by Glen Duncan
“Since you know about the vampire deal,” the vampire said, when his feet touched the polished oak floor, “let’s not waste time. Donate your services voluntarily in exchange for access to Quinn’s book and the friendship of the Fifty Houses for the rest of your life.”
No point saying: Or what? Now that I could see the vampire I could smell him, too, suggestible schmuck that hybrid perception is. Stubborn pockets of wolf shivered and heaved. Here was the all-but-overwhelming limbic imperative to rip his boochie head off. Here, too, packed tight in the phantom animal haunches, was coiled flight. A migrainy ambivalence: Get him. Run. Get him. Run. There was a burst of automatic weapons fire outside, from the roof guard, I guessed.
“What’s going on out there?” Jacqueline said. I still held her by her hair. Hot scalp and the odour of shampoo. The room’s overdose of patchouli had been to mask parfum de vamp. He stood perfectly still, feet together, hands by his sides, no smile, just the trademark physical economy and the intolerable self-possession of a mime artist or juggler. He’d spoken English with an Italian accent. Casa Mangiardi? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I hadn’t counted heads getting into the people-carrier. Four departed, one stayed behind. In a moment he’d make his move, a move so fast I’d be living in its upshot (doped, gagged, bagged and cuffed) without realising it had happened. In wolf mode I would have been a match. Human, I might as well be a blow-up doll.
“Jacob, please,” Jacqueline said. “That’s really hurting.”
Surrender made itself sensuously available, a lover who’d stolen up behind me and put her arms around me and pulled me close and was breathing on my ear. Here, if I wanted it, was the peace of dissolving into the bigger will. Cloquet’s peace with Mme Delon, no doubt.
“Jacob, please,” Jacqueline repeated. “Please.” I relaxed my grip on her hair. Let her go. She moved away. A small woman with an elfin head and a body just beginning to lose the fight. I thought of Cloquet’s enthusiasm for her anus, and smiled.
“Very good,” the vampire said. “Shall we?”
No illusions. I was going willingly or I was going after a touchingly brief struggle, but I was going. A mad cinematic montage burgeoned, of myself assimilated into vamp-camp, prisoner, yes, but civilly treated, swapping monster yarns by the evening fire, gradually rewiring revulsion, finding the common ground, investing in Helios for the sheer science, against all odds—against nature starting a verboten interspecies affair, the glacial Mia and her lovely legs—jump cut to a shot of myself in lupine form spread-eagled on a brushed-steel slab, limbs shackled and head clamped, screaming, attended by white-coated boochies and state-of-the-art invasive gizmology, blood running from my ears, nose, rectum …
More gunfire from without. Shouts. A helicopter. I wondered where poor Cloquet was in all of it, whatever it was. Wondered too, since for a few moments now the javelin had been a modest little sentience next to my foot, whether I could get down to it and hurl it before the vampire did to me whatever he was going to do. Of no more practical use (obviously, since it was metal, not wood) than giving him the finger, but in my fey state the punk pointlessness of the gesture appealed.
“Take me with you,” Jacqueline said to him. “I know it didn’t go precisely to plan, but after all you’re getting what you wanted. I swear you won’t regret it.”
“Don’t speak,” the vampire said, not looking at her. Then several things happened very fast.
An explosion shattered the wall of glass and a bolus of smoke and flame woofed into the room and almost immediately retreated again. The force of the blast blew all three of us off our feet. I smashed into the stools by the bar and felt a rib crack. The javelin went too, missed my head by six inches, buried itself in the bar’s mosaic flank behind me. The vampire, closest to the detonation, sailed spectacularly over the bar, and went into the mirror-backed brilliant bottles with a flailing crash.
