These Lowly Creatures

Dr. Godfrey sat in the OB-GYN waiting room, where a sitcom he vaguely remembered loathing played as an otherwise emaciated young woman in her third trimester shrilled over it into her cell phone the excruciating details of her proud triumph in one of those squalid sexual potboilers that so frequently end up arbitrated in front of the cameras of daytime television judges. Next to her was a morbidly obese friend or relative who nodded and mm-hmm’d through the story as if on a pew. On her other side was a lean man years her senior in a sheriff’s deputy uniform with a nose that led not just his walk but his slouch. His arm was around the pregnant girl. Godfrey thumbed through the lone Sports Illustrated he assumed was here to reduce the chances of expectant fathers taking flight.

“And I says Mom, I says Mom, you just tell him that demon pig bitch and anything that smells like her is gone by this weekend or he’s never touching this again.”

“Mm-hmm … Mm-hmm…”

Despite his evident sexual proprietorship over the prize in question, Nose had little enough stake in the drama; rather, his focus was on Godfrey, to whom he had now sent enough dagger glances that it could not be coincidence, though whether it was because of some inadvertent offense or the alpha-male hostilities that Neiman Marcus cuff links and a well-shined shoe instinctively arouse in a certain species of blue-collar man could not be said.

Godfrey employed a mental exercise. He had read at a young age a guiding principle that had changed the course of his life: The first step to liberty is respecting the rights of others. This had made him something of an aberration in the Godfrey line, the idea that each and every soul with whom you share this planet, no matter how unlike, much less appalling to yourself, was worthy of empathy and respect in all circumstances. So the exercise was simply continuing to sit here with this magazine whose words were a blur of irritation and trying to find a modicum of generosity toward this particular segment of humanity instead of escaping to the car and having a slug from the flask that he rationalized he wasn’t hiding because the glove compartment wasn’t a hiding place, it was a perfectly innocent compartment. What distinguished this exercise from punishment was a question of degree rather than intent.

Suddenly there was a report like the firing of a gun and Godfrey’s head snapped in alarm. But there was no threat, no threat to his daughter, and the sound’s provenance became clear as the obese girl slid to the floor: an existing hairline fracture in the leg of her chair had snapped under her weight.

She lay dazed on her back like a tortoise carved out of butter as her friend cackled into the phone. “Oh my holy shit!” said her friend. “Guess whose fat ass broke the chair!”

Godfrey put down the magazine and rose. He went to the fallen fat girl and held out his hand. “Are you okay?” he said. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”

Afterward, passing over the Hot Metal Bridge, he asked Letha if she’d like to go to lunch at the club. “Are you sure you have time?” she said.

He didn’t. He nodded. “She has irises,” she said.

He didn’t know what she meant. And then he did and found himself at a momentary loss as though any second now words would be invented.

“I wonder what color her eyes are,” she said. “I need some fresh air, okay?”

He did not object to fresh air and she cracked her window and her bangs danced in the wind.

* * *

Just upriver Olivia leaned against the hood of her pickup, smoking a cigarette in the shadow of the Dragon. This local luminary was a sculpture of rebar and oxygen hosing of a serpent’s head. It stood roughly thirty feet in height between the mill building and the hot stoves of Castle Godfrey. What castle complete? The sculpture’s author was a mystery; the figure made its first appearance on the property in 1991 following the aborted attempt at removing the Bessemer converter for scrap that resulted in the death of one worker and a half dozen injuries. Fearing the hand of some millenarian cult, the sheriff’s department destroyed the statue, only for another of identical placement and proportion to take its place soon after. This process was to repeat itself several times before it graduated into a received part of the landscape, like the pornographic graffiti or scrap pile of exploded electric appliances or pieces of furniture dropped by the more enterprising of bored local youths from the ore bridge.

Sun glinted off the water, causing Olivia to wince and the cigarette to fall from her lips. She crushed it with the toe of her shoe and walked to the entrance of the mill unevenly in heels and went inside. Several minutes passed. There was a breeze and the hawk glided into it, coming to a standstill, wings tilting to and fro like a child on a balance beam. Then the old doors slammed open with a rusty whine and Olivia came stumbling out and, bracing herself on a wall, heaved a dark and glutinous puddle on the ground. She retched herself into dry heaves and then eased herself to the ground and lay on her back. She fished her phone from her purse and dialed. It took a minute to connect with the person she was looking for.

