Hemlock Grove

by Brian McGreevy

  He looked at her face and it occurred to him he could just do it. Here and now. They did not have to get where they were going, Peter did not have to be the one to decide. Roman could just give her the blade and tell her to cut her own wrists and inside of her legs and her neck and anywhere else that would bleed fast and comprehensive into the dirt. Maybe he could even tell Letha to forget. For all he knew he could do that too. He looked at her. He tried to summon the intention and warrior’s focus he had felt so recently looking into the mirror, but this was not a picture, it was a person. A little fucking girl. Roman did not feel like much of a warrior.

  They went on and when the trail broke Roman said he would go up ahead to make sure everything was all right and jogged up to the chapel and entered carefully. He imagined being spoken to by the affirming mechanized voice of his GPS. You have arrived. Peter was waiting. Roman held his finger to his lips before Peter could speak. Peter did not need him to explain. It was here. Roman had brought it here while there was still sun in the sky. He looked at Roman.

  “Good,” he said. “You did a good job.”

  Roman said nothing. He handed Peter the bag with the cord.

  From the steps, Letha asked if it was okay.

  Peter became rigid. “What is she doing here?” he said.

  “It’s complicated,” said Roman.

  He called that it was okay and Letha led Christina in, and Christina’s and Peter’s eyes met, and Letha looked from one to the other and did not know just how but knew she had made a bad mistake; the look on her face the instant you realize the car is no longer obeying the steering wheel.

  “I’m sorry for telling everyone you were a werewolf,” said Christina.

  Peter walked up to her. He pulled the cord free of the packaging. She looked at him with those dreamy eyes. He knotted a loop in the cord.

  Letha asked what was going on. Peter did not answer her.

  “Get her out of here,” Peter said to Roman.

  Roman went to Letha and put a hand on her arm but she was fixed where she stood. She could only dumbly spectate. Roman gently told her, “Come on,” but she did not and he did not force her, and could not himself. No one was going anywhere now, any more than a moth flies away from the light; it would have broken the law of attraction.

  “Get on your knees,” Peter told Christina.

  Letha felt a wave of nausea and Christina obeyed. Peter slipped the cord over her head and fastened it tightly around her neck. She stayed there on her knees, docile, as he went and knotted the other end to where the nearest pew was bolted to the floor. He went back to her and stood over her.

  “Can you control it?” he said.

  She looked at him sleepily.

  “Last night was it just something that happened or did you make it happen?” he said.

  She did not answer him.

  “Did you make yourself turn, or did you hear it? Did you hear your other name?” said Peter.

  She did not answer. It was like she was actually asleep with open eyes. He took the cord and yanked it and she collapsed into a sprawl.

  Letha’s nausea intensified into a kind of vertigo. Roman was afraid she might faint and guided her to a pew and she allowed him to sit her down. Standing was doing her no favors in coming to terms with the mistake.

  “If you don’t answer me,” said Peter, “I will choke the life from you right here.”

  Christina got back to her knees.

  “I decided to,” she said. “I wanted to.”

  “Okay,” said Peter, nodding; now they were getting somewhere, and he said it again. “Okay.”

  He crouched so they were level. “If you decide to turn tonight, you are going to die.”

  “Are you going to kill me, Peter?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Do you hate me?” she said.

  “No. I don’t hate you,” he said.

  She beamed.

  “Why her?” said Peter. “Why did you go to her?”

  Christina looked at Letha. Yesterday, seeing Roman and the doctor slipping food and blankets into the chapel, she knew that Peter was in there. It was no more in question than the location of her own heart. Peter had made her, he was part of her now. There was no hiding from yourself, not in the end.

  “Because when I saw you in here with your ugly little thing in that whore I wanted more than anything to feel her fear on my tongue and her bones crunch between my teeth and her blood run down the fur of my neck.”

  She looked at him hopefully. “We can eat her together,” she said. “I always left you the bigger piece.”

  Letha was ambivalent now. It was sinking in that her initial impression of the mistake she was watching unfold was not entirely on target, but this brought her no relief.

