The Unknown Lands

By Insomniac Owl

Peter would have stayed, maybe, if Letha were still alive. It's just, things went so spectacularly to shit that night in the abandoned church. It's all he thinks about when he's driving, all he dreams about when his mother nudges him into the back. Blood on his face, Letha screaming, the reek of bacon grease in his nose.

He closes his eyes. Thinks instead of Letha's long blonde hair, smelling on different days of raspberry shampoo, of cinnamon, of coconut. He thinks of Roman, teeth bared over the axe in his hands.

They're in Ohio by morning.

Somewhere near Akron, they stop to eat pilfered breakfast burritos by the side of the road. The sky overhead is a clean, clear blue. The air smells like cool earth and he forgot the name of the last town they were in three minutes after they passed the sign.

Lynda, seated beside him on the hood of the car, has begun listing to the side. She's been driving for nearly eight hours, and that after an uneasy nap, head shoved up against the passenger side window. One side of her hair is sticking up, and he reaches to flatten it.

"We should stop," he says, easing her burrito from her hands. "Just for a few hours. I don't want to die in a ditch somewhere. Or I can drive, if you want."

His mother smiles at him, gaze sleepy and warm in the rising sun. "I'll find us a campsite."

She pats his knee, then disappears into the passenger seat. Peter catches a mess of maps tumbling from the glove compartment, folded wrong, rivers and oceans blue as the lightening the sky overhead. Lynda has all kinds of maps stuffed in the car - East Coast, West Coast, Canada, Tibet. He hadn't thought to ask where they were going when they were still in Pennsylvania, and now the answer feels irrelevant. Still. He leans back over the hood of the car.

"Where we headed, anyway? Long term, I mean."

Lynda shakes a map out, flattening it open across the dashboard. Her voice is muffled behind the glass. "West, honey," she says, a bit absently. "I have some cousins in California - Benny and Susan, remember them?"

He does, but only barely. A bearded face at the funeral, a woman in a blue dress lifted from Target. He and his mother have stuck mostly to the East Coast since Nicolae died, so they haven't had much contact with their family elsewhere - there are even some Rumanceks back in Europe still, though he doesn't know anything about them except that they exist. But he knows what California looks like. Beaches and mountains, forests big enough to lose himself in.

Neither one of them could say why they're running, but they both feel it. Diana would say it's chakras, and Lynda would say it's in their nature as gypsies, but to Peter it's something else. Animal nature, maybe. That fear of the cage Hemlock Grove became without him ever seeing the inside of a jail cell. Peter looks at his mother, drawing a finger across a map with her lips thinned in concentration. She's doing this for him, he knows. Not the running, but the running to California. It's as far away from Hemlock Grove as they can get and still be somewhere with decent weather.

"California sounds nice."

He wedges the last of his breakfast burrito into his mouth, sucks the juice from his thumb. And then, without thinking, slides his nail under his teeth, to worry at the blood he imagines is still there.

He gets the first text at four in the morning, just over the Indiana border. It wakes him up. He has the phone on vibrate but it's stuffed in his jeans, against his hip, the light a surreal blue glow on his jacket when he pulls it free.

Whr r u?

Peter hesitates. Then he thumbs the phone off, slides it back into his pocket.

In a 7-11 off Highway 50 - loneliest road in America, the signpost said - he sees Shelley's face in the paper. She's in the Las Vegas Weekly and the Nevada Appeal, the USA Today, the god damn New York Times. Godfrey Heiress Suspected Multiple Murderer. Daughter of PA Businesswoman Suspected Serial Killer.

Everything had seemed so isolated in Hemlock Grove, an island in the middle of a long dark sea. Safe in that, when he left, nothing would follow him out. But he's nearly a thousand miles away now, and Shelley's staring at him from half in the newspapers in the gas station, and Roman's name is written across a hundred pages, and the entire country knows what happened. It feels like someone's torn his secrets from his skin and laid them out for anyone to see. It hurts about as much.

