Wisdom Is Where the Brain Meets the Heart

The chapel stood against the tree line under the gray of the sky, near enough in shade that it could have been an afterthought from the same brush. In the sanctuary, dusk light filled the chapel and cobwebs stretched between the crossbeams and the outside air sent small dust devils up the aisle as Dr. Godfrey shut the heavy oak doors. He assessed the situation and soon after took Roman back across the campus to the main facility on a supply run, Peter still needing clothes and Godfrey needing information that separating the suspects was more likely to provide. Godfrey put an arm around his nephew.

“Good to see you walking, kiddo. Now what the hell is going on?” “Sometimes…” said Roman, and then he stopped, hesitating. “Sometimes what?” said Godfrey.

“Sometimes a wolf goes crazy and doesn’t eat what it kills.”

Godfrey’s first impulse was to consider this an evasion, but something older and deeper told him otherwise.

“When you say a wolf, what exactly do you mean?” “I mean a werewolf.”

Godfrey considered this. Any other day of his adult life and he would have been detaching himself and analyzing the cause of this shared delusion—plainly enough, it wasn’t a lie. But he had resolved in the blue dawn, looking into his coffee and seeing the whorl of cream and knowing absolutely he was witness to the transmigration of two souls, knowing it had happened again and it hadn’t happened to her and being as thankful as he was for anything, he had resolved to emerge from the world of shadow and come to a Rational Explanation for what was going on, and now in light of day it was necessary and impractical clarification he finally achieved. There was no such explanation. So, unfettering oneself of irreconcilables, where did this leave one? A werewolf loose in Hemlock Grove. How offensively obvious. And more striking than simple credulity was the realization that in a dark and hermetic corner of his mind he had of course known already.

He gestured to a bench and sat.

“Is it Peter?” he said, cringing inside. “It’s not Peter.”

“Peter isn’t a werewolf?” “He is. But it’s not him.”

Godfrey was unsure how he felt about this. “I was with him last night,” said Roman.

Godfrey nodded. “And you’ve been trying to find this … bad werewolf?” “He’s not really bad, he’s just sick,” said Roman.

“But you didn’t find him?” “I was in a coma.” Godfrey chuckled. Oh that.

“Supposing,” said Godfrey, “you were to sum up as much as you’ve actually learned that we can use.” Roman thought about it. He shrugged. Godfrey waited for something to follow but realized the shrug

itself was his answer.

He patted Roman’s knee and squeezed. “I believe,” he said and nodded at the chapel, “they’ll be able to keep themselves entertained long enough for us to step into my office and have a drink.”

They stood and continued.

“So we have another month to find the bad wolf,” said Godfrey. “Vargulf,” said Roman.

“Gesundheit,” said Godfrey. “In the meantime keeping that one away from the torches and pitchforks?” Roman nodded. More or less.

Godfrey flicked the edge of a withered holdout birch leaf. So, a goal. Or something. And compared with living day to day with your head in a lion’s mouth of cloying and impenetrable nothing, what was there to say? Wisdom was where the brain met the heart and what he felt right now was the literal difference between life and death. He felt something that he hadn’t felt since his aborted attempt to break things off with Olivia. He felt like drinking to be more and not less awake.

“Where’s your mother?” he asked. Roman looked off down the path. “She’s with Shelley.”

* * *

It was nearly dark and the two of them were alone. Dr. Godfrey would return after nightfall to bring food and take her home. They lay on a pile of blankets on the altar, Peter wearing scrubs and Godfrey’s sweater and Letha in his arms. Above them the stained glass was pelted by a light rain.

“They were in their beds,” said Letha. “The sheriff was on a call. But he had a car outside, and they didn’t see anything. Whatever it was got in without being seen and … did that. That’s no wild animal. What kind of person has it in them to do that?”

The cat leaped onto the windowsill and sat; his dangling tail flicked, keeping time. Peter slipped his hand up under her shirt and ran his hand in slow hemispheres over her stomach. She toyed with the snake ring encircling her finger.

“Do you think plastic has a consciousness like stone or wood?” she said. “Do you think it remembers where it’s been?”

She took his arm and pulled it over her snug and they lay listening to the rain for a while. She thought about the life that grew inside her and the shadow of all this death. That if a thing is defined in contrast that’s what life is, the shadow of death. So the mystery of death couldn’t be the bad thing, because without it there wouldn’t be life. The badness was life, just life happening, as essential a part of the good as the good. And what was there to do but to take it as it comes and to hope, to hope constantly and carnally and with no time to lose.