Jacqueline Delon was on her hands and knees two stools down from me. A large shard of glass protruded bloodily from her outer thigh. Another from her shin. Another from the side of her head. She reached up and gently plucked this one out and looked at it. It occurred to me I might be similarly inconvenienced. Sure enough, dreamy investigation discovered a large scalene fragment sticking out of my left shoulder. I followed Jacqueline’s example and tenderly extracted it. Blood welled and hurried out. With a sort of abstracted apathy I took hold of the javelin. The out-of-sight helicopter was a deafening evocation of Apocalypse Now. The explosion had filled the room with heat, briefly; now cool air rushed in like an angel. The javelin wasn’t budging. I struggled to my feet. Jacqueline, in the silence of freakish stoicism or deep shock, hauled herself via one of the stools onto hers. One stiletto had absconded. Even in her state the imbalance was intolerable. She reached down and removed the remaining shoe. We looked at each other as if we’d both just been born.
The vampire appeared behind her. He wasn’t there, then he was. This is the way of it. Fast. Too fast. His natty little face was glass-flecked, glass-studded, beaded with blood. He wiped it, swiped it, actually, as if it were covered in maddening flies, though his expression of compact enlightenment remained intact. “Shall we go?” he said.
Then the helicopter appeared. Descended in profile like Miss Muffet’s spider. Thudding chop and the room’s lethal wreckage crazily aswirl. A WOCOP Bluebottle, lightweight, fast, handleable. The bulbous smoked-glass head dipped, once, as if in decorous greeting—Ellis beamed out at me from the pilot’s seat—then turned through 45 degrees to face us with its brutal lights.
I knew what it was packing. So did the vampire. So, most likely, did Jacqueline. They call the ammunition “hail”: eight-inch hickory darts discharged at the rate of thirty per second. They call the gun, naturally enough, “Mary.”
He didn’t get away clean. At least a dozen shots hit him—I saw one go straight through his throat, another struck just below his eye—but he was fast enough, just fast enough, to cover his vulnerable heart.
With the nearest shield to hand.
Two seconds, no more. I got one glimpse of Jacqueline’s floodlit body magically covered in quills before the vampire launched himself—and her—backwards, shot over the bar’s shattered remains and smashed through the window on the other side of the room, out into the night.
I wasn’t surprised, when Ellis killed the floods, to see a stubbled Grainer in full combat gear sitting with grand masculine casualness half out of the passenger seat, a Hunt Staker resting across his knees, a cigarette slotted semisatirically into the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick. He gave me a salute, index finger to forehead, smiled, then turned and nodded to Ellis, who pulled the chopper back, swung it slowly around, lifted it up and away above the trees.
It started raining.
31
I DIDN’T HAVE much fun getting myself out of the villa. There was the removal of two more bits of glass for a start, one in my left calf, one—excruciating when I took my first steps—in my right knee. For a few minutes I just lay on one of the elephantine couches bleeding and feeling sorry for myself. It was pleasant, curled up with manageable pain, listening to the rain fall. These are the first minutes of peace, I thought, with a miffed snuffle, I’ve had in bloody ages.
But that, obviously, wouldn’t do. I hobbled to what was left of the bar, took a fortifying swig of Kauffman’s, retrieved the Luger from the debris and gingerly crunched my way out onto the terrace.
Except for the rain—thanks to which a lovely fresh odour of wet earth cut through the smoke—the Delon estate was silent. The two ground-floor guards lay sprawled nearby, bloodied, dead, one of them still clutching Cloquet’s binoculars. No sound from the roof. Grainer would have shot the lookout up there through the cross-hairs from fifty yards away. The called-for reinforcements weren’t visible, had looked at each other, I felt sure, and with earnest cowardice wordlessly agreed: Fuck reinforcement.
Which meant avoiding them if they were now, tightly wound
with safeties off, poking around.
Transportation was the pressing issue. I certainly wasn’t walking, not with my bleeding bits and stove-in rib. (Ribs, plural, I now thought; too much pain for just one.) It was possible Cloquet had driven here, but no less likely he’d arrived by parachute or camel or space-hopper. In any case, who knew how far it was to “the south gate”? No. I needed motorised transport, which, since one of the many things I haven’t got around to in my two hundred years is learning how to fly a helicopter (Jacqueline’s ship-to-shore sat ready on its asphalt pad), meant finding my way to the garages and hot-wiring whatever was in there.
