Hemlock Grove (2 page)

Peter nodded.
Just terrible.

“In this day and age.”

Peter shook his head.
This day and age.

“It just really makes you wonder,” said Vice Principal Spears.

“It was probably a bear,” said Peter. “I bet it was a bear.”

Down the hall Peter could feel the man’s eyes between his shoulder blades like pinpricks.

He went to his locker. On the other side of the section was some kind of hushed conversation. He paused as is irresistible when you are privy to business not your own and cocked an ear.

For the lamb which is in the midst of their throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters—

Oh. Gay. He continued on his way, passing two girls and Mrs. McCollum standing with heads bowed. Mrs. McCollum’s eyes were open and eager for persecution over this commingling of church and state and they locked on Peter’s and lighted indignant. Embarrassed, Peter gave a thumbs-up. Whatever peels your banana, lady. Mrs. McCollum shut her eyes, annoyed at the presumptive Satanist’s blessing.

—and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.

In the three weeks of school before the discovery of most of Brooke Bluebell from Penrose, Peter had made no friends—and lost one.

Peter and Lynda Rumancek moved to Hemlock Grove midsummer. Lynda’s cousin Vince had died of alcohol poisoning and left his trailer on the outskirts of town to another cousin, Ruby. But Ruby was newly married to the owner of a pawnshop she frequented and had no use for so plebeian a windfall. So she passed it to Lynda in exchange for half a pack of cigarettes and a hand massage. The Rumanceks preferred trade to charity out of principle and Lynda gave legendary hand massages. The timing was auspicious enough. Lynda and Peter had been living in a small apartment in the city for nearly two years and were feeling the itch. Two years was unnaturally long for a Rumancek to stay in any one place; it made a mausoleum of the brain.

Hemlock Grove was, at this writing, a town in transition. Its past: Castle Godfrey, long the colloquial name for the steelworks, which sat on the riverbank shuttered and half razed in a field speckled with gold and white, goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. The Godfrey Steel Company, founded in 1873 by Jacob Godfrey, was at its peak an integrated steel outfit encompassing 640 acres and employing upward of 10,000 men in the endeavor of building the country on two axes—vertically in Manhattan and Chicago with high-grade steel from its open-hearth ovens, and horizontally to the west with rail from its Bessemer converters: a gauntlet dropped before heaven and earth, shrouding the sun in clouds of black dust that required the wives of steelworkers to hang whites inside and plated the teeth of livestock miles away with steel filings. But now an old dead thing that interrupted a flower bed. Its future: health care and biotechnology, the two largest employers in the Easter Valley now the Hemlock Acres Hospital, the flagship psychiatric facility of the regional university system, and over the next ridge the privately run Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Technologies. The latter the bastard successor of the steelworks, a 480-foot incongruity of steel and glass the summit of which was the highest point in the county. And known colloquially as the White Tower because it had not in twenty years of operations gone dark once. So after a century-long legacy as a mill town, much of Hemlock Grove had transmuted into middle-class blamelessness. But while the blood of industry may have run dry, the husk, like Castle Godfrey, still breached. Rail yards and strip mines and beached coal barges all fallen to some degree of disuse or decay, streaked with tears of rust in contrast to the forests of the region, the trees and the rivers and the hills day by day overtaking the rude, rotted exoskeleton of the Godfrey empire, all dotted with moldering desanctified churches that had gone the way of the working class.

So—why not?—a change of scenery. Vince Rumancek’s trailer was situated in a wooded cul-de-sac at the end of Kimmel Lane, down the hill from Kilderry Park and just past the tracks—the traditional divider of workers and management and to this day a telling indicator of socioeconomic station. Still, good to get out of the city and give your thoughts some elbow room. The nearest neighbors were a retired couple, the Wendalls, who lived half a mile up in a house over a pond Peter sometimes skinny-dipped in late at night. The Wendalls were tame enough. They bore welcoming biscuits and euphemistic praise of Vince—one, one
heck
of a whistler—and hid their discomfiture over the Rumanceks’ tattoos. The visible ones, at least. Or Lynda’s tolerance of her son’s semantic dispute with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s definition of “minor”—deduced by the number of Budweisers he consumed over their short visit—and yet how little provocation it took for his laziness to vex her into hurling curses at him in the old tongue, or the lung-flattening hug she pulled them both into on their departure. (The first time I experienced Lynda’s embrace I have the distinct recollection of feeling like she was trying to squeeze the last drop of toothpaste from the top of my head.)