She pulled his hand over her breast. “In … church?” he said.

Afterward they fell still, glowing and panting. She lay over him, unmoving, in routine feminine disregard for the man’s body heat situation in such circumstances, but earlier in the day he had known he would never be warm again so he’d take it. Suddenly a black blur caught Peter’s eye, the cat bolting from the window. And he looked over just in time to notice movement on the other side of the glass, a fleeting apparition disappearing before he could make anything out but the red-stained shock of white hair.

* * *

Shelley still seemed shaken when Roman got home so he tucked her in for a nap and said he would make dinner. The steak package was still on the kitchen counter, dried pink on the white diaper pad, and the meat on the floor had been stepped on. He cleaned up and was running hot water over the mop when Olivia said, “What happened to the front door?”

Roman turned. She wore a long white cardigan with the sleeves hanging girlishly past her thumbs and her hair was in a ponytail, and there was nothing in her demeanor to suggest she had been missing a night and a day or all the things that had happened in that time.

“Where have you been?” he said.

“The institute. I had a bit of a spell. But Johann says it’s nothing to worry about.” They looked at each other.

“I feel much better now,” she said. Roman wrung out the mop.

* * *

At the other Godfrey household Marie was waiting for her husband and daughter to arrive. Dr. Godfrey had a sinking feeling, confronted with her in the foyer. She had known Letha was with him and even called twice to verify when they would be home. So what now?

“It was the soonest we could get away,” he said, preempting his defense.

She did not respond. She came forward, that tension deliquescing like snow packed in a tight fist, and she seized Letha and held tightly. There was a tremor in her shoulders. She had not been angry, she just needed to hold her daughter.

Letha went upstairs and Godfrey sat in the armchair in the living room and exhaled. Long day. Long long day. Marie sat on the arm of the chair and rested a hand on the back of his neck and squeezed. They didn’t look at each other, he just sat and felt the good pressure on his neck.

“Have you eaten?” said Marie. Godfrey shook his head.

“I made you a mouse,” said Marie, making her voice nasal in an impression of the actress Ruth Gordon. “A nice chocolate mouse.”

Godfrey smiled and his shoulders shook and he began laughing. The explanation for why this was funny to them goes back a long way.

Godfrey said that he was going to grab a shower, and that that sounded perfect.

Godfrey showered, and parsed with the heedless lucidity of exhaustion the guilt he felt over the ugliness of his thoughts toward his wife, a woman whose greatest crime was giving her best years to a marriage with a man who was in love with an enemy she knew had the power to destroy her family. And he came to the second revelation of the day, and emphatically more immediate and inconvenient than the acceptance of men from time to time becoming wolves. He was ashamed. He was ashamed and so was Marie, ashamed over their years of complicity in never saying it: he was married to a woman he hadn’t loved since the first time he saw Olivia.

He looked down and had a vision of the particles of dead flesh breaking from his torso and sluicing down the drain. Well, that was wrong. That was the wrong way to live.

He turned and cracked his spine. Six months, he decided. Six months was reasonable to acquit his obligations. After the birth. Twenty years ago, six months would have been an eternity. All those dinner parties, the slow, sweet poison of lingering glances, clinking glasses with her ringing through him for days after; ultimately the crisis as a doctor and a husband and a brother whether or not to take her on as a patient, the woman he’d contrived every opportunity to see if only to feel her fingers graze his arm as she laughed. Knowing before ever seeing it that her ass was like a stationary drop of water on a flower stem —twenty years ago, the six months it took before the first time he took possession of this remarkable ass

were a torment.

Coming off a stretch of forty eventful waking hours, Godfrey felt something he had difficulty identifying at first. Something that in practical reality could hardly be less self-evident or inalienable. He felt free. Just imagine. After the passage and permutation of so much time, time a wheel always turning back on itself and yet moving forward all the while, he would in six months finally arrive at the destination of a long and by the day more astonishing journey. He would live right and have faith in love. He would become a grandfather, and he would marry Olivia.

Later, in bed, Dr. Godfrey finally fell into the most earned sleep of his life. And then his phone rang to inform him Christina Wendall had disappeared.

The Price

With a troubling sense of déjà vu Peter was shaken awake by Roman the second day running. “I ordered a redhead,” said Peter.

Roman did not acknowledge the joke. “What?” said Peter.