“Sheriff Sworn, Olivia Godfrey … Yes, yes, and yours … Well, I was wondering if it wouldn’t be too much trouble if you would request your men to keep an eye out for any unusual activity around the mill … Precisely … Quite, cheers.”

She stretched her arm and dipped a finger to the puddle and brought the fingertip between her lips.

* * *

Peter was doing a card trick with the Major Arcana for Shelley in the school parking lot when Roman approached and said it would be better if he didn’t come along for the follow-up. Peter gave him an inquisitive glance as he produced the Hanged Man for Shelley. She shook her head and he flicked it aside.

“Der Führer’s panties are in a bunch,” said Roman. “I’ll come by your place in the morning.” Peter flashed the Hierophant. She shook her head again and the card was discarded.

“What is she so afraid of?” said Peter. “Her talons slipping out,” said Roman.

Peter nodded. Then his nose wrinkled and he doubled over in an explosive sneeze and a card fluttered to Shelley’s feet faceup. The Wheel of Fortune. Shelley grinned.

“Gee, I wish I was cool enough to know magic tricks,” said Roman.

He drove Shelley home. An institute van was parked in the drive. When Shelley saw it she clapped her hands and leaped from the cart, which lurched and rocked from side to side. She landed with a whoom that sent a rippled wave through the grass and she bounded to the door, stopping herself short of inadvertently battering it from its hinges. Steadying herself, she attempted to properly turn the knob in a ladylike manner. She was spared the effort as her mother opened the door and stepped out.

“Darling,” she said, “you have a visitor.”

Dr. Pryce stepped into view. “Hello, Glowworm.”

Shelley seized him by the chest and held him aloft, mustering her fullest restraint to prevent herself from spinning.

“Do settle down, dear,” said Olivia.

Shelley set Dr. Pryce back to his feet. He smiled indulgently.

“I was wondering if my best girl would care to join me for a walk?” She tipped up and down like a child on the edges of her cubes. “Hello, Roman,” said Dr. Pryce.

“Hey,” said Roman, passing by. He and Pryce had never had anything but a superficially civil relationship. The doctor fell into the rare category of person that gave even Roman the creeps.

“Any designs on the evening?” said Olivia.

“Nein,” said Roman with a crisp Nazi salute. He went inside.

Dr. Pryce threaded his hand through the crook of Shelley’s arm and they strolled around the house to a trail through the tree line in the rear. She left quadrangular imprints in the ground and bare leaves clumped to her feet. There was gloaming light through the naked trees and he noticed the tip of an earthworm protruding from loose earth. He knelt and pinched it and stood once more, holding its dangling, dirt-speckled pink to the light.

“‘It may be doubted,’” he said, “‘whether there are any other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly creatures.’”

They admired it a moment and then he delicately replaced it. They went on. “Would you like to know a secret, Glowworm?” said Pryce.

She looked down at him. Did he even need to ask?

“Through some quirk of design, I was born with a sense of self,” he said. “Can you imagine anything so horrific? It’s like the terror of waking up and not knowing where you are and the terror of the most lucid nightmare all at once. And if that wasn’t enough, I was born twelve weeks premature. It was no bracing swat on the behind and delivery into loving arms that welcomed me to this world, no—it was the loveless mercy of an artificial womb. My first weeks as a sentient being were spent in solitary confinement. But I’ve always taken issue with that phrase. If anything, it’s lucky I have no tendency toward agoraphobia; the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm, from particles of atom to the far reaches of the universe encompassing thirty powers of ten in space, all within the apparatus of the mind: the firmament without and the firmament within merely opposing sides of the glass. And in that pacific solitude, in full awe and dread: I saw it. Destiny is no more than the fulfillment of purposive potentialities within us. The human cerebral cortex is a single sheet composed of more neurons than there are stars in the known universe folded like a paper crane to fit in a quart-sized cubbyhole; there is enough potential energy in a single person that if released would equal thirty hydrogen bombs. Destiny is nothing to sneeze at! And there I saw my own. So I willed the power to hatch myself from that incubator because my Work in life illumined before me as perfect and outstanding as a single star at night, and I had no time to lose.”

There was a slim tree felled in their path about four feet from the ground. Shelley grasped it and lifted it over her head as they passed under it, letting it crash back behind her.

“I understand,” he said, “you have a certain confidence with your uncle.”

She tensed in expectation of chastisement. He put a pacifying hand on her arm.

