Here Be Dragons, They'll Eat You Whole
By Insomniac Owl
Roman graduates two months later. Or rather, he gets a diploma, and a dispensation from the principal saying he doesn't have to walk if he doesn't want to, on account of his mother being dead and his sister a serial killer.
He spends the night getting high in the mansion's empty pool instead. The radio's turned up loud, and as the night goes on, empty beer bottles collect in the shallow end, tipped over or stood up straight or shattered against the fiberglass. He goes through so much coke he gets a nosebleed, and in the morning he wakes with a crick in his neck, from sleeping in the lawn chair, and clicks through everyone's Facebook photos. They all look disgustingly happy. Whatever fear the murders laid over this town is gone, at least in these photos; he can't even see the shadow of it anymore.
He leaves a few scathing comments with too many smiley faces at the end of them, then closes his laptop. He's fucking starving. There's a raw steak in the fridge that will take the edge off, at least.
He turns eighteen that summer, a hot day in July, sweating and drunk on the back lawn. He stopped getting sunburns about the time his heart stopped beating, but he likes to lay out in the sun like a lizard, in sunglasses, transferred heat shallow in his skin. He can see Peter's trailer from here. The tiny white stamp of the old hammock out front, through the forest clawing at the edge of the property. Roman hasn't been down there since Peter first left, but he's drunk now and it seems like a good idea, so he picks up his glass - whiskey and lemonade, with a little ice - and tramps out toward the tree line.
His shoes are scuffed and filthy by the time he gets to the trailer. There's no path other than the one Peter hacked out months ago, and that's all but overgrown - except there are snapped branches everywhere. Probably from deer, or kids wandering through; months old, anyhow. Roman presses his thumb into some of the broken places as he passes, just in case.
It all looks exactly the same. Obscene spray paint on the sides, broken window in the front, dead leaves pressed into the floor. When Peter lived here there had been sage and salt in the air, and underfoot the worn-out warmth of rugs probably older than he is; now there's nothing left but dirt caked into the corners and the smell of trees and molding carpet. It feels like it's been abandoned for decades.
Roman stands there for a while, swaying gently. The last time he stood in this room he'd been human. The air is sticky and close against his skin, and he feels like he's sinking into a warm salt-water sea; when he turns toward the door, he half expects to see his mother waiting outside. But she isn't there either.
Hunger clenches in his stomach, hot and ragged. He balls his hands into fists, then swallows.
Whr are u? he texts.
No answer.
For all that Roman was raised to be self-reliant, he's never really been alone before. Growing up he had his mother, and then Shelley, and then Letha, and then there was Peter, with his cigarettes and his affected punk manner and his talk of superstitions, of swadisthana, the pulse of the earth underfoot. Now the only people he sees are the cleaning staff that comes three times a week, to dust and collect the tumblers Roman leaves around the house - he doesn't bother with plates these days, just eats the meat raw from the fridge, but he goes through a lot of glasses.
He sees Norman, of course, but Norman doesn't really count. Neither does the baby.
Someone else takes care of her, maybe a nanny, maybe something Norman or even Pryce arranged. Roman goes upstairs sometimes, but it's just to look at her. To stare at her, until he can't stand it anymore and has to leave.
She doesn't look like him.
She doesn't look like Letha either, though, so there's that.
He took a picture of her once, on his phone. It was supposed to be for Peter, but he never sent it, because what would he have said? He knows everything that goes on in the Godfrey labs now, and half of it he can't explain. Pryce and his religious fervor for orchids, the gene work and dissections. When all the vargulf shit was happening there was a rumor going around that the animal was something escaped from Godfrey Tower - it hadn't been, of course, but now Roman would have believed that it was. All that shit's too complicated, though, and nothing he wants to tell Peter about anyway.
Come back, is what he wants to say. You can't fucking leave me. I need you.
In the middle of December, Pryce convinces him to go to a director's board meeting. He says Roman's importance as a figurehead, if nothing else, should not be underestimated. He says this with a smile, shallow as Roman's own but three times as painful.
There's already someone there when Roman gets to the conference room. Older, middle-aged, a bit fleshy. He introduces himself as Daniel Stone. "I knew your mother a little," he says, reaching across the table. "I was so sorry to hear about what happened." He's fawning while trying to look like he isn't, and Roman was tired of that act ten years ago. He prefers fear.
"Don't be; she was a bitch." He hunches his shoulders, and the man leans in even more. "But mention her again," Roman says, voice pitched low and steady and lethal underneath, with the low hum of ice in his veins, "and I'll make sure they never find you, either."
The man looks at him. Doesn't blink. He looks like John Paul II at two hundred pounds, round and soft and quiet, but something in Roman recoils like an eel and he thinks, maybe, that he's underestimated his new business partner. Peter would know, one way or the other. Roman spends the first ten minutes of the presentation drafting anxious text messages to ask, but he doesn't send any of them. The powerpoint gets more and more tedious, he starts playing Tetris on his phone, and any apprehension he had slips away under mind-numbing boredom.
