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.
* * *
4:12 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.”
* * *
4:39 p.m.
The last of the sun had disappeared and the hills had gone dark with pinpricks of light as though containing a single source of it inside when an institute van pulled alongside Olivia’s truck, like opposing pieces of a game as old and esoteric as the totem overlooking it. Dr. Pryce exited carrying a plain canvas tote bag. There was a tar drum between the hot stoves and the river with an orange glow in its mouth and he went to it. Next to the drum was Olivia’s purse and within what remained of what was formerly her outfit, streaked in crimson and engulfed in flame. He looked at the water. An unbelonging whiteness breached the surface as though expelled from the river’s unconscious. Olivia standing nude, waist deep, staring off at those lights dotting the hillside and gently disrupting the surface tension with a slow back-and-forth motion of her arms. Pryce’s eye fell to the scar on the small of her back, all that demarcated her as an earthly body. He said nothing, the tableau too immaculate for her to be unaware of an audience. Eventually she turned and waded back, emerging on the bank and standing before him. She was covered with gooseflesh and her nipples were small and dark and black trails of mascara ran down from her eyes. Pryce handed over the bag and placed his hands on a broken length of rebar that stuck from the ground.
“In there,” said Olivia, indicating the mill building. “Still warm, for whatever use that brings you.”
“Lod isn’t going to like this,” said Pryce.
“If they want Norman’s share they’ll learn to,” she said. “They knew where they were sending the little golliwog.”
She shook her head. One did have to admire the ingenuity: recruiting women and homosexual military veterans with a background of sexual trauma likely to require the validation of an external patriarchal figure. But honestly: “The Order of the Dragon”—what utter poppycock.
“This was irresponsible,” said Pryce. “And … uncalled-for.”
He waited for her to react; in the history of their relationship he had never registered such direct insubordination.
She looked searchingly into his face and gave a sympathetic cluck. “You
liked
her.”
Pryce was silent; nothing in the position of utilitarian ambivalence this arrangement forced him into was quite so galling as her ultimate trespass: knowing at any given moment what he was actually feeling.
Olivia removed from the bag a pair of surgical scrub bottoms and a sweatshirt. He watched her dress.
“Why is it that you’re the only one who hasn’t asked me what I’m really doing?” he said.
She gave him a why-do-you-think look. “Because I don’t care,” she said.
“Do you know who it is that’s killing these girls?” said Pryce.
She took her wet hair in both hands and squeezed excess water from it.
“Of course I do, Johann,” she said. “I’m a mother.”
She knelt and picked up her purse. The hem of the sweatshirt rode up, revealing the pale of her back.
“You know I can fix you,” he said. “Your scar.”
She produced a compact mirror and regarded her reflection, wiping away streaks of mascara.
“The less you pursue this line of conversation,” she said, “the more likely we are to remain friends.”
Just then, somewhere in the valley, there was a rifle shot. Her head snapped, but not in surprise—he realized that behind the Olivia Show she had been steeling herself all along for its coming: the break. Several more shots followed, a flinch going through her body with each, and she made no attempt to conceal it, nor could she. How afraid she was.
Then it was quiet again and she replaced the compact and walked past Pryce, making her way delicately in bare feet.
“Clean it up,” she said.
He did not turn, hearing the truck start up and pull away. The fire in the drum had burned down to embers, ash commingling with all the previous ash from all the previous fires, leaving only a dustbin for the next time Olivia decided to ruin a dress. Now he turned downriver, seeking the cap of the institute over the ridge.
“A lighthouse guiding a lone vessel through evil waters if ever there was one full stop,” said Pryce. “He reminded himself comma again comma that whatever sacrifice of personal conscience comma even his humanity comma was required of him was ultimately of scant consequence in his penance full stop. A body comma he was making his best girl a body comma and until he had perfected the procedure for Shelley Godfrey’s rebirth into a body to make the world love her as much as he did comma whatever was required of him to keep the lights on was a small price full stop.”
And then the light of the White Tower went dark.
“What in blue blazes!” said Pryce.
* * *
4:25 p.m.
Dr. Godfrey pulled into the drive of Godfrey House to find it empty of vehicles. He got out of the car and went to the porch and sat on the steps. The last thing he had to spare right now was a moment to call his own; it felt like stealing from the gods. His stop before this one had been to the hospital morgue to view the last girl; if it was who he thought it was this appointment was manifestly his. But to his surprise the body was too sexually mature to be Christina’s, surprising because his wishing it on someone else continued to be granted and he knew he’d be paying for it somehow or other. It wouldn’t hurt, he knew. Being consumed by a wild animal would not actually cause pain, fear triggering the release of naturally occurring opioids that would act as an analgesic. To die in that way wouldn’t hurt, because you would be in a perfect euphoria of fear. And then he was scooped: a concerned roommate had called inquiring about a small burn scar on the inner left forearm and the latest had a name. Godfrey was left with a need to hold a woman’s body, full of unruly life and lust and all the terrifically maddening things this beast ravened with love gone bad. And for this sudden carnal imperative what better archetype? But she wasn’t here, nor had he had any contact in the last few days. Not that it mattered, really; he had spent so many years building a rational empire of words in a war against his own blood but now he couldn’t give less of a shit what or wasn’t spoken, he was possessed once more by something he actually
wanted
. He wanted to defeat the monster and save his family. He felt a light tickle on his wrist and looked down to find a daddy longlegs traversing it. He brought his arm to eye level and watched the spider move with a kind of startlement as though first encountering such an apparatus.