Hemlock Grove

by Brian McGreevy

  Godfrey smiled and his shoulders shook and he began laughing. The explanation for why this was funny to them goes back a long way.

  Godfrey said that he was going to grab a shower, and that that sounded perfect.

  Godfrey showered, and parsed with the heedless lucidity of exhaustion the guilt he felt over the ugliness of his thoughts toward his wife, a woman whose greatest crime was giving her best years to a marriage with a man who was in love with an enemy she knew had the power to destroy her family. And he came to the second revelation of the day, and emphatically more immediate and inconvenient than the acceptance of men from time to time becoming wolves. He was ashamed. He was ashamed and so was Marie, ashamed over their years of complicity in never saying it: he was married to a woman he hadn’t loved since the first time he saw Olivia.

  He looked down and had a vision of the particles of dead flesh breaking from his torso and sluicing down the drain. Well, that was wrong. That was the wrong way to live.

  He turned and cracked his spine. Six months, he decided. Six months was reasonable to acquit his obligations. After the birth. Twenty years ago, six months would have been an eternity. All those dinner parties, the slow, sweet poison of lingering glances, clinking glasses with her ringing through him for days after; ultimately the crisis as a doctor and a husband and a brother whether or not to take her on as a patient, the woman he’d contrived every opportunity to see if only to feel her fingers graze his arm as she laughed. Knowing before ever seeing it that her ass was like a stationary drop of water on a flower stem—twenty years ago, the six months it took before the first time he took possession of this remarkable ass were a torment.

  Coming off a stretch of forty eventful waking hours, Godfrey felt something he had difficulty identifying at first. Something that in practical reality could hardly be less self-evident or inalienable. He felt free. Just imagine. After the passage and permutation of so much time, time a wheel always turning back on itself and yet moving forward all the while, he would in six months finally arrive at the destination of a long and by the day more astonishing journey. He would live right and have faith in love. He would become a grandfather, and he would marry Olivia.

  Later, in bed, Dr. Godfrey finally fell into the most earned sleep of his life.

  And then his phone rang to inform him Christina Wendall had disappeared.

  The Price

  With a troubling sense of déjà vu Peter was shaken awake by Roman the second day running.

  “I ordered a redhead,” said Peter.

  Roman did not acknowledge the joke.

  “What?” said Peter.

  Roman walked to the pulpit and placed both hands flat. Hoping the pose might invest him with … he didn’t know what. But it didn’t do anything, so he just said what there was to say.

  “Another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Last night. Another girl.”

  Peter was quiet for a moment.

  “Who?” he said.

  “They don’t know. No head. But it wasn’t her. I went there before I came here.”

  Peter was quiet. He put his fingertip to the floorboard and traced the words thank you in the old tongue and then blew the words away.

  “It was the wrong moon,” said Roman. “That’s impossible, right?”

  “Sure,” said Peter agreeably.

  The cat leaped onto the pulpit and raised his haunch pleasurably as Roman knuckled where his tail met his rear.

  “Now what?” said Roman.

  Peter lay back and closed his eyes.

  “We need to talk to Destiny,” he said. “Destiny knows more about the protocols than I do. She might have an idea.”

  He did not add that she better, because he was out of his own.

  “If you go anywhere, you’re going to get shot,” said Roman. “Shot if you’re lucky.”

  “You go. And hurry. You need to be with Letha by sundown. No chances tonight, she’s on your watch. She’s on your watch until this is over. That’s your job now.”

  Roman looked at Peter. The motes in the light that fell between them went about their own affairs.

  “I know,” said Roman.

  The cat splayed on his back and Roman rubbed his belly. He curled like a black velvet fist around his hand and bit him.

  “Hey hey hey,” said Roman, “we don’t love with our teeth.”

  He cut through a trail not far from the chapel that ran from the campus between the hills. The opposite mouth of the trail opened on 443 and Dr. Godfrey had said to use it for their comings and goings. Little knowing this precaution failed in preventing Christina Wendall from spying uncle and nephew spiriting provisions to the chapel the previous afternoon. How little we all knew.