“I’m not cross with you. I’m not Olivia. But there is something I have to do, something very important, and by necessity very secret. Have you ever shown your poetry to your mother?”

She looked at him in alarm.

“Exactly. There is nothing wrong with secrets. You know, the alchemists believed that a creative work has a sort of life all its own independent of the creator, straddling the worlds of psyche and matter, of both and neither. A subtle body, they called it. Can you imagine anything so beautiful and precious? All creative expression a reverse eucharist: providing a spirit body! Can you think of what you wouldn’t do

to protect such a spectacle of fragility? There is no shame in hiding some things. Now, you’ve done nothing wrong, but, Glowworm, I do have to ask you, as a personal favor, to repeat nothing I tell you. To anyone. Ouroboros is that important and that vulnerable. Just … trust me that it’s for the best.”

Shelley met his eyes and nodded gravely.

“I am in my best girl’s debt,” said Pryce, “and even more deeply if she gives me a smile.” She grinned.

“I suppose we should turn back. You never know what you’ll run into in the woods these days. And I don’t suppose you’d have room for a slice of pumpkin pie?”

She nodded vigorously. They turned back on the path and a low-lying branch caught in her hair.

“Oh dear,” he said and stood on a large rock, gently disentangling it. He brushed away dry leaf particles.

“I’m so proud of you, you know,” he said. “It’s not for nothing. Your time in this incubator.” Her cheeks flashed dimly like lightning behind cloud.

* * *

Destiny stood at the sink and unscrewed the lid and reached in and pulled out the worm, which she rinsed under the faucet. It had gone from white to a pale blue-red, and while skinny before it now bulged lasciviously.

“Down the hatch,” she said and tipped her head back and swallowed it whole. She sat down and nodded to Peter. On the kitchen table were two leather belts. Peter looped one belt around her abdomen and arms and fastened it tightly. She crossed her ankles and he bound them to the chair with the second belt.

“Are your feet ticklish?” he said.

“It would be your last act on this Earth,” she said. “Don’t go far. This can get a little bumpy.”

Peter stood behind her, bracing her shoulders. Suddenly she sucked in her breath as though at sharp abdominal pain.

“Be quick,” she winced. “It passes fast.”

Just then her head whipped forward and both belts strained taut, catching Peter by surprise and causing him to lose his grip; he only just managed to catch the back of the chair before it tipped forward. Her breathing now hoarse and erratic, she snapped back upright and her hair lashed Peter’s face; her spine arched rigid and her extremities strained as she panted through her nose and began to wrench violently from side to side; the chair lurched and rocked in Peter’s grip. Then she fell limp and the breath rolled down her nose. Her hair draped forward so all he could see were her lips, a loose strand of spittle issuing.

After a moment Peter said, “Can you talk?”

“Yes.” Her voice was brittle and diaphanous, like the wings of a dead insect. “What can you tell me?”

“I hated butterscotch. I was good at trig and liked to sew. All my life I was more afraid than anything of swimming where you couldn’t see the bottom but one day I just wasn’t anymore. I was planning on giving Scott Buford a blow job on his birthday but would have chickened out. My parents always loved me more than my sister. I hope they get that sorted out.”

“What can you tell me about your death?” Peter said more specifically.

“I came to Hemlock Grove because of the invitation. It was dark, and I didn’t see anyone else, but I thought that was part of it. So I parked a little way off and doubled back, like it said. And there he was. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, waiting there in the mist. I’d never seen anything like it. But I wasn’t afraid, not yet. I was in a dream. And then he came to me, but slowly. Like a friend. I could see now it was a dog, but not like any other dog. He was so big. So big and so black. He came to me and I reached

out and held out my hand for him because I’ve always had a way with dogs. This close I could see how tall he was, his head was as high as mine. And so skinny it hurt my heart. Skinny but still strong. Some animals you can just feel it in the air around them, how strong they are. But I wasn’t afraid. I have a way with dogs. I reached out to pet his cheek, and that’s when I saw those eyes. Horrible yellow eyes.”

“What was the invitation?” said Peter. “Where were you?”

Destiny convulsed. She looked up at Peter through eyes that looked far past him.

“The way he looked at me with those eyes,” she said. “That helpless way a dog looks at you when it can’t tell you what it needs.”

Just then Destiny belched once and then twice and her head dropped and the worm slid out of her mouth and slopped to the floor. She looked at Peter.

“Let me up,” she said.

