Chasseur looked up at Olivia, who regarded her from the doorway. She was wearing her sunglasses and lighting a cigarette and Chasseur was suddenly uncertain whether or not she had been standing there this entire time, if moments before she had simply looked right through her like a rainbow visible at only the precise angle.
Olivia said nothing, watching her, and despite the sunglasses Chasseur knew her sight line as well as if it had been drawn with a dotted line: she was looking at the wound. As a woman in the military Chasseur had thought she knew what this was like, but the reality was something else entirely: being looked at like … meat. Chasseur worked her hand under her shirt and out of view. She looked away from Olivia and up at the wings, disappointed. Not unintended for the eyes of the living, but set decoration for her own black box theater. Fucking actresses.
Chasseur fought for air, for the awareness of air going in and out. Of course Chasseur had imagined her own martyrdom; it had been part of her training. But when sleeping with a lover Chasseur could never lie face-to-face because anytime her own inhalations and exhalations married so closely with the inhalations and exhalations of another she became acutely convinced she was breathing in pure carbon dioxide. She had never imagined it feeling like this, like everything about it was somehow wrong.
The blood from Chasseur’s hand spread out in her shirt in a blossom. She felt Olivia’s eyes on it, they had never left. Chasseur closed her eyes.
“Hmmm,” said Olivia. This recalled to her a fond memory. “When I was a young girl there was a game I used to play with my cousins, wicked little beasts of the first rank. The game was called Wolves in the Wood, and ‘play with’ perhaps misstates it, implying my consent as part of the proceeding. At any rate, after the moon had risen they would spirit me out to the forest, an enchanted place in the fullest sense of the word, filled with mysteries and nameless dangers prowling in the dark, and there would be hell to pay if we were caught. They would lay me down on a bed of moss—I can feel it to this day on the back of my neck—and I was to close my eyes and keep perfectly still as they circled through the trees on tiptoes, growling deep in their throats and warning me that there were wolves on the hunt with a taste for little girls, and that the slightest movement on my part would give me away and I’d be gobbled up in a blink. Of course I was terrified for life and limb and would do my utmost to escape this monstrous fate, but the harder I concentrated on not betraying myself, the more impossible it became not to smile. Fatal! A great cry would then go up—you moved! you moved!—and with yips and howls they would descend on me and cover my body head to toe with kisses.”
Chasseur opened her eyes. “Write it on the bottom of your shoes for the devil to read,” she said.
Olivia removed her sunglasses and placed them in her purse. She looked at Chasseur. There was no distinction between pupil and iris in her eyes, it was as though they had been overlaid with golden red rose petals and backlit by an opposing sun. She put her purse on the ground.
“Oh, Little Mouse,” she said. “You moved.”
* * *
4:39 p.m.
The last of the sun had disappeared and the hills had gone dark with pinpricks of light as though containing a single source of it inside when an institute van pulled alongside Olivia’s truck, like opposing pieces of a game as old and esoteric as the totem overlooking it. Dr. Pryce exited carrying a plain canvas tote bag. There was a tar drum between the hot stoves and the river with an orange glow in its mouth and he went to it. Next to the drum was Olivia’s purse and within what remained of what was formerly her outfit, streaked in crimson and engulfed in flame. He looked at the water. An unbelonging whiteness breached the surface as though expelled from the river’s unconscious. Olivia standing nude, waist deep, staring off at those lights dotting the hillside and gently disrupting the surface tension with a slow back-and-forth motion of her arms. Pryce’s eye fell to the scar on the small of her back, all that demarcated her as an earthly body. He said nothing, the tableau too immaculate for her to be unaware of an audience. Eventually she turned and waded back, emerging on the bank and standing before him. She was covered with gooseflesh and her nipples were small and dark and black trails of mascara ran down from her eyes. Pryce handed over the bag and placed his hands on a broken length of rebar that stuck from the ground.
“In there,” said Olivia, indicating the mill building. “Still warm, for whatever use that brings you.”
“Lod isn’t going to like this,” said Pryce.
“If they want Norman’s share they’ll learn to,” she said. “They knew where they were sending the little golliwog.”
She shook her head. One did have to admire the ingenuity: recruiting women and homosexual military veterans with a background of sexual trauma likely to require the validation of an external patriarchal figure. But honestly: “The Order of the Dragon”—what utter poppycock.
“This was irresponsible,” said Pryce. “And … uncalled-for.”
He waited for her to react; in the history of their relationship he had never registered such direct insubordination.
She looked searchingly into his face and gave a sympathetic cluck. “You liked her.”
Pryce was silent; nothing in the position of utilitarian ambivalence this arrangement forced him into was quite so galling as her ultimate trespass: knowing at any given moment what he was actually feeling.
Olivia removed from the bag a pair of surgical scrub bottoms and a sweatshirt. He watched her dress.
“Why is it that you’re the only one who hasn’t asked me what I’m really doing?” he said.
She gave him a why-do-you-think look. “Because I don’t care,” she said.
“Do you know who it is that’s killing these girls?” said Pryce.
She took her wet hair in both hands and squeezed excess water from it.