  Roman drove to Destiny’s apartment in Shadyside. While parking, he noticed in the street a crow picking at something flat and black on the pavement. Roadkill. Something off somehow. Roman got out and saw that the crow was feeding on the remains of another crow. A black feather tufted from the diner’s beak. This was highly distressing to Roman.

  “Hey!” he said in the admonishing tone of a counselor to a rowdy camper. “You—you stop that! No way, José!”

  The crow looked at him, but when he didn’t move any closer it resumed a disinterested pecking at its brethren as though nibbling more out of boredom than anything else and Roman felt a queasy impotence in chastising this abysmal augur. He shook it off as best he could and went upstairs and was admitted by Lynda, who seized him into a embrace that crushed an exhalation from his diaphragm.

  “How is he? How’s my baby?”

  “He’s safe,” Roman said.

  “What does he need?” said Destiny.

  Roman brought her up to speed. Destiny pursed her lips and nodded mechanically for a while after he had stopped speaking.

  “How is this happening?” said Roman.

  She was uncomfortable. She picked up a shaker of salt from the table and shook some into her hand and threw it over her left shoulder. It was cold comfort.

  “The laws of magic are like the laws of anything,” she said. “They work because you obey them.”

  “You can just break them?” he said.

  “Not for free,” she said.

  “How do we fight it?” he said.

  She looked at him. “It’s time for you to admit this isn’t your fight.”

  “How does Peter fight it?” he said.

  “How do wolves usually fight?” she said.

  “Can Peter do the same thing? Turn when the moon is wrong?”

  “Not for free,” she said.

  Lynda had been quiet but interjected now. “What’s the price?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” said Destiny. “The only person who can know the answer to that is Peter. I can give him what he needs to find the answer, but I have to tell you, I’m pessimistic, Lyn. I’m pessimistic there’s any answer that isn’t going to be a giant shit sandwich for him to eat.”

  Lynda considered this. “The brother of the man Nicolae killed found us years and years later,” she said eventually. “Nicolae had to become a murderer twice in his life; these fires go out but the coals don’t. If this isn’t ended it will be just around the corner every day of his life. And if you don’t let a boy become a man, it’s no one’s fault but your own when you’re still wiping his ass when he should be making you grandchildren.”

  Destiny said nothing. She went to a shelving unit and began rummaging through drawers.

  Lynda took both of Roman’s hands in hers, and looking at her face he knew that what he was seeing was a person doing the hardest thing she was ever called to in her life. He knew that this was the face he would be forced to look into for all eternity if he fucked this up.

  “I miss when he was a baby,” she said. “If I could flip a switch, I’d just live in a whole world of babies.”

  Shortly after, Destiny gave him the provisions Peter would require but stopped him from leaving immediately. She stood i
n front of him and faced him, casting her eyes just over the top of his head and then closing them. After a moment she opened them again and said okay.

  “What?” he said.

  “Your Sahasrara,” she said. She held a hand over her own crown, indicating. “Sometimes it glows.”

  * * *

  They lit five beeswax candles and within this perimeter made a consecrate circle of chalk in the aisle, and Roman took a small satchel and emptied it in the center, making a pile of ash of willow bark and beggar’s button and powdered greenfly, the still point in a turning world.

  They held hands and the ganglia of their palms kindled discreetly as the frequency passed between them and Peter quietly said the old, old words as they walked three times the sinister path around the consecrate circle. This done, Roman did not know if he ought to be detecting any sort of shift in the balance of things, but he was not as sensitive as Peter.

  “We … in business?” he said.

  Peter didn’t answer. Roman didn’t speak, he didn’t like the look that was now on Peter’s face, and neither did Peter, wearing it. Peter walked down a pew and hunkered to his knees. Then straightened, returning with Fetchit in his arms. He knelt in the circle. The candle flicker spooked the cat and it attempted to worm free, but Peter held fast even as the struggle intensified with slashing claws and an unsettlingly human whine.