* * *

After cleaning up, Destiny put a hold-on hand to Peter’s arm at the door.

“Another thing,” she said. “How much do you know about this place, Hemlock Grove?” “It’s a place,” he said, trying to look terribly blasé.

“You can play Mr. Big Stuff with me but I’ve seen you cry your eyes out when Nicolae said the utilities guy was Leatherface,” she said.

“What should I know?” he said.

“You need to be very careful around Roman Godfrey and his mother,” she said.

“The little prince has no teeth,” said Peter. “And the queen is an actress. Underneath the mask she’s just bored.”

“He has no teeth yet. But I could see with my Third Eye a trouble with his Anahata chakra, and just like I knew there would be, there’s a dangerous conversion of his fate line and his heart line. He is going to face the hardest choice he will ever have to make, and however he falls will have very very large consequences for anyone around him.

“And you should watch your step around an actress whether or not she’s upir. Because you never know how many masks that crazy bitch is wearing.”

Peter nodded. She tightened her grip.

“Make no mistake about their kind,” she said. “I was in love with an upir once. Someday when I’m drunk enough I’ll tell you about it. But please take my word for it: Never forget what he is. Especially if he has.”

“Okay,” said Peter, impatient. There being no naturally occurring balm for exactly your own doubts quite like the implication that you don’t have them under control.

He paused.

“What do you think of angels?” he said.

“Angels are messengers that help us understand God,” she said. She looked at him. “Why are you asking me about angels?”

“There’s this girl at school,” he said.

“What is it with you and crazy girls?” she said. He didn’t have an answer. He wished he did.

No Upward Limit

That evening Roman stood nude facing the bathroom mirror with the blade of a box cutter pressed just to the side of his pubis, and he made a small incision. He was in the habit of on occasion cutting open— nothing excessive—his chest or his abdomen; not to release any inner pain or cause a fuss, but simply because he liked to, liked the feeling of hot blood trickling down his belly or his legs or his cock, liked the complementarity of it, that life was in essence liquid, not solid. He watched in the mirror the rivulet curve with his hip down his inner thigh and the hairs of his legs stood, the warmth of it versus the cold of the tile under his feet. He tightened his core and clenched his buttocks to increase the flow.

“Bloody invigorating!” he said.

Then his phone rang; the ring was the song “Common People.” “Shit,” he said, reaching for a hand towel.

Downstairs, Roman told his mother he was going to pop off to Letha’s. She searched his face, and finding a trace of that subtle glow his cousin tended to awaken in him that he was not sufficiently artful in mendacity to fake, said, “Fine.”

He continued past but she stopped him. “Just a moment, darling, you’ve got an eyelash.” She put a hand to his face and looked into his eyes.

* * *

“Where’s Peter?” said Letha. “Otherwise engaged,” said Roman.

He lay on her bed and she sat Indian-style on the floor. “So you have dirt for me,” he said.

“In spades,” she said. “I was actually surprised I could get Dad to go into it, but he’s just carrying so much these days he seemed relieved to have an excuse to talk about it. He can’t get away from it, you know. It’s on all sides. But he’ll get through it. He’ll get through it when he holds my baby.”

Roman did not respond.

“So it turns out before Pullman saw the attack he was a test subject in a sleep study at the White Tower,” she said. “He thinks it was connected with an experiment called Project Ouroboros where he was killed and brought back to life.”

“Huh,” said Roman, thinking of Pryce’s unexpected call. “What’s your dad think?”

“He doesn’t know what to think. Considering there were no tracks, if what this guy thought he saw was actually a hallucination it … makes a lot more sense that you guys are right.” She looked down and picked at fringe on the carpet. “That it’s a person.”

Roman nodded. Then he stopped abruptly and looked at her with a blank expression. “What?” she said.

“The institute is one of the most advanced medical centers in the world,” said Roman. “The only thing that matters is where the baby will be safest.”

A moment passed and Roman continued to nod, but now with some confusion. She was confused too. They looked at each other. It passed. Letha turned her head to the side, cracking her neck, and reached back to squeeze a knot in her trapezius.

“Want a back rub?” said Roman.

She scoffed, as a selfish person offering an unselfish gesture can expect.

“Come on,” he said. “You can’t tell me those tits aren’t murdering your shoulders.” “Shut up!” She folded her arms around her chest.

Roman patted the blanket. She bit her lip.

“Your token display of resistance fools no one,” he said.

