Hemlock Grove

by Brian McGreevy

  When she opened them some time later her cheek did not lie on fur but on flesh, pink and wet and warm. A man. Her arm rising and falling on his chest with his breathing. She sat up bemused and looked at Peter. Peter in one pink and wet piece. She was not sure what to make of this beyond some occult understanding that it ran over any sensible order of things, that receiving yet another miracle was not simply tackily excessive but quite possibly made her the most selfish person alive.

  “I’ll take it,” she said.

  Peter groaned and shifted but did not awaken. She leaned forward, her lips not quite touching his face. She did not understand this thing that had happened, nor intended to. As it had been said: Death is fucking magical. And with a tenderness like no kiss, she licked him.

  You Must Make Your Heart Steel

  The winter was cold, but then the spring. It was now six months since the incident at Godfrey Chapel and though only questions remained about that night, they were rhetorical. Because the killing had stopped. How and why was catching a ghost by the tail; the killing had stopped and life in Hemlock Grove went on. The White Tower was light again as ever, but gone was the controlling share of Norman Godfrey. The principal holders are now Olivia Godfrey in trust for her son until his fast-approaching eighteenth birthday and Lod LLC. From time to time Olivia, Dr. Pryce, and a man of imperious girth and military bearing with, on close inspection, a signet ring of a serpent and a cross can be seen strolling the nautilus trail around the institute, on what business beyond enjoying the weather’s pleasant turn is anyone’s guess. For Dr. Godfrey only questions remained, but they were rhetorical. A question is a door and an unopened door is just part of the wall and as long as it’s standing it’s doing its job. The killing had stopped. Upon the lump receipt of Lod’s improbable payment from a Luxembourg account, he put it all into the Godfrey Foundation, stipulating to his wife that whatever it was used to build bear any name but his. Plans were also under way to convert the mill into an interactive industrial museum and learning center, the central attraction an exhibit visit inside an authentic Bessemer converter. (There are rumors it’s haunted.) There were cardinals and goldfinches in the trees and greedy mud on the ground that would suction off a shoe and finally, on the thirteenth of April, after the very last of the long chill, Peter was making up for lost hammock time when a warmth suffused his Swadisthana. He listened to the sound of the wind like the roar of a distant crowd.

  “Well I’ll be,” he said.

  Moments later the phone rang and he went inside. The latest stray raced through the open door into the trailer, a double-wide. He answered the phone to receive a glad piece of news. It was expected; she was due at any moment, but some things can never be expected no matter how much they are.

  Peter said nothing; being philosophical made him quiet. Fetchit jumped on the kitchen table and mewled. The black ones had a way of finding the Rumanceks’ door. Peter nooked the phone with his shoulder and went to the cupboard and took out a can of tuna.

  “Well!” said Letha, on the other end of the line.

  “Sorry, I’m feeding the cat,” said Peter.

  “Good to hear you have your priorities straight.”

  “Babies have to be born, and cats have to be fed,” said Peter equitably.

  Now there was a quiet on the other end suggesting he might want to reconsider his response.

  “Baby,” said Peter, “my heart has no words. Your smile makes flowers grow and your tits could knock a rhino sideways. I love your ass to pieces and anything that pops out of you. This is the best news I’ve had all day.”

  “Oh, my chariot arriveth. Catch you on the flip side.”

  She hung up. It had been agreed that he would not be present for the labor: she felt it was important to be on her own. Peter did not object—he had seen a video of childbirth in biology once and just didn’t have the stomach for it.

  Later in the afternoon Peter met Roman at Kilderry Park. A few undergraduates were throwing a Frisbee. Peter and Roman sat on a picnic bench at the pavilion. Roman was wearing the vintage Italian sunglasses that were his latest affectation and produced two cigars. Peter nodded. Nice touch.

  “Uncle Roman,” said Roman.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace,” said Peter.

  Roman handed a cigar to Peter. Peter asked him if he’d made any headway with the Cat Lady and Roman shook his head.