  But … I trusted you, thought the cat.

  “What are you doing?” Roman said.

  “You might want to turn around,” said Peter.

  “What are you doing?” Roman said again.

  Peter looked at him. Roman turned and looked up at the organ loft and the sounds of the cat’s resistance ended with a popping sound like a shoulder dislocating. It was the worst thing he’d ever heard.

  “It’s over,” said Peter.

  But Roman didn’t turn. He now hated the food in his stomach. He hated his relief that he had not been called, that this really was Peter’s fight. He heard Peter open a penknife.

  “I’m going to go outside for a minute,” said Roman.

  “Okay,” said Peter. “That’s okay.”

  Roman walked out and sat on the front steps. Storm clouds overhead as though someone had stood on the hills and run a roller of black paint over the sky. Roman wondered if someone was in a plane over the cloud cover at that moment, closing his window to block out the sun. Roman hoped his chair got kicked. He reached into his blazer and took out the tin mint container. Opened it and took out a Xanax and chewed it, the bitter lingering on his tongue. A little while after, the door opened behind him and Peter emerged.

  “What are you doing?” said Roman. “You can’t be out here.”

  But Peter did not look at him and Roman saw his eyes were like the eyes of the wolf, eyes with no regard for making conversation. He walked to the tree line and disappeared. Roman popped another Xanax and the cloud bank became a luminous bruise as lightning flickered without sound.

  Roman waited on the steps.

  “What the fuck,” said Roman and his eyes were hot with water. “The fucking cat.”

  A few minutes later Peter emerged from the tree line and sat next to Roman on the steps. He didn’t say anything. He stared off in the manner of a person who had just been handed one giant shit sandwich. Roman waited for him to say something.

  “Bacon,” said Peter eventually.

  Roman waited for him to say more than that.

  “I’m going to need bacon grease,” said Peter.

  “Is that how you fight it?” said Roman.

  “Yeah,” said Peter.

  “Is there … a price?” said Roman.

  Peter rubbed his face.

  “It’s my face,” said Peter. “The price is my human face.”

  Roman rose and put his hands in his pockets as though to take the air. But he didn’t go anywhere. He just stood there on the steps next to Peter with his hands in his pockets.

  “Did Nicolae really walk across the ocean with lily pads on his feet?” said Roman.

  “No,” said Peter. “He stole a car at the nearest farm and sold it for airfare.”

  “Oh,” said Roman.

  “I’m going to need bacon grease,” said Peter. “A lot of it.”

  “Sure,” said Roman.

  * * *

  At Godfrey House, Roman stood over an iron skillet of a full pound of bacon spitting and cackling like perdition’s coven when he felt a pair of hands massage his neck.

  “I believe,” said Olivia, “that’s enough cholesterol to see you comfortably into your dotage.”

  Roman prodded at the skillet with a spatula.

  “It’s going to end tonight,” he said. “Tonight we’re going to kill it.”

  She squeezed. “Do turn the fan on. It will stink of pig to high heaven.”

  When it was finished Roman drained the grease into a Tupperware container and wrapped the strips in wax paper and set them aside for Shelley. He went out to his car and Olivia followed and placed a hand on his arm. He turned to her and took the shame over his softness in the chapel and made it hardness here. He was going to stand by Peter. Nothing was going to stop him from standing by Peter.

  “If you may spare a moment for your mother,” she said.

  He studied her face, holding the hardness of his own. She was holding a thin black attaché case.

  “Please, Roman,” she said.

  He set the container in the passenger side and she took his hand and led him to the back of the house, where he saw that she had moved the freestanding floor mirror from the guest room to the patio. On its oval face there was simple line drawing of a wolf made with white nail polish and within its chest a spot of red. Its heart. She handed him the attaché case and told him to open it. Inside was a small and ornate double-bladed axe. It was made of silver and the handle consisted of the bodies of two intertwining serpents, the heads flattening into the blade edges. It had the gleam of a recent polish but this was cosmetic: make no mistake, it was very very old. She drew him to the mirror and stood behind him. She placed her hands on his shoulders and told him to look into the glass and he did. She asked what he saw.

