Letha opened the door and Roman stood fixed where he was and Christina Wendall emerged. She looked at him and he looked at her.
We looked at each other.
Black Run
Remi stretched her gleaming neck
Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.
It wasn’t until she was eleven that the mill came to haunt her dreams. Although it had frightened her at the time, and every time after that she saw it, it was with the knowledge of the way the smallest noises became large in those walls, or how it was to feel the dark on the outside and the inside of your skin; she wasn’t any more afraid of it than her grandparents’ attic or the caverns she had visited at summer camp, or any place where it took no real strength of imagination to conjure all the things that might happen to little girls in there. She thought no more of the mill except the odd day shiver in passing.
Until the dreams, but the dreams didn’t start until after the poem. She came across the poem through Debbie, her babysitter, a senior. The twins made fun of her for still having a babysitter, but she didn’t mind, really—she read her grandmother’s thrillers, she knew the kinds of things that happened to little girls. Debbie was reading the poem for an English class. She finished it and raised her eyebrows and said, “Well, the boys are sure going to get a kick out of this one.” Naturally, Christina had to see.
She couldn’t even read it all the way through the first time. The first time her heart pounded and her hands shook and the act of breathing felt like swallowing rocks. Debbie asked if she was all right and she said it was just a dizzy spell. She gave the book back to Debbie and said she was going to lie down. In her room she found a copy on the Internet and now read it through and through and through. Words are thermal energies. These energies were introduced into her system to become kinetic in her thighs and her fingertips and behind her eyelids. States of matter changed. Her heart became a liquid that pooled under her feet and she was a water bug racing on molecules.
She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,
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?
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.
She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;
She sucked until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away
But gathered up one kernel-stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turned home alone.
There were things no one knew about her. You wouldn’t know she’d had her first kiss but she had, in secret. It had been the previous summer, one day at twilight she went up the lane to Peter’s and found him asleep on the hammock. She liked Peter better than other boys because he was just easy to be around, you didn’t have to worry about coming off as weird because he was the weirdest person you had ever met. And he had poked her in the pit of her stomach and told her it’s where she knew the unwritten universal histories of the terrible and ecstatic, numbnuts, and went and overturned her head and her heels. She said his name but he didn’t wake up so she bent close to him and sniffed and he smelled like bad beer. Then he snored one of those half snores like a piglet and there he was this funny sleeping goon who had opened up a world of infinite possibilities and what else was she supposed to do?
But the twins were less chaste. They had both gone all the way that same summer, Alyssa with Ben Novak and then Alexa with Mark Smoot. This was incredible to her. It was enough putting her lips on this boy’s because it was just the perfect thing to do in the moment, but to think of the whole of him on top of her and the rest of it, nature’s final puzzle, what was between his legs and what was between hers.
Golden head by golden head,
Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other’s wings,
They lay down in their curtained bed:
Like two blossoms on one stem,
Like two flakes of new-fallen snow,
Like two wands of ivory
Tipped with gold for awful kings.
She was not simply incredulous that Alyssa had lost her virginity, and Alexa on her heels to keep up. It wasn’t just the how of the act itself, opening your legs and letting it into you, wanting it all up in you. But an incredulity no different than if they had slipped a poison into her drink that was a thousand needles in her heart and delivered this information to her with a blushing glee she—she—was expected to take part in.
How they could do that to her.
Moon and stars gazed in at them,
Wind sang to them lullaby,
Lumbering owls forbore to fly,
Not a bat flapped to and fro
Round their rest:
Cheek to cheek and breast to breast
Locked together in one nest.
Identical. Are you kidding! She could have told them apart with her eyes closed.
She looked it up and found there was another way, a way to become a werewolf without being bitten. But it’s not like one had anything to do with the other. Not in her head. It wasn’t that she was hurt and the next day she went about looking into becoming a monster. Life isn’t as clean as all that. Life isn’t clean. This was weeks after the fact and she was over it, basically. The heart is an absorbent muscle, basically. Why, then, become a wolf person? The same reason as kissing one. Peripeteia. An important writer of her time needs Material. But how was she supposed to know? How was she supposed to know it would actually work?
Early in the morning after the Corn Moon when she knew there was no danger of Peter being awake she searched the ground around the trailer until she found what she was looking for. Tracks. Tracks tell the story of who this animal is and what it wants and how this is interwoven with the fabric of its ecosystem. As long as the animal believes in itself.
She got down on her knees and poured water from a bottle into the deepest impression and got to all fours and drank. But the water was quickly absorbed and she ended up less drinking from the track of a werewolf than lapping up mud. This was what her inquisitive temperament had brought her to, on her hands and knees with mud on her lips. She was not optimistic.
