Hemlock Grove (27 page)

“Peter!” Roman cried, and he ran to the fence.

The wolf shook its head and attempted a few more steps before its legs gave out and it splayed to the ground.

“What is it!” said Roman, the panic in his chest so overpowering that it didn’t occur to him he was talking to a dog.

A convulsion passed through the wolf and it was still. Roman cried out Peter’s name again but the wolf just lay there. Its tongue lolled. The rise and fall of its ribs. A long, thin tube, Roman now saw, sticking from the ribs. That was the thing, whatever it was, the thing that was hurting his friend. Roman seized the fence and started to climb. There was razor wire along the top but he wasn’t thinking that far ahead. He just saw his friend lying there helpless with a thing sticking out, and that was as far as he’d gotten.

“Get down.”

There was a rustling in the brush and a person emerged from a few yards down, on the other side of the fence. It was Chasseur. She was camouflaged in dark khaki that was rank with deer piss to mask her own scent and she carried a rifle with a scope and there was a pack around her shoulders, and Roman realized what was sticking from the wolf: a dart.

“You don’t understand,” he said, still hanging on to the fence.

She stopped and shouldered the rifle and sited him.

“Get down,” she said.

Roman dropped to his feet. “Listen to me,” he said.

“Do not attempt eye contact,” she said. “Stay ten paces back. Keep your hands visible. Do
not
attempt eye contact.”

Roman averted his look. “It’s not him.”

Chasseur set her rifle and her pack on the ground by Peter. She did not show that she heard what he had said.

“I said it’s not him!”

“How do you know that?” she said. Less to entertain the discussion than keep him amused while she did what she had to. She was willing to tranquilize him if pushed, but didn’t want it to come to that. To the eye a shot is only geometry and yardage and wind, but to a still-beating heart pulling a trigger on another living body and watching it fall is to be avoided, it does not give you a good feeling. If you aren’t a psychopath or a male.

“Because—” said Roman. How
did
he know that? “I was with him last time. The whole night.”

“You’re lying,” she said. She undid the clasps of the pack.

“If you hurt him, you are dead,” said Roman. “Do you hear me?
Dead
,” he stressed pathetically.

“He’s fine,” said Chasseur. “And if you threaten me again I’ll come over there and break your fucking teeth in.”

She pulled a thin plastic loop from the bag and fitted it around Peter’s hind legs and tightened it. Roman mashed his knuckles into his face, chastened and desperate.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But … I’m telling you, you don’t know what you’re doing right now.”

She fastened another ZipCuff around his forelegs and pulled a conical steel and leather apparatus from the pack.

“It’s not Peter,” said Roman. “We were tracking him. That’s why we came here. To get the scent.”

She tucked Peter’s tongue in his mouth and closed his jaws and fitted the apparatus around his snout. A muzzle.

“Just how much of what you think you know is what he told you?”

Roman looked up helpless at the spreading inkblot night. His foot sank into the ground with a mud belch. Abruptly he snapped his fingers and jabbed emphatically at the fresh paw prints.

“The
vargulf
doesn’t leave tracks!” he said.

She did not deviate from fitting the straps of the muzzle.

“Didn’t you hear me?” he said. “Peter leaves tracks, the killer doesn’t.”

“No tracks were found,” she said.

Roman came forward to the fence and she put a warning hand on the rifle butt.

“It’s going to be your fault,” he said. “If there’s another one tonight, it will be your fault.”

She tightened the straps. “Roman,” she said, “what can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more. This is not your friend. This is not a person. I know it’s hard for you to accept and I believe it’s hard for him too. I believe that you wanted to find the monster, and so did he. Because he couldn’t know that about himself. You can’t know that about yourself and continue being a person.”

Roman shook his head. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “That’s just bullshit.”

She gave Peter’s restraints a once-over and stood. “This is an animal,” she said. “That’s what it is.”

Roman looked pleadingly at her. She repeated her admonition about eye contact.

“If you’re wrong, someone is going to die tonight,” said Roman. “Can’t you see I’m just trying to help? Why won’t you let me help?”