  Since the abrupt termination of Project Ouroboros in November, Roman had maintained hope of finding some kind of trail to his sister, of whom no sign had been found. No tracks. The latest was a medium to whom Destiny had referred him who operated a cougar sanctuary in West Virginia.

  Roman pursed his lips. The Cat Lady had induced a trance in an attempt to communicate with Shelley but wound up falling to the floor in a sort of seizure, whispering incoherently about fate lines and heart lines and unholy communion and the headaches, the headaches, and the cottage was surrounded by low hisses and snarls as her agitation spread among her brood. Roman stuck a pen between her teeth and rolled her into the recovery position and waited for her to come to and escort him to his car without being eviscerated. In parting she apologized that she would not be able to help him—though did not refuse her fee—but instead offered these words: “Still. What she is trying to say is ‘still.’” Roman would have written off the entire expedition as a fool and his money, except that he had been experiencing headaches of increasing severity lately. A heightened photosensitivity of the eyes that forced him to keep his sunglasses on more or less continuously before dusk.

  “Dead end,” said Roman.

  Peter nodded. Both rationally and instinctively he believed Roman’s search to be futile. Shelley was gone. And wherever it was she had gone, there was no looking for her. But he never voiced his pessimism to Roman, nor for that matter was there cause. He doubted Roman himself believed his quest to be anything but quixotic, and on balance it was simply better for him to have something keeping him busy.

  Roman looked off into the sky at a lance of sun penetrating cloud and was quiet a moment.

  “I see her sometimes,” he said. “In dreams.”

  Peter looked at him. Why was he lying?

  “Not in dreams,” Roman admitted. “I’ve been … trying it on myself.”

  Peter didn’t understand, then he did. The thing they didn’t talk about, because when one friend has this power, not talking about it is a lot easier than talking about it; the paths it can lead down that one virtue of the male sex is an unparalleled lack of curiosity to see where they go. The power behind his eyes, and the meaning of this power.

  “I look into the mirror, and I tell myself to see her,” said Roman. “I feel her all the time, but I tell myself to see her. And things go dark, and I can feel myself on a threshold, and I don’t know what’s on the other side, where the shadows are. But there’s a light way off. And I know the light is an angel, and the angel is her.

  “It’s her,” he repeated, as though this had been contested. “She’s out there, and I want to get closer but I can’t. I’m afraid of what will happen if I go too far. Then she starts calling out to me, but she’s so far away and I can only just hear her. What she’s saying is, ‘You must make your heart steel.’”

  He sat and looked at Peter. Peter fidgeted, uncomfortable. He could sense when Roman was going to bring up that night at the chapel, and though he didn’t mind providing an ear he was himself loath to volunteer anything. In truth he had almost no memory of what happened, and he didn’t want it otherwise. The thing about coming back from the dead was that your life went on, and he didn’t like dwelling on it. The presentiment of an unpaid debt that he didn’t like dwelling on at all.

  “When you did what you did,” said Roman, “how were you not afraid?”

  But this was not a question Peter was expecting. At first he was bemused, then he chuckled and shook his head as though at a foreigner’s comical malapropism.

  Roman was as baffled as a Chinaman. “What?” he said
.

  “I’ve never been more scared of anything in my life. I could never have done it if I didn’t know you were there too.”

  They were quiet. Roman looked out at the hills, seven shades of ever flusher and more life-giving green. He shook his head.

  “Fucking angels,” he said.