“Yeah yeah,” she said and climbed next to him, lying prone. He straddled her and took a seat on the cushion of her posterior and tucked her hair to the side.

“You’ll have to excuse me if my performance isn’t one hundred percent,” he said. “I’m not used to doing this through a shirt.”

“You’re so gross! If I wanted to hear about your whoredom I’d pay more attention in the girls’ bathroom.”

He dug his thumbs into her trapezius and made slow semicircles, radiating outward to her deltoids. She inhaled sharply and let it out in a long slow breath. He worked his knuckles into her scapulae.

“You are good at this,” she said. “Gross!”

Her nose wrinkled from an itch and she rubbed it with the back of her hand. He took her wrist and regarded the ring on her finger.

“What’s this?”

“A prize. Peter said it was good luck.”

Roman said nothing. He worked his thumbs incrementally down her spine, then slid his fingers under her shirt and kneaded her waist and the dimples of flesh on either side of the small of her back.

“Right there. Ohmygod right there,” she said.

There was a clipped knock and then Marie Godfrey entered before waiting for a response. “Honey, that dancing show you like is on,” she said.

“Thanks, Mom,” said Letha.

Marie hovered at the door, in a conundrum over her disapproval and lack of theoretical ground to protest.

“Ooh, am I next?” she said with a laugh of unpleasant brittleness that her ears regretted registering as her own.

“Absolutely,” said Roman, giving her a wink that made her wish she was carrying a hatpin.

“Oh, Mom,” said Letha, “I think I’m going to see about switching treatment to the institute. I know Dad will have a conniption, but it’s one of the most advanced medical centers in the world, and the only thing that matters is where the baby will be safest.”

* * *

Dr. Godfrey sat with the phone to his ear, drumming his fingers on a jar on his desk containing two fist-sized skeins of intricately woven crimson fibers: the blood vessels of the brain cast in colored polymer— a gift from the Women’s Psychiatric Society for his generosity to their cause. He inquired of his wife what precisely he was supposed to do about it.

She apologized. “I meant to call someone with some kind of control over what happens under his roof,” she said.

Dial tone filled his ear. His hand fell away but he did not replace the phone in the cradle. He sat regarding the dead pinholes of the receiver.

* * *

“How very goddamn mysterious,” said Olivia. She closed Godfrey’s office door behind her. “The monsieur summoned?” she said.

He didn’t get up from behind his desk. She sat on the couch, reclining. “What is Johann up to?” he said.

“Why on earth should I know?” she said.

“Anytime I try to pick up his leash he goes hiding behind your skirts. Why is that?”

“Because as long as I’m apprised of quarterlies, I concern myself as little as possible with … whatever it is Johann does,” she said.

“My daughter has decided she’d like to pursue treatment at the institute,” he said. “Sensible,” she said.

“It won’t happen while I’m alive.”

“You’re looking at me like I’m supposed to argue about something that’s none of my business.” “What about the bid to buy me out? That’s your business.”

“If someone wants your share, it’s news to me,” she said indifferently.

“When you’re lying about something I know you know, exactly what do you want me to believe?” he said.

She rose and went to his wall cabinet and took out a bottle of scotch.

“From what I’ve seen, people believe exactly what they want to, independent of your encouragement,” she said. She poured a glass.

Godfrey looked at her. The first time she had been in his office since she was a patient. Eliciting the same response she always had then, never replicated by another: outrage over his own inability to control his feelings.

“How can you not care after what he did to Shelley?” said Godfrey, ears flushing with a rising anger happier than any drunk. “Do you have antifreeze in your veins?”

She didn’t reply.

“What kind of mother are you?” he said, unfair, awful, and exalted.

She replaced the scotch on the shelf, putting the bottle on its side without screwing the cap back on and shutting the door. She returned to the couch as the liquid began flowing from the crack in the door down the paneling and puddled on the carpet.

Godfrey rose and went to the couch, standing over her. “Stand up,” he said.

“Thank God,” she said. “I was worrying you only had me over because Marie doesn’t listen anymore when you’re feeling boorish.”

He took the glass out of her hands and put it on the table, then reached his hand under her skirt and jerked on her panties, which slid down to her shoes. They faced each other. She breathed the smell of scotch into his face.

“Does that help you get it up these days?” she said.

