by Glen Duncan
We returned to the house, a silent walk through the silent village under the constellations. For the first time since the kill I felt lust flickering again between us—then realised: She’d felt it before me, knew the next phase of the cycle had begun, was faced again with its inevitable end point. Hence thigh-deep alone in the wine dark sea.
The villa smelled of our freshly washed linen and the veranda’s potted lemon and thyme. We undressed with a strange placid precision and slipped naked between the cool sheets.
“Don’t you find it strange that I’ve taken your word for it about the drugs?” she said. Somewhere on the road trip we’d covered narcotic suppressants, my old days of the cage, the cast-iron safe, the key. I’d told her the truth: It’s possible to get through, medicined to near death, for a couple of lunations, maybe three (doing four I’d nearly killed myself—literally, I’d torn my own flesh off; if it hadn’t been for the howler’s accelerated healing I’d have bled to death), but there are two reasons for not doing it. First, it’s the worst suffering a werewolf can go through. Second, it’s pointless, because whether it’s this month or the next or the one after that, unless you commit suicide you will certainly kill again—and again and again and again until you die of old age or silver finds you. I’d told her all this.
“I don’t find it strange,” I said. “You see the logic. Morally a month’s abstinence here or there’s meaningless.”
“That’s not why I haven’t tried it,” she said. “I haven’t tried it because I remember what those first three times were like and the thought of going through that again terrifies me. It’s not seeing the logic. It’s cowardice.”
“I’m no different. It terrifies me, too. Plus the last time I tried it I failed.”
“But you’ve done good in the world. You’ve counterbalanced.”
“Money gestures. Which is nothing if you’ve got the stuff to burn. Besides, it doesn’t work. Money’s not legal tender in the moral world.”
My cock had stirred next to her hand. I knew she knew. Was readying herself for the exquisite capitulation. Through sorrow and shame into warmth, and the peace of having no one but each other.
“It doesn’t change,” she said. “I keep thinking there’s some way around it, but in the end it’s still either kill yourself or get on with being what you are.”
“Don’t kill yourself,” I said.
“Will you stay with me?”
“Yes.”
Just stay.
“I might kill myself,” she said. “It’s hard to say.”
“Will you promise not to kill yourself without telling me first?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“I promise not to kill myself without telling you first.”
That night I had a tumble of vivid dreams. I think we made love again, in the half-asleep way that comes close to magic. Then more dreams. One of being repeatedly stung in the neck by an elusive insect. I thought, I must tell Talulla about this when I wake up. I must—But the thought fell off suddenly into darkness.
And when I woke, late, the room was filled with sunlight and a sea-smelling breeze, and before I lifted my head from the pillow I could feel the emptiness in the bed where her body should have been and Ellis’s voice said: “Jeez, Jake, it’s about time.”
47
HE WAS SITTING in the room’s one rattan chair at the foot of the bed with his back to the French windows that opened onto the veranda, hands clasped over his belly, one leg crossed at a wide angle over the other. Trademark black leather trousers, steel-toe-capped boots, pale denim jacket. The waist-length white-blond hair was down today. A movement of air brought me his marshy foot odour. A tuning-fork hum in my teeth brought me silver rounds in the shoulder-holstered firearm. I sat up to face him.
“We’ve got her,” he said. “Do you want Q&A or shall I just roll it out?”
“Tell me,” I said.
Ellis nodded, briefly, as if to confirm his private guess at my reaction had been correct, then he got to his feet, made a just a sec gesture, went out onto the veranda and came back a moment later with two cups of freshly brewed coffee. He handed me one then returned to his seat.
“First, let me reassure you,” he said. “Talulla’s alive, well, completely unharmed. She’s far from here, in a location I can’t disclose yet, but you need have absolutely no anxieties about her comfort. This I promise you, Jake.”
I set the coffee down on the bedside table. My hands were trembling. Walking back from the beach last night under the stars she’d taken my hand. Neither of us had said a word but the gesture had made both of us think, gently, of death. Now I had an image of her sitting with her knees drawn up on a spartan bunk in a windowless cell. Alive, well, completely unharmed. I had to believe him because not believing him left me nothing.