There's a copy of the New York Times tucked into his jacket when he slides into the passenger seat, and he's not sure how it got there. He opens it anyway. It's a short-ish article. Only three columns, nothing he hasn't heard before. The words burn themselves white into the backs of his eyelids, and when he looks out the window, when he blinks, he can see them shimmering out there in the desert like a mirage.

He spends his first month in California digging for clams off the beach at Monterey. In the daytime the shore is crowded with tourists, but at night everything gets quiet, and there in the dark he listens to the waves roll in and stares at a horizon he can't quite see. He can't go any farther West than this. He can't get any farther from Roman unless he ties a pair of lily pads to his feet and walks across the ocean.

He finishes his last few months of high school in a slick new building in the middle of town. He takes the bus to get there, and to get home, and in between he stares at whiteboards and listens to people talk the same way he listens to the ocean. Sometimes they talk about him. Gypsy freak, wierdo. High school is the same everywhere. Two weeks in people are talking about how he stabbed a guy in an alley back somewhere on the East Coat, and ate the heart with blood dripping through his fingers. Two weeks in, he hasn't said a word to anyone about anything. He goes to school and comes home and sometimes he does his homework; he lets the tides lap up and down his calves, and keeps a tally of how long he's been gone.

His skin tastes permanently of beach sand and bonfires. Sea salt weighs his hair down straight. On the full moon he and Lynda drive down Highway 1 to Point Lobos, to the state preserve, where the forest is big enough to lose himself in.

It's the only time he changes.

On a Saturday, late in July, the headlines read: Godfrey Matriarch Commits Suicide. He buys that one with the last of the grocery money, reading it quickly and with deepening nausea because it can't be true, it can't, it can't, and Peter knew what really happened the second he saw the headline.

There's a picture - of course there's a picture - of Olivia the week before, at the welcome ceremony for some guy named David Stone. A new partner at Godfrey Industries. She's wearing a white dress and Roman is nowhere to be seen, but he's in the article plenty. Apparently, she killed herself on Roman's eighteenth birthday.

Except of course she hadn't, and Peter squeezes his eyes shut in the middle of the sidewalk on a hot California afternoon, against what he knows to be true: that Roman killed her. He knows it and something in him sings in triumph, in recognition. This is his brother. He's been wandering hobbled in the dark, and this is the hope he's been searching for since he first went to his knees on the forest floor.

Below his sternum, deep in his throat, he chokes on and swallows down the wolf.

There's a piece of shoreline, just a few miles north, where the waves have beaten an arch through the rocks. On the nights he's out later than he should be, that's where he is. Staring. It's dark, and the waves are loud and steady; he can feel the uncertain earth beneath him, the bone-deep chakra pulse. Nicolae used to talk about chakras, but Diana believed in them; she was the one who explained what it meant when he said he could feel the earth beneath his feet like a living thing.

"There are thin places in the world," she told him in her apartment, the smell of incense like rain and chalk and something sweet. "They're secret, sacred places, through which the universe can sing to you. Most people, no matter where they are, they can't hear it. But you're special Peter. You can."

He thinks this arch is one of those places. A hole in the world. He can't see anything through it, because the waves come up in roaring white rush that never quite recedes; if he walked through it, what would he come out into on the other side? Alpha Centuri? Roman's attic bedroom? An alley in a city he's never been to, where he squats with blood on his shoes and someone's heart between his teeth?

"You're biting your nails," Lynda says when he gets back, pulling his hands into her lap. Their apartment is larger than the trailer in Hemlock Grove, and larger than the place they had before that, too; she has to pull his hands across the corner of a coffee table to look at them. The space doesn't help. He's more tan than he's ever been in his life, but his heart feels like someone's crushing it in their fist. He's starting to hate the sight of redwoods.

He pulls his hands away, reaches for his cigarettes.

"It's nothing."

He's picking up toothpaste and shampoo and buying a gallon of milk at the counter when he sees Roman's face in the paper the cashier's reading. It's not front page, third or fourth maybe, somewhere toward the middle, but the picture takes up half the page and the rest is… an interview? Roman Godfrey Rising. Jesus Christ. Peter's been on the road for a week and a half, but Roman's shadow is outrunning him. In the picture his eyes are as cold as chips of ice, and Peter knows it's an upir looking back at him now, a real one.