He took her by the shoulders and turned her around and forced her down to her knees doubled over the couch. He knelt and hiked her skirt over her waist and slapped her with force on the buttocks. She breathed out sharply. He slapped her again, and again, and again, and she let out a cry and braced her hands on the cushions to push herself up. He reached with his left hand and gripped her by the neck and held her in place as he struck her with greater abandon, her shoulders racking with low sobs now and her bare flesh imprinted a luminous mottle of sunset red over a glimmering vulva like a heat mirage on the highway, the sight of which gripped his heart like such a vista of natural beauty one desires with every molecule but never can possess. He sank down, encircling her thighs with his arms and running his lips

and his tongue over her rear and the small of her back. She pushed back against him and sank to the floor, reaching for his crotch and removing his belt and tossing it to the side. She unclasped his trousers and lay back and he parted her legs, entering her gently and kissing the wetness of tears on her face. She looked him impatiently in the face.

“Like you mean it,” she said. He thrust.

“Yes,” she said.

He quickly built up a new head of steam. He felt like a rabid little rodent. He felt like a god of carnage. How he felt mattered much less than the fact of feeling so much of it.

Later he stood and took a box of tissues from his desk and handed it to her. She seized his hand. “Come here,” she said.

He allowed her to pull him down. He lay with his head to her breast and she ran her hand up and down his back. Their first time had been on this floor many years ago. If it had seemed like he couldn’t have felt worse about it then it was because he had been too young a man to know yet that time is cyclical, that there is no upward limit to the number of times you can make the same mistake.

“My poor, poor Norman,” she said.

He would have liked to lie here weeping for a while but was too depleted to cry. It felt like all the world’s kindness was in the flat of her hand.

A Large Bad Thing

The next morning Roman and Peter went to 7 Royal Oaks Drive in Penrose. There was an SUV parked in the driveway with a bumper sticker for the losing Republican ticket of the latest gubernatorial race. On the porch hung a Thanksgiving flag of a cornucopia and lying over the mouth of one garbage can on the sidewalk was a mat with a paw print in place of the o in Welcome. A pale middle-aged man answered the door. He was wearing glasses with a fingerprint smudge on the edge of one lens and a Steelers T-shirt and sweatpants, his neck and chin pink and red stubbled with razor burn. He had not clipped his toenails recently.

“Can I help you?” he said.

“Mr. Willoughby?” said Roman.

“Yes?” He was medded out and apathetic about their identity or the purpose of their call. “Is Mrs. Willoughby in?” said Roman.

“No, she isn’t.”

Roman looked him in the eye. “Why don’t you go take a nap.”

Mr. Willoughby went inside to a couch and lay with his back to the room like a cartoon drunk. Peter went to the stairs but Roman lingered over the man. He removed the man’s glasses and breathed on the lens and wiped the smudge with his blazer. Peter looked at Roman and jerked his head in the direction of the stairs. Eyes on the ball. Roman set the glasses on the table and followed him to the second floor, where they began opening doors. Peter found the bathroom and Roman what appeared to be a teenage girl’s room. Peter looked in and said, “This bed has been slept in.”

The next room they tried was Lisa’s. The bed was made and would not be unmade soon. On one wall was a corkboard with pictures of Lisa and her friends tacked to it as well as a hodgepodge of images of popular musicians and exotic travel destinations and a magazine fitness regimen. On her desk was an artist’s dummy in a miniature ballroom gown doing a pirouette on top of a sewing machine. Roman went through her dresser, and Peter her desk. Peter flipped through all her letters and school notebooks and college brochures. He found a doodle she’d apparently done during social studies of a Pilgrim woman being chased delightedly by a Native American with a massive erection tenting his loincloth, and a single sheet of computer paper with a heading on the top: HOW TO CHANGE. The rest of the page was blank. He replaced her things in the order he found them.

“Anything?” he asked Roman.

Roman held up a pair of white panties with cotton on the back like a bunny tail. “Hippity hop,” he said. Peter dug through her closet, Roman pulled a box of childhood photos and mementos from under her

bed.

“What if it’s in her car?” said Roman, neatly stacking elementary school class photos and construction paper valentines. “What if it was in her purse?”

“I’ll never understand what a person can do with so many darned shoes,” said Peter, who himself wore only the things as often as custom or climate made necessary.

Roman added a program for an old Swan Lake recital to the pile. He held up a picture of eleven- or twelve-year-old Lisa in the costume of a Depression-era hobo with a five o’clock shadow done in charcoal. “Riding the rails,” he said.

