by Glen Duncan
It’s seemed, these thirteen days, that I’ve left real time behind, drifted into a suspension or loop where seconds bulge and minutes warp, taking their normal shape only when I hear Talulla’s voice on the phone.
•
It’s seemed. Until a couple of hours ago. Ellis has been.
I was pouring myself a drink when the library door opened and he entered, smelling of wet London. He had a painful-looking stye on his left eye and was wearing an excess of ChapStick. The effect was of a creepily humanised waxwork. “Wouldn’t mind keeping you company with one of those, Jake,” he said, before taking the armchair opposite the couch, which received him with a leather gasp. “It’s miserable out there.” I poured a second Scotch and handed it to him, suppressing a shudder when our fingertips met at the glass. “Jiminy,” he said, after slug and lip-smack. “That’s better.”
The impulse to do violence to the man was powerful, reflexive and held absolutely—Talulla on her bunk, eyes wide in the TV light, trying to see through the wall, the night, the unknown miles, to me—in check. I put another log on the fire, pokered it a bit, pointlessly, then sat down on the couch, facing him. Obedience. You keep her alive with obedience.
“Okay,” he said. “Operational instructions. Two days from now, on Wednesday morning at nine a.m. precisely you ring the WOCOP office in Marylebone on this—here: It’s a completely clean phone with a trace blocker. Don’t mix it up with the other one. Grainer will be at the office. You won’t get him, obviously, you’ll get the usual bullshit from whoever’s on reception. You tell them to give Grainer the message to call you on the clean number in one hour, then you hang up. Grainer will call.”
“How do you know?”
“Jeez, Jacob, just listen, will you? He’ll call because you’re all he fucking thinks about. You think I’m making this up as I go along?”
“Okay, okay.”
“I’m under pressure, dude.”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. Held the heel of his hand against the stye. “When he calls you, you set the meet. Full moon’s Friday, moonrise 18:07. This you know, obviously. Don’t let him change the location. Wales. Your forest, okay? We’re set up for that. You head out for the Pyrenees or someplace and we’re screwed. Got it?”
“Got it. When do I see Talulla?”
No reply. The blood drained from my scalp. My knees and hands were adrenaline-rich, giddily ready to do something. There was nothing I could do. “I have to see her,” I said. Then added, with no need to pretend careful desperation, “Please. For God’s sake.”
Ellis exhaled, heavily. The brightness, the look of heightened sensuality, was, I now saw, exhaustion. I hadn’t realised he was so near the edge. “Oy, Jake,” he said, shaking his head, like a benevolent rabbi I’d disappointed with my weak will. “Impatience. Seriously. I know this is hard for you …” He glazed over. Drifted a moment. Went through something in his impenetrable interior … “Actually I do know this is hard for you. I’m sorry. I’m not using my imagination. That was my New Year’s resolution, you know. Work on standing in the other fellow’s shoes. That and to read one poem every day.”
The feel of the poker I’d used was still phantomly there in my hand. Perfect for splintering a human skull. I didn’t move.
“Okay, listen,” he said. “The hotel you stayed at in Caernarfon, the Castle Hotel. You’re booked in there Thursday night. Same room. The room that overlooks the street. You get there Thursday and wait for my call. You stay in the room. You don’t go anywhere or see anyone. No hookers, nothing.”
Again I thought of Maddy—or Poor Maddy, as she’s become in my lately sentimentalised memory, her terrible comprehension (and flawed denial) when Grainer had said, He’s a werewolf, honey. On the back of which flashback something suddenly nagged—but I had no time for it.
“You’ll bring her to the room?” I said.
“No, Jake, we won’t bring her to the room. You just check in and wait.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Ellis. Seriously. I’m not—” I stopped. Ellis sat very still, the awful long-fingered white hands at rest on his knees. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. The feelings. God dammit.”
He rolled his head on his neck a couple of times, easing tension. I held my tongue between my teeth. To my good fortune Russell appeared in the doorway. Ellis looked up.
“Land Rover went past again, sir,” Russell said. “You told us to let you know.”