He knows the story. Killed by their own hand, an upir rises again like a three-minute quickie Jesus to walk the earth eternal and devour the flesh of the living blah blah blah. That doesn't tell him how it happened to Roman. It doesn't tell him what's going to happen now. Because it still looks like Roman, upir or no, flesh-easter or no; in the photo one corner of his mouth is just beginning to tick up so that, with his head tilted forward a little, he could be about to break into a slick grin, or laughter. And yet, the expression looks studied - or maybe that's just the eyes. You can see the darkness in them, Nicolae said once, in the tiny cramped space of his trailer, but all Peter can see is the humor, and the ego, the black edge of danger Roman carries with him wherever he goes.

"That it?" The cashier lays the paper aside in a soft rustle of newsprint. It sounds like birds falling from the sky. Stupid-ass birds, he hears, a ghostly whisper in his ear, and shivers.

"Sorry, yeah." He pays for the milk, and tucks a paper under his jacket on the way out, when the cashier's back is turned.

It's the tail end of tourist season, but the sidewalks are still crowded. It took him a while to get used to crowds again, after Hemlock Grove's dark spaces and wilderness. He misses the forests. Out here the land is open, because of the ocean, trees thinning out the closer you get to the water until it's all just these low-growing succulents that ooze a clear, viscous fluid, like aloe vera, when he steps on them.

"Another one?" Lynda asks when he gets home. She glances over the kitchen table with one raised eyebrow. Peter looks at her, steadily, then thumbs open the paper.

"It's so goddamn quiet here," Roman says. "Mom's gone, and Shelley's gone; Norman's here but I never see him, he's just this burnt-out skin walking around. Everything's gone to shit and I'm trying to, like, hold things together, the company and the family name and trying not to tear everyone's throats out all the time, because I want to, you know? I hate them all. How could you - how am I supposed to do this on my own? You fucking left me. I mean, fuck you, Peter. Fuck you!"

It's nearly winter. In California this means there's a fifty-fifty chance of there being ice on the grass when he wakes, and if there is, it's gone in a few hours. Peter's lived through snowstorms so fierce the oil froze in the car, and trees cracked under the weight of ice stacked on the branches. On the milder days, he goes out in t-shirts. But the beaches are nearly deserted, and on the street, no one will look him in the eye. There's nothing to do except drink and steal, and read the newspapers stuffed under his bed with the trash.

He snaps at Lynda. Can't help doing it. He picks at the desserts she makes, breaks a plate one afternoon by accident and then hurls one of the pieces against the wall.

"I'm sick of this place!" he yells. Inside he's all frustration and directionless rage, turning in on himself because he doesn't know what else to do. He never used to be like this. He's eating his own tail. The thought sends a cold shiver down his spine, and he can't think why.

Lynda's eyes flick from his face to the broken plate, to the wall he's facing, trembling. "Do you want to leave?"

"Yes! Yes, god, thank you Jesus!"

Her gaze is as cool and calm as deep water. "Alright," she says. "Where to?"

Anywhere, he wants to say. Anywhere else. But he knows even then, staring at her across the table with his chest heaving, that leaving won't unravel this tangled mess in his chest.

"Fuck." The word is strung-out and ragged, hiccupping into a high keening sound he loses control of before it even starts. Lynda folds him into her arms, and rocks him like a child until he stops sobbing.

"I don't know what to do," he whispers into her shoulder.

"You do, baby." She pushes him back, smoothes his hair from his face. "You do."

Except that he doesn't.

It comes to him later, dry-eyed and smoking a third cigarette under the stars, that he's lonely. He's lonely in some deep way and the depth and breadth of it scares him, because now he knows what it is to have people, and what it is to lose them. He might be in California, but he's still in a cage; he will be in a cage if he runs to the Carpathian Mountains and never thinks of Hemlock Grove again. There will always be blood under his nails, on his tongue.