“What are you looking for?” said a girl in the doorway.

Roman and Peter turned. She was about fifteen, with the unappealing variation on her sister’s beauty, and overweight. Roman glanced at Peter, who held up his hand. He would field this one.

“We’re looking for a piece of mail that would have come for your sister,” said Peter. “We think someone might have killed her.”

“Someone like you?” she said. “Touché,” said Roman.

“Roman,” said Peter. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Were you the ones who dug her up?” said the girl. They were quiet.

“I don’t care,” said the girl. “Like that’s so much worse than what already happens when you die. There are things living inside you right now that will eat you from the inside out. It’s called symbiosis. Mom used to call me ‘the sentimental one.’ She’s out taking Gary to be put down now. She can’t handle a dog being around, and Dad can’t handle the dog Lisa loved so much having new owners. I always thought he was an annoying little fucker, but it still seems like a bit much for a Boston terrier.”

The girl looked at them with eyes as opaque as candle wax.

“I have it,” she said. “What you’re looking for. I’ll get it.” She disappeared. Roman looked at Peter. “Sorry,” he said.

Peter said nothing.

The girl returned moments later with a blank black envelope.

“I wanted to borrow a pair of socks and I found this,” she said. “I wanted to come along, but she wouldn’t take me. I … had an, I don’t know, a flash. Maybe at the time it wasn’t really a flash of anything, it just feels like it looking back. But you know how it is when you’re mad at someone when they’re leaving and part of you thinks, What if something happens and I never see her again and what I say now is the last thing I ever say? And I looked at her and she was always so fucking pretty and I said I hope she ends up left in a Dumpster.”

She handed the envelope to Peter.

“I showed it to my parents, but they just got pissed,” she said. “They think it was just an animal. They think it was just me trying to get attention.”

Peter opened the envelope and pulled out a card of black construction paper with lettering of glitter and glue and read it. He looked at Roman.

“You’re Roman Godfrey, aren’t you?” said the girl. “How do you know who I am?” said Roman. “You’re a Godfrey,” said the girl.

“What is that?” said Roman. “What does that say?” “I thought you might be here for me too,” said the girl.

Peter handed the card to him. Roman looked at it and was quiet. “I guess you’re not,” said the girl, morose.

The card was an invitation to a party. The party was INVITATION ONLY and you were not to tell another LIVING SOUL. SHHHHHHH, it said. The party was being held at Castle Godfrey the night of the full moon.

“Do you have any idea who might have sent her that?” said Peter.

“No, I don’t. She didn’t have any friends from Hemlock Grove that I knew of. But someone did steal her wallet out of her purse at a Starbucks there a couple of weeks ago. I figured you guys might have it.”

Roman didn’t respond or seem to be paying that much attention anymore. He held the invitation with his name on it as he would a sacred text.

“Thank you,” said Peter. “This is a lot of help.”

“Why are you looking for him?” said the girl. “The one who did this?” “Because he’s going to be joining Gary,” said Roman.

* * *

Olivia took Shelley on a trip to the library. They branched out to different sections, Shelley physics and Olivia periodicals. Shelley passed the children’s section. A woman in a rocking chair was reading to a semicircle of children on the rug. “Not by the hairs of my chinny-chin-chin,” she said. Then she stopped as Shelley passed and the children turned. Shelley was immobilized—all those little eyes Lilliputian stakes. A little girl slid out and touched one of Shelley’s cubes with an expression of awe. The right side of Shelley’s face curled into a smile. A dark stain formed in the lap of a quivering boy and he began to cry. The storyteller knelt forward and shushed the boy but his tears began to spread from child to child like match heads flaring too quickly for the storyteller to contain. Shelley moved on.

Olivia heard the dim chorus of terror and hummed quietly to herself, selecting a wooden-spooled Wall Street Journal. It is commonly expected that wealthy families go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, and JR, being of the fourth and solely responsible for saving the Godfrey fortune from certain ruin, believed this could be forestalled largely by the concerned parties being able to make hide or hair of the financial page without the assistance of flunkies. Early in his education of his wife she had balked— the only figure she could be expected to be overly troubled with was her own—but surprisingly got the hang of it upon realizing its relationship to her own art: once decoded, the market, like the stage or the heart, was simply another arena in which desire went to war. An elderly man of the sort that can be found at libraries with a preference for print periodicals, sitting at a nearby table, said, “At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I’m always damn impressed to see a lady with a nose for business.”

