by Glen Duncan
But with her, like this, with manhood (as it were) restored, there was no room for anything else. I knew—with the negligible part of me not unstrung by ecstasy—that I would have to spend some energy after this convincing her she hadn’t done me an injury of initiation. It would take all her cunning courage to rise above that fear, that guilt. And yet I knew she would. It was the last gap in intimacy between us bridged, that she loved me and wanted me enough to risk turning herself into something I’d resent. I loved her for it.
37
THREE YEARS LATER, we came back.
Three years. Approximately. In how many thousands?
Nothing had dulled. Nothing had dulled. The world was still ours. Giant skies, glamorous constellations. The sound of the sea on the shore. That mist-rain that doesn’t fall but materialises in soft suspension in the air around you. The kills knitted us. The profane matrimonial rite, renewed every month, deepening our monstrous cahoots. Only species exigencies rucked the silk. Most obviously, that I was confined to the hours of darkness. Of course she adjusted her sleep pattern and became mostly nocturnal, but it wasn’t easy. For a start, the week either side of full moon, her sleep was all over the place. But more than that, she missed the light. Of course she did. I missed the light, and I’d had centuries to get used to it. We had, effectively, weeks apart. Naturally, just after sunset was our window. Even if she was sleeping nights we still had hours, and the restriction made them precious.
“How was the light today?”
“Big. Hot. Broad. Yellow-white. The sky’s blue was like a drumbeat. I watched the black tree shadows revolve. When the sun went down it was like someone’s hand was pulling it, very gently. It was soft-edged and orange. The land went purple, then dark blue and grey, then black. Then you opened your eyes.”
Sometimes, kissing her, I could smell the sun and the air on her skin. It aroused me beyond reason.
The other discrepancy was that I had to feed every fourth or fifth day. But killing with her had made killing without her an enraging chore. I pushed it. Six days, seven, eight. It was the one thing she scolded me for. But when I timed it just right—starved myself so that the thirst reached a debilitating intensity on full moon—the reward was unholily sweet. There was nothing—nothing—like our union then, wedded in blood, a lawless law unto ourselves.
“We go at night,” I said. “I come with you.”
“I don’t want you to come with me.”
We’d come back because she’d dreamed of her mother, dying. Her human mother. Whom she hadn’t seen since the tribe had driven her out. Her mother had fought for her to be allowed to stay. Until her father had beaten her into silence—and near death. Now, because of the dream, my beloved wanted to see the old woman again, one last time.
Once, I said to her: “Vali, it’s just a dream.”
Only once, because when she answered “I have to do this,” and looked at me, I knew it would be pointless to argue. She believed in dreams. Not comprehensively. Perhaps five or six times since I’d known her she’d dreamed something and been unable to ignore it.
We should go south tomorrow.
Why?
I dreamed it. There’s something bad waiting in this direction.
You dreamed it?
Yes.
I didn’t argue. She was so unsuperstitious in all other respects it left the value of the exceptions high. And who was I, after all, to argue with dreams? I had none. Had had none since my Turning. Sleep was an uninterrupted blackout. Sometimes I woke with the vague feeling that something had been going on—that my slurped-down dead had been boisterously up all day—but there was never any content. Waking then was like coming home to a house perfectly in order and nonetheless knowing the kids had had a party while you were away.
“I’ll come with you as far as the edge of the camp,” I said. “I won’t come in with you. No one will even know I’m there.”
We were still a day’s journey from her tribe, whose annual peregrinations she was assuming unchanged. A dangerous assumption, I thought. For all she really knew there would be no one there. Or a different tribe altogether. A hostile one. A more hostile one.
“Vali?”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Come on, it’s getting late.”
Early, she meant. We were in a mossy forest of giant trees and tiny bluebells with a green-and-black stream running through it like liquid malachite. No cave. I’d dug out an earth in the bank under a dying oak, half the roots of which emerged from the turf like a wizened hand. (Daylight protection in those days was a drag. Stones, brushwood, skins, logs, holes in the fucking ground.) I’d fed, joylessly, three days ago, and in anticipation of coming deprivation—Vali wouldn’t need to eat for another eight days, and I wanted to wait—the thirst had started a preemptive protest in my chest and calves.
“Don’t go far,” I said to her.
“Calm down,” she said. “This forest is going to be pretty in the sunlight. Besides, I’m exhausted. Give me a kiss.”
I remember that kiss. Soft and lingering and tender. Her hand wrapped in my hair, one fierce squeeze. The smell of her skin, the dark glimmer of her eyes.
That day, that sleep, I had a dream.
I was in a meadow, just after sunset. Daisies and buttercups like shy little spirits in the dusk. A line of dark trees to my left, rolling hills to my right. I didn’t recognise the place. I was looking for Vali. Every blade of grass said she’d been this way, recently; the land was rich with her scent. But something resisted me. My legs laboured, weakened with each trembling step. The air was first soupy, then pliable, then quagmire. Eventually, I lay down on the ground, utterly exhausted. I seemed to lie there for a long time, watching the stars, wondering what would happen when the night was gone and the sun rose. Or rather, knowing what would happen, but wondering how it would feel. The sadness of not seeing Vali again before I died kept expanding in me. It kept reaching what I thought must be the limit of what I could feel and still go on existing. But the sadness just kept getting bigger.