“I can’t do this naked,” I said.
“I understand. Go ahead.”
I got to my feet, felt the perfect vacuum where any concession to or interest in my nakedness would with anyone else have been, and dressed, quickly, in yesterday’s clothes. Then sat on the edge of the bed and lit a Camel. My in-love self like a straitjacketed lunatic sobbed and rocked back and forth repeating They’ve got her. They’ve got her. They’ve got her. There was a sore spot on my neck I couldn’t resist rubbing.
“Still stinging?” Ellis asked. “Tranquilizer dart. We’ve got this new guy, calls himself the Cat. Justifiably, if he got up onto your balcony without waking you. You didn’t hear anything?”
A dream of being stung by an insect. My own uselessness lay on me like a passed-out drunk.
“Just give me the information,” I said.
“Right. So we’ve got her. You can have her back and live happily ever after. All you’ve got to do is kill Grainer.”
I looked up at him. His face was peaceful, dark blue eyes lucid. He returned my stare. “You heard me correctly,” he said.
“Why Grainer?” I asked.
Ellis took a sip of his coffee, swallowed; his Adam’s apple moved in his gullet like a little elbow. “Jake,” he said, “it’s like this. For some time now I’ve been involved with a movement within the organisation. This is a group of people—some from Hunt, some from Tech, some from Finance—who’ve read the writing on the wall. I mean it’s pretty big writing on a pretty big wall: We need you. Literally, you’re our reason for being. Not just you, obviously. The vamps, the demons, the reanimated, the voodoo kids, the Satanists, the djin, the poltergeists, the whole crowd. Problem is the crowd’s getting a tad small. You see this, right?”
Post-9/11 wacko-rumour said the Bush administration had launched the attacks itself, the reward being carte blanche for oil-savvy aggression and a shot in the already steroidal arm for the military-industrial complex. No fear, no funding. Ergo al-Qaeda. Same principle here.
“The guys who did their job so well they did themselves out of a job,” I said.
“Exactly. My friends and I aren’t prepared to let it happen. It’s okay for Grainer, he’s got money and he’s sick of all this shit anyway. But what’s a guy like me going to do? Flip burgers?”
Not just funding, then. Identity crisis too. Ellis didn’t know anything else. Porn stars talked of the industry as a loving family. The Hunt, I could well imagine, played the same role.
“FYI,” Ellis continued, “there are now two WOCOPs. World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena, and World Organisation for the Creation of Occult Phenomena. We’re not out. In all likelihood we never really will be. But under our influence things are going to change. We’re going to save what’s in danger of being lost forever.”
“By killing Grainer?”
“You have no idea, Jake, how much clout the guy has. It’s not just him. There’sa nucleus, a damned junta. They’re controlling funding, recruitment, research, policy, media. Half of them are cynics robbing the organisation blind and the other half are zealots who don’t realise they’re cheerleading themselves into redundancy.�
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“I had you pegged as a zealot,” I said.
Ellis shook his head with a sort of benevolent disappointment. “I’m a pragmatist, Jake. Always have been. I thought you knew that.”
“And when you kill Grainer—sorry, when you get me to kill Grainer—what then? A coup d’état? Or are you picking the generals off one by one?”
“We don’t want a bloody revolution,” he said, then swallowed the last of his coffee and put the cup down on the floor. “The organisation’s too unstable and our numbers too small. We’re looking at three, maybe four key deaths in the U.K. cabal. A dozen in the States. We don’t want to overdo it. We’re looking at quietly making our presence felt. Gentle steering. You see how this would work? The zealots, admittedly, have got to go, and Grainer’s a zealot to the core, but the cynics can be persuaded. Either to go voluntarily or to stop abusing the organisation. Not a bloody revolution, but not an entirely velvet one, either.”
“Then you don’t need me,” I said. “Just kill Grainer yourself. In fact you have to for the threat of your group to be credible.”