“Because you don’t believe in God,” she said.

She pulled the dart from Peter. “Please go to your car and leave of your own volition. I’m going to be really pissed off if you make me shoot you.”

For a moment Roman was still except for the play of shadow on the hollows of his clenching jaw. Then he turned his back to the fence and walked away.

“God doesn’t want you to be happy, He wants you to be strong,” she said.

She looked down at the truly marvelous specimen at her feet breathing the last of its free air. Questions of right and justness aside, the wolf would surely die in a cage. Its kind didn’t know how to live in one. She knelt and placed her palms flat on its chest and belly and felt its breathing and permitted herself this one moment of pity before what had to be done was done. The death of freedom was always something to be mourned.

*   *   *

The van was parked along the train tracks a half mile away. Chasseur sat for a few moments on the back bumper and caught her breath, folding forward and pulling her lower back into a long stretch. It hurt more than it used to, humping a load that far. She didn’t know whether it was her or this case, but it used to be that being in the field made her feel younger. She got up to close the rear doors but stopped, glancing a moment at the mud-caked paws. Doubt gnawed, but the method prevailed: replicable observation and measurement of material phenomena. The sanity of science of apostolic necessity in trafficking with mystery, God the most necessary hypothesis. She shut the wise wolf in.

“Take this sword: its brightness stands for faith, its point for hope, its guard for charity,” she said.

She looked out at the river. On the other bank several streetlamps dotted their reflections on the water, making a series of stuttering exclamation points
!!!
She took out her phone. Holding her fingertips to the crucifix around her neck but not quite touching. She dialed.

“He’s in bracelets,” she said. “Make a bed.”

She hung up and watched the light of her LCD screen slowly fade, then walked around to the driver’s side of the van and came face-to-face with Olivia Godfrey.

“Hello again,” said Olivia. She wore a satin evening gown as white as a grin and Chasseur could not account for how so glaringly absurd a thing could have gotten the drop on her, but it wasn’t a priority.

Chasseur unholstered her .38 and aimed it at Olivia. Pulling a trigger on another body has its exceptions.

Olivia regarded her with a cocked head. “The cross you wear,” she said, “it’s not of your order.”

“Mrs. Godfrey,” said Chasseur, “I am going to give you one opportunity to slowly place your hands on the vehicle, and if you take one step toward me I will kill you.”

Olivia’s head cocked the other way. “Saint Jude. Oh, Little Mouse: What makes you feel so lost?”

She stepped forward. Her gown shimmered like the risen moon in the river.

*   *   *

And Peter woke.

He didn’t know what had happened or where he was. He didn’t know shit about shit. This is no way to go through life, he thought. He focused. He was nude and in a strange room—but he had been here before, the night before—he was in the guest bed at Godfrey House. And someone was standing over him. Roman. Roman was waiting for him to wake up. It was in his posture and his eyes. Roman had bad news.

Peter tried to sit up, but this was ambitious. There was a heavy groan and he realized it was coming from him. He tried to pinpoint the last thing he could remember but it was like looking at shapes underwater: nothing resolved into actual thingness and anything might eat you.

My heart really breaks for Peter here. He didn’t deserve any of this, and it is with great melancholy that I picture him peeing on a tree, a lattice of diamonds imprinted on his bare back from the hammock, or pulling his hair fully around his face to become Cousin Itt, or chasing a squirrel—too slow!—up a gully. All in all, Peter’s love of being Peter was so great that like an overfilled bucket of paint it slopped over even in the smallest moments of his day. No, Peter didn’t deserve any of this. Though it could be said it was his fault.

“What happened?” Peter said. It was like sandbags were tied to his words.

“Alexa and Alyssa Sworn,” said Roman. “The
vargulf
got the sheriff’s daughters.”

Peter looked at the ceiling. He had no idea what to do with this information; this was not a respectable way to go through life. Then he snapped upright and seized Roman’s arm.

“
Lynda
,” he said.