Then I felt her, next to me. It seemed impossible that I hadn’t heard (or smelled) her coming near, but I turned, and there she was, lying next to me. She was naked, but her skin was warm.
“I will come back to you,” she said. “And you will come back to me. Wait for me.”
When I woke, I knew she’d gone to her tribe without me.
38
I DID THE twenty-hour journey in six.
When I got to the camp, daylight was less than two hours away. Skin tents, cooking sticks, a few women already awake, lighting the fires. A sleepy lookout, leaning on his spear, standing with his left foot on top of his right, a little way beyond the perimeter.
He didn’t see me coming. Didn’t hear me. Didn’t smell me. Instead found himself lifted by the throat and whisked with marvellous mystery into the cover of the trees. He’d dropped his spear (needing two hands for the pointless attempt to dislodge my one, which was cutting off his air) but there was a sharpened flint at his hip that would do. I pinned him, sat on him, showed him the flint, let him feel it at his throat. He grasped the situation immediately.
“Cry out and you die,” I said to him, in his own tongue, Vali’s tongue. “Understand?”
He nodded, eyes bugging from the choking. He was a long-bodied fellow with a big head of thick, matted black hair like a large fur hat. I put my finger to my lips—breathe, but do it quietly—then released the pressure on his windpipe. Much gurning and wincing as he struggled to keep the noise of recovering from near-strangulation down. The flint had already drawn a little blood from his neck. He swallowed and gasped, gasped and swallowed. I gave him a moment. He smelled of river water and cured skins and some animal fat they rubbed into their hair.
“The woman who came here,” I said, pressing on the flint. “Where is she?”
“She’s … She’s here.”
“Where?”
“The big tent. Fa’s tent. Fa and Mabon’s.”
Mabon. The spurned lover who’d followed her. Whose head she’d biffed with a rock. My blood rustled, a nervy herd about to be panicked into a stampede.
I knocked the lookout unconscious and went in silence back to the camp. (Strictly I ought to have slit his throat, but the possibility he was kin to Vali stopped me.) Thirty or so tents, no mistaking the biggest. Two spear-equipped guards and a fire already going outside. You’d think I’d have thought out what I was going to do. But having the capabilities I had, I hadn’t. Human resistance, to me, was like the resistance of straw to fire.
The guards were awfully surprised when I morphed out of the firelight.
“Greetings,” I said, palms raised. “Peace. I’m here to speak with your chief.”
From their reaction I might as well have said: Die screaming, motherfuckers, I’ve come to kill you all! They both assumed a combat stance, spears hoisted, and simultaneously released a strange, warbling, falsetto cry—something like, mooloomooloomooloo—which, I knew, with a sort of weariness, was the raised alarm. Women shrieked and dropped their firewood. Tents stirred. Feet scurried. Within a few moments I was surrounded by gawping humans in varying states of dress and consciousness. The old, the women, the children, mainly. Perhaps a dozen men under twenty-five, armed with spears, flints, bows and arrows, the string-and-rocks caboodle with which their most skilled hunters could niftily trip and hobble an antelope from fifty paces. (The masculine cream of the tribal crop away on the hunt, obviously.) The sweet stink of roused human blood roused my blood, lashed the already restive thirst into prancing delight. But that wasn’t what I was here for.
The flap on the main tent whipped open and a young woman of dark, bitchy prettiness emerged, a-jangle with beads and teeth. Firm little breasts and a taut belly. Her black hair hung in thick ripples down to her trim waist. Tribal psyche hushed, more in fear of her than they were of me. Mabon and Fa. This was Fa, evidently. Chief’s wife. Mabon had sought solace in the arms of another. I doubted he was entirely happy.
“Greetings,” I repeated. “I’m here for the woman, Vali. Let me speak with her and we’ll be on our way.”
Mistress bitchy looked me up and down. She had a fiery, perpetually calculating little brain. Very few men would be her match, I thought.
“Hold him, idiots!” she barked.
Muscled arms found me, established what they thought would be an undislodgable grip on my wrists and biceps and neck. Removing them would be a moment’s trifle, once I’d decided on it.
“What do you want with her?”
“To escort her from your camp, quietly.”
“She’s your woman?”
“My companion.”
“Ha!”
She had very white teeth, plump lips but a small mouth. Her face was too easily and too much animated. She wanted power. She was devoted to it.
“She’s not your woman,” she said, grinning. “She’s not a woman at all. She’s a traitor and a murderer and a stinking malek-hin!”
“I’d like to see her, please,” I said. “Perhaps I could speak to Mabon?”
Crowd murmur. The very slightest hint of uncertainty in Fa.
“Mabon is not here,” she said. “I speak for him in his absence. However, we will give you your ‘companion,’ so you can ‘escort her’ from our camp safely. Bring her!”