But the next cycle she had the mill dream again, though now it didn’t end as it had before, without resolution. This time the thing was behind her in all its unknown immensity and the hole in front of her and she made her choice. She could not turn around. She could not look at its face. And so, not knowing what she did, on the night of the Harvest Moon she Went Down the Hole.
Tears once again
Refreshed her shrunken eyes,
Dropping like rain
After long sultry drouth;
Shaking with anguish fear, and pain,
She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.
What happens when the head is not removed from a werewolf after its death? It is doomed to tell its story. The forever howl.
Christina was a girl both young and old for her years; she had never shed the breathless curiosity of a child assembling its universe: What is that? Where did that come from? Why is that like that and not another way and what is its orientation with every other thing?
Why?
Why?
Why?
She is her own Greek chorus now, and she’s very very sorry for everything that happened.
Peripeteia, Redux
“Baby on board,” said Letha, chastising.
Roman flicked his cigarette out the window.
>
“We’re going back to the clinic now,” said Letha. She was sitting in the backseat with Christina. “Don’t freak out, there’s another place there that’s safe.”
The girl had said she did not want to go back to her room. She said her room was cold and full of ghosts. Letha made Roman promise not to tell her dad. Roman promised readily enough; he had no intention of bringing Norman into this. Where this fell exactly vis-à-vis the Hippocratic oath was thorny but moot. This was werewolf law; Peter would know what to do.
Roman really hoped Peter would know what to do.
“The chapel,” said Christina.
Letha said, “Yes.”
“Will … he be there?”
“Peter?” said Letha. “Yes, he will. But he’s not going to hurt you, I promise. You know I’m not going to let anyone hurt you, right?”
“I know,” said Christina.
Letha’s breastbone oppressed her heart at the girl’s bravery after all that had happened to her, to her friends … Letha’s eyes welled but she could hardly let herself cry if the girl did not. She put an arm around Christina and said, “You know it’s going to be okay now, right?”
Christina cuddled into her and put a hand on Letha’s belly with a wondering look: a little person lived in there!
“It’s weird that impossible is even a word,” said Christina.
Roman’s hands tightened on the wheel. The sky was black and the sun was a blood yolk. Roman made a detour, turning off toward the Wal-Mart.
“What are you doing?” said Letha.
“Peter needs some things,” said Roman.
“What things?” said Letha.
“An extension cord.”
“What does he need an extension cord for?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Why didn’t you just grab one from the house?”
“Slipped my mind.”
“How did that slip your mind?” she said, nagging.
Ahead, on the side of the road in their lane of traffic but trundling down the opposing direction, was an old person in a motorized wheelchair. This person was hunched forward in a bulky sexless sweat suit pinned at the knee stumps, grizzled sexless face, eyes dim and indifferent, watching an old rerun on television.
“Someone must have dropped a banana peel,” said Roman listlessly.
“That’s silly,” said Christina.
“He’s silly sometimes,” said Letha.
Roman wondered what it would be like to have the brain of a girl for just one day, how much more sense things would make.
In the parking lot Roman pulled into a space and crept over the white line to be nose forward but suddenly a yellow pickup swung aggressively into the same space from the opposite direction and both braked to avoid collision. The pickup honked and Roman backed up.
“Careful,” said Letha.
The other driver stepped out. He was a skinny but at the same time paunchy young man in a Penguins jersey with a crew cut and one of those birthmarks overtaking half his face like he had been spewed on with pale pink dye. He leered at Roman and grabbed his crotch with an obscene thrust.
Roman turned to Letha. “Will you come in with me?” he said.
“I’ll wait with her,” said Letha.
Christina looked at him with a dreamy expression.
“Leave the keys so we can listen to the radio,” said Letha.
Roman went inside and paced, deliberating whether or not to simply make Sporting Goods give him a gun while she was still a girl. But he decided against it because he wasn’t sure that was what Peter would want. Not really. The reason he decided not to was that he needed the decision to be Peter’s.
He passed a dressing room as a boy of ten or eleven exited. The boy was plump and mildly retarded and wearing only a pair of girl’s panties with strawberries imprinted on them and he started mincing around, swishing his rear from side to side in an exaggerated catwalk strut. Roman tried not to stare, but honestly. “No! No! No!” said the boy’s mother with an unmistakable not-again inflection as she swooped in and wrenched him back into the dressing room and gave Roman a dirty look, but honestly, lady.
