Hemlock Grove (3 page)

“Well goodness,” she said. “What’s he like?”

“I don’t know. He seems okay.”

But Peter did not attempt to strike any sort of aquaintanceship with Roman. The
upir
were a queer breed. Nicolae had told him stories, by and large unverifiable shadows passing through the mist even for an old Gypsy with a credulous child, but Peter had only ever encountered them personally once before, when he and Lynda were living upstate. He’d wandered onto a lakefront property deep in the Lake Erie woods that Snow Moon. The snow was thick and the trees looked like tufts of frayed black thread pulled through a white comforter and there were three of them, one man and two women. They were drinking wine on a patio and speaking French, each nude except for one of the women, a statuesque mulatto, who wore a Santa hat. Peter knew immediately there was something strange about these people. Beyond the obvious. “
Loup-garou!
” exclaimed the mulatto as Peter emerged from the tree line, and they called to him with great excitement. He came up the stairs and they fawned over him in delight, patting and stroking and putting the hat on him. Making him the life of the party and he was glad to have found such merry friends. But then there was a low whimpering sound in the darkness just beyond the patio and the white woman made a sympathetic
uh-oh
sound as though hearing a baby in need and took a piece of cheese from a platter on the table and held it out to a shape hanging from a tree branch that came close to the house. Peter moved in for a closer look. His stomach became a knot. The shape was a fox with its hind leg in a snare. The leg was broken and from its pathetic, emaciated appearance it had been here awhile. The woman scratched the fox’s ears and held the cheese an inch or so below its lowermost reach. The fox’s snout worked vainly and she raised her hand just enough for its tongue to lap the morsel, then with a clumsy-me expression she dropped the cheese to the ground. The man smiled at Peter—wasn’t this a fun game?—and handed him a piece of cheese. Peter was paralyzed. Many times later he would replay the scenario where he had the presence of mind and the courage to reach out to the fox and snap its neck, but in the vital moment he possessed neither. It was a living thing with a shine still in its eyes and he would have given anything for the bravery to take that from it. With shaking hands he placed the cheese carefully back on the platter and walked down the steps and back to the tree line, not meeting their faces. “
Très vulgaire!
” he heard the white woman say behind him and he felt a light thud against his back. Peter whirled to make sure he wasn’t in some danger from their projectiles but she was simply throwing cheese. The man called out insults and turned, waving his buttocks and slapping them emphatically as the mulatto observed him with cool detachment. Peter raced now into the forest, the hat falling softly in the snow behind him.

For days he could hardly stop crying, but after Lynda finally got him to relate the incident she simply shook her head and said, “The French.”

Peter could not say whether or to what degree his classmate was of similar character; nevertheless it did not seem like a bad idea to proceed with caution around Roman Godfrey.

But this policy did not prevent Peter from paying careful attention to the
upir
’s conduct the day the news about the Penrose girl was out.

Between second and third period Roman bought an ambitious amount of coke from the resident dealer, with whom he engaged in a prolonged and emphatic debate over who would win in a fight between Batman and Wolverine, then skipped fourth period to nap in his car, a 1971 Jaguar with what had every appearance of a mule cart hitched to the back. At lunch he tossed a Tater Tot into Ashley Valentine’s cleavage, and recess he spent sitting on the picnic table in conversation with Letha Godfrey, also a senior and Roman’s first cousin, though sharing none of his more outstanding qualities except, it goes without saying, the green Godfrey eyes. In English, Mrs. Pisarro, who took particular exception to Roman’s cavalier approach to scholasticism, singled him out to read an excerpt from the poem
Goblin Market
:

She clipped a precious golden lock,

She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,

To Pisarro’s surprise, as well as the bulk of the class, his reading was hushed and reverential, investing the dead words with, of all things, dignity.

Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red:

Sweeter than honey from the rock,

Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,

Clearer than water flowed that juice;

She never tasted such before,

How should it cloy with length of use?

The room was quiet. Ashley Valentine closed her eyes. Pisarro was annoyed. Though he was technically doing what he’d been called upon it seemed an all the more diabolical species of sass.