“Of course I do, Johann,” she said. “I’m a mother.”
She knelt and picked up her purse. The hem of the sweatshirt rode up, revealing the pale of her back.
“You know I can fix you,” he said. “Your scar.”
She produced a compact mirror and regarded her reflection, wiping away streaks of mascara.
“The less you pursue this line of conversation,” she said, “the more likely we are to remain friends.”
Just then, somewhere in the valley, there was a rifle shot. Her head snapped, but not in surprise—he realized that behind the Olivia Show she had been steeling herself all along for its coming: the break. Several more shots followed, a flinch going through her body with each, and she made no attempt to conceal it, nor could she. How afraid she was.
Then it was quiet again and she replaced the compact and walked past Pryce, making her way delicately in bare feet.
“Clean it up,” she said.
He did not turn, hearing the truck start up and pull away. The fire in the drum had burned down to embers, ash commingling with all the previous ash from all the previous fires, leaving only a dustbin for the next time Olivia decided to ruin a dress. Now he turned downriver, seeking the cap of the institute over the ridge.
“A lighthouse guiding a lone vessel through evil waters if ever there was one full stop,” said Pryce. “He reminded himself comma again comma that whatever sacrifice of personal conscience comma even his humanity comma was required of him was ultimately of scant consequence in his penance full stop. A body comma he was making his best girl a body comma and until he had perfected the procedure for Shelley Godfrey’s rebirth into a body to make the world love her as much as he did comma whatever was required of him to keep the lights on was a small price full stop.”
And then the light of the White Tower went dark.
“What in blue blazes!” said Pryce.
* * *
4:25 p.m.
Dr. Godfrey pulled into the drive of Godfrey House to find it empty of vehicles. He got out of the car and went to the porch and sat on the steps. The last thing he had to spare right now was a moment to call his
own; it felt like stealing from the gods. His stop before this one had been to the hospital morgue to view the last girl; if it was who he thought it was this appointment was manifestly his. But to his surprise the body was too sexually mature to be Christina’s, surprising because his wishing it on someone else continued to be granted and he knew he’d be paying for it somehow or other. It wouldn’t hurt, he knew. Being consumed by a wild animal would not actually cause pain, fear triggering the release of naturally occurring opioids that would act as an analgesic. To die in that way wouldn’t hurt, because you would be in a perfect euphoria of fear. And then he was scooped: a concerned roommate had called inquiring about a small burn scar on the inner left forearm and the latest had a name. Godfrey was left with a need to hold a woman’s body, full of unruly life and lust and all the terrifically maddening things this beast ravened with love gone bad. And for this sudden carnal imperative what better archetype? But she wasn’t here, nor had he had any contact in the last few days. Not that it mattered, really; he had spent so many years building a rational empire of words in a war against his own blood but now he couldn’t give less of a shit what or wasn’t spoken, he was possessed once more by something he actually wanted. He wanted to defeat the monster and save his family. He felt a light tickle on his wrist and looked down to find a daddy longlegs traversing it. He brought his arm to eye level and watched the spider move with a kind of startlement as though first encountering such an apparatus.
“Even if it is the world’s most fucked-up family,” he said.
There was a creak and he felt a dip in the boards under his posterior. He shook the spider free and slid to the side and patted the empty spot beside him. Shelley sat. They both looked out at the dip beyond the yard and the valley rolling out. It would soon be night and the lamppost at the end of the property came on. He reached and rubbed between her shoulders.
“It’s almost over,” he said.
He meant it as a comforting platitude but at the same time found it was true; like a sleeping body aware that the alarm would soon be going off he could feel it, the cusp of the end. Thankfully.
“Everyone’s safe,” he said. “Letha’s home. The boys are at the chapel. Your mother…” He realized he hadn’t the slightest idea where she might be, and that it would no more occur to either of them to be concerned for her safety than the sudden inversion of gravity, a cognitive unviability.
“Your mother and I are complicated,” he said. “In the sense that a hadron collider is complicated. I’m sorry it meant lying to you. We’ve been lying about it so long I almost forgot there was anyone who still believed it. But that doesn’t make it any less crummy.”
He was quiet, then went on.
“You’re a lamp,” he said. “You shine on people and you’re either going to show what’s best in them or what’s the most crummy. And you always got the best of me because there you were, lighting the way. So it’s even worse how you had to learn about my shitheel side. But that’s your tragedy, and nothing breaks my heart more: you’re always going to be surrounded by people who don’t deserve you.”
Shelley turned to him. There was a glimmering in her eyes, but not of water: it was a gossamer film of light. Godfrey looked away, a stone in his throat. Never in his lifelong quest for it had he encountered a purer promise of redemption, or felt less deserving.
His phone rang.
“I’m sorry,” he said, voice faltering. “I … I have to get this.”
He answered. It was Intake. He listened to the latest and then said he’d be there as soon as possible.
“Have him wait in my office,” he said. “Try to keep it from going off in act three.”
He hung up.
“I have to go,” he said. “The sheriff is admitting himself, but he won’t surrender his gun. The Fredericks family found him sitting in their driveway with his rifle in his lap, singing Patsy Cline. No good ever came out of possessing a firearm in a Patsy Cline–singing mood.”