“Okay,” Ellis said. “Get a trace on the plate. It’s probably nothing.”
“On it, boss.”
“And tell Chris I’m coming out, will you?”
“Roger that.”
“What Land Rover?” I asked, after Russell had gone.
“It’s nothing,” Ellis said. “Been seen twice. Now three times. Probably just a local resident. These guys are getting bored.” He swallowed the last sip of his drink and leaned back in the chair, for a moment turned his face to the fire and watched the buckle and snap of the flames in the hearth. “We’ll do a slow drive-by, Jake. You’ll see her. You’ll talk to her on the phone. That’s it. Don’t push it. This is a favour. This is goodwill. In lieu of future cooperation.”
“I understand. But Ellis?”
He looked at me.
“I want to level with you about something.”
The blond eyebrows raised. Eyes lapis lazuli buttons. “You do?”
“Yes. Listen, and don’t flip out: I know they’re not going to release Talulla. Wait—” when he opened his mouth to protest. “Wait. Hear me out. Don’t say anything till I’ve finished. You and I both know the eggheads want her in the lab. I’m buying that you want werewolves back, but not that people like Poulsom are going to take their chances with natural selection. I know the odds are I’ll never see her again, even if I survive Grainer—unless you take me in too. Look, for all I know that’s the plan anyway. I off Grainer for you and your boys are waiting with tranqs and a cage. In which case fine. In which case go ahead. If the only way I get to live out my days with Talulla is as her fellow lab rat then so be it. I’d rather share her fate than live without her. Now you can laugh if you want to.”
He didn’t laugh, but the eyebrows were a long time coming down. Eventually, he smiled. “I’ll tell you what, Jake,” he said. “I like you. I really do. You’ve got the clarity. So many of the fuckers I deal with are just blundering around in a fog.” He shrugged. “Of course you’re right. They want to keep her until they know transmission really works. They want to get the numbers up to fifty in captivity, then everyone gets out and the game begins again. Frankly, I don’t know why they bothered trying to sell you anything else. I was against it. Won’t be like that when—” He stopped himself. Almost blushed. When I’m in charge, he’d been going to say.
“And me?” I said. “What’s supposed to happen?”
“They want you, too, of course, if we can get you in safely.”
“Then get me in safely, will you?”
He stared at me with what looked like collusive delight. “That I can promise you, Jake. You have my word on it.”
Operationally there wasn’t much to go over. I’d given him the Beddgelert location soon after arriving here and he’d prepared an Ordnance Survey map showing a half-mile radius around the spot where, a hundred and sixty-seven years ago, my life as a werewolf began. I was to stay within it. The bodyguard wasn’t going with me to Wales. Ellis thought there was a good chance Grainer would put surveillance of his own in the area once I’d made the call: A glimpse (or word) of me in the company of WOCOP personnel and he’d know something was afoot. The climate of paranoia was extreme. Therefore Thursday morning a private car would pick me up and drive me, alone, directly to Caernarfon. Yes, I’d be exposed for a few hours at the hotel, but it was unavoidable. Ellis himself would be with Grainer.
“He’ll want you there?” I asked.
“He’s always said I’d be with him. I think he wants a witness. You have to
understand, this is his whole life. The culmination.”
Mentally there was much going on. Chiefly file-rifling for who I’d need to contact and how to move the requisite fees fast, whether I’d be able to get past the phone and room taps at the Castle, but also stubborn currents of doubt that Ellis really had it in him to murder his mentor. Pointless currents of doubt. There was no other way to get to Talulla.
“Here’s the Marylebone office number,” Ellis said. “Wednesday, nine a.m. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He turned for the door.
“Ellis?”
“Yeah?”
“Is she really all right? I mean, no one’s done anything to her?”
He looked at me again. For a moment all veils fell and I could see what he really thought: that I’d been weakened, that in some fundamental way I’d let him down. As of course had Grainer. As of course had his mother before that. He was, I now realised, the most singularly alone human being I’d ever encountered. In the purified moment between us I saw his future, the rise to despotism, isolation, eventual madness, most likely suicide. All without love. We both saw it. And as if the universe was invested in proving there was no end to the perverseness of the heart (even the werewolf heart), I felt a flicker of pity for him. He felt it too—and in a reflex of terror shut it out.