“I am going to kill him,” he said. “It’ll be me replacing the silver ammo with regular shit. You just provide the camouflage, Jake. It’s the perfect faux cover. We have to let these guys know we did it without giving them the means to prove it. They’re connected in the straight world. We could face regular legal prosecution if we don’t get it right.”
“You’ve left it a bit late, haven’t you?” I said. “I mean, there’s only me left. What difference is keeping me alive going to make?”
He looked at me, almost smiling. “Nice, Jake. But there’s you and her. You didn’t know if we knew about her. You had to find out. We do.”
A slender hope, but worth a try.
“Grainer knows about her?”
“No. Just my people.”
My inner strategist was working through the terror. Grainer doesn’t know about her. Is that any good? Can we use that? Not sure. Give me a minute.
“Okay,” I said. “So there’s me and her. That’s two of us. Big deal. Hardly enough for a Hunt renaissance.”
For a moment Ellis didn’t reply, indeed seemed to attend to some frequency only he could hear. Then returned, with a short sigh. “Jake,” he said. “Oh, boy. You have no idea what’s going on. I don’t even know where to start.”
My scalp shrank. I didn’t want him to start. The details, in any case, wouldn’t matter. All that mattered was that some giant First Principles error had produced fantastic false ramifications. Now everything you thought you knew … Everything you were sure was … Didn’t you see this coming? You, the big reader?
“We’ve cracked the antivirus,” Ellis said.
The temptation to say “What?” though I’d heard him perfectly was all but overwhelming. I resisted, just.
“Serendipitously, too,” he said. “I guess it’s always like that with the big discoveries, a bit of raw meat falls on the fire and voilà!—cooking. Anyway, we’ve got your girl to thank.”
For the werewolf, but they’d hit me. In the calf. A tranquilizer, presumably, since a moment later I was out like a light.
No, angel. Not a tranquilizer. Jesus Christ.
“Is Alfonse Mackar dead or not?” I asked.
“He’s dead,” Ellis said. “He died the night he ran into Talulla in the desert, though he wasn’t killed by us. Some local amateur outfit in a fucking Jeep. Can you believe it? We had to recruit them to shut them up. Seriously, Jake, it’s a circus out there, a free-for-all. Every teenager with a smelting kit and a diploma in Buffy. I mean there was a time when—”
“Would you just tell me what’s going on?”
He held up his hand. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Let me get a refill. You want?”
I did not. While Ellis fixed himself a fresh cup I picked up the few items of Talulla’s clothing that lay scattered around the room and put them out of sight. Covered the bed, too. It was horrible, him seeing the evidence of our intimacy now that it was wrecked. I couldn’t stop thinking of the way she’d taken my hand last night and neither of us had been able to say anything. As if we’d shared a premonition of loss.
Ellis put his head round the French window. “You want to sit out here? It’s a beautiful day.”
Teeth clenched, I joined him on the veranda in dazzling light. The sun said maybe three o’clock. Below us a scatter of small white houses dotted the hill down to the village, where Konia went about its absurdly picturesque business. A brown-skinned fisherman sat on a capstan mending a net. A waiter leaned against a lamppost, smoking. Four teenagers lounged around an orange Vespa. I took the seat opposite Ellis with the light behind me. The sun’s heat fit the back of my head like a hellish yarmulke.
“Okay,” he said. “Research on werewolf infection stopped officially five years ago. Unofficially, our boys carried on. It was tough, with the shortage of live specimens—but we had Alfonse Mackar. Alfonse was our golden goose—until he got away. Escaped, for Christ’s sake. Can’t believe we were so slack there. Some of those young guys …” He looked away, shaking his head. “Anyway,” he continued, “that night in the desert we were trying to recapture him. Failing that, get a shot of the latest version of the antivirus into him. What happens? The shooter hits Talulla with the dart by mistake.” He leaned forward, eyebrows raised. “And who is the shooter? Me! Fucking Dead-eye Dick!” He relaxed and leaned back again, smiling. “Serendipity, Jake, every time. All along we’d been trying to treat the werewolf. Suddenly, accidentally, we treated the victim. Talulla’s the first person to survive the bite—and Turn—in more than a hundred and fifty years. She survived and Turned because the meds our eggheads cooked up actually work. We still don’t know if they kill the virus in an established lycanthrope, but they obviously kill it in a new one. A dose of this when you’re bitten and bingo—brand-new werewolf. That’s Poulsom’s thinking, anyway. He’s the brain. These are exciting times.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “You killed Wolfgang. You. You’re Grainer’s surrogate son. You’ve killed loads of us.”