Roman walked to the pulpit and placed both hands flat. Hoping the pose might invest him with … he didn’t know what. But it didn’t do anything, so he just said what there was to say.

“Another one.” “Another what?”

“Last night. Another girl.” Peter was quiet for a moment. “Who?” he said.

“They don’t know. No head. But it wasn’t her. I went there before I came here.”

Peter was quiet. He put his fingertip to the floorboard and traced the words thank you in the old tongue and then blew the words away.

“It was the wrong moon,” said Roman. “That’s impossible, right?” “Sure,” said Peter agreeably.

The cat leaped onto the pulpit and raised his haunch pleasurably as Roman knuckled where his tail met his rear.

“Now what?” said Roman.

Peter lay back and closed his eyes.

“We need to talk to Destiny,” he said. “Destiny knows more about the protocols than I do. She might have an idea.”

He did not add that she better, because he was out of his own.

“If you go anywhere, you’re going to get shot,” said Roman. “Shot if you’re lucky.”

“You go. And hurry. You need to be with Letha by sundown. No chances tonight, she’s on your watch. She’s on your watch until this is over. That’s your job now.”

Roman looked at Peter. The motes in the light that fell between them went about their own affairs. “I know,” said Roman.

The cat splayed on his back and Roman rubbed his belly. He curled like a black velvet fist around his hand and bit him.

“Hey hey hey,” said Roman, “we don’t love with our teeth.”

He cut through a trail not far from the chapel that ran from the campus between the hills. The opposite mouth of the trail opened on 443 and Dr. Godfrey had said to use it for their comings and goings. Little knowing this precaution failed in preventing Christina Wendall from spying uncle and nephew spiriting provisions to the chapel the previous afternoon. How little we all knew.

Roman drove to Destiny’s apartment in Shadyside. While parking, he noticed in the street a crow

picking at something flat and black on the pavement. Roadkill. Something off somehow. Roman got out and saw that the crow was feeding on the remains of another crow. A black feather tufted from the diner’s beak. This was highly distressing to Roman.

“Hey!” he said in the admonishing tone of a counselor to a rowdy camper. “You—you stop that! No way, José!”

The crow looked at him, but when he didn’t move any closer it resumed a disinterested pecking at its brethren as though nibbling more out of boredom than anything else and Roman felt a queasy impotence in chastising this abysmal augur. He shook it off as best he could and went upstairs and was admitted by Lynda, who seized him into a embrace that crushed an exhalation from his diaphragm.

“How is he? How’s my baby?” “He’s safe,” Roman said.

“What does he need?” said Destiny.

Roman brought her up to speed. Destiny pursed her lips and nodded mechanically for a while after he had stopped speaking.

“How is this happening?” said Roman.

She was uncomfortable. She picked up a shaker of salt from the table and shook some into her hand and threw it over her left shoulder. It was cold comfort.

“The laws of magic are like the laws of anything,” she said. “They work because you obey them.” “You can just break them?” he said.

“Not for free,” she said. “How do we fight it?” he said.

She looked at him. “It’s time for you to admit this isn’t your fight.” “How does Peter fight it?” he said.

“How do wolves usually fight?” she said.

“Can Peter do the same thing? Turn when the moon is wrong?” “Not for free,” she said.

Lynda had been quiet but interjected now. “What’s the price?” she said.

“I don’t know,” said Destiny. “The only person who can know the answer to that is Peter. I can give him what he needs to find the answer, but I have to tell you, I’m pessimistic, Lyn. I’m pessimistic there’s any answer that isn’t going to be a giant shit sandwich for him to eat.”

Lynda considered this. “The brother of the man Nicolae killed found us years and years later,” she said eventually. “Nicolae had to become a murderer twice in his life; these fires go out but the coals don’t. If this isn’t ended it will be just around the corner every day of his life. And if you don’t let a boy become a man, it’s no one’s fault but your own when you’re still wiping his ass when he should be making you grandchildren.”

Destiny said nothing. She went to a shelving unit and began rummaging through drawers.

Lynda took both of Roman’s hands in hers, and looking at her face he knew that what he was seeing was a person doing the hardest thing she was ever called to in her life. He knew that this was the face he would be forced to look into for all eternity if he fucked this up.

“I miss when he was a baby,” she said. “If I could flip a switch, I’d just live in a whole world of babies.”

