Hemlock Grove (34 page)

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.

When she opened them some time later her cheek did not lie on fur but on flesh, pink and wet and warm. A man. Her arm rising and falling on his chest with his breathing. She sat up bemused and looked at Peter. Peter in one pink and wet piece. She was not sure what to make of this beyond some occult understanding that it ran over any sensible order of things, that receiving yet another miracle was not simply tackily excessive but quite possibly made her the most selfish person alive.

“I’ll take it,” she said.

Peter groaned and shifted but did not awaken. She leaned forward, her lips not quite touching his face. She did not understand this thing that had happened, nor intended to. As it had been said: Death is fucking magical. And with a tenderness like no kiss, she licked him.

You Must Make Your Heart Steel

The winter was cold, but then the spring. It was now six months since the incident at Godfrey Chapel and though only questions remained about that night, they were rhetorical. Because the killing had stopped. How and why was catching a ghost by the tail; the killing had stopped and life in Hemlock Grove went on. The White Tower was light again as ever, but gone was the controlling share of Norman Godfrey. The principal holders are now Olivia Godfrey in trust for her son until his fast-approaching eighteenth birthday and Lod LLC. From time to time Olivia, Dr. Pryce, and a man of imperious girth and military bearing with, on close inspection, a signet ring of a serpent and a cross can be seen strolling the nautilus trail around the institute, on what business beyond enjoying the weather’s pleasant turn is anyone’s guess. For Dr. Godfrey only questions remained, but they were rhetorical. A question is a door and an unopened door is just part of the wall and as long as it’s standing it’s doing its job. The killing had stopped. Upon the lump receipt of Lod’s improbable payment from a Luxembourg account, he put it all into the Godfrey Foundation, stipulating to his wife that whatever it was used to build bear any name but his. Plans were also under way to convert the mill into an interactive industrial museum and learning center, the central attraction an exhibit visit inside an authentic Bessemer converter. (There are rumors it’s haunted.) There were cardinals and goldfinches in the trees and greedy mud on the ground that would suction off a shoe and finally, on the thirteenth of April, after the very last of the long chill, Peter was making up for lost hammock time when a warmth suffused his Swadisthana. He listened to the sound of the wind like the roar of a distant crowd.

“Well I’ll be,” he said.

Moments later the phone rang and he went inside. The latest stray raced through the open door into the trailer, a double-wide. He answered the phone to receive a glad piece of news. It was expected; she was due at any moment, but some things can never be expected no matter how much they are.

Peter said nothing; being philosophical made him quiet. Fetchit jumped on the kitchen table and mewled. The black ones had a way of finding the Rumanceks’ door. Peter nooked the phone with his shoulder and went to the cupboard and took out a can of tuna.

“Well!” said Letha, on the other end of the line.

“Sorry, I’m feeding the cat,” said Peter.

“Good to hear you have your priorities straight.”

“Babies have to be born, and cats have to be fed,” said Peter equitably.

Now there was a quiet on the other end suggesting he might want to reconsider his response.

“Baby,” said Peter, “my heart has no words. Your smile makes flowers grow and your tits could knock a rhino sideways. I love your ass to pieces and anything that pops out of you. This is the best news I’ve had all day.”

“Oh, my chariot arriveth. Catch you on the flip side.”

She hung up. It had been agreed that he would not be present for the labor: she felt it was important to be on her own. Peter did not object—he had seen a video of childbirth in biology once and just didn’t have the stomach for it.

Later in the afternoon Peter met Roman at Kilderry Park. A few undergraduates were throwing a Frisbee. Peter and Roman sat on a picnic bench at the pavilion. Roman was wearing the vintage Italian sunglasses that were his latest affectation and produced two cigars. Peter nodded.
Nice touch.

“Uncle Roman,” said Roman.

“Hail Mary, full of grace,” said Peter.

Roman handed a cigar to Peter. Peter asked him if he’d made any headway with the Cat Lady and Roman shook his head.

Since the abrupt termination of Project Ouroboros in November, Roman had maintained hope of finding some kind of trail to his sister, of whom no sign had been found. No tracks. The latest was a medium to whom Destiny had referred him who operated a cougar sanctuary in West Virginia.

Roman pursed his lips. The Cat Lady had induced a trance in an attempt to communicate with Shelley but wound up falling to the floor in a sort of seizure, whispering incoherently about fate lines and heart lines and unholy communion and the headaches, the headaches, and the cottage was surrounded by low hisses and snarls as her agitation spread among her brood. Roman stuck a pen between her teeth and rolled her into the recovery position and waited for her to come to and escort him to his car without being eviscerated. In parting she apologized that she would not be able to help him—though did not refuse her fee—but instead offered these words: “Still. What she is trying to say is ‘still.’” Roman would have written off the entire expedition as a fool and his money, except that he had been experiencing headaches of increasing severity lately. A heightened photosensitivity of the eyes that forced him to keep his sunglasses on more or less continuously before dusk.

“Dead end,” said Roman.

Peter nodded. Both rationally and instinctively he believed Roman’s search to be futile. Shelley was gone. And wherever it was she had gone, there was no looking for her. But he never voiced his pessimism to Roman, nor for that matter was there cause. He doubted Roman himself believed his quest to be anything but quixotic, and on balance it was simply better for him to have something keeping him busy.

