolled onto her back into a full-body stretch. “Still … it does hold a terribly erotic sort of appeal. Being hunted down and devoured by some savage brute. It’s enough to give one the shivers.”

  He shut off the bathroom light and went to the door. She made no move to cover herself.

  “I meant it, Olivia,” he said.

  She smiled wistfully. “What makes you think I don’t know that?”

  * * *

  On the third Saturday of October Roman gave Letha and a few friends a ride home from the movies. By now the agitation over Brooke Bluebell had settled. There was no target to which blame could be nailed, no face to the outrage, nothing to be done except the handful of hunters who attempted to track the creature that had left a ghostly lack of trace, nothing to be said except how senseless, utterly senseless it was, and how it just went to show you. Leaving unspoken what was nonetheless agreed: at least she wasn’t from here.

  Once it was just the two of them left in the car Roman produced from his blazer the flask of vodka from which he had been taking slugs during the movie and helped himself to another, then held it decisively in Letha’s face. She’d been waving it away all evening with what he considered an appalling lapse in manners. She made no move to take it so he gave it a shake in case it had somehow escaped her attention.

  She held up her arms in an X and told him to get over it.

  “Since when?” he said.

  “Since get over it,” she said.

  Growing up, Roman and Letha had seen almost nothing of each other; there had been no formal meeting between the branches of their family since the death of Roman’s father and the two of them did not have regular contact before high school. Letha had gone up till then to a private Episcopalian academy but had found that the elitism made her bones ache: Roman did not seriously consider any of the prep schools it would have been logical for someone like him to attend for the simple and unthinkable reason it would have required living away from home. So when they did finally indulge their mutual curiosity it was with the bond of blood but none of the familiarity. Letha was a small and sandy blond girl with distinctively idiosyncratic features that were as far from pretty in the conventional sense as they were from homely, and where Roman was mercurial, Letha was mystical. She possessed a kind of half-step-removed sense of discovery as though she passed through life having just woken from a successful nap. Naturally this polarity drew them only closer—a fact that filled her father with no small disquiet.

  Roman made a wounded face. “Have a drink like a civilized person,” he said.

  “Watch the road,” she said.

  Roman merged left onto 443. They entered the mouth of a wooded passage between two hills, and dark branches from either side made a trellis overhead.

  “Don’t be uncivilized,” he said.

  “Can we drop it?” she said.

  “We can drop it when you stop being a See You Next Tuesday and have a drink.”

  “Roman, drop it.”

  “What, are you pregnant or something?” he said.

  She said nothing. He looked at her.

  “Shut up,” he said.

  She nervously smoothed her hair.

  “Shut your lying whore mouth,” he said.

  “I … was waiting for the right moment,” she said.

  He drank, and pulled suddenly onto the shoulder and stopped the car. Route 443 was a road with many dips and blind curves with regular accidents for that reason.

  “Roman, start the car,” said Letha.

  He sat with his hands on the wheel, unmoving.

  “Maybe I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to be a drama queen,” she said.

  “Is it Tyler?” he said.

  Tyler was a boy Letha had dated briefly in the spring, an utter drip Roman held in just about the regard of a wet towel left on the bed. But now Roman sat looking ahead and in the center of his mind’s eye he saw the other boy while off on the edges there was a dark flickering like a pair of taloned shadow hands slowly wrapping around his face.

  “It wasn’t Tyler,” she said. “Now please start the car and stop being a drama queen.”

  Tyler left his mind but those dark fingertips continued to dance, to taunt, to close.

  “Who,” he said.

  “I don’t want to talk about it unless you start the car.”

  He rolled down the window and took the keys from the ignition and dropped them onto the ground outside.

  “Who,” he said.

  “See? I knew you were going to make a federal case over it.”

  “Who,” he said.

  She folded her arms. “Well, you sound like the world’s dumbest owl,” she said.

  He shut his eyes, wanting the shadows to go away, but they didn’t care whether or not his eyes were closed. He opened his eyes and took one hand off the whee
l and pressed the horn so it made one long blare.

  “Who,” he said.

  “Stop it, Roman.”

  “Who,” he said.

  “Stop it, Roman.”

  He centered his vision on his hand on the horn, only distantly hearing it. This is really here, he reminded himself, growing less convinced.