She sucked and sucked and sucked the more

Fruits which that unknown orchard bore,

She sucked until her lips were sore …

Alex Finster said, “Poor baby.”

Duncan Fritz said he could make it all better.

Roman looked at them wearily. “Are you fucking philistines pretty proud of yourselves?”

“Mr. Godfrey!”

“Sorry, Mrs. P.,” he said with expert disingenuousness. “I guess we’re all a little rattled by this Kilderry Park thing.”

Peter’s ears perked.

After school Roman gave his sister a ride home.

If Roman Godfrey was a riddle, Shelley was the epic fornication of mystery and enigma—in all of Peter’s own unlikely travels he had not encountered an unlikelier specimen. Shelley was not
upir
, and Peter was frankly at a loss what in the hell you would go about calling her; she was a blind spot for his Swadisthana. Though a freshman and at least anatomically female, Shelley was seven and a half feet tall, her head and shoulders huge and hunched, her skin the pensive gray of a late November sky. One side of her already misshapen face was paralyzed and she could produce no syllables approaching coherence. But the second strangest thing about her was her boots, for lack of a better term. She wore on her feet two hermetically sealed plastic cubes roughly the size of milk crates.

The strangest was the glowing.

Shelley climbed into the cart and Roman behind the wheel and they drove off, Roman turning his head and looking directly at Peter, meeting his eye. The other boy’s face frank and impassive, dispelling any doubt he knew he was being watched. Roman tapped the side of his nose: Keep it clean. The car turned from the drive and from her cart Shelley raised one broad palm. Peter returned the wave. He had established a precedent of being friendly to the creature, passing winks or courtly bows, one time stopping her and with his foot removing a trail of toilet paper affixed to one of her cubes. The Godfreys passed from view.

Peter turned to head for his bus and discovered that he was not the only one playing I Spy today: over by the flagpole Christina was watching him; she startled on detection and she disappeared with the flux of bodies. Peter boarded his bus and sat holding one hand in front of him and regarded his symmetrical index and middle fingers together as though examining a manicure. His balls were in a state.

*   *   *

That night Peter went to the park. There was no evidence of the girl except for a warning from the police stating that anyone caught trespassing after hours would be incarcerated. He entered, drawing his fingertips in a stutter across the links of the fence, and nosed around until he found it. To say there was no evidence is an exaggeration, the land has a memory of such things. It was behind a bush, maybe ten paces from the perimeter of the woods. Fewer, you were running. The spot. He lay down where Brooke Bluebell had been killed and laced his fingers behind his head and looked up at the stars and the trees on the hilltops and a few miles to the east the halo of the White Tower. The light that never went out.

Her picture was distinct in his mind. It was not that he felt any special kinship with her apart from morbid curiosity, but that all the news agencies had gotten hold of, if not collectively willed, the Picture. You know it, the one where she’s in her cheerleading uniform and smiling not for the camera, but for her sister or her best friend or a boy or any of the countless things to put one on her face, when she had one. The Picture, pornographic with tragedy.

He wondered if Roman Godfrey had done it. Peter had been in the hills that night and smelled something, a vague but forbidding malevolence. But it was nothing that coalesced at the time, and with a mental hospital down the road you could expect some funny vibrations come full moon. And it wasn’t the first time he had felt some occult disturbance in this town. There was something else, a presence of some kind, dwelling underfoot, no manner of thing under the sun. Peter could not get a grasp of its horns but he knew it was down there, older than the hills it lived under. There had been a couple of times when, in a liminal state on the hammock, a vision would come to him of a snake, a Bible black serpent slowly and sensually consuming itself by the tail. But then his eyes would snap open and he would look at the sky through a lattice of boughs and irritatedly push it out of his mind. Peter had a great talent for not losing sleep over questions to which he did not know the answer, so these intrusions on that very sleep really rattled his cage. But it, whatever
it
was in some dark place underneath and older than these hills, was not the same thing that had killed Brooke Bluebell from Penrose. He knew it in his Swadisthana. The world is a body and different parts channel the frequency differently. Some
more
than others, closer to the pulse of mystery underneath the illusion of the illusion. Hemlock Grove was such a place, and the thing under the hills—if
thing
was not itself an overstatement—was part of it, fearful and unknowable, like the “thing” that superintended that animals breathe in what trees breathe out.