Roman looked off into the sky at a lance of sun penetrating cloud and was quiet a moment.

“I see her sometimes,” he said. “In dreams.”

Peter looked at him. Why was he lying?

“Not in dreams,” Roman admitted. “I’ve been … trying it on myself.”

Peter didn’t understand, then he did. The thing they didn’t talk about, because when one friend has this power, not talking about it is a lot easier than talking about it; the paths it can lead down that one virtue of the male sex is an unparalleled lack of curiosity to see where they go. The power behind his eyes, and the meaning of this power.

“I look into the mirror, and I tell myself to see her,” said Roman. “I feel her all the time, but I tell myself to see her. And things go dark, and I can feel myself on a threshold, and I don’t know what’s on the other side, where the shadows are. But there’s a light way off. And I know the light is an angel, and the angel is her.

“It’s her,” he repeated, as though this had been contested. “She’s out there, and I want to get closer but I can’t. I’m afraid of what will happen if I go too far. Then she starts calling out to me, but she’s so far away and I can only just hear her. What she’s saying is, ‘You must make your heart steel.’”

He sat and looked at Peter. Peter fidgeted, uncomfortable. He could sense when Roman was going to bring up that night at the chapel, and though he didn’t mind providing an ear he was himself loath to volunteer anything. In truth he had almost no memory of what happened, and he didn’t want it otherwise. The thing about coming back from the dead was that your life went on, and he didn’t like dwelling on it. The presentiment of an unpaid debt that he didn’t like dwelling on at all.

“When you did what you did,” said Roman, “how were you not afraid?”

But this was not a question Peter was expecting. At first he was bemused, then he chuckled and shook his head as though at a foreigner’s comical malapropism.

Roman was as baffled as a Chinaman. “What?” he said.

“I’ve never been more scared of anything in my life. I could never have done it if I didn’t know you were there too.”

They were quiet. Roman looked out at the hills, seven shades of ever flusher and more life-giving green. He shook his head.

“Fucking angels,” he said.

*   *   *

Outside, the moon was a boar’s tusk and the owls gave their two cents while in the bedroom there was only the whir of the projector’s motor. There was a white sheet tacked to the wall for a screen and the movie being projected was from the silent era and was black-and-white with a tint of green, as was the fashion of the time to create a sense of mood and mystery. The setting was a soundstage that was not really a soundstage but an expressionistic representation thereof where the shadows cast by the arc light of even the straightest lines fell like a maze of thorn brush. The facsimile of the thing constructed within the thing itself, dream within the feedback loop of the brain. Or vice versa. And within the soundstage a lone player, a woman. She had on the exaggerated eye makeup that was the fashion of the time and nothing else. And alone within this cathedral of ingenuity and infinity she danced. The dancer aching, grieving for the mist-covered mountains of the home she was so far away from, and so far away from returning to, and this dance inelegantly rendered by a shutter speed sixteen frames per second due to the technological limitations of the time, causing a simultaneously increased and halting speed. But the inelegance of the motion only contributing to the poetry of it. Essential truths gained by loss in translation. The essence of beauty not perfection, but the doomed aspiration.

Olivia lay in bed and watched, savoring like wine the shared age-old ache in her own bones as on-screen the woman danced the grief of her slow, slow journey home and in turning from the camera revealed her own imperfection. There was on the dancer’s spine above the coccyx, like the mountain range of a relief map, a pale pinkie-length scar—the remnant of some crude surgery.

*   *   *

In his room Peter was awakened by a pang in his groin of such pressing acuity he mistook it initially for the need of a beastly piss, but he had gotten as far as the toilet before he realized it was not his own bladder he had felt but a different plane of signal altogether. He stood there dumbly, appurtenance in hand, waiting for a flash flood or a meteor or whatever it was that could have caused so profound an agitation within his Swadisthana. But then he realized, and then the phone rang. He did not go to answer it. He stood there knowing. It continued to ring until eventually Lynda picked up. He heard her answer and then she just listened. Her end of the conversation simply a hushed “Oh no oh no no no oh no.” He tucked himself in his boxer shorts and gathered up his ponytail in one hand and with the other opened the cupboard and reached for a pair of scissors. He put the toilet seat down and sat, releasing the fistful of hair so it scattered to the floor as footsteps approached the door and he waited for the gentle, gentle knock.

*   *   *

Pryce received a call informing him of the disturbance in the OR and gave the order not to get in the way. He turned and stood at his office window and looked up at the night and stars.

“Where are you?” he said.

He pressed his fingertips against the window, the cool of the glass.

“Why did you leave us all to her?” he said.

Soon there was a sound at his office door not of knocking but a brute and insistent kicking. He opened the door and in the hall stood Dr. Godfrey. In his arms was a sheeted bundle. His eyes were stained as red as the sheet in his arms.

“Do it,” said Godfrey.

Pryce said nothing.

“Bring her back, Johann,” said Godfrey.

“Norman, come in and sit down,” said Pryce.

“You need to bring her back,” said Godfrey. “Do whatever you need to. Just bring her back.”

“Norman, what say we sit down and talk about this?”

“She’s getting cold! Bring her back. You think I’m being irrational but I’m not. I will write you a check for any amount you can imagine. Bring her back to me.”

“Norman,” said Pryce. He stepped into the hall and reached to take the bundle from his arms. Godfrey jerked away with hot feral eyes.