  * * *

  Outside, the moon was a boar’s tusk and the owls gave their two cents while in the bedroom there was only the whir of the projector’s motor. There was a white sheet tacked to the wall for a screen and the movie being projected was from the silent era and was black-and-white with a tint of green, as was the fashion of the time to create a sense of mood and mystery. The setting was a soundstage that was not really a soundstage but an expressionistic representation thereof where the shadows cast by the arc light of even the straightest lines fell like a maze of thorn brush. The facsimile of the thing constructed within the thing itself, dream within the feedback loop of the brain. Or vice versa. And within the soundstage a lone player, a woman. She had on the exaggerated eye makeup that was the fashion of the time and nothing else. And alone within this cathedral of ingenuity and infinity she danced. The dancer aching, grieving for the mist-covered mountains of the home she was so far away from, and so far away from returning to, and this dance inelegantly rendered by a shutter speed sixteen frames per second due to the technological limitations of the time, causing a simultaneously increased and halting speed. But the inelegance of the motion only contributing to the poetry of it. Essential truths gained by loss in translation. The essence of beauty not perfection, but the doomed aspiration.

  Olivia lay in bed and watched, savoring like wine the shared age-old ache in her own bones as on-screen the woman danced the grief of her slow, slow journey home and in turning from the camera revealed her own imperfection. There was on the dancer’s spine above the coccyx, like the mountain range of a relief map, a pale pinkie-length scar—the remnant of some crude surgery.

  * * *

  In his room Peter was awakened by a pang in his groin of such pressing acuity he mistook it initially for the need of a beastly piss, but he had gotten as far as the toilet before he realized it was not his own bladder he had felt but a different plane of signal altogether. He stood there dumbly, appurtenance in hand, waiting for a flash flood or a meteor or whatever it was that could have caused so profound an agitation within his Swadisthana. But then he realized, and then the phone rang. He did not go to answer it. He stood there knowing. It continued to ring until eventually Lynda picked up. He heard her answer and then she just listened. Her end of the conversation simply a hushed “Oh no oh no no no oh no.” He tucked himself in his boxer shorts and gathered up his ponytail in one hand and with the other opened the cupboard and reached for a pair of scissors. He put the toilet seat down and sat, releasing the fistful of hair so it scattered to the floor as footsteps approached the door and he waited for the gentle, gentle knock.

  * * *

  Pryce received a call informing him of the disturbance in the OR and gave the order not to get in the way. He turned and stood at his office window and looked up at the night and stars.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  He pressed his fingertips against the window, the cool of the glass.

  “Why did you leave us all to her?” he said.

  Soon there was a sound at his office door not of knocking but a brute and insistent kicking. He opened the door and in the hall stood Dr. Godfrey. In his arms was a sheeted bundle. His eyes were stained as red as the sheet in his arms.

  “Do it,” said Godfrey.

  Pryce said nothing.

  “Bring her back, Johann,” said Godfrey.

  “Norman, come in and sit down,” said Pryce.

  “You need to bring her back,” said Godfrey. “Do whatever you need to. Just bring her back.”

  “Norman, what say we sit down and talk about this?”

  “She’s getting cold! Bring her back. You think I’m being irrational but I’m not. I will write you a check for any amount you can imagine. Bring her back to me.”

  “Norman,” said Pryce. He stepped into the hall and reached to take the bundle from his arms. Godfrey jerked away with hot feral eyes.

  “Norman, give her to me,” said Pryce.

  “You’ll do it?” said Godfrey.

  “Norman, let me have her,” said Pryce.

  Godfrey was reluctant, but complied.

  “You’ll do it now,” said Godfrey.

  Pryce waited until his hold was secure before answering.

  “No,” he said.

  Godfrey was quiet. The crazed inspiration that had sent him on this mission was suddenly and completely extinguished. Other fires went out now too. He eased himself against the wall and slid to the floor.

  “She’s too old, Norman,” said Pryce. “What about the baby? I may have a chance with the baby.”

  Godfrey addressed his knees. The square fluorescents reflected off the floor down the hall, a long row of molars.

  “Fuck the baby,” he said.

  Pryce took the bundle into his office and laid it on the floor. He pulled aside the sheet and looked into the face, which had contracted into a mask of the mocking ugliness of death. He called Hemlock Acres and told them to send a car, then came into the hall, locking the door behind him, and sat on the floor next to Godfrey. He inhaled the smell of disinfectant. He had never understood before why people didn’t like that, the way hospitals smell. He had never known before how comfortless it could be.