The women presenting is the new head of some department or other, in a dark grey skirt suit and a shirt the precise color of fresh blood. Looking at it is weirdly hypnotizing, like staring into a mirror.
80 percent of Godfrey Industries, she says. Research. Biotechnology. Expansion.
"What we need to do is start going public with more of our discoveries," she says, leaning both palms against the table. "Under Ms. Godfrey's leadership we opened an obstetrics wing, and that's the kind of thing we need more of. The public needs to see us working for the common good, not just showing these flashy commercials and pouring money into the labs without actually producing products for widespread consumption."
"Who the fuck picked her to lead this thing?" Roman asks, when the meeting's over, leaned in close to Pryce. He's smoking. This time, no one tells him not to.
"Your new colleague. He hired her too, I think."
"Huh." Roman looks back at them, and yeah, sure enough, they're standing together and he's shaking her hand and smiling. Roman remembers looking into man's eyes, steady and flat as a pit viper's. "I want her fired."
"I'm afraid that won't -"
"Then get rid of her. I don't care how. You said you wanted more money to fuck around with those orchids, right?"
Pryce smiles, plastic and painful-looking. "Consider it done."
On New Years Roman invites his entire graduating class over for a party. Most of them even make it, because it's Christmas break, and everyone who went away to college or university is back for the holidays. It makes him feel normal for all of five minutes, until he catches himself listing toward a girl's wrist. She has her arm thrown around his neck and he can't remember her name. He can taste the tingling sweetness of her blood, but he hasn't even opened his mouth.
"I heard you were a real gentleman in bed," she says, her mouth a wound in the shadowed hallway. The bass thump of music pounds in his chest like a heartbeat, and he wonders, idly, if she would think he had one if she put that hand on his chest instead. If it would fool her. He thinks of going to bed with her, of drawing a razor blade across her throat and pushing his mouth against the rush or, better yet, of peeling her flesh back with his fingernails, the way Peter clawed his way out of his skin once a month.
"Fuck off," he says.
He wants to drag her back, kicking and screaming up the stairs, wants to kill everyone in this house and bathe in their blood, Hemlock Grove's own Elizabeth Báthory.
Instead he walks out of the house, climbs into the Jag and tears down the road. It's raining, but not enough to pull up the roof. Shelley's out in this rain somewhere, Roman thinks. Or maybe she found a place to stay, a barn or abandoned building or a church, even, and maybe this one isn't empty. Maybe there are people there who take care of her and love her for who she is, and ruffle her hair to make her glow like a lightning bug.
He stays out till dawn. When he gets home, the mansion is empty.
Peter, he texts. PETER.
Again, no answer.
For some things a trip to the Tower is necessary. Paperwork, research proposal reviews, and the things Pryce refuses to tell him about over the phone, of which there are many. But for most part Roman runs the company the way his mother ran it: hands-free, except when he wants something done. It suits him. Gives him time to get high and think about the new business partner.
Daniel Stone is always there at the Tower, Pryce says. He asks questions, suggests research, methods, tries to talk his way into the closed-off corners of the labs. He's only a partner in name, however, and 49 percent doesn't give him access to everything.
"Why are you telling me this."
"I'm loyal," Pryce says, and smiles, plastic-hard. "In my way."
Roman reaches for a cigarette, lights it. "Find out who he is. He came from somewhere."
"The Holy Mother's own womb, the way he talks."
Peter would have muttered that under his breath. Pryce says it in such a clear, precise voice it's impossible to think he meant anything else."
It turns out Daniel Stone is actually Father Daniel Stone, and that he knows what Roman is, and what Peter is, and what his mother was before she died. "Filth," he hisses, in Roman's office with the lights off, so that his eyes glint white in the florescent lights from the hall. "Murderer."
And he's right, is the thing. Roman remembers sleeping with Ashley, the unfamiliar twist of her features as she cried and screamed and told him what he wanted to hear. He remembers sleeping with Letha. Remembers the woman from the office, whose body is now probably fertilizing orchids.
So he could tell this man, this impostor, to turn around and walk away. He could make him forget this. Forget Roman, and Peter, and Olivia, forget that he owns forty nine percent of Godfrey Industries. But what's the point of being good, Roman wants to ask, stepping from behind his desk, if there's no one around to be good for? He has had enough of school-room pettiness, of impotent adolescent rage.
It surprises him, how easy it is, like taking a bite of fruit. His entire body hums.
When he's finished Roman lets the body fall, rolling slack and soft against the carpet. He lifts his hands and licks the blood from between his knuckles, from under his nails, from the creases in his palms where it's dried, brown and flaking.
He opens his mouth to say something to Peter, but no one's there.