  The color drained from Peter and he got to one knee to support himself. Christina smiled with a wistful melancholy.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You can kill me as long you don’t hate me. You should do it now, while you still have me like you want me. It’s already happening, you haven’t got a lot of time. I can’t turn it around any more than you can turn around night and day. Do what you have to while it’s still day. You made me. I’m yours.”

  She put her hands to the floor and crawled forward on all fours and brought her face inches from his.

  “You’re my master, you can do anything you want to me.”

  Peter kneeled there in the last of the light peering back into eyes that now hardly seemed a thing of the sublunary world.

  “Oh God,” he said. “Please forgive me.”

  She smiled again. “I’ve never heard my name,” she said, though it was not the voice of a girl that spoke, it was a sound like the hinge on hell’s gate, the sound of a thing that most dangerously of all things didn’t know its name.

  And then she turned.

  Letha’s mouth formed the shape to allow the release of a very loud sound that did not emerge. Roman seized her arm and pulled her up and to the altar. Peter wheeled back behind a pew. Christina quivered and howled and the thing in her was so much bigger and meaner than she, it simply burst forth in a clap detonation of efficient violence. The transformation was instantaneous and irrevocable. Now the beast. The killer. Standing, the dimensions of a starved horse, flesh and clothing hanging in wet tatters from white fur. Every hair a killer. It looked at Peter. Enough has been made of its eyes. Matchstick legs crouching and then the spring-release of coiled rage and the beast, drunk on the fear in the room, pounced to kill.

  But in what might have been a great comic effect in other circumstances, the cord yanked it back in midair with a clipped yelp, its entire body snapping in a whiplash and falling to the ground. It scrabbled forward, now on foot and the cord pulling taut as it struggled. Foam sprayed from its snapping jaws, white flecks of it hitting Peter’s face as he emerged from the pew. Peter’s face calm and understanding. Understanding this beast. Its name, its not-so-secret name, was Pain.

  Roman kept himself in front of Letha and fumbled with the case and pulled out the axe and hoped Peter really had something up his sleeve because holding it now in his hands and faced with the primeval fury that had been let out of its cage he knew he held no weapon against this beast. But it was no great comfort when Peter stood there placidly watching as the white wolf snarled and frothed, straining so hard it was choking, and no way that cord would hold it back for very long, Peter just standing there like watching a barn burner of a storm or any other natural phenomenon that happens on occasion.

  “Do something!” said Roman. He had no better suggestion.

  Peter turned from the white wolf and Roman saw now he was holding something in his hands, picked up from behind the pew. The Tupperware container. Deliberately, Peter wiped the dog slobber from his face. He then opened the container and dipped his hand inside. This was not what Roman had in mind. The white wolf reared back and attempted another vain pounce, pratfalling to its side, the cord entangling one of its slashing legs. Like an act
or applying stage makeup, Peter rubbed the grease on his face. He turned back to the white wolf. Roman realized.

  “Peter! No!”

  But Peter ignored him as the white wolf took the cord in its jaws and brought them together with an earsplitting SNAP and rose with the severed cord around its neck. It walked forward and stopped in front of Peter. Letha screamed now, finally joining the party, and she clawed at Roman’s shoulders trying to struggle past him, but he held her in check, remembering that he had a job and he was doing it. To be between this and her.

  The white wolf sniffed Peter’s face and experimentally licked. Peter stood there. He shut his eyes. He might have been better appreciating a scent or waiting for a kiss. But what he was doing was remembering. This was the first wolf he had encountered since Nicolae and he was remembering with sudden vividness the feel of Nicolae’s tongue. The memory a good one, fine for the last behind his human face.

  The white wolf snapped and tore the face from his body.