“She’s fine, Jake,” he said. “She’s cool. I promise you. Stop worrying. You okay for supplies here?”
•
It’s three in the morning. The night-shift boys are at the nadir of their boredom. The fire in the hearth is low, hissed into occasionally by rain coming down the chimney. For days now I’ve been circling my predicament—our predicament, mine and Talulla’s—trying to will a better way out of it. There isn’t one. It’s a relief to accept it, finally. In thirty hours, with a prayer to the God who isn’t there, I’ll make the call to the Marylebone office.
50
THE BLOOD ON these pages is mine.
51
THIS MIGHT BE the last I write. If it is, I hope whoever finds this journal carries out my final wish (see inside front cover) and gets it to you, angel.
On Wednesday morning I made the call. Got the call back, from Grainer himself. The trick, I’d decided, was not to oversell it.
“Jacob,” he said. “I’m aghast.”
“I don’t want a conversation,” I said. “Friday moonrise. Have you got a pen and paper? Beddgelert forest, Snowdonia. OS Grid SH578488. You get what you wanted.”
“All things considered,” he said, “it’s really the only fitting—”
I hung up.
The day was a churning and excessively detailed nightmare. It rained, continuously, cold skirls blown and dashed by an icy wind. Brollies dislocated. Car headlamps came on. A drain in Earl’s Court Road blocked and made an iridescent black lake. The Hunger was a long-nailed hand raking my insides from gullet to anus. Desire, too. Oh, yes. Plans to hatch and a lovesick heart to comfort were matters of indifference to the pre-Curse libido, which, having reached apotheosis with Talulla last full moon was making it clear it would never again settle for less. I had to watch the booze, too, though by Wednesday evening the last of Harley’s Macallan was gone. Diminishing anaesthetic returns. I hadn’t left these rooms for more than two weeks. Perhaps a little craziness was setting in, but I was convinced I could feel Lula reaching out telepathically. Maddeningly just on the edge of clarity. I’d asked Ellis to let her call me but he’d claimed it was out of his hands. Said he’d stuck his neck out as it was to get me the drive-by.
My own phone had been confiscated and Harley’s disconnected. I had no doubt the two I now had from Ellis were bugged and alarmed, but it was a ticklish trial to resist taking the chance. Every hour was an hour I could have spent getting the mercenary ball rolling. As it was I’d have to find a way of getting a clean line out from the Castle Hotel, which would be my only chance to act unwatched. I’ve had moral offsetting recourse to hired guns before. I used them against the Fascists in Spain, the Nazis in occupied France, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the death squads in El Salvador, most recently against government forces and Janjaweed militia in Darfur—and in every instance absolutely nothing moves without money. A lot, up front. I have half a dozen SCOAs (Security Codes Only Accounts) in Swiss banks but even with my access and contacts setting up an operation in less than twelve hours would be a trip to the border of insanity. But it was all I had. I’d never see Talulla again without getting into WOCOP myself, and I’d never spring us without professional help from outside.
The vampires had other ideas.
Just after midnight I heard Russell outside the library door saying: “Andy? You reading me?” Pause. “Andy, come back.” Pause. Then loudly: “Andrew, put your twatting headset back on.”
Nothing.
“What’s going on?” I said.
Russell put his head round the door. “Sit tight in here,” he said. Then into his com: “Chris, I’m not getting anything from Andy. Go up there and check, will you?”
Andy was on roof duty. Chris on the floor immediately below him. Russell was on the library level with me, and fourth man Wazz (I hadn’t enquired into derivation) patrolled the ground floor. “Wazz? You copy all that? Yeah. Look lively.”
I’d got up from the couch and was about to advise being given a weapon just in case, when what happened next happened.
Very fast.
A (literally) staggering stink of boochie. Clamped salivary glands and the surge of nausea. One foot came off the floor for a moment while the room tilted. I found myself back on the couch. My vision clouded. Someone upstairs screamed.