Days later they were visited by the Wendalls’ granddaughter, Christina. Christina was thirteen and small for it, a girl with chipped painted nails and skinned knees and a black raven’s nest bramble of hair containing a face like a single pale egg. Christina was a girl both young and old for her years; she had never shed the breathless curiosity of a child assembling a taxonomy of the known universe—what is that? where did that come from? why is that like that and not another way and what is its orientation with every other thing? why? why? why?—and the only person her own age she knew who wanted nothing more when she grew up than to be a Russian novelist. Naturally, she found it imperative to experience these unfathomables firsthand, and she was not disappointed. How perplexing and thrilling, these Rumanceks! Her own parents were both production support analysts for a firm in the city, and that this lifestyle of breezy and pantheistic irreverence existed and was somehow permissible knocked her sideways. She marveled at Peter especially, a real-life Gypsy close to her own age.

“Half-breed,” he corrected her. Nicolae, his grandfather, was full-blooded Kalderash Roma from the Carpathian region but had married a
gadja
woman after emigrating.

“What does any of that mean?” said Christina.

“It means his bloodline will forever ride the earth on two horses with one ass,” said Peter.

This setting the tone for their relationship: her confusion over what he was talking about and the evident pleasure it gave him. Half the time she didn’t understand what he was saying, and the other half whether or not he was pulling her leg. For example, the bunch of dried milk thistle and centaury root over the door, the purpose of which he said was warding off the Evil Eye. But—whose?

“It’s more like buckling your seat belt,” he said. “You just never know.”

And his claim that her arrival on their doorstep had been presaged by the presence of soot on a candle’s wick, or the elaborate pentagram that Peter had carved in a tree trunk. (Not, he told her, a Satan thing, but because each point corresponds to an element and the topmost the soul, and because it looks fucking metal.)

Enough! She demanded of Peter how much of this business was real.

He shrugged. “Let’s say it’s a bunch of baloney,” he said. “Then it’s baloney that’s been getting people through the night since we humped in caves. Now look around. Would you say the world has its shit together any better without it?”

She hadn’t thought of it like that.

“And of course it’s all real, numbnuts,” he said. “You know it right here.” He poked below her belly button.

Thus her doom was sealed.

For their part the Rumanceks received Christina’s regular presence the same way they did the bone-bag black cat, all eye and ear, who started hanging around—with shrugging acceptance and one simple stipulation: eat eat eat. Lynda was a woman as cheerful as and similarly proportioned to a beach ball whose maternal inclinations tended to encompass whatever happened to fall into her immediate field of vision.

One afternoon Peter was lying in the hammock idly twirling a string for Fetchit (so named because of Nicolae’s habit, owing to an immigrant’s lack of sensitivity to cultural nuances, of using “Stepin Fetchit” as an umbrella designation for all black cats) and half listening to Christina explain to him that no matter how funny it sounded there was nothing funny about actually
suffering
from restless leg syndrome, when abruptly she changed the subject and asked him if he was a werewolf. Peter’s hand stopped and the cat went for the kill.

Peter cursed and sucked his knuckle. “What the hell would make you say that?” he said.

“Your index and middle fingers are the same length,” she said.

Peter removed the hand from his mouth and regarded his symmetrical forefingers.

“Jesus,” he said, “where’d you pick that up?”

“I don’t know, TV or something. Just one of those things floating around, I guess. But I was just looking at your hand and poof, there it is. So are you a werewolf or what?”

Peter shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Really?” she said.

“You bet your ass,” he said. “But don’t tell your grandparents. It would probably make them uncomfortable.”

“Were you bitten by a werewolf?”

