by Glen Duncan
I held Fluff’s head in my lap. He was shaking. His lips were moving, but I couldn’t tell what he was saying.
“What? What is it? Tell us what we need to do!”
Suddenly he opened his eyes and looked at me.
“Fluff? Jesus … What should we do? Do you need blood? Should we get blood?”
He smiled, but like he was seeing something else. Not me. Something miles away.
“Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,” he said. “So much as gladness that some end might be.”
“What? For fuck’s sake, Fluff, we—”
But a spasm took him again, lifted him almost into a sitting position like someone had yanked a chain around his throat. Then he fell back into my lap. There was pinkish snot coming out of his nose. My hands were weak. “Oh God,” I heard myself saying. “Oh God, Oh God …”
“Listen,” Mia said. “Will the pilot take orders from you?”
“What? Yeah. Why?”
“Call him and tell him to make the preparations. God only knows how we’re going to get him through the airport like this … We’ll have to find another way …”
“What are you talking about?”
“Are we going to stay here all night?” Caleb said, appearing in the van’s open rear exit.
“Get in,” Mia told him. Then turned to me. “I know someone who might be able to help,” she said.
75
Talulla
I SLEPT THROUGH most of the next day, but since there were still three hours of daylight when I woke I went downstairs with the hope of grilling Devaz. Whatever it was that had “cured” him had come at a cost. I needed to know.
No luck. The doors at the bottom of the first flight down were locked. So much for mi casa, su casa. The house was quiet. There were no signs of the gore I’d traipsed in yesterday, nor, when I went back out beyond the banyans, was there any trace of the kill. Grishma, presumably, whose absence from the