Shelley looked at him questioningly.
“Jennifer Fredericks,” he said. “She was the last one.”
She stared at him. The light in her eyes suddenly flared like looking directly into the noonday sun and he looked away, blinking.
“Are you okay?” he said. “Shelley…”
She rose. A noise escaped her, a low moan of bestial desolation: betrayal, in the way that all personal wounds are a kind of betrayal, and disbelief that such a thing had actually happened; you—the you and this is the kicker that has never really been there—let this happen.
“Sweetheart,” said Godfrey, reaching out for her, but he grasped only air as suddenly she sprang forward, clearing the stairs and hitting the drive in a collision that caused the pavement to crack, and charged off with improbable speed, clearing car lengths at a bound. Godfrey watched helplessly as she crossed the boundary of the property, the lamppost’s light extinguishing suddenly as she passed, and continued headlong down the hill; he heard the percussions of her footfalls after she passed from sight, and as those faded the rise of her cry into something horrific and wrathful, a thorn in the paw of the heavens.
Godfrey was at a loss. Nothing in his experience of his niece having provided him any indication she could move like that, or that that noise was contained inside her. Like the first time he’d seen the blow of the Bessemer as a child: a terrific vent of flame and fury from the mouth of a dragon, but that wasn’t it at all—merely the latent potential of everyday iron, hiding in plain sight until given the pretext not to.
He took out his phone, but it was dead. He went to his car, but it would not turn over either. As, he suspected, would be the fate of any piece of electronics-based technology in Shelley’s wake. He got out and stood under the blacked lamppost, his sense now not of impending climax but its initiation; whatever was happening was happening now and here he was, benched. The lone and useless rich man at the house on the hill, visible and still forgotten. He saw on the ground a single white feather, which he picked up and held on a flat palm and blew as hard as he could. It wheeled and tumbled back to earth, a victim of forces it could neither comprehend nor protest. He looked out on the valley and night fell around him. The moon was a broken ornament on the water and the White Tower became visible.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he said.
Then in the distance there was a series of shots, followed by a silence of unequivocal authority. And there it was: over. Whatever that meant for everyone.
“Over,” said Godfrey. Not in sorrow or relief or any speculation where it might fall between. He was just getting his head around the idea.
“It’s over and nothing else is going to happen,” he said.
Then the light of the White Tower went dark.
* * *
3:32 p.m.
On Roman’s return to Hemlock Acres there was a news bulletin: “The search continues for Hemlock Grove teenager Peter Rumancek, suspected of involvement in a series of local slayings previously attributed to some kind of animal. The third victim in last night’s carnage has been positively identified as area woman Jennifer Fredericks…”
Something stirred in Roman, that niggling sort of something that lodges in the back of your teeth but you can’t get it out.
“It is now theorized that the killer may have trained one or more wolves for use in these terrible crimes. Francis Pullman, deceased, claimed to have witnessed the first victim, Brooke Bluebell, attacked by a black quote demon dog, while last night there were multiple reported sightings of a large white wolf…”
Roman turned off the radio. Could there have been more than one all along? One black, one white …
And then he swerved into the nearest driveway and swiped the mailbox, knocking the passenger-side mirror so it hung dispirited like a mostly severed limb. He reversed and made a 180-degree turn and put the pedal to the floor and brown leaves did rejoicing somersaults in his wake.
* * *
3:43 p.m.
“This is fun!” said Letha
. “Can you believe I’ve never had a tea party before? Doesn’t it make you want to refer to yourself in the royal we? Here, give us your cup and we’ll just refresh you then.”
Outside there was the noise of a car coming down the street at an aggressive speed. The tires screeched and it stopped out front. Letha gingerly took the cup from her guest’s quaking hand and went to the window, parting the curtains.
“Oh, it’s fine,” she said. She looked at the pale and cringing figure on her bed. “Don’t be scared. It’s fine.”
Downstairs there was the sound of the door being thrown open and footsteps taking the stairs two at a time.
“Okay,” said Letha. “Okay, if you want to, you just wait in here, okay?”
The sound of Roman calling her name as the footsteps approached her door.
“One minute,” said Letha. “Just wait in here,” she whispered.
She went and opened her door partway.
“Are you okay?” said Roman.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I was about to sneak out and meet you guys like you said. What’s up?”
“You’re okay?” said Roman. “Everything is cool?”
“I’m fine. Don’t worry, I’m fine.”
They both looked at each other suspiciously. It was then he noticed over her shoulder the teakettle on her dresser. Two cups.
“Who’s here?” he said.
“Okay, don’t freak out,” she said.
“Who’s. Here,” he said.
“Okay, I need you to not freak out. I need you to wait right here, okay?”
She tried to close the door but he held out his hand and stopped it gently but implacably with his fingertips and she didn’t press it. She walked to the closet.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey, it’s just my cousin, and he’s going take us where we’re going to be safe, okay? No one is going to hurt you. We’re not going to let anyone hurt you, okay? I’m opening the door now.”
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