When my sight returned I saw Russell in profile through the library’s open doorway. He was looking at something out of shot and his face was the face of a child in deep distress. In an admirable testament to Hunt training his hands were doing what they’d been drilled to do and searching his belt for optimal weaponry. I saw his fingers close on a UV stick and begin to draw it out—before the sound of flesh and bone rupturing followed a split-second later by a spray of blood that covered his face and chest stopped him. He groped, blinded, managed to get the UV stick out—then jerked and dropped it, undetonated, both hands ascending with a strange slow grace to his throat, where what was unmistakably one of the Hunt’s own wooden stakes had buried itself.
Flung or fired by whatever was coming along the landing towards him. He went with what looked like deliberate slowness down onto his knees, eyes wide, mouth open, trying and failing to swallow, khah … khah … khah.
The black vampire from Heathrow appeared on the landing. Seductively calm long face suggestive of immense patience and capability. In his left hand he held a Hunt Staker, lately discharged. With his right he dragged the body of Chris, the second-floor man, by its spinal column, which had been yanked through the abdomen and ribs. In with the stench of vampire I caught a poignant whiff of shit from the gashed human bowels.
Two rapid computations. First, that only Wazz downstairs remained alive. Second, that only a dozen paces stood between me and capture.
The library had a second door connecting to a bedroom, from which another exit took you back to the landing. The question (posed in the distended dreamscape of perhaps two seconds, while the vampire dropped Chris’s corpse, moseyed over to kneeling Russell and took the young man’s skull gently between his hands) was which door to go for.
A person steps into the road, turns, sees a truck about to hit him, seems to freeze. The freezing is the amazingly quick brain making its honourable start on the avoidance mathematics, the geometry of getting out of the way. And even the amazingly quick brain is too slow. The first trajectory calculations are barely—BAM! Good night.
Ditto here. I was still in the early trigonometry when the vampire with a deft twist snapped Russell’s neck, turned and launched himself at me.
One finds oneself flying through the air. That’s quite something. Time stretches to accommodate peripheral details: my foully smouldering
Camel abandoned in the onyx ashtray; the empty Macallan bottle on the floor; a signed first edition of American Psycho one of the agents had brought up from the contemporary collection downstairs; the bellows I gave Harley for Christmas twenty years ago.
Nearer details were regrettably vivid too: the vamp’s dark eyes with whites tinctured brown, his bad meat odour and long calm face, the feel of his cold left hand around my throat (a nail had already drawn blood) and his cold right in a grab that pinched the flesh of my chest through my clothes. Overwhelmingly the power discrepancy. Overwhelmingly his being able, now that he had hold of me and we were flying through the air, to do pretty much whatever he wanted.
Not that revulsion wasn’t mutual. His face’s calm was forced. The werewolf, a vampire has written, smells like the Platonic form of a filthy animal. I wondered—as I had such liberty for wondering, while we sailed across the library—if vampires ever threw up. Throw up what, though? All they had was blood. Harley would have known. (Poor Harls. He hadn’t much liked American Psycho. Savage satirist or twisted fuck? he’d asked me, when he’d finished it. Both, I’d said. It’s a false dichotomy. The romantic days of either/or are over. Who’d know that if not me?)
As one we crashed into the chimney breast and fell, just to the right of the hearth. Something brittle snapped under me. My spine, I thought, since the vertebrae had taken the brunt of impact—but in the moment it took him to slash four fingers across my face (white heat, blood welling in my left eye as if half the world were having a red cocktail poured into it) I knew both that it wasn’t a bone and that it was my only chance of escape.
We’d ended up with me propped at an angle against the wall, him sitting astride my thighs. His face had a sprinkle of dark skin-tags or moles (that in a genuine horror evocation brought Lula’s fair torso with its beloved beauty-spot constellations) and a likeable outcurve from nose to top lip. Black typecasting would have him as nirvanic drug lord or philosophising janitor. He put his hand over my face and I writhed as if trying to get out from under him—in fact trying to get hold of the thing that had snapped under my back.