and so it begins . . . again.

A Chapter by Aria

Roman, Macy, and Peter are still trying to get over the aftermath of last years horrors, but it hasn't been easy, and it won't be getting any easier.

MAY

Somewhere deep in the woods, there is the sound of screaming again. Footsteps thumping. Horrible laughter echoing through the trees. Blood, warm and thick, pumping the life out of someone’s veins.

But if there’s no one else around to hear it, does it really make a sound?

They are coming.

He graduates the last week of May. Or, more accurately, he receives a diploma in the mail and a note from Principal Gibbons with the respectful suggestion--or desperate offer, depending on how you look at it--that he doesn’t walk on account of the fact that his mother is missing, his cousin had died two months prior by giving birth to an incestuous abomination that now resides in his own home--though the public doesn’t know that; even they can’t know that--and his sister revealed to be Hemlock Grove’s most wanted serial killer. He doesn’t take it too personally. Why would anyone want a monster like him flaunting success of any kind after all the destruction he and his family has caused this sweet, picturesque little town? It’s bad enough he is going to be heading the Institute now that his mother is gone. Pryce has promised to get the word out that she committed suicide, unable to handle the backlash from Shelley’s exposure, by the end of summer around the time that he’ll come into the throne. It’s better than the truth, at least.

Roman doesn’t really give a f**k either way. The whole graduation process means less than nothing to him, now especially. It won’t be long now before he is a legal adult, sole beneficiary to his late father’s entire fortune. Education is not necessary--in fact, Pryce and his little minions would probably like it much better if Roman was an uneducated little vegetable, lest he get in the way of any of their sinister projects. He’s been to the White Tower only a few times since the day he was there with Peter, for Letha, and it’s unbearable even for him. There were rumors flying around before, about the town’s monstrous killer being an escaped something from the Godfrey Institute--of course, that wasn’t the case, but now Roman might have once believed it was.

He spends graduation night dodging phone calls, getting fucked by the memories and voices that aren’t really there, listening to a beer bottle rolling across the basement’s empty pool. The sound of it is dissonant and beautiful, and he thinks Peter would have liked it, somehow. He snorts so much coke the nosebleeds seem never-ending, and even then he can’t tell if they’re from the drugs or the compulsion he can’t seem to stop using. It’s stronger now that he’s come into his own. He’s still not sure what he is, or how to control it, and he’s had one hell of a time trying to make sense of the s**t Google hands him. It’s interesting, though, figuring himself out. Gives him something else to do besides wait, and remember, and drink until he passes out, too exhausted to dream.

But tonight it doesn’t work. He can’t halt the thinking, or hide from it, either. He can’t force himself into forgetting, into making his heart still, even if the beating of it already has. He’s jittery and he knows exactly why. Why else?

Where are you? he texts sometime around midnight. He can barely keep his eyes open and focused long enough to type out the letters, and even then they jumble up on the screen.

The phone stays silent for the rest of the night.

He turns eighteen in early August, as the heat is slowly dying out and nights are getting shorter, though nothing seems to change much. He spends it getting drunker than ever on the roof, watching the summer sun sit high in the sky over the forest that races to meet the edge of his back lawn. Sunburns stopped mattering the moment his heart ceased to beat, but it still feels nice to sit there in the stillness of afternoon, heat unable to pass through the thick protective layer of his skin. The mansion beneath him is empty, but he hasn’t bothered to notice silence for months now, there or anywhere.

The Tower is a distraction, at least. He sits in on meetings that are next to meaningless in the grand scheme of his life, watches faceless blobs in lab coats skitter around the building that is his now, the building that keeps him afloat. Otherwise, not much happens in his life anymore. A constant stream of people comes and goes throughout the day, maybe just to have a visual that he’s still alive, holed up in this beautiful prison, but he hardly notices. He lumps them in with the shadows on the wall that he sees all the time, only dangerous or scary if he acknowledges their existence. There’s also girls as well, an abundance of them, but no one ever stays, and some can never leave. There’s never enough blood in them to truly sate his ever growing desire, so he’s stopped bothering to keep track.