Could the girl have been the victim of a wild young
upir
? Possibly. It was not their traditional style, but the breed was capable of far greater transgressions. Or so old wives had it. And though Roman did not really seem the type, Peter was one to talk about how far to trust appearances.

There was a breeze and it carried the smell of grass and he held up his hands to feel it pass between his fingers when he saw something in the tree line: a gleaming—no, a twin gleaming, eyeshine: it was a pair of eyes, glowing like a cat’s. Peter rose. Roman Godfrey emerged. They stood apart, looking at each other. Their clothes rustled in the breeze and the cicadas were indifferent.

“What was it like?” said Roman.

“What was what like?” said Peter.

Roman hesitated, hands together, fidgeting. Scared?

“Killing that girl.”

You’re Not the Only One

“I didn’t kill her,” said Peter. “I figured it was you.”

Roman was confused. “Me? Why would I do it?”

Peter shrugged. “Why would I?”

“People are saying you’re a werewolf,” said Roman.

“You believe everything people say?”

Roman persisted. “Then why did you come back? Is this your territory or something?”

Peter’s hackles went down, identifying no immediate threat of attack. He sat Indian-style. “Territory is so bourgeois,” he said airily.

Roman eyed him. “Are you sure it wasn’t you?”

“You could try to like contain your disappointment,” said Peter.

“I was just asking,” said Roman, chastised. He sat too and picked a leaf from a bush. “Then who was it?” he said.

“Bear,” said Peter. “Cougar. Creative suicide.”

Roman tore the leaf down the middle and rubbed the halves between his forefingers. “It’s weird,” he said. “I knew her. I mean, I didn’t know her know her. But to see her. Parties and stuff. She liked my car.” Tearing the leaf into quarters. “Now she’s dead. How fucked is that?”

“It’s a nice car,” Peter said.

“I also knew your uncle or whoever,” said Roman.

“Vince?” said Peter.

“Yeah. Sometimes we’d have bonfires and he’d show up with a bottle of hooch. I liked his stories. The girls would get pretty freaked out, but girls, you know?”

Peter nodded that the intrusion of an alcoholic vagrant who had grown tired of shaving by the age of fifteen was the kind of thing to put girls in a state.

“I didn’t know him very well,” said Peter. “He called me Petey and I didn’t like that much. But he always used to slip me one last nip after Lynda cut me off and sometimes he had this way of passing out while he was still sitting at the table with his eyes open that I thought was a neat trick.” He was reflective. “I guess he had a real problem.”

A cloudywing moth passed close by and Peter’s arm darted out to catch it. A flair for opportunistic showmanship ran in the Rumanceks’ blood and he was pretty sure he could get twenty bucks from the rich kid in a dare to eat it. But his hand wasn’t clever enough and the moth fluttered off.

Roman tore the leaf into eighths and let them sprinkle to the ground. “I remember coming here with my dad,” he said. “I don’t have too many memories of him, but I remember when I was pretty young and being here and getting stung on like the webbing between my toes and the look on his face. How helpless he was. Because there was no way for him to figure out why I was crying like that. Until my foot swelled up like a tit with toes.”

“What happened to him?” said Peter.

Roman made a gun out of his hand and blew his own brains out.

“Shee-it,” said Peter.

“Shee-it,” said Roman.

“My mom says my dad is dead or something,” said Peter. “She doesn’t really get more specific. Ladybug.”

Roman brushed a ladybug from his lapel.

“What’s it like?” he said. “Living like, you know. You people.”

It didn’t bother Peter being referred to as “you people”—it respected the fundamental boundary of life: haves and have-nots. And Peter did not account himself the impoverished one.