One knows, of course.
Always, with the big things, one knows just a moment ahead.
I will come back to you. And you will come back to me. Wait for me.
The two guards disappeared behind the tent. Then returned with what they had to show me. The first was dragging Vali’s naked, decapitated body. The second bore a wooden pole, with her head jammed onto its sharpened end.
I don’t know how many of them I killed. Not all, since most of them began running once they saw what they were up against. I don’t remember killing any children (though I can hardly swear to it) but I certainly killed several women, starting with Fa, whose guts I opened with a single swipe. That image, actually—her looking down to see her abdomen yawning, emptying its contents like someone opening his mouth and letting half-masticated food fall out—was the last clear snapshot. Everything after that swims red. Rage (the dark twin of ecstasy) is transcendent, in that you only know you were gone in it by virtue of coming back to yourself. It’s a blank Somewhere Else defined by the return to the all too vivid Here and Now, where you find yourself still saddled with insufficient finiteness, still in dismal possession of fingertips and eyebrows, a face, hands, legs, the whole maddening corporeal package. Maddening because every cell speaks the reality, the new reality—in this case the reality of what I’d lost. Forever.
The disgust was unbearable. The disgust at what they’d done to her, yes, the violent demonstration that her body obeyed the physical laws, but disgust too at the thought that as far as the world was concerned this couldn’t be anything other than justice. If there was to be a notion of justice it would have to entail this. And who—millennia before poor Socrates asked his suicidal question—did not have an intuitive notion of justice? Here was the core of monstrosity: If you were a monster the human world had nothing to offer you but the just demand for your death. And since they were, in the last analysis, your food and drink, what could they be but right? There was no argument you could bring against them. All you could bring was your monstrous enmity. Irreconcilable differences, as the divorce laws would have it, far in the future.
I buried her a mile away, in the forest, since forests were her favourite, in either form. I buried her a mile away. Let me not exclude the vicious, innocent practicalities, that I had to cradle her body in my arms with her severed head resting on her own soft midriff. There are things you think you won’t be able to do, that need the actual to become possible. There are things that only become thinkable once you’re already doing them. And even then perhaps not. I performed the actions in a self-averted trance, not really taking it in, not really accepting it. Thinking all the while, in fact, that I would discuss the horror and absurdity of it with her later.
Promise me you’ll live as long as you can.
I nearly broke the promise there and then, sitting by the freshly filled grave while the world without her in it boomed against me like an ocean. An ocean going about its vast, repetitive, pointless business. The temptation to simply wait for the sun was full of warm comfort. It would be so easy. Just don’t move. Just. Don’t. Move.
But I imagined her face, smiling with a forgiveness that was also a demand at the exposed cowardice. I felt the calm force of her. You can’t. You have to live. You promised. I will come back to you. And you will come back to me. Wait for me.
I didn’t decide to live.
I just postponed killing myself.
It began to rain. I knelt, kissed the cold earth of her grave (still, still thinking, with the idiot part of myself, with all the stubborn stupidity of love, that I would see her when I woke) then rose, turned, and headed deeper into the forest.
39
Justine
STUPID FUCKING IDIOT.
All these years and everything he’s told me and I still do the dumbest fucking thing. I can’t be this stupid again. You think it through, Justine, he told me, God knows how many times. Because if you stop thinking it through, you die. It’s as simple as that.
Well, maybe I’ll die. Maybe I’ve fucked it up for both of us.
Dear Fluff,
Please don’t worry about me. I have to do this. And I can’t do it with you. Don’t come after me.
Go and find her. I’m sorry for what I said. I’m sorry for everything.
Love,
J
I left the note at the top of the stairs that lead down to the vault. I dressed upstairs, in my room, threw a few clothes into a bag, licence, passport, cash, cards, then went down to the garage. Unlocked the fake plates strongbox and found a Texas registration. Swapped it up for the Jeep’s locals and slipped two more (Wyoming and New Jersey) under the spare wh
eel. I was so busy congratulating myself on how smart I was to remember to do this that it wasn’t until I’d been driving for an hour that I realised I should never have taken the Jeep in the first place: It didn’t matter what state the car was from if forensics swept it and found traces of the body we’d had in the trunk.
I pulled over. Hands shaking. Knees unravelling.
And the thirst like a wasps’ nest I’d just jabbed with a stick.
I leaned against the side of the car, breathing, thinking: You’re on the freeway. You can’t stop. Cameras. Cops. There was a piece of graffiti I’d seen somewhere that said: ONE NATION UNDER CCTV.
I got back in. I told myself there was no reason for the cops to stop me. Anyway the bodies were wrapped and we’d bleached the trunk. Stop being an idiot. Stop panicking and think it through. You stop thinking it through and you die. It’s as simple as that.
Deep breath. I put it in drive. Signalled. Gas. Gently. If they’d seen me pull over I’d say I wasn’t feeling well. That’s what it would’ve looked like. That’s what it was.