For all that Roman was raised to be self-reliant, to never need anyone even if they were there all along, the thing is that he’s never not had anyone there. His mother had always been there whether he wanted her to be or not, and then Shelley, and his uncle Norman and Letha, and all his superficial friends at school; and eventually along came Peter, with his s****y clove cigarettes and leather jacket and obsession with superstitions, the swadisthana, and the damned internal drive to bring justice to a town he’d only just met, a town that hated him like nothing they’d ever seen before. The only people Roman encounters now are the shadows and the cleaning crew hired by someone or other who comes every three days to sweep and dust and keep the place remotely livable. He hasn’t been eating much, and when he does it’s straight from the refrigerator, so plates and silverware aren’t an issue. There is no shortage of tumblers and empty glass bottles, though.

He supposes there is Norman, too, but barely. Sometimes he doesn’t even really count. Neither does the baby.

There must be someone in charge of taking care of her, but it isn’t Roman. The only time he dares to come near her is when the curiosity is too much to hold off, and even then it’s just to stare at her. He can’t help it: she’s beautiful. There is no denying it. But it’s a sort of faraway beauty, an untouchable force, because the fact of the matter is she doesn’t even look like him. And she doesn’t look like Letha, either, so maybe it doesn’t matter much, anyway.

He wants to tell Peter. About everything. He can if he really wants to, but it’ll hurt.

Roman stares at the screen of his cell phone until he just can’t handle it anymore.

F*****g a*****e, he types.

A few minutes pass, slow and heavy in the heat of the evening.

No answer.

The silence is harder than he expected. It’s just, there’s never any goddamn people around to talk to about anything. Not his mother--though that one was his own doing, whether he wants to acknowledge it or not--or the cleaning people, or even the shell that occasionally responds to his uncle’s name. He just wants to talk about the meaningless s**t, the stuff that keeps him up at night until the only thing left to do is snort coke until his nose gushes like a cancer patient’s and he has to look his disgusting self in the mirror, see himself for what, not who, he really is. But that’s not what he really wants to say, either. And even if he said it, it wouldn’t change anything. Peter wouldn’t give a f**k.

Come back, is what he wants to say. Come back, why did you leave in the first place? You can’t just f*****g leave. I need you.

May is an empty month for her. Everything in her mind is jumbled and confused, like she’s lost and can’t find her way back, to where she isn’t sure--not like she doesn’t know who she is anymore so much as she never knew who she was in the first place. The grief shapes her, molds her into this shell of a person who sometimes takes sips out of cups and rarely eats, barely showers, only ever sleeps. The teachers pass her because it’d be cruel not to, and they know. They know this town has seen too much destruction and pain, and it will take years to put it behind them, if that's even possible at this point.

“Macy,” her mother says one afternoon, after Macy has been bed-ridden for two full days. She carries a tray of soup and crackers, all of which she knows will go uneaten. “Macy, are you awake? You need to eat, honey.”

No answer. She wasn’t expecting one anyway, but it still hurts. Mrs. Holcombe turns away, fighting back useless tears, and ends up face-to-face with her son Tyler’s bedroom door--one that has been locked shut for weeks now. It makes her heart ache, a pain that can’t be erased easily. Two of her children losing loved ones in the same year, to the same fate. Maybe it’s time, she wonders, to leave this old town finally in the past. Start somewhere new and put all the horror and despair behind them. But they’ve been rooted in this town for too long now, and leaving feels even harder than staying.

Macy herself wouldn’t know what to do with herself if they moved away. She knows they’re talking about it, can hear their whispers wafting up from the kitchen and into her bedroom through the ventilation. It would be nice to see Hemlock Grove burn to dust in the rearview mirror, but it seems too difficult. She’s missed so much class, it’d be impossible to catch up in a new, foreign school unsympathetic to her problems. Mostly leaving just feels like admitting weakness, like she can’t handle it. But she’s Macy Holcombe, number one in her class, smartest girl around, definitely going somewhere other than this nowhere town. Tough as nails, too--or so she thought. She’s supposed to be able to handle this. So why does the thought of leaving her bedroom make her feel sick?

Jenny would be so pissed that she’s being such a baby. She would have told her to get her s**t together and move the f**k on. But that’s easier said than done. Besides, what did Jenny ever know about grief, anyway? The closest thing to a funeral she ever went to was the one they held for Tyler’s hamster in third grade.