Shortly after, Destiny gave him the provisions Peter would require but stopped him from leaving immediately. She stood in front of him and faced him, casting her eyes just over the top of his head and then closing them. After a moment she opened them again and said okay.

“What?” he said.

“Your Sahasrara,” she said. She held a hand over her own crown, indicating. “Sometimes it glows.”

* * *

They lit five beeswax candles and within this perimeter made a consecrate circle of chalk in the aisle, and Roman took a small satchel and emptied it in the center, making a pile of ash of willow bark and beggar’s button and powdered greenfly, the still point in a turning world.

They held hands and the ganglia of their palms kindled discreetly as the frequency passed between them and Peter quietly said the old, old words as they walked three times the sinister path around the consecrate circle. This done, Roman did not know if he ought to be detecting any sort of shift in the balance of things, but he was not as sensitive as Peter.

“We … in business?” he said.

Peter didn’t answer. Roman didn’t speak, he didn’t like the look that was now on Peter’s face, and neither did Peter, wearing it. Peter walked down a pew and hunkered to his knees. Then straightened, returning with Fetchit in his arms. He knelt in the circle. The candle flicker spooked the cat and it attempted to worm free, but Peter held fast even as the struggle intensified with slashing claws and an unsettlingly human whine.

But … I trusted you, thought the cat. “What are you doing?” Roman said.

“You might want to turn around,” said Peter. “What are you doing?” Roman said again.

Peter looked at him. Roman turned and looked up at the organ loft and the sounds of the cat’s resistance ended with a popping sound like a shoulder dislocating. It was the worst thing he’d ever heard.

“It’s over,” said Peter.

But Roman didn’t turn. He now hated the food in his stomach. He hated his relief that he had not been called, that this really was Peter’s fight. He heard Peter open a penknife.

“I’m going to go outside for a minute,” said Roman. “Okay,” said Peter. “That’s okay.”

Roman walked out and sat on the front steps. Storm clouds overhead as though someone had stood on the hills and run a roller of black paint over the sky. Roman wondered if someone was in a plane over the cloud cover at that moment, closing his window to block out the sun. Roman hoped his chair got kicked. He reached into his blazer and took out the tin mint container. Opened it and took out a Xanax and chewed it, the bitter lingering on his tongue. A little while after, the door opened behind him and Peter emerged.

“What are you doing?” said Roman. “You can’t be out here.”

But Peter did not look at him and Roman saw his eyes were like the eyes of the wolf, eyes with no regard for making conversation. He walked to the tree line and disappeared. Roman popped another Xanax and the cloud bank became a luminous bruise as lightning flickered without sound.

Roman waited on the steps.

“What the fuck,” said Roman and his eyes were hot with water. “The fucking cat.”

A few minutes later Peter emerged from the tree line and sat next to Roman on the steps. He didn’t say anything. He stared off in the manner of a person who had just been handed one giant shit sandwich. Roman waited for him to say something.

“Bacon,” said Peter eventually.

Roman waited for him to say more than that. “I’m going to need bacon grease,” said Peter. “Is that how you fight it?” said Roman.

“Yeah,” said Peter.

“Is there … a price?” said Roman. Peter rubbed his face.

“It’s my face,” said Peter. “The price is my human face.”

Roman rose and put his hands in his pockets as though to take the air. But he didn’t go anywhere. He just stood there on the steps next to Peter with his hands in his pockets.

“Did Nicolae really walk across the ocean with lily pads on his feet?” said Roman. “No,” said Peter. “He stole a car at the nearest farm and sold it for airfare.”

“Oh,” said Roman.

“I’m going to need bacon grease,” said Peter. “A lot of it.” “Sure,” said Roman.

* * *

At Godfrey House, Roman stood over an iron skillet of a full pound of bacon spitting and cackling like perdition’s coven when he felt a pair of hands massage his neck.

“I believe,” said Olivia, “that’s enough cholesterol to see you comfortably into your dotage.” Roman prodded at the skillet with a spatula.

“It’s going to end tonight,” he said. “Tonight we’re going to kill it.” She squeezed. “Do turn the fan on. It will stink of pig to high heaven.”

When it was finished Roman drained the grease into a Tupperware container and wrapped the strips in wax paper and set them aside for Shelley. He went out to his car and Olivia followed and placed a hand on his arm. He turned to her and took the shame over his softness in the chapel and made it hardness here. He was going to stand by Peter. Nothing was going to stop him from standing by Peter.

“If you may spare a moment for your mother,” she said.