He goes to bed late that night, an image of the waning moon huge and luminous in his mind, and dreams of Roman's hands on his skin, Roman's mouth on one flayed shoulder.

Roman's new business partner dies on a Thursday. Alcohol poisoning. When he reads about it the next day Peter finds a picture of the guy online, an old man with white hair and a face like John Paul II at 200 pounds, and tries to convince himself it's true.

There's a comments section at the bottom of the article. He reads one, then the rest. The first few are sympathetic enough, but most of them are nasty, and Peter sits at the computer feeling his teeth tighten until they squeak and ache, the wolf coming through the way it does sometimes. One of the comments spirals into a thread on the Godfreys; he clicks it open to forty six remarks about Roman's character, about his mother, about how he's a cruel, money-hungry bastard and probably a murderer too, like his deformed freak of a sister.

Peter closes down the threads, methodically, one by one, and then he closes all his tabs, and logs out of the computer, and shuts it down, even though you're not supposed to. Breathe, Diana's voice says in his ear. The wolf lurches up, in a wash of heat and rage that shakes his neck loose and snaps his teeth together, hard. There's a pressure behind his eyes, the first telltale sign of a change; he's never done it in daylight before but he knows the feeling.

He scratches his nails against the table, briefly. There's a group of kids just come in, voices, smells he recognizes from school. The the red-head in the middle smells like pepper, like Axe, like charcoal and the ragged menthol burn of cigarettes.

"Look who it is," the kid says, head turned to one side. It isn't quiet, but it's not at normal volume either. He's not talking to Peter. He's not being cruel, the way kids are sometimes. It might escalate to that, the way it did at school, but right now they're just walking past the check-in desk, past the red steel support beams, toward Peter but only because they have to pass the computers to get to the books.

Peter stands. His knuckles ache. There's suddenly too much saliva in his mouth and he imagines walking over, just two quick steps, and laying the kid out on the floor with a good hard punch to his face.

The boys pass.

Breathe, Diana says again. And this time, Peter does. He knows what he has to do.

Jeopardy is on tv, and there's something in the oven. Pork chuck and spices. He can smell it.

The commissioner of Scotland Yard resigned in 1888, the day before the final murder attributed to this man. "Did you go into town?" Lynda asks.

"No, just around." Who is Jack the Ripper. Peter reaches to adjust his backpack. "Mom."

Lynda looks up. He knows the moment she sees his bag, the extra pair of shoes in his hand, the second she knows what they mean. They look at each other from across the room, and for a long moment he thinks she's going to say something important. Instead she smiles, smoothes a hand over the blanket in her lap.

They never got another cat, Peter thinks, inanely. Maybe she should, for when he's gone.

He can still feel Fechit's neck snap under his hands sometimes when he's not doing anything in particular, when he's waiting for coffee, or getting cereal out of the cupboard, when he's standing in the shower with the water as cold as it will go. That echo of death burned into his muscles. Clench of fur and snap of bone. Like so many other things that happened that night killing Fetchit went quickly, without much time for reflection, so that now, months later, his mind has to keep returning to it to try to make sense of it.

"Do you want me to drive you?" Lynda asks.

He shakes his head. He's standing just in front of her now, close enough to touch her knee, or the blanket. "Nah, it's fine. I've got bus fare."

"Well. You be safe out there. And tell him I said hi, would you?"

Peter smiles, barely. "I will."

"Akana mukav tut le Devlesa," she says, and touches his face before she turns.

"I don't think God'll do me much good anymore, Mom."

Lynda smiles. "I'm your mother. I can say what I want."

He takes one last look around the living room - familiar blanket, familiar shrine to Nicolae, familiar dish on top of the television, where he leaves his jewelry when he changes. He doesn't quite know what he'll accomplish in going back. It isn't as though Roman needs help, or would accept it if he did; Letha's dead and every day he has to fight down the wolf inside him. It's just, he can't stay here anymore. Maybe that's a good enough reason to leave. He lifts his face toward Lynda.

"I'll text you when I get there," he says.

And then, "I love you."

And then he goes.