She thinks it’s all her fault. That if Jenny hadn’t been on her way to Macy’s house that night to hang out and maybe hook up with Jake later that night at a party in Penrose, none of this would have ever happened and things would be the same still. When Jenny never showed, Macy convinced herself that she had intercepted Jake on the way to Macy’s house and just forgot to text her about what happened. Which sucked, yeah, but it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility with Jenny. She was always doing rash things, whatever felt right at the moment, while Macy was the one who thought things through, never putting her feet anywhere outside of her comfort zone until she’d made completely sure that everything was perfect and in place. So if Macy had never asked Jenny to come over that night, feeling just a twinge of jealousy that her friend was broadening horizons and getting popular again, Jenny might still be alive.

She clings to it like it’s the only thing she has left.

Weeks pass; things change, but barely. It feels like the hardest thing in the world just to get out bed at first, but eventually Macy finds herself in the hallway outside her bedroom. Then at the end of it. At the top of the stairs, then the bottom. Finally, on a breezy day in late June, she makes it to the kitchen; her mother tries to mask the surprise and near-heart attack when she sees her.

Macy begins to test herself. Leave her bedroom door open. Make it to the bathroom, wash her hands, look herself in the mirror without having the urge to get sick. Eat lunch without counting the calories, without splitting it into a million pieces to make illusions. Sit on the front porch for an hour. It’s so hard, so hard without Jenny. But she does it, if only because if she doesn’t, something bad will happen, and her parents will never forgive her for it.

Time passes. Slowly, but it does.

Maybe he would have stayed, if things had gone differently. If Letha was still alive. If Christina hadn’t been such a child, too young to understand the colossal mistakes she was making, too gentle for him to accept killing her. If Roman wasn’t what he was, what he surely had to be now. But nothing had gone right that night in the abandoned church, and the longer he stayed there the worse it got.

Peter closes his eyes, thinks of something better, but instead he ends up thinking about Letha’s blond hair, soft and sweet in his fingers and smelling of vanilla shampoo. Her eyes, green like forest pines; her smile, sweet and kind. It hurts too much to imagine her as anything but what she is now, so he thinks of Roman. Roman, one corner of his mouth turned slightly upward as he leans forward, about to make some obscene joke. Roman, holding Letha as the white wolf raged, snarling and salivating, as Peter burned his face off in a weak attempt to save them all. Roman, with his teeth bared in a fearless growl, facing down death with the axe clutched tight in his hands.

Peter opens his eyes. He doesn’t know how it can get much worse, missing these two people so much, but it does. And it’s all his fault. He should have been smarter, not let himself get too attached to people he would someday lose. But he was stupid, and now the more miles he puts between himself and that town, between him and those memories, the harder it becomes, like trying to outrun your own shadow. F*****g Godfreys.

They make it to Ohio by morning.

Somewhere close to Indiana--or maybe it’s Illinois, he just isn’t sure anymore--he gets the first text. His phone vibrates against his leg, making him jump a little. Even that holds a bit of familiarity, pinching his chest just so, reminding him of getting that final phone call. Catch you on the flipside. He hates himself for letting what happened seep so far into his everyday life to the point where he can’t even glance at so much as a mechanical object without remembering. It takes him a moment to wiggle it out in his awkward positioning in the back of the car, but a good bump from Lynda’s driving finally frees it.

Where are you?

Peter stares at the words, hesitating. That’s always been his problem: too much thinking, waiting for the right moment, and then the right moment comes and goes and he’s left wondering where the hell he went wrong. A modern-day Hamlet, Lynda likes to call him. Something certainly stinks in Denmark. There are a million things he wants to say but none of them would help the situation, so he turns the phone off, stuffs it back in his pocket.

June and July pass quickly at various places they arrive in along the way, none holding enough meaning to keep them around for very long. Then August comes and they’re in California now, holed up a little shack on the coast in San Pedro. Lynda cooks all her old dinners and puts up the shrine for Nicolae above the makeshift fireplace, and it even smells like the woods sometimes. If he closes his eyes, he can imagine that they aren’t really in California at all, that they’re back in Vince’s old trailer and nothing has changed. He sees everything perfectly in his mind’s eye: the stale beer bottles and rotten fruits lying everywhere; the hammock in the front, swinging gently in the wind; and Letha sitting in it, her bare legs hanging over the side as she peels an orange. The juice squirts and dribbles down her hands, soaking her white slip dress, but it makes her laugh, long and high and sweet.

That’s when he has to stop himself. It’s not bad to reminisce about the trailer. But hallucinations are not good. Hallucinations mean that nothing he’s doing is working, and running is just making it worse.

He can’t stay, though, and he can’t go back. Gypsies aren’t meant for cages, not even ones made of friendship.