He studied her face, holding the hardness of his own. She was holding a thin black attaché case. “Please, Roman,” she said.

He set the container in the passenger side and she took his hand and led him to the back of the house, where he saw that she had moved the freestanding floor mirror from the guest room to the patio. On its oval face there was simple line drawing of a wolf made with white nail polish and within its chest a spot of red. Its heart. She handed him the attaché case and told him to open it. Inside was a small and ornate double-bladed axe. It was made of silver and the handle consisted of the bodies of two intertwining serpents, the heads flattening into the blade edges. It had the gleam of a recent polish but this was cosmetic: make no mistake, it was very very old. She drew him to the mirror and stood behind him. She placed her hands on his shoulders and told him to look into the glass and he did. She asked what he saw.

He didn’t understand. “I see us,” he said. “Look closer,” she said.

He met her eyes in the mirror and lids of his own fluttered and fingers came from the shadow place and closed around his field of vision and things went dark. But there was a sound. His ears were filled with the sound of a pulse, but it was not his own. He felt this pulse ringing in all of his nerve endings and he saw again, he saw through the pall of the shadow like the sun burning through cloud and he knew he was standing on a threshold and he knew what was real: the mirror, and in the mirror the heart of the wolf pumping and alive, and this was what his mother had wanted him to see.

It was his Kill.

Roman lifted the axe over his head and could feel with the back of his neck his mother’s smile, and he brought the axe plunging down into the heart of it.

The breaking glass returned Roman to his senses and he backed away, panting and in a sweat in the cold air. Olivia pulled the axe from the splintered backboard and placed it back into the case and handed it to Roman.

“Try not to lose it,” said Olivia, “it goes back rather a long way.”

He did not know what to say. He did not have words for his gratitude. She put a hand to his face. “We don’t need words,” she said.

You Moved

Sunset is at 4:55. You’ll want to keep that in mind.

* * *

P.m.

Chasseur woke to the sight of angels’ wings. They were spread on the wall above her, the color of rust and portent, whether rising or falling in the eye of the beholder. She attempted to move but found that both her wrists and feet were bound by her own ZipCuffs. She rolled to one side. The floor on which she lay was covered with paper and detritus, and several yards away was a door opening on the main floor of the mill building, the outline of the Bessemer visible over the rail of the stairs. She rolled to the other side. There was another pair of wings on the floor next to her, and more on the ceiling. It had to be admired, grudgingly: the artistic spirit in its purest incarnation, unintended for the eyes of the living. But more relevant to her reconnaissance: the artist herself was absent, leaving her for the moment alone, and there was a west-facing window jagged with broken glass like broken teeth through which the setting sun was visible, perfectly framed between the hilltop and cloud bank like God’s eye peering through, as astonishing and unprecedented a sight as every sunset of her life. So another gift, the two crucial elements of an escape-and-evade scenario: time and opportunity.

She rolled to her belly and wended to the wall. It occurred to her that she no longer smelled of the urine she’d used to mask her own scent, or for that matter her own evacuation, which would have been an inevitable consequence of being unconscious for a day or more. She had been cleaned, her clothes laundered. And she felt between her legs a strange but familiar imposition: a feminine sanitary product, too long for her and ill-fitting, not her preferred brand. At least two days then, if it was that time of her cycle. She couldn’t connect her last waking memory with her present circumstances but how she got here wasn’t what mattered, getting out was. She shifted to a wobbling kneel, reached for the windowsill, and pulled herself to a standing position. From there she pivoted, bracing her elbow for increased stability, and brought the plastic of the ZipCuffs to a shard of glass and ran her hands back and forth in a sawing motion. Hands. Those unassuming appendages neither toothed nor clawed that had given that unlikely ape Homo sapiens dominion over all other carnivores. She pictured the hands that had cleaned and dressed her and stuck a tampon up her, the ones she was going to remove from their wrists and in a forgivably Protestant homage nail them to the front door. Take this sword: its brightness stands for faith …

The ZipCuff slipped suddenly and her arm plunged downward, the glass entering the flesh of her palm and snapping off as she fell on her back. It hurt but there wasn’t enough time to hurt; she held the arm out in appraisal and blood issued unchaste down the jag of glass. She brought the glass between her teeth and pulled it free, clamping tight and bringing the ZipCuff to it and finally severing it. But the victory was short-lived: she nearly swallowed the glass at the sound above her of a turning flint wheel.

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.”

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.”

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 gr

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 581