“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.
* * *
3:32 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.
* * *
3:43 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.