  He didn’t understand. “I see us,” he said.

  “Look closer,” she said.

  He met her eyes in the mirror and lids of his own fluttered and fingers came from the shadow place and closed around his field of vision and things went dark. But there was a sound. His ears were filled with the sound of a pulse, but it was not his own. He felt this pulse ringing in all of his nerve endings and he saw again, he saw through the pall of the shadow like the sun burning through cloud and he knew he was standing on a threshold and he knew what was real: the mirror, and in the mirror the heart of the wolf pumping and alive, and this was what his mother had wanted him to see.

  It was his Kill.

  Roman lifted the axe over his head and could feel with the back of his neck his mother’s smile, and he brought the axe plunging down into the heart of it.

  The breaking glass returned Roman to his senses and he backed away, panting and in a sweat in the cold air. Olivia pulled the axe from the splintered backboard and placed it back into the case and handed it to Roman.

  “Try not to lose it,” said Olivia, “it goes back rather a long way.”

  He did not know what to say. He did not have words for his gratitude. She put a hand to his face.

  “We don’t need words,” she said.

  You Moved

  Sunset is at 4:55. You’ll want to keep that in mind.

  * * *

  4:12 p.m.

  Chasseur woke to the sight of angels’ wings. They were spread on the wall above her, the color of rust and portent, whether rising or falling in the eye of the beholder. She attempted to move but found that both her wrists and feet were bound by her own ZipCuffs. She rolled to one side. The floor on which she lay was covered with paper and detritus, and several yards away was a door opening on the main floor of the mill building, the outline of the Be
ssemer visible over the rail of the stairs. She rolled to the other side. There was another pair of wings on the floor next to her, and more on the ceiling. It had to be admired, grudgingly: the artistic spirit in its purest incarnation, unintended for the eyes of the living. But more relevant to her reconnaissance: the artist herself was absent, leaving her for the moment alone, and there was a west-facing window jagged with broken glass like broken teeth through which the setting sun was visible, perfectly framed between the hilltop and cloud bank like God’s eye peering through, as astonishing and unprecedented a sight as every sunset of her life. So another gift, the two crucial elements of an escape-and-evade scenario: time and opportunity.

  She rolled to her belly and wended to the wall. It occurred to her that she no longer smelled of the urine she’d used to mask her own scent, or for that matter her own evacuation, which would have been an inevitable consequence of being unconscious for a day or more. She had been cleaned, her clothes laundered. And she felt between her legs a strange but familiar imposition: a feminine sanitary product, too long for her and ill-fitting, not her preferred brand. At least two days then, if it was that time of her cycle. She couldn’t connect her last waking memory with her present circumstances but how she got here wasn’t what mattered, getting out was. She shifted to a wobbling kneel, reached for the windowsill, and pulled herself to a standing position. From there she pivoted, bracing her elbow for increased stability, and brought the plastic of the ZipCuffs to a shard of glass and ran her hands back and forth in a sawing motion. Hands. Those unassuming appendages neither toothed nor clawed that had given that unlikely ape Homo sapiens dominion over all other carnivores. She pictured the hands that had cleaned and dressed her and stuck a tampon up her, the ones she was going to remove from their wrists and in a forgivably Protestant homage nail them to the front door. Take this sword: its brightness stands for faith …

  The ZipCuff slipped suddenly and her arm plunged downward, the glass entering the flesh of her palm and snapping off as she fell on her back. It hurt but there wasn’t enough time to hurt; she held the arm out in appraisal and blood issued unchaste down the jag of glass. She brought the glass between her teeth and pulled it free, clamping tight and bringing the ZipCuff to it and finally severing it. But the victory was short-lived: she nearly swallowed the glass at the sound above her of a turning flint wheel.