It took me a wearying and peculiarly indeterminate time to locate them, limping and creeping and swearing through my teeth and going around, I now suspect, in circles. I think I might have sat down and passed out for a few minutes in one of the corridors. Elsewhere I vomited dismally against a wall, presided over by a vast sub-Bosch painting of a Black Mass. The rain came down harder, as if to evoke with its hiss time boiling away to nothing. I passed a large dark room where a wall-mounted flat-screen with sound muted showed an overweight rapper performing rap hand gestures, which are supposed to project masculine cool but in fact look like a pointlessly violent version of deaf sign language. The baby-faced skinhead from the Hecate lay on the floor in a pool of blood, untidily dead, with eyes open and one leg bent under him. I went down more stairs than there ought to have been.
Eventually, wounds hot, scalp whispering, ribs vociferously against all this moving around nonsense, I found the utility room and a moment’s comfort in the benign smell of clean laundry. A door from there led to a curved corridor, off which (I was under the mezzanine) were three more doors to the garages.
Goldilocks and the Three Cars. Ferrari 458 Italia in red. No keys. 1956 Jaguar XK140 in white. No keys. 1976 Volkswagen Super Beetle in metallic lilac. Keys. See, Jake? Life said. It’s a comedy. Lighten up. I got in and started the engine.
WOCOP forces (if indeed there’d been anyone besides Grainer and Ellis) had withdrawn. When I stopped on the drive and rolled down the VW’s window I got the forest’s massy green consciousness absorbing the rain in the dark, the land’s deep thirst. Nothing else.
“Cloquet?” I called. “You there?”
Nothing. God only knows why I bothered. One has these occult compulsions. He reminded me of Gollum. He’d take it hard to hear his precious was dead. Or undead, depending on vamp whim. I called again. No reply. So be it. I hit the gas.
32
THE SENSIBLE THING would have been to switch to a less conspicuous car and get to an airport. I couldn’t face it. I was exhausted. My wounds had stopped bleeding by the time I drove out of Jacqueline’s south gate (in human form as in lupine I heal with obscene rapidity) and by tomorrow morning would be gone. The ribs, even with my cellular speed-knitting, would take a day longer. Physically this was nothing, a scrape. Yet all of me that was not flesh cried out for repose. The vampire had left me, as I must have him, with a feeling of cloying contamination. I wanted a bath, a quiet room, a cool bed.
All of which, I record with humble gratitude, I found. An hour later, having cleaned myself up as best I could in Arbonne’s public loo, I checked into the Hotel Eugenie just east of the village, where for two hundred and eighty euros I was furnished for the night with a large en suite room done in rustic chic: heated oak floor, Basque rugs, bespoke iron four-poster, wireless Internet and—God bless Monsieur and Madame Duval—an enormous free-standing bathtub. There I took meditative refuge with an iced flannel over my eyes and a bottle of 1996 Château Léoville Barton (Saint-Julien) for company. I dimmed the lights and lay back in the soft water’s warmth and for a short while at least was pleasantly revisited by that sedative phrase, Come what may … Come what may … Come … what …
One wants not to think. One wants, I repeat, all sorts of things. Presently the bottle was empty and come what may had yielded to what the fuck are you going to do? Indeed. Practicalities like a little slag heap. The vampires would know where I was but wouldn’t try again tonight. Too risky with me back under Hunt surveillance. Jacqueline’s job had been to get me off WOCOP’s radar long enough for a snatch. She’d failed. The Hecate must have drawn heat, as Cloquet said, hence the hasty ship-jump to the villa Delon. My cock rose through the bath foam in salute to the memory of the morning’s sex—then just as smoothly sank back when I thought of Quinn’s book.
Taken by the boochies in the hope that my need to acquire it would keep me alive.
Another sigh. This is what happens, I told myself. Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.
