c h a p t e r f o u r
Peter Rumancek
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"I SAW THAT IN MY DREAM THE OTHER NIGHT," Roman Godfrey announced as he took up a seat beside Peter in English class, leaning over the gap to talk.
He had been doing that a lot. For three days now to be specific, clinging to the side of the most interesting soul he could find because, assumingly, he had nothing better to do. It was sort of sad, really, once it became apparent just how utterly aimless he was without his dead best friend.
At his words Peter began to unfurl the sketch he had crumpled up in his hand, some roughly drawn cryptic image of an ouroboros. The upir seemed hopeful that it must have meant something, that they had both dreamed of the same symbol in the same circumstance.
Peter just hoped it was a coincidence but unfortunately for him it seemed unlikely.
Nothing about his encounters with Roman seemed like they were a coincidence. Nothing about the bottomless darkness like that in Roman's eyes could ever be a coincidence.
"What do you think it means?" Roman asked him, his perfectly trimmed fingernails rapping on the desk.
"Probably something important," Peter answered with a note of sugary sarcasm. It wasn't like he meant to sound either rude or disinterested- but talking with Roman in public was the perfect way to draw even more attention to himself which was something he wanted least of all.
Especially talking about this.
"Jude was in my dream. Was she in yours too?"
Now was the time where any normal person would have sat down with Roman and discussed to him the concept of grief and closure and that dreaming about dead loved ones was a perfectly normal thing to experience after loss. The assumption that Peter had shared a similar dream with Roman would have been absurd had it not been true.
"Yeah," Peter answered after a while, the pad of his thumb brushing across the drawing.
No renderings on paper or crude sketches mimicking the things he had seen in his dream would ever bring to justice the twisting, jarring feeling of darkness that Peter had experienced in the dream he had the other night. Nothing could make him forget the way the shadows had swallowed him whole and spat him out in a forest of endless trees that stretched all the way to the sky and straight through it. How the crescent moon had gleamed like a gnarled claw in the sky, how his eyes could never remove themselves from it. The werewolf had experienced preminition dreams before, and his heightened awareness of the supernatural meant those kinds of dreams felt familiar.
In that dream, standing in that clearing, witnessing the suffering of a girl who used to know him, Peter's one sole instinct had been to run.
He didn't want to think about her anymore. Thinking about her made him think about the dream which made him think about his cowardice which made him think about how he hated that part of himself. That part of him that prioritized flight over fight, protecting himself over others. The selfish wolf in him who wanted to tuck tail.
He didn't want to think about how his shared dreams with Roman meant he was tied with the upir in some way. He didn't want to think about how those shared dreams likely meant a shared fate- and that whatever was to come meant trouble for the both of them. That whatever was to come had something to do with Judith Evergreen and the mystery of her death.
Peter wanted no part of it. Messing around with this stuff wasn't on his list of safest nor smartest things to do. So just like he tried to drown out Roman's desperation, he also tried to drown out the dreams by pretending they had not been frequenting him ever since moving to Hemlock Grove.
"I couldn't get close to her in mine," Roman said with a pause. "I tried."
Peter had tried to get close to her too. But the trees had stretched further and further away until all he could see was the silhouette of her body breaking. The further he had ran towards her the further away he had moved. Like the dream was taunting him.
"So. What now?"
"I don't know," Peter answered hastily. "I don't know, Roman. It might not even mean anything."
You know that's not true.
"Look I know this is weird-" Roman cut in, "really fucking weird. But you know what's even weirder? Sharing extremely specific dreams about a girl who died who we happen to both know. I don't even know you and you don't even know me. But like it or not this means we're connected."
Peter fought hard to bite back his retort because he knew Roman was right.
"And what am I supposed to do about that exactly?" he asked. "You think I've got all the answers?"
"I'd say you're a good place to start."
Because he was the one more intertwined with the supernatural, he assumed that Roman assumed. If only Roman knew how close he really was with the uncanny. How close he really was to the monsters he had only been told of. To the ones he had not been told of.
The two of them stopped talking when class started, because they got reprimanded by the teacher for their inside chatter and loose squabbling.
Peter dreamed of the forest again that night. He dreamed of the smell of rotting flesh, the hissing of a serpent and the silent screams of a girl in pain. He dreamed of running through bramble thickets that only got thicker and higher until they blocked out the light, of becoming snared in the thorns and pickled and stabbed and shredded by the sharp points.
He dreamed of deer with bloody mouths and glassy, blank white eyes. They stared at him through the trees, standing still and vacant like empty macabre creatures.
He dreamed of torch light flitting through the trees, footsteps treading in hasty increments, fast and slow, close and far. He dreamed he was standing naked in a clearing surrounded by snakes winding through the black muddy grass to strangle him. He dreamed of snake bites and gloved hands choking back his screams.
He woke up in a cold sweat for the fourth night in a row. He also woke up to a phone call.
"Peter it's me, Roman- don't hang up yet, please" the upir rushed when Peter answered the unsaved number. "Look I just need to talk to you. Tell me you didn't just have that dream and I'll leave you be."
"I didn't just have that dream again."
"Jackass."
"Yeah."
"You saw the deer right?"
"I did. Did you see the light?"
"I did. Did you see the snakes?"
"Shit."
"Shee-it."
There was a break, a silence between them that only swelled along with the tension through the line. This was real and dark and twisted and broken. It left him with a nagging pain in his gut that told him Roman was right.
"You feel it, don't you?" Roman asked, his voice pooling with urgency.
Peter could feel it. Peter could feel it and he couldn't even deny it. Peter could feel the importance clinging to him like tree sap to bark, like smoke in a confined room that just kept getting smaller. Something was about to happen and that something would be his job, would be his and Roman's job, to foresee and to stop. To find their own answers when there were none. The weight of the world felt heavy on his shoulders and this time Peter could not run.
He couldn't.
"Whatever this is, whatever fucked up bullshit this is. We're in this shit together," the upir spoke again, as if he were desperately afraid that Peter wasn't going to reply.
"We have to do something," the werewolf conceded. "But where would we even start?"
"Your guess is as good as mine."
Where life ends and death begins. Where the aftermath of death is found. Where hopefully, Peter would be able to pick up a scent or a feeling or an omen or some kind of sign of what to do and what the fuck was going on. Something that could lead him to wherever or whatever the fuck it was that Judith Evergreen was trying to show them.
"The ditch," Peter exhaled through his nose, disappointed in himself for suggesting such a morbid thing. "The ditch her body was found in. We start could start there."
"What makes you think we'll find anything?"
"Just a feeling," he answered.
Roman picked Peter up in his car about half an hour later. They drove to the outskirts of town and got out at the start of the woodland reserve trail. In the dead of night they walked.