  Letha continued to scream but Roman could not be sure if it was right at his ear or somewhere far, far off. Peter crumpled and the white wolf lowered her head and lapped at the remaining grease. It was not a good sight, this beast with its muzzle licking his friend’s face away, and Roman’s eyes floated up the nave to the quote Jacob Godfrey had seen fit to have inscribed over the tympanum: OUR LOVE MUST NOT BE A THING OF WORDS AND FINE TALK. IT MUST BE A THING OF ACTION AND SINCERITY. Roman nodded. So his moment after all. This beast wouldn’t want him, it would want her, and this was not a thing that would happen. It would come for her and he would throw himself at it and maybe he would kill it or more probably it would kill him, but either way she would make it through this. He saw the beating heart in the mirror earlier, his Kill, and he knew that the heart was his own, as were all hearts, there was no hiding from it. But she would make it, because maybe he wasn’t much of a warrior but if there was one thing that he was cut out for it was an epic and retarded act of love.

  The white wolf finished finally and lifted its head, leaving something gleaming, and looked up at them. Roman took Letha’s wrist and said, “When I say so, run. Run for the acute unit and lock yourself in as deep as you can. Will you do that?”

  She did not answer him and he saw in her terror and grief right now that whatever she did, she would do it wrong. The vargulf took a gingerly first step over Peter toward them.

  Roman looked her in the eye. “Live through this,” he said.

  But then there was a startled yelp and the white wolf listed to the side. The brown wolf’s jaws were clamped around its throat. The vargulf thrashed wildly, pulling the brown wolf fully formed from the grisly chrysalis of what had been moments before a boy called Peter. The white wolf shook frantically but the brown wolf’s fangs only closed with greater implacability, so it was forced to change tack, turning inward and its fangs working for purchase in the flesh of its enemy. The fangs of a werewolf the end of the story.

  Roman watched the two beasts rip and rend at each other with a ferocity that knocked them back and forth against the wall and through the pews and to the floor; the white wolf larger by threefold but no smell of fear to the brown, only resolution, the resolution to hold and hold and beyond any reasonable measure to hold. A resolution breakable only by death. And as they rolled and sprawled and clawed, ears flat and muzzles pulled taut revealing white teeth and black gums and undercoats matting red, yet both of them silent all the while—once the fight has begun, werewolves do not make a sound—it was apparent that that was exactly where this was going. Death. In the warring silence that was the one clear thing: neither of them was going to survive this battle.

  The white wolf ripped off half the brown wolf’s ear and its rear claws hooked into its stomach and tore, but in all its savage power it could not hurt the brown wolf enough to make its release. So the primal intercourse. Good versus evil at its most raw and elemental. But standing beholden to the full catharsis of what had seemed so necessary to Roman now just seemed tiring. Tiring because he felt prematurely the weight of carrying how stupidly fucking sad this was for the rest of his days.

  He noticed a low murmuring by his ear. It was Letha. She was praying. She was praying for her angel. You crazy-ass fucking bitch, thought Roman. He started praying too.

  Just then the darkening light outside took on a queerish blue cast and with it a low and distant thunder. But the light did not diminish as it would have with a lightning strike. The light grew brighter. Whatever it was, it was moving. Getting closer. And Roman felt a tremble in his shins and realized that the rumble was not thunder but the ground itself moving. The dogfight continuing heedless. Letha fell silent and Roman himself wondered if such a ludicrous deus ex machina was actually happening. Had their prayer been answered?

  The light grew brighter still, spilling from the crack under the doors, and disruptions of dust fell from the beams, the foundations of the church quaking. And in that moment a connection that had failed earlier clicked suddenly in Roman’s mind: Jennifer Fredericks. Jenny.

  “Oh,” said Roman, and he tackled Letha, throwing his body over hers just as the doors exploded from their hinges and shattered stained glass rained on his back and the room was filled with a blinding light that was visible to planes in the sky and the bellow of a giant’s rage. There followed the sounds of a vengeance nasty, brutish, short. The thud of one body being unceremoniously cast from the fight, the crack and howl of another breaking.