I got out of the bath, dried myself with irritated meticulousness, donned one of the Eugenie’s white towelling robes and in an act of forced jolly recklessness ordered up another bottle. Vampires? Hunters? Let the fuckers come! And while we’re at it, fuck Quinn’s book. If getting to it (to the truth, my inner romantic protested, the truth, Jacob, after all these years …) if getting to it meant submitting to the no-nonsense pricks and pokes of vampire science then the book might as well not exist. Of course I could always try force. One werewolf against the Fifty Houses of the undead …
Glass One of Bottle Two went down in a couple of analeptic swigs. I flicked on the TV. A French home-makeover show. A couple weeping uglily at the miracle of their cheaply redecorated kitchen. I changed channels. American Idol. Transformation again, this time from Nobody into Superstar. Perhaps Jacqueline was right: Humanity’s getting its metamorphic kicks elsewhere these days. When you can watch the alchemy that turns morons into millionaires and gimps into global icons, where’s the thrill in men who turn into wolves?
I turned the TV off. Sat on the edge of the bed. Felt the gathered tension go, accompanied, incredibly, by the third sigh of the day. (Like bloody buses or bloody Copean men, these sighs: none for ages then three at once.) Nothing, I averred, breathing with quivering drunk dignity through my nostrils, had changed. Be Quinn’s book true or be it false its existence wasn’t going to alter my course. If you can live two hundred years without the solution to the riddle of your nature you can die without it too. Humans go to their graves with none of the big questions answered. Why should werewolves fare better?
A fresh pack of Camels had arrived as ordered with the wine. I lit one up. The greatest gift of lycanthropy is knowing smoking won’t kill you. I poured the last glass of the night. Peace returned, somewhat. Nothing, I repeated, had changed. I would sit out the twenty-nine days to the next full moon, whereupon Grainer—
Ah, yes. With cruel belatedness the image of Harley’s murderer bloomed. Naturally his appearance on the chopper was a calculated provocation, the ease of body, the joyless Navajo smile, the mock salute. It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick. Come off it, Jake, I could hear him saying. You telling me you’re really going to let me get away with that? It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick.
Enough. I finished the cigarette. Turned out the light. Lay down on the bed. How long since I’d slept? Forty-eight hours? Seventy-two?
Wolf-silt churned in my shoulders. When I’d ripped through the junkie’s throat his body had jerked as if in violent ejaculation. Now his spirit shuffled through the packed underworld of my bloodstream, friendless in the murmuring crowd. It’s official. You’re the last. I’m sorry. I closed my eyes.
33
THREE WEEKS HAVE PASSED
Everything’s changed.
Jesus fucking Christ.
34
THE MORNING FOLLOWING my night at the Hotel Eugenie I took a train to Paris and spent the journey bringing these pages up to date. I clocked two WOCOP agents after transferring at Bordeaux, replaced by two more in the capital. A matter of indifference to me—or perhaps not quite indifference, since their presence was keeping the undead in check. Naturally the boochies were watching me, via human familiars during the day, in person(
s) by night. Ordering a Long Island Iced Tea in a Montmartre night club at three in the morning a wave of vamp-nausea hit me hard enough to make me reel. I turned. Blond blue-eyed Mia at the opposite end of the neon-lined bar raised her glass (a prop, obviously) with a smile. Calm intelligent white hands and oxblood lipstick. A strikingly beautiful woman who smelled like a vat of pigshit and rotten meat. You appreciate the cognitive dissonance. Anyway, she made no move. I stayed in Paris a couple of days, too dull-hearted even to take a farewell turn around the Louvre. I hired a red-haired, big-breasted athletic escort and surprised myself with the vehemence of my climax. Postcoitally I tried, from a supposed correspondence between volcanic ejaculation and the capacity to affirm life, to work up a bit of feeling for still being here. Failed. Libido, I was forced to conclude, was a lone warrior flinging itself around the battlefield everyone else had deserted.
At last, five days since waking in the Hecate’s hold, I took a British Airways evening flight from Charles de Gaulle to London Heathrow.
•
Which is where everything—everything—changed.
•
Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—
I know what he was going to say now.
(“And you don’t believe in fate?” she said to me.)
(“I’ll believe in anything you tell me,” I said.)
Big coup for the if and then department. If I hadn’t decided to take the Heathrow Express instead of a cab … If I hadn’t stopped to buy smokes in Arrivals … If I hadn’t taken the train to Paris … If I hadn’t spent the night in Arbonne … If, if, if. Embrace determinism and you’re chained all the way back to the beginning. Of the universe. Of everything.