Roman turned and nearly collided with another person, a small Asian woman with the precise and fragile beauty of a ceramic figure. They looked at each other with the kind of mutual astonishment of finding oneself suddenly and intimately in eye contact with a complete stranger and Roman had the impulse to take her delicate hand and place it against his face just for one moment and say, She’s just a fucking little girl, a little girl like all the rest of them, this isn’t how it was supposed to be—not that he expected this person to have a satisfactory answer to that, or that one existed, but at least for one moment she could touch his face with soft, sensuous Oriental understanding. But before Roman had the opportunity to act on this impulse or for that matter mumble an apology, the woman abruptly turned away and hastened down the aisle and Roman got a fleeting view of her profile, discovering that the side of her head was dominated principally by a burn scar about the dimension of a palm laid flat, no hair growing within its perimeter and the skin like butter melted and congealed once more, and in place of an ear a hole you could look into like a key slot.
“Well okay,” said Roman. He went to the men’s room with the intention of being sick but both stalls were occupied and the air hale with defecation and he leaned over a urinal only to be greeted by a fat pustule of blood on the pink urinal cake as though someone had leaned over much like himself and rocketed a nosebleed.
“Well okay!” said Roman, finding his distaste to have the perverse effect of repulsing his nausea. He straightened and smoothed his lapels and proceeded to Hardware for his original goal. Up front he purchased a twenty-five-foot length of extension cord, paying cash as a precaution to prevent leaving a paper trail. But though the total was just over $22 the cashier gave him an even $3 in change. Roman paled.
“Oh no,” he said.
The cashier began ringing the next customer’s purchases, though Roman had not moved.
“I need my change,” he said.
“Excuse me?” said the cashier.
“My change,” said Roman, handing back the third bill with shaking fingers.
The cashier looked at him, wondering if he was serious. Roman blinked back tears of desperation. He held the dollar out in one hand and the receipt in the other.
“I need the exact change right here,” said Roman.
“Why?” said the cashier, who was a gaunt gray young girl possessed of the spirit of reverse charity that overtakes some when seeing another in clear need.
“Because I can’t go,” Roman pleaded heedlessly. “I need you to give me the amount of money that’s here on the receipt before I can go.”
“Sir, I’m assisting another customer.”
Roman commanded his feet to lift from where they stood, but it would have taken a claw hammer. He felt distantly like he was forgetting something and he started breathing again. But the fact remained, blank and pitiless: the numbers didn’t add up and he could not go before they did, the fact of it crushing him like the handshake of a small-dicked god.
The old woman after him gave Roman a nervous look as she handed over her money.
“I’m … I’m not normal,” he said apologetically, then suddenly muscled between her and the checkout counter and snaked his arm into the register as it opened and helped himself to a handful of coins and sprinted to the exit as commotion rose behind him, counting out his exact change and flinging the excess behind him, the weight of the heavens from his shoulders.
* * *
At the copse along 443 where the trailhead breached, Roman parked.
“We’re going through the woods?” said Letha.
“Sunset isn’t till four fifty-five,” said Roman.
Letha looked uneasily at the lengthening shadows beyond the tree line. She looked at Christina.
“To grandmother’s house we go,” said Christina.
They got
out and Roman gathered the supplies. Christina took Letha’s hand and they entered the trailhead.
“Do you want me to carry anything?” said Christina.
“I got it,” said Roman.
“What’s in the case?” said Christina.
“Papers,” said Roman.
“What papers?” said Christina.
“My Christmas list,” said Roman.
“That’s not what it is,” said Christina. “We peeked while you were inside.”
They were on a path. At the end of this path was a destination. Roman decided that any other details were extraneous.
“Are you going to use that to cut out its heart?” said Christina.
“Okay, shush,” said Letha indulgently.
They went down the path. Dry leaves crackling underfoot, the reverent twilit hush. They passed a lone Cat digger, its belly consumed by rust and the shovel end disappeared within the undergrowth. Up ahead was a hill bisected with a gully down which a load of old tires had been discarded as though disgorged by a dyspeptic Earth and there was a sheer rockface along the path with a carving of the Dragon on it. Christina stopped.
“Hey, we need to keep moving,” said Roman. This was not their destination.
Christina ran her fingertip down the curve of the Dragon’s back and her fingertip came away dusted with chalk powder. She looked at Roman earnestly and said, “Would you like to know a secret?”
This was not their destination!
“Let’s get moving,” said Roman.
Christina nodded and took Letha’s hand once more and then Roman’s and walked between them. Her hand was cool and dry like crepe paper.
“I think your sister is a good person,” said Christina.
“Yes, she is,” said Roman.
“She just gives you a good feeling,” said Christina.
He nodded, not seeing the thorny tip of a low branch that scratched his eyebrow. He sucked in his breath and refrained from swearing loudly. In this of all circumstances he would succeed in watching his language.
“Ooh,” said Christina. She stopped and touched the scratch by his eyebrow.
Hemlock Grove Page 25