  “Stop it, Roman!”

  The finger began to lace and he grew less convinced.

  Afraid, she tore his hand from the wheel and clasped it hard between her own.

  “It was an angel,” she said.

  The shadow evanesced from his mind’s eye and he grew aware of a pressure, the pressure of her hands on his. Really here.

  “It was a what,” he said.

  “It was an angel,” she said.

  He was quiet.

  “Literally?” he said.

  “It was an angel,” she said.

  He was quiet.

  “Tell me about it,” he said.

  “How would you talk about dancing to a person without legs?” she said.

  “I have legs that won’t quit,” said Roman. But as someone who was by nature a taker he knew when he had taken exactly as much as he was going to get. Though it had never before been so much more and so much less than what he wanted.

  He opened the car door and leaned out and picked up his keys. He took a long drink from the flask and turned the ignition and pulled back onto the road.

  “Told your folks?” he said.

  “They’re … adjusting,” she said.

  Roman raised his eyebrows. Imagine that.

  “Mom is coming around to where she can even admit it. Dad … Dad wants me to have an abortion.”

  “Holy cow,” said Roman.

  “He thinks it’s all in my head.”

  Roman offered no opinion.

  “But I’m having this baby.” Stated with a calm, nonpartisan, and immovable authority. “Deal with it,” she said.

  “I didn’t say anything,” he said.

  “Deal with it,” she said.

  Roman rounded a curve carefully, his drunk driving always much more conscientious when Letha was in the car. Neither spoke for a while as he dealt with it.

  She let him. She had not enjoyed hiding this from everyone she loved. Liar! In fact possession of a miracle all to herself had filled her with a private thrill no less than a pack rat who had stumbled across a lost temple of fascinating refuse—it was hers, all hers! But now the time had come to share it; it was no longer hers alone. Annoyingly.

  Roman did not reopen the subject, but he did pick up his iPod and put their song on the sound system. Their song was a British pop-rock ballad about a rich girl who sexually slums it with a poor boy in the interest of vacationing among the lower classes. Their mutual appreciation of this song was a private joke between them, being the only members of their own peer group who could relate to the unique position of having been born into irrational privilege. Letha began to hum along and Roman gave the volume a quarter turn up and followed shortly with another.

  You’ll never do what common people do

  And soon enough the dial could turn no farther and both Roman and Letha sang along with it at full volume, her hair swept from side to side as she danced in the passenger seat and he steered with his knee and pretended to drum the wheel.

  You’ll never watch your life slide out of view

  They rounded another bend where the vagrant who frequented Kilderry Park was lying in the middle of the road directly in their path. Roman slammed the brakes and the car screeched to a near perpendicular angle before humping to a crass stop. The air was bitter with hot rubber and the radio continued.

  because there’s nothing else to do-o-o-o-o

  Roman turned off the music and asked Letha if she was okay.

  She nodded, looking out at the man. The man was on his back, grimacing and mashing his palms into his temples as though trying to squeeze something out.

  “We should help him,” she said.

  Roman nodded in disagreement. But there you had it with girls and their notions. He put on the hazard lights.

  “Maybe you should stay here,” he said.

  They both exited but Letha stood by the car as Roman cautiously approached the man. There was on his shirt a damp bib of vomit and he smelled like the underside of a bridge. Roman asked if he was okay and the man emphatically jerked his head from side to side in indignation over what he heard in place of Roman’s question.

  “It’s not right,” said the man.

  “Would you like to come with us?” said Letha.

  Roman winced. “Calling the paramedics is also an option,” he said.

  “I don’t want to see,” said the man in an infantile whine. “I don’t want to se-e-e-e-e tha-a-a-at.”

  Roman stepped to the side and dialed 911 on his phone as Letha came forward. He tried to stare her back as the call connected but she knelt over the man.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  “I don’t know, there’s a guy here on the road, I nearly hit him,” said Roman into the phone. “I think he’s schizophrenic or something.”

  The man looked at Letha with terrified incomprehension. The lid of his dead eye twitched.

  “What’s your name?” Letha said again, with a preternaturally supple bedside manner like a nun played by Ingrid Bergman.

  “Uh, 443,” said Roman, “about two miles south of the White Tower. Right before Indian Creek.”