He nodded again, lowered his head. Ridiculously, sighed. “You’re right, Jake,” he said. “It took me too long. I was under the man’s spell. He’s got the gift, you know, the charisma. He has been like a father to me. But I had to stay close to him to find out who the crucial players in the organisation are. He’s got access to everyone. Even now the thought of him not being around makes me a little ill, and it’s a year since I joined the renegades. There’s the ghost of ambivalence like a spirit that can’t cross over. It’s the price of double agency.”
I felt ill myself. Not least because it was clear Ellis was mad. His inner universe was impenetrable. He might be telling the truth. He might be suffering a protracted hallucination. The fundamental reference points and parameters weren’t there. You had to make a decision to take him at face value. Easy enough, since the alternative was a void where another explanation should be.
“By the way,” he said, “it’s only fair to tell you: You’ve had the antivirus yourself. The new one. More than once.”
“What?”
“Drinks at the Zetter. Again in Caernarfon. Poulsom’s still after a version that destroys the virus in the biter. Talulla got bitten, and got the antiviral, and as a result Turned. But we still don’t know if she can Turn anyone herself. Plus, having the drug that allows successful infection in the bitten victim gets us nowhere in the big picture. I mean, think about it: We’d have to be there every time someone got bitten to administer the drug. It’s completely impracticable.”
There was a memory of a Scotch at the Zetter that hadn’t tasted right. I ordered an Oban, I’d said to Harley. I think they’ve given me Laphroaig.
Harley.
My life, I thought, is a list of people I’ve failed.
“Trouble is of course you haven’t bitten anyone,” Ellis went on. “That’s another condition of the deal, obviously. You’re going to have to start
leaving survivors. We’re thinking two living for every one dead. You guys are going to be in clover while the numbers go up again.”
The light sheeting off the white veranda was irritating my eyes and the heat was an angry sentience. In spite of their irrelevance the details maggot-tickled my brain.
“Why didn’t you take her?”
“Say again?”
“Talulla, in the desert. Why didn’t you take her in then?”
Ellis’s phone rang. He glanced at the number. Ignored it. “We would have,” he said, “but another unit turned up. Regular WOCOP with one of the goddamned Directors on board. They didn’t know what had gone down, obviously, no clue a civilian was involved, but they wanted us to get Alfonse’s body out of there ASAP. Poulsom had gone back to surgi-tag Talulla, but beyond that there was nothing he could do on his own. The Director transferred to our chopper to fly Alfonse back to the Phoenix HQ. Poulsom had to leave her where she was and hightail it. We picked him up a mile from the highway.”
“What do you mean ‘surgi-tag’?”
“It’s a bug,” Ellis said. “A transmitter. ’Bout half the size of your pinkie nail. Surgically implanted. It’s in her chest. Poulsom was curious about what effect the antivirus would have on her. I guess even then he had a hunch. The guy’s uncanny with these things. Anyway, we lost her. We thought she must have died like all the others because for the longest time we got nothing. Then, two months back, beep … beep … beep. I wanted to bring her in right away but the vote was against me. Rumours were rife we had a mole ourselves. Climate of paranoia. One of Poulsom’s guys had disappeared. The whole movement nearly collapsed. But we waited it out.”
Actually I do still get a slight pain in my chest sometimes. As if there’s a splinter in there. God, that tequila’s gone to the tips of my toes. The thought of them knowing where we were the whole time, all the miles across the States, all my pointless caution, gave me a feeling now like sensual capitulation.