  And just as suddenly it was done with. Roman blinked the color from his eyes as though snowblind to see the aftermath. The doors splintered and upended in the pews. The brown wolf bleeding and motionless against the wall. Kneeling in profile against the dusk his baby sister, chest heaving and cradled in her arms the nude body of one more dead girl, her back curved and a fragment of spine protruding. Shelley looked at her brother. Her eyes fathomless, the magnitude of it. The first time in her life she had ever made the choice to hurt another living thing.

  He stood, carefully brushing the dust and debris from his sleeves. He went to her.

  “Put her down,” he said. “Put her down, Shelley.”

  He lay a hand on her back. Her face sagged against him. He braced himself to bear the weight of it. He told her it was okay. He told her again to put her down. And that was when he saw it was not over yet. And that was when he saw the man.

  The man was standing outside. He had in fact come to Hemlock Acres with the intention of admitting himself, realizing that the tenor of his own thoughts was no honor to anyone, least of all those lost. But the man had been drawn to the commotion of the chapel and he stood now outside it with hate in his heart and a Mossberg 500 in his hands and there was nothing for him to see but the murderer of one more dead girl.

  The women of the audience may want to close their eyes now.

  Roman’s cries were drowned out by the ring of the sheriff’s first shot. Shelley seized from the bullet’s impact but she did not fall, and Christina Wendall slid from her arms to the floor. Roman made an unthinking dash, arms waving, for the sheriff, but Shelley took him by the scruff of the neck and tossed him aside. Roman splayed backwards and out of harm’s way as the next shot buried in her chest.

  Roman continued crying out and struggled to his feet but Shelley had begun to move. She lumbered down the steps and let out a low of pain as Sheriff Sworn shot her a third time, but she reached the ground and loped past him, and he pivoted and chambered another round but as he was siting there was the clash and spark of metal on metal and the rifle dropped from his hands and Roman looked into his eyes and said, “Don’t hurt her. Please don’t hurt her,” and raced after Shelley, yelling her name. But she would not stop, she could not stop, she was an engine building steam that could only power faster and faster into the forest and up a single track, and Roman followed the sound of her crashing as she hurtled to the summit of the hillside, beginning once more to fluoresce, each bound building more power and momentum, propelling her farther into the air, branche
s and even full trees snapping as that juggernaut steamed inexorably for the only destination, all that was left, and far behind her Roman crested the hill to see her blue light; from this height it might have been a firefly as it approached the institute, the place of her creation, coming closer and closer before, as he knew it would in the moment just cusping the actual event, winking out as though swallowed by the very earth.

  Roman stopped and caught his breath. The front of his jeans was cold. Apparently his bladder had released at some point, but he had not noticed. He saw snagged in the snarl of a hemlock a torn skein of thread from Shelley’s shirt and he wiped his hands dry and pulled it free. Roman had a series of protocols that was supposed to maintain order and balance in the world. He had an alliance with the virtuous and harmonic number four and multiples thereof and was an enemy of primes; primes the emissaries of the dark place. He would reset his alarm a fixed number of times depending on the hour it was supposed to go off, would sooner step on a nail than a crack, could not fall asleep unless he was certain every drawer and cupboard in the house was securely shut, always entered water with his left foot, and always untied knots. But as he worked with trembling fingers, freeing one fiber and another and another, frantically loosing individual and innocuous strands by the light of the institute, it occurred to him for the first time in his life that what he was doing was completely pointless. That there was no protocol that could undo the things that had been done this night in the naming of what is good and evil. He dropped the thread to the ground, his work unfinished. He had never performed such a breach before. Could never have imagined such a thing. He felt empty. He had never imagined such an emptiness.

  And then the light of the White Tower went dark.

  * * *

  Letha approached the wolf. It lay on its side, unconscious and wheezing and its fur stickied red. She lay behind it and pulled its body into hers and looked into its eyes. The wolf looked back and they were Peter’s eyes. She was the only one to learn Peter’s true secret: that there is no “it,” only him, always him. She buried her face into his coat and she inhaled this smell of dog as the wise wolf died. She lay with his body in her arms and closed her eyes.