God Doesn’t Want You to Be Happy, He Wants You to Be Strong

As Roman passed Kilderry Park he saw the black pillar of smoke issuing from down the hill and his stomach sank. He hurried, but when he reached the Rumanceks’ plot there was nothing waiting but the scorched husk of the trailer. He got out and stood for a while as close to the black and buckled metal as the heat would allow. On the ground there was a carpeting of ash and debris and something fluttered into his jacket. He took it in his hands; it was the singed fragment of a Peanuts cartoon he recognized from the refrigerator. Roman released it and turned from the trailer. A broken compact mirror lay on the ground, open like a clam. It was cracked and reflected the wash of black smoke in the sky’s white.

His phone rang. Peter. Destiny had had a dream in her Third Eye and retrieved Lynda in the night. They were in the city.

“How’s it look?” said Peter.

“Like the last time Shelley made toast,” said Roman. “Molotov cocktail, maybe. Or grenade.”

Peter was quiet. Then he said, “What happened last night?”

“I don’t know,” said Roman. “Last I saw you were down and Chasseur was going to take you and there was nothing I could do about it. So I’m driving, just driving up and down the river until, you know, a better idea comes along, when Mom calls and says to come back and keep an eye on you. I go home, there you are. She isn’t. Is she back yet?”

“No,” said Peter.

“Well, looks like I won’t be bringing you a change of socks.” He rubbed his face and his hand came off blackened with soot.

“I watched you change back,” he said. “This morning.”

There was another pause. “Yeah?” said Peter.

“Yeah. It’s actually … it’s … beautiful.”

“Okay,” said Peter.

“I’m not a homo,” said Roman. He hung up, noticing a black shape reflected in the driver’s window, and turned to find the cat sitting a few paces off. It looked at him, flames licked the menisci of its eyes. Roman looked at the cat. It peered into his face hieratic and unknowable as the night. Roman stepped forward, scooped a hand under its belly, and tossed it into the car.

*   *   *

Peter hung up and regarded himself in the same mirror in which he had done the other night, pondering what it would reflect on this morning after the Snow Moon. It was equally useless, showing nothing but a face as grim and gray but one day older. A face without options. He had one option. Whose son was he? He slapped his bare stomach hard with both hands and went downstairs to the kitchen and rooted through the refrigerator. On the bottom shelf there was a twenty-two-ounce rib eye bulging red and wet against the wrapper. He put a cast-iron skillet on the stove and turned the burner on high and tore the meat from the package. He gave the skillet another minute to get hot before dropping the steak into a searing scream, that scream like it is just now dying. He let it sit for only a few seconds before pinching it between his fingers and flipping it. He extinguished the flame and lifted the skillet and slid the steak into his hand. The surface was brown but red juice welled in the striations and the trim of fat was still pink, and when he bit into it the center was an almost iridescent purple. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. He hardly chewed and swallowed before tearing another bite, and the next. The juice ran down his hands and his chin and the hair of his torso. He held it greedily with both hands and snapped his head back to tear the gristle. He saw Letha standing in the entryway.

Peter stood with his face glistening and the greasy trails running down his chest. Neither knew what to say. The mystery of what another person may be thinking at any given moment. Then, by nameless stimulus, he dropped the steak to the floor and they fell into each other and held.

“What do we do now?” she said eventually.

“I guess we just stand here like this until something happens next,” Peter said.

She laid her face in the nook of his arm. He was clammy as though from a night of fever and smelled as bad as he looked and this sounded like a fine plan.

The front door was kicked in.

Peter seized Letha’s arm and pulled her out the back door. Not thinking, but heedless obeisance to his most basic instinct, the foundation upon which all others were constructed. The woods, always run for the woods. They raced across the deck and through the yard, but before they reached the tree line there was the report of the back door banging the side of the house and along with it the Jehovan command
FREEZE
.

They froze. They turned slowly. Neck was standing in the doorframe. He was in jeans and a sweatshirt but he had a sidearm aimed at Peter. Peter had heard of the big bang theory and the idea of the whole of the universe squeezed into one little black dot but it was never something that made any sense to him until looking into the barrel of that gun pointed at him. Nose appeared, also in street clothes.