  A look came over the man’s face like there was suddenly something of desperate importance he needed to communicate.

  “Ouroboros,” the man whispered.

  “Is that your name?” said Letha.

  “He’s just, uh, he’s out here in the middle of the road freaking out. He really needs some kind of help.”

  His gaze fell from her face. Tears streamed from one eye.

  “Today I have seen the Dragon…” said the man.

  She held out her hand.

  “Don’t—” said Roman.

  But the man took her hand and held it, a flower known to be extinct.

  “I’m Letha,” she said.

  “What?” said Roman. “My name?”

  He hung up and gently drew Letha away.

  “Okay, boss,” he said, “how about we chill out right over here where no one’s gonna makes us roadkill?”

  He swallowed his own antipathy and bent to lend the man a hand. The man’s eye met his. The seeing eye like bloody milk, spotlit and then shadowed in the blinking hazards. Roman attempted something like a smile, it was like lifting a thousand pounds overhead. The seeing eye became a thorn that hooked into Roman and the man held up his hands protectively and they fluttered frantic and effete as he screamed with full-throat horror.

  “Jesus!” said Roman, leaping back.

  The man desperately crab-walked to the side of the road. “YOU!” he screamed. “IT WAS YOU! IT WAS YOU! IT WAS YOU! IT WAS YOU!”

  Roman was still and quiet. He felt a tug on his arm; Letha was pulling him to the car. His eyes lingered on the man, who had backed himself into an escarpment and his legs continued pushing uselessly, like a remote control toy commanded by a cruel child.

  “I don’t want to see,” he said pitifully to himself, and repeated this appeal in incantation long after the car had disappeared.

  They sat in the car in competing silences. As they passed over Indian Creek, Letha looked at Roman. The moonlight on his affectless face like silk gliding over stone. Her hand rested over his on the shift.

  A Pattern

  Later that night Roman was sitting at the darkened dining room table sipping from the flask and slowly counting the number of crystals that comprised the chandelier—160, he knew well, but the product of 40 fours was considerable comfort to him and its confirmation a soothing process—when those crystals began to glitter from a faint light.

  “What are you doing up?” said Roman.

  Shelley was filling most of the doorway. She
was wearing a shapeless nightgown and emitting a soft glow, an idiosyncrasy of hers when experiencing agitation and anxiety.

  “Thirsty?” he said, offering the flask.

  She did not move and in her eyes there was the justifiable apprehension over what pyrotechnics habitually erupted in Godfrey House after a period of studied silence.

  “I’m fine,” he said unconvincingly. “I’m … just thinking.”

  Her glow gently lapped the ceiling through the chandelier like the light in an indoor pool. He shoved back from the table.

  “I’ll tuck you in,” he said.

  They went up to the attic, where Shelley slept on a stack of king-size mattresses, with another stack of twins crosswise at the foot. Shelley did not have an auspicious relationship with bed frames. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with books and in one corner was an easel and in another an antique astrolabe consisting of concentric brass rings. The ceiling was a firmament of many dozens of glow-in-the-dark star and moon stickers.

  Shelley sat on the bed. Roman stood at the astrolabe and placed his fingertip to the rim of the outermost ring and traced an orbit. He regarded the darkening of dust on his fingertip, the abstruse whorls and eddies providing a pattern but not a clue. Outside, there was an owl’s low hoot and Shelley’s light guttered under her gown.

  He brushed his finger along his jeans and came over and sat on the edge of her bed, facing away from her. She waited for him to say something.

  Softly, he began to hum. She smiled wide and joined in with him. He started the words and she kept the melody.

  “This little light of mine,” he sang,

  “I’m gonna let it shine…”

  He turned and ran his finger down Shelley’s cheek, leaving a faint, luminous worm in its wake.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s brush your teeth and change your shoes.”

  Peripeteia

  On the afternoon of October 29, Roman surprised Peter by passing him a note in English. A month had passed; tonight was the Hunter Moon. No further relationship had developed between them since their earlier meeting, which Peter believed to be for the best. Roman was unstable, like a coin spun on a tabletop: the closer it came to rest, the greater its velocity, now one end up then the other. He was neither heads nor tails. And of all potential outcomes in their continued association nearly none fell outside Peter’s extensive Hierarchy of Shit He Could Live Without.