She turned to him, and seeing that the nose in question was connected to Olivia Godfrey, the affability drained from his face and his mouth spread wide in a death grin.

“Why, thank you,” she said, herself old-fashioned enough to receive a man’s compliment in the spirit it was intended.

Olivia and Shelley convened at two armchairs upstairs overlooking the windows. The springs in Shelley’s chair sagged nearly to the floor as she opened her book. Olivia craned her neck, reading aloud over her daughter’s shoulder:

“‘Of course, minute as its impact may be in our physical universe, the fact of quantum entanglement is this: If one logically inexplicable thing is known to exist, then this permits the existence of all logically inexplicable things. A thing may be of deeper impossibility than another, in the sense that you can be more deeply underwater—but whether you are five feet or five fathoms from the surface you are still all wet.’” Shelley clapped the book shut and folded her arms in a pout. But then her eyes lit (not a turn of phrase) and she rose, waving vigorously. Olivia looked over. The object of her daughter’s enthusiasm was a girl of approximately her own age accompanying an old woman with a stack of trashy detective thrillers, a small girl with a black raven’s nest bramble of hair and one glaring lock of white bang that to Olivia’s

authoritative eye was not a dye job. The girl, if she was not mistaken, who had found Lisa Willoughby. Christina responded to her classmate’s cheer in seeing her out and in good spirits with a smile of her

own, but it faltered under the refracting blackness of Olivia’s sunglasses. She hurried on with her grandmother.

Disappointed, Shelley sat, and in so doing the afternoon light glinting off cars in the parking lot caught Olivia’s eye. Olivia tried to look away but could not. Suddenly and irreversibly at its mercy. The light transfixing her, the shadow closing in. The shadow just waiting for her to get distracted by the light

shimmering gold like a field of—

Shelley looked up as her mother braced one hand on the arm of the chair and drew the fingertips of the other softly down her own her face and her eyelids fluttered and she said, “The sunflowers…”

And with that crashed to the floor.

* * *

“It’s just an empty, out-of-the-way place,” said Peter as he exited the car. “It doesn’t mean anything for all we know.”

Roman looked off to a patch of bare rockface in the hillside where a tree grew outward in the shape of a J.

“Do you know what that’s called?” said Roman. “When the root system is right there in the rock. Do they have a name for that?”

“I don’t know,” said Peter. “A lot of things have names.”

They agreed to convene later in the evening and Peter went inside where Lynda was watching TV and putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a commonly reproduced Monet.

Lynda told Peter Lisa had stopped by. “‘Lisa’?” said Peter.

* * *

From the archives of Norman Godfrey:

NG: I spoke with Dr. Pryce. FP: …

NG: Do you know who Dr. Pryce is, Francis? FP: Yeah. I know him.

NG: He says you participated in a medical experiment at the Godfrey Institute. Is that true? FP: So what?

NG: Is there a reason you didn’t mention that before? FP: I did tell you. They killed us.

NG: According to Dr. Pryce, you took a highly experimental barbiturate. FP: I’m not a fucking liar.

NG: No one’s saying that. I just wanted to get a better sense of what you’re going through. FP: They fucking gave us something, all right. They killed us and brought us back.

NG: Francis, can you possibly help me understand the … mechanics of that? FP: Today I have seen the Dragon …

NG: Can you elaborate on the things you see? FP: Things … come in my head.

NG: What kinds of things?

FP: Baby in a blood pouch. River glowing red. Dog hatching from a big black egg. Needle the size of a sword. Demon with a crown of light.

NG: This needle—was it some kind of drug?

FP: This is not about goddamn drugs! This is some evil, unnatural shit that has no business happening. You think this is just some junkie bullshit, talk to one of the other guys, see how they’re sleeping. I even got a name for you, saw it on the chart by mine. Varga, H. You talk to H. fucking Varga before you start looking at me like I’m making this shit up.

NG: Francis, please calm down. I’m not jumping to any conclusions.

FP: Yeah. Godfrey’s your fucking name. I bet it’d be real nice for you to come to the fucking conclusion

this was all just some old nigger junkie bullshit.

NG: Francis, please, I’m here to help you. I’m a doctor, I just want to help … someone. FP: …

NG: …

FP: Then make it stop. (Nurse Kotar enters.)

NK: Doctor, I’m sorry to interrupt, but you have an urgent phone call.

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 621