Peter made a face at this distasteful notion. He was no fan of violence in general, and in particular when it was directed at him. “Nicolae was the seventh son of a seventh son,” he said. “It’s in my blood.”

“Is your mom?”

“Nah. It’s a recessive gene or some shit.”

The implications of this revelation crowded her head and she tried to think of something intelligent to ask.

“Do you … like being a werewolf?” she said.

“What do you think?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Use your imagination, dipshit.”

She evaluated the pros and cons. “It seems like it would be kind of neat,” she said.

“Well, it’s probably about the best thing in the world, for your information,” he said. “So there.”

“Really?” she said.

“Obviously,” he said.

She was quiet but her mind was still a whirlwind. How about them apples! But in the tizzy of a thousand and one urgent questions she now had, the foremost popped out of her mouth.

“Can I be a werewolf?” she said.

“In theory,” said Peter, evasive.

He dangled his arm, snapping his fingers a few times, and Fetchit came and nuzzled the back of his hand.

“Little prick,” said Peter.

“Will you bite me?” said Christina.

“Don’t be retarded,” said Peter.

“Come on.” She lifted her leg so her calf was level with him. “Look how young and tender.”

“Get that skinny, sorry drumstick out of my face,” said Peter. “Wouldn’t do you much good anyway. You’d be way more likely to get tetanus and die than turn.”

“Yeah, right. I think you’re just being selfish.”

He considered. “Well … there might be another way.”

She was eager. “What?”

“Go get me a beer and stop hassling me.”

After school started, Christina stopped spending days at the lane and Peter saw her only in the halls, but that was the extent of their relationship as of the first day, when she skipped over to give him a hug in view of her friends, identical twins Alexa and Alyssa Sworn, as beautiful and cruel as albino tigers, who were appalled she would have anything to do with that walking herpes factory, let alone touch him without
scouring
afterward. Though Peter did not take her distance after that personally, it was no picnic being a girl that age.

But the day after most of a girl from Penrose was found in Kilderry Park, Peter really wished he hadn’t told Christina he was a werewolf.

*   *   *

Peter made people nervous, and they did not have to know that once a month he discarded his man coat and roved in the purview of arcane and unruly gods to feel it: he was not their kind. Peter didn’t mind. He had his family and infinite roads to explore and could not imagine needing more, and if this was at the expense of fitting in—whatever that meant—so what. There was so much to learn from every place. Or at least something worth watching. Who was in love with their best friend’s boy- or girlfriend, who was in love with their best friend, who cut, who starved, who locked themselves in the handicapped bathroom to jerk off or cry, who was addicted to what or had been raped by whom—it was everywhere, a wonderful world of darkness and desire right under the roaring bleachers, if you had your eye out. But in the halls of HGHS the greatest concentration by far of curiosity and intrigue collected around two students, brother and sister: Roman and Shelley Godfrey.

Roman was also a senior, well within the innermost ring of privilege and popularity. The Godfrey name as sovereign as Dupont or Ramses, and he made no attempt to obscure it from hair he would think nothing of taking a half day off school to go into the city to have styled and bleached (his bone pallor suggesting a natural dark, not to mention a general indisposition to playing outside), or the small but impressive pharmacy he carried in a tin mint container. And obviously the car. The desire to be burdened by possessions was one that had in the main escaped Peter, but as a teenager of traveling blood he had no defense against anything with a combustion engine and the fact was that car was totally metal. But Roman otherwise had little in common with the other rich kids, exhibiting a nearly complete lack of regard for social expectation. His behavior not rebellious so much as entirely unmotivated to behave in any way that didn’t conform exactly to the cast of his mood at the moment, his sense of entitlement as phenotypal as the green eyes. This characteristic of his dynasty dating back to its first possessor, his three times great-grandfather the legendary steel baron, Jacob Godfrey. (Green of course being the color of money.) It had made him mercurial.

But none of this was what Peter found so compelling about Roman Godfrey.

“There’s an
upir
at my school,” Peter told Lynda the first week. His Swadisthana made him sensitive to these things.