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 walke
d 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.
You see! Who would have had any suspicion a girl who couldn’t say the word menses went around calling people cunts and fat retarded cows in her head? Saucy little bitch! She caught sight of her small smile in the ceiling mirror. She paid her money but it still felt like stealing.
She returned along the same path twisting the plastic bag on her wrist clockwise and counter and saw in a furrow of earth a small rabbit hole. She stopped. It reminded her of the dream. She considered this another less welcome occult indicator of the turn inside her, the return of a recurring dream she had not had in years. It is a simple dream. She is inside the mill, as she had been once before, in that dark you can feel on both sides of your skin, and something is in here with her. The thing is the same color and smell as the dark. But she knows it’s in here all the same; there’s a difference between a place where you are the only living thing and where you are not, and something in here is alive. And there is only one place to hide: in the dark she can just make out the outline of that great black cauldron keeled to its side. Of course if she doesn’t know what the thing in here is she can’t know what it wants, if there’s even any reason to hide. But it’s a chance she can’t take so she makes her way to the cauldron and puts her hands to the lip and peers in. But what if hiding means there is no place to run? What if there is something worse inside the cauldron? Or if there is nothing in it at all? Real bottomless nothing? But there is a dark thing in this mill with her and she can feel its nonshadow fall on her, it is right behind her now and she doesn’t know what it will want if she faces it. She is paralyzed. She doesn’t know whether to turn and face it or Go Down the Hole.
And then she woke up.
“You can be such a weirdo sometimes you should just tie a ribbon around your skull and walk into the Brain Barn,” Alyssa said. (The Brain Barn was the common nickname for the Neuropathology Lab at Hemlock Acres, which housed three thousand human brain specimens and was an object of great fascination among local youths.)
Well, what of it? Some people had funny dreams. And moments where they felt that every cell in their body was made of cancer, or that when they breathed they breathed out pure oxygen and breathed in cigarette ash. And broke down into hysterical tears at that video on the Internet of the elephant that paints its own portrait, as Christina had recently in the computer lab, for no more articulable a reason than it seemed to her that all nameless sadness she had ever experienced or for that matter existed in the great ethereal matrix of which all life is part was somehow encapsulated in that video transmitted for light amusement. She was a late and mysterious bloomer with a date on Friday with an eleventh grader and a plan to show certain somebodies just how much it was possible for a person to change, so peripeteia and what of it!
As she passed the rabbit hole something else came to view beyond the furrow—an incongruous patch of color—fabric, a shirt. At first she thought it might be a vagrant and she tensed, but … did vagrants wear pink? She crept a few steps to peek. It was a girl. Lying on the dried leaves, near Christina’s age, a little older. Face pretty but smeared clownishly with mascara and body glitter as though she hadn’t washed off last night’s makeup, and whoever she was Christina did not know her from school, though she had some inkling of recognition. The girl’s eyes were open and staring at the sky with a glazed, insensate look, what Christina would imagine a person hopped up on PCP would look like if Christina knew exactly what PCP was, except the twins’ dad occasionally had a cautionary story of people hopped-up on it.
Christina stepped forward and started to ask if the girl was all right but didn’t finish. She dropped the bag containing one spiral notebook, one Pilot Precise pen, one diet iced tea, and one box of condoms.
The girl was on the ground, twigs and leaf bits caught up in her splayed hair, arms twisted at all the wrong angles; her pink shirt had an image of a lewdly frosted cupcake on the chest and her skin and lips similar in hue to rubber cement, and, as had been obscured from Christina’s vantage: the girl’s lower half was missing.
Christina sagged against a tree trunk. No sir. Obviously this was a gag, some kind of cheap prop. It didn’t even look real after a second look. Halloween on its way and some guys got this from the mall and left it here for some stupid little girl just like her to stumble on and completely freak out. And she had probably seen the horrible thing on a wall display somewhere and that was where she “recognized” her from but still fell for it. Probably a camera on her as we speak. Okay, if that’s your game. She was making a few changes, here was a golden opportunity.
“Oh,” she said experimentally to the torso, “you gave me a real scare there.” She talked in the suggestive, wide-eyed tones of pornography. Which she wasn’t personally familiar with, but sometimes the twins imitated. “Ooh, you look a little pale. Do you need … mouth to mouth?”
She was greatly pleased with her own performance. The unseen conspirators somewhere in the trees getting a real bang for their buck. Well, hold on to your hats, fellas. She got on her knees, flushed at her own daring—what a little slut!
“Gosh,” she said, “you sure have pretty lips.”
She lowered her mouth to the dummy’s. The dummy’s mouth was moist and feculent like if you have ever had the unfortunate but irresistible impulse to smell a compost jar. Christina fell back, gagging. It was then that she caught movement in the gray-white gore of the lower abdomen, a pulsing that at first she thought was something trying to push its way out. But then it hit her it was actually lots and lots of little pulsing feeding things that were not trying to emerge; this was the last thing they wanted.
* * *
Who am I? What’s my dog in this fight?
I’m the killer.
Boo.
PART II
NUMINOSUM
The Order of the Dragon
From the archives of Dr. Norman Godfrey:
NG: No one’s used that word, Mr. Pullman.
FP: This is a fucking crazy house, it’s between the lines. Check my record. My luck is shit, not my head.
NG: I have. There’s no history of psychosis, and your MRI is clean, but that was quite a night you had on Saturday, would you agree?
FP: …
NG: Do you have any memory of it?
FP: Check my record. Nothing wrong with my head.
NG: Would you care to discuss it?
FP: You got a name?
NG: My name is Norman. Dr. Norman Godfrey.
FP: …
NG: Would you like to discuss Saturday night, Mr. Pullman?
FP: Why are you talking to me?
NG: Why do you as
k?
FP: You think I don’t know who you are?
NG: Does it matter what my name is?
FP: Why are you talking to me?
NG: Fair enough. Because my daughter asked me to. You met her on Saturday, do you remember?
FP: …
NG: Let’s talk about that night, Mr. Pullman.
FP: We talk about it you’re gonna lock my ass up here.
NG: Frankly, you already said more than enough the night in question to make a case for that. I’d just like to give you a chance to explain. Now, you repeatedly told the paramedics that “they” had done this to you. Who did you mean?
FP: …
NG: You said “they” had killed you.
FP: …
NG: Is “they” the government?
FP: Do I got a dick in my mouth? I ain’t fucking crazy.
NG: Is it voices?
FP: …
NG: Do they talk to you?
FP: … I see things.
NG: Such as?
FP: (inaudible)
NG: What do you see, Mr. Pullman?
FP: Who else is gonna die.
NG: … Can we take a moment for you to elaborate on what you meant when you said you had been killed?
FP: The fuck it usually mean?
NG: But you’re sitting here right now.
FP: They brought me back.
NG: How did they pull that off?
FP: Cardiocerebral resuscitation.
NG: I see … Can you tell me about Ouroboros, Mr. Pullman?
FP: Where’d you hear that?
NG: It was something else that you mentioned repeatedly. Can you tell me its significance?
FP: Where does the soul go? It’s why they killed us. The plan, it’s all in their plan. It’s not right. It’s not right that now we have to see those things. I don’t want to see.
Hemlock Grove Page 5