  “I’m sorry, Norman,” said Pryce. “I’m not God.”

  * * *

  Olivia insisted she drive although Roman was what is called holding up. But she knew it was not only deceptive but more dangerous. She knew about holding up. He had at least gotten sleep—she had doctored the vodka with several tablets of Ambien—and she had sat at his bedside like she had months ago during that god-awful business with the little dead lesbian. When he woke she asked where he would like to go and was relieved when he simply said “Peter.” Pryce had phoned her the night before and she had enough on her hands; she wasn’t ready yet for Norman. She had priorities.

  As they drove in silence, Olivia debated whether or not to warn him but decided against it. He could only hate the messenger regardless of how much more the messenger loved him than anyone else ever could. There was nothing that could make this easier on him, no matter how much it harrowed her heart to be reduced for the present to chauffeur, bearing him to a destination where he had no suspicion what he would find, what he wouldn’t. He sat next to her, holding up. She reached and touched his face. He flinched; the one thing his inner heart did not want now was to be touched, but she did not remove her hand. A mother has certain rights, and when a person can’t be consoled, sometimes irritation will have to suffice to remind him that you’re here, you are right here. They passed the park and turned down the lane.

  As Olivia predicted, when they reached the Rumanceks’ plot the car was gone and the trailer door hung open; they had not bothered to shut the door behind them. They stepped out and Roman looked mildly befuddled as though searching for a puzzle piece that was not in the box. Then his eyes overfilled with sudden awful knowing. The obvious she could not prepare him for: that a Gypsy was a Gypsy was a Gypsy. They will steal the rings off your fingers or the love right out of your heart and leave no more to show for it than a trail of smoke in the night. But she said nothing as the full weight of it came on in, taking admittedly small satisfaction in being, naturally, right. But only very small. How ill matched the boy was for this enemy!—death was one thing, quite involuntary for the most part. But desertion. There was no destroyer of worlds quite to match it. She reached to the small of her back and lightly traced the ridge of her scar through her blouse.

  Many years ago Olivia had been a young girl in the land beyond the forests and the uglier of two sisters. Hers was not the kind of lack of beauty that suggested the promise of something unrealized but a drab androgyny that w
hen placed beside her sister’s loveliness was a perverse joke. And the punch line, at the base of her spine and extending about the length of a long thumb: her tail. But she had always been a happy child nonetheless, a gentle spirit who could lose entire afternoons wandering through a valley of sunflowers singing to herself, and much protected by her father and elder sister who believed the heart of the world could not extend charity to so simple and homely a girl.

  But their great love could not prevent their fear from coming to pass, and in her thirteenth year Olivia had her first taste of the suffering from which she had been shielded for so long. His name was Dimitri and he was a slave. It was standard at the time for the aristocracy, and no name was older or more vaunted than her father’s, to possess numerous Gypsy slaves, and it was something she had never put any more thought into than their horses or pigs. For it to occur to even so gentle and sensitive a spirit to hold an opinion on the thought of owning people like horses or pigs would have required it to occur to her that Gypsies were in fact people—a notion not even a child could take seriously. But then Dimitri. Which is not to say that the purchase of this slave suddenly clarified the issue of taxonomy but rather complicated it infinitely. Not so much that she realized that Dimitri was a man no different from her father or his friends, but that he was a creature quite unlike any other man or Gypsy she had ever encountered.

  Olivia’s father bought Dimitri for the unthinkable sum of two oxen, for which entire families might be purchased. But he was indeed an unparalleled specimen: it was not as if his shoulders or his thighs were near as stalwart as the ruminants for which he was traded, or his mind or beauty of any remark; it was a particular talent famed throughout the mountains that commanded him such a price. For being a member of a race of dance and song, Dimitri had a way with the fiddle to make the devil stomp his feet.