Hemlock Grove (6 page)

A look came over the man’s face like there was suddenly something of desperate importance he needed to communicate.

“Ouroboros,” the man whispered.

“Is that your name?” said Letha.

“He’s just, uh, he’s out here in the middle of the road freaking out. He really needs some kind of help.”

His gaze fell from her face. Tears streamed from one eye.

“Today I have seen the Dragon…” said the man.

She held out her hand.

“Don’t—” said Roman.

But the man took her hand and held it, a flower known to be extinct.

“I’m Letha,” she said.

“What?” said Roman. “My name?”

He hung up and gently drew Letha away.

“Okay, boss,” he said, “how about we chill out right over here where no one’s gonna makes us roadkill?”

He swallowed his own antipathy and bent to lend the man a hand. The man’s eye met his. The seeing eye like bloody milk, spotlit and then shadowed in the blinking hazards. Roman attempted something like a smile, it was like lifting a thousand pounds overhead. The seeing eye became a thorn that hooked into Roman and the man held up his hands protectively and they fluttered frantic and effete as he screamed with full-throat horror.

“Jesus!” said Roman, leaping back.

The man desperately crab-walked to the side of the road.
“YOU!”
he screamed.
“IT WAS YOU! IT WAS YOU! IT WAS YOU! IT WAS YOU!”

Roman was still and quiet. He felt a tug on his arm; Letha was pulling him to the car. His eyes lingered on the man, who had backed himself into an escarpment and his legs continued pushing uselessly, like a remote control toy commanded by a cruel child.

“I don’t want to see,” he said pitifully to himself, and repeated this appeal in incantation long after the car had disappeared.

They sat in the car in competing silences. As they passed over Indian Creek, Letha looked at Roman. The moonlight on his affectless face like silk gliding over stone. Her hand rested over his on the shift.

A Pattern

Later that night Roman was sitting at the darkened dining room table sipping from the flask and slowly counting the number of crystals that comprised the chandelier—160, he knew well, but the product of 40 fours was considerable comfort to him and its confirmation a soothing process—when those crystals began to glitter from a faint light.

“What are you doing up?” said Roman.

Shelley was filling most of the doorway. She was wearing a shapeless nightgown and emitting a soft glow, an idiosyncrasy of hers when experiencing agitation and anxiety.

“Thirsty?” he said, offering the flask.

She did not move and in her eyes there was the justifiable apprehension over what pyrotechnics habitually erupted in Godfrey House after a period of studied silence.

“I’m fine,” he said unconvincingly. “I’m … just thinking.”

Her glow gently lapped the ceiling through the chandelier like the light in an indoor pool. He shoved back from the table.

“I’ll tuck you in,” he said.

They went up to the attic, where Shelley slept on a stack of king-size mattresses, with another stack of twins crosswise at the foot. Shelley did not have an auspicious relationship with bed frames. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with books and in one corner was an easel and in another an antique astrolabe consisting of concentric brass rings. The ceiling was a firmament of many dozens of glow-in-the-dark star and moon stickers.

Shelley sat on the bed. Roman stood at the astrolabe and placed his fingertip to the rim of the outermost ring and traced an orbit. He regarded the darkening of dust on his fingertip, the abstruse whorls and eddies providing a pattern but not a clue. Outside, there was an owl’s low hoot and Shelley’s light guttered under her gown.

He brushed his finger along his jeans and came over and sat on the edge of her bed, facing away from her. She waited for him to say something.

Softly, he began to hum. She smiled wide and joined in with him. He started the words and she kept the melody.

“
This little light of mine
,” he sang,

“
I’m gonna let it shine…”

He turned and ran his finger down Shelley’s cheek, leaving a faint, luminous worm in its wake.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s brush your teeth and change your shoes.”

Peripeteia

On the afternoon of October 29, Roman surprised Peter by passing him a note in English. A month had passed; tonight was the Hunter Moon. No further relationship had developed between them since their earlier meeting, which Peter believed to be for the best. Roman was unstable, like a coin spun on a tabletop: the closer it came to rest, the greater its velocity, now one end up then the other. He was neither heads nor tails. And of all potential outcomes in their continued association nearly none fell outside Peter’s extensive Hierarchy of Shit He Could Live Without.

But then, without warning albeit in keeping with his mercurial nature, Roman handed Peter a piece of folded notebook paper with a disarmingly plain request:

can i watch?

“Are we passing notes, Mr. Godfrey?” said Mrs. Pisarro.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, ma’am,” he said.

After the bell rang, Peter approached Roman. He had debated all period and convinced himself that indulging the other boy’s curiosity was the more sensible course than evasion—discouraging him would only egg him on. But in truth his Rumancek blood would not permit him to pass up an opportunity to show off. He said, “Come by around five.”

“Holy shitbird, is that Gypsy butt-pirate asking you out?” said Duncan Fritz.

“Eat a tampon, you uncouth mongoloid,” said Roman.

The sky was in a hierarchy of reds when Roman arrived at the Rumanceks’. Peter let him into the trailer, a dense babel of inherited and inventively scavenged furniture and incense and healing stones and Hollywood musical collector plates and figurines of Renaissance masterworks and unreturned library books and a cabinet devoted to the Indian god Ganesh gaudily bordered with Christmas lights like the Virgin of Guadalupe. Roman stopped at the latter, confused. He asked if they were Hindu or whatever.

Peter shook his head. “He’s the god of new beginnings. But I’m not sure if Nicolae ever actually knew that. He would always call him Jumbo and ask him if what he had between his legs was anything like what was on his nose. Nic was a real class act,” he added.

He led Roman into the kitchen and introduced him to Lynda, who was placing a pan of peanut butter cookies in the oven. She had been delighted when Peter informed her the
upir
would be visiting them after school: since her son would be out for the evening it gave her someone to cook for. She sat the boys at the kitchen table and asked if they’d like milk.

“Sure,” said Roman.

“Honey?” said Lynda.

“Lactic acid,” said Peter.

“Right right,” she said. She poured Roman a glass of milk and gestured at her own abdomen, spinning the finger. “It does funny things to the tummy,” she explained.

Peter’s eyes flitted out the window to monitor the sunset. He had, Roman now noticed, a general air of twitchy distraction, rubbing both his biceps like he had a case of the mean reds after smoking his last cigarette.

“So,” said Lynda, “what are your plans after graduation?”

Roman shrugged like it was a question of commensurate consequence to his agenda for the weekend. “I guess my mom’ll bribe my way into somewhere decent.”

“That’s nice,” said Lynda.

Peter’s hand clacked a butter knife on the table independent of any conscious motor command on his part. She laid her hand over his.

“He gets nervous beforehand,” she said. “Hormones.”

“I have Xanax,” said Roman.

Peter declined.

“Maybe just enough to wet my whistle,” said Lynda.

Roman took out his tin mint container–cum–apothecary and produced two Xanax, giving one to Lynda.

“Does it hurt?” he asked Peter.

Peter shook his head. “You wouldn’t notice if a bus hit you.”

“Are you still … you?” said Roman.

Peter looked at him.
Guess.

Lynda reached and pinched her son’s rough cheek. “He’s a good boy,” she said, tugging on the flesh between her fingertips with the brutality of perfect love. “He’s his mother’s handsome little honeybun.”

A few minutes before five-thirty the three of them went outside. Lynda held Roman by the door as Peter went forward. He removed all his clothes. He was brown and covered in black densities of hair and his penis was uncircumcised. On the right side of his rib cage there was a tattoo of a letter, a small
g
.

“What’s the
g
stand for?” said Roman.

“‘Go suck an egg,’” said Peter.

He walked forward undoing his ponytail and his hair fell around his shoulders. It was as though the scent of falling night soothed his shaky nerves and he moved with a grace and authority invested by no lesser power than the earth under his feet. The air was suddenly so pregnant with anticipation of magic and its brother menace that it occurred to Roman somewhat belatedly to ask if they were safe here.

“It’s fine,” said Lynda. “Just stand back.”

Roman then snapped his fingers and said, “Darn.”

“What?” she said.

“I forgot to bring a Frisbee.”

With shamanic gravity, Peter raised his middle finger. He glanced at the last of the sun puddling into the horizon like red mercury and got down on his knees, head bowed and hair hanging over his face. He was still. He waited for the calling of his secret name. Lynda clutched Roman’s arm. Fetchit sauntered over and sat with one leg splayed, licking himself.

Then there was a spasm in Peter’s shoulders. His toes curled and his fingers clutched the dirt. Lynda’s grip tightened and Peter let out a cry like nothing Roman knew walked this earth. Peter fell to his side, his face contorted as though pulled by a thousand tiny hooks and muscles quivering in a frenzy of snakes under the skin. The cat fled into the trailer. Peter clutched at the pulsing flesh of his abdomen and raked, leaving pulpy red gashes with wet bristle poking through. He gripped the pulp and tore decisively, the flesh coming away with the slurp of a wet suit to reveal a blood-matted vest of fur. Roman put a hand over his nose as a stench of carrion filled the air and the sloppy, ramshackle operation that moments ago had been known as Peter thrashed its hind parts, the lower half kicking free of its man coat. A wet tail protracted and curled. Its howls all the while more plaintive and lupine as a snout emerged through its lips and worked open and shut, its old face bunched around it in an obsolete mask. It rolled onto all fours and rose shaking violently, spraying blood in a mist and divesting itself of the remnants of man coat in a hot mess.

Now standing before them in the gloaming was the wolf. Roman leaned against Lynda; he had lost his center of gravity. He had not actually known what to expect in coming here tonight, much less that it would reveal to him two essential truths of life: that men do become wolves and that if you have the privilege to be witness to such a transformation it is the most natural and right thing you have ever seen.

“Fuck,” Roman whispered.

The wolf was a large animal, tall and sleek and regal as the moon its queen, possessing the yolk sheen of the newly born and lips curling back to reveal white fangs as it yawned and stretched out its forelegs, rump wiggling in the air. Lynda’s eyes moist with ultimate maternal egotism and Roman weak-kneed with admiring envy of those fangs, white fangs gleaming, gloating over the purest dichotomy of having/not having. Of course the fangs of a werewolf are of an exaggerated length and curvature more typical of the feline family. They are the final say; once the jaws are closed nothing on earth can escape them.
Lupus sapiens
: the wise wolf. This, Roman, who had lived here all his life, finally saw, is the lord of the forest. You are a serf.

The hurly-burly settled, Fetchit reappeared and inquisitively approached the wolf, which gave the cat a peremptory and aloof sniff before turning its attention to the slop of flesh from which it had been born and burying its snout within with wet gnawing sounds soon following.

“Can I … pet him?” said Roman, somewhat recovered. To the extent he ever would be.

“Not while he’s eating,” said Lynda.

“Peter,” said Roman.

The wolf finished its supper and looked over, snout comically wreathed in red pulp, but whether or not there was any recognition in those old eyes it would have been impossible to say. What, however, was with certainty absent was any conventionally canine display of interest or affection. Werewolves, unlike either species of which they are representative, are not pack animals. It defeats the whole point of being a werewolf. This was a wild thing as cosmic and inscrutable as all truly wild things, and having an entire world of smells waiting, it turned and walked intentionally to the trees and with a rustle disappeared.

*   *   *

Three days after the Hunter Moon, Christina Wendall cut through a wooded path behind her house to the Walgreens to make a secret purchase. Tyler Lane, an eleventh grader, had asked her out this Friday and not only had she defied expectation by agreeing, but she was also planning on doing something to set expectation on its head. Christina did not have that sort of reputation—really her reputation was pretty much the complete opposite—but recent inner portents suggested to her some significant changes were in the tides. People change—who says they can’t? Alexa and Alyssa didn’t buy it, pointing out she still blushed at the word
menses.
Christina blushed. But a person could change, and if she was to become an important writer of her time she had an obligation to broaden her horizons. So she was a late bloomer, this gave her Character—peripeteia, they called it in drama class, a turning—but now what was needed was Material. The twins had pretty much bloomed when they were ten, so they didn’t understand that. They thought they knew everything, but they didn’t. As far as they knew, she hadn’t even had her first kiss. There were things they didn’t know. At the register the cashier pursed her lips in disapproval but rang Christina’s items silently.
Cunt!
trilled an outrageous voice within the reaches of Christina’s mind, with such vehemence she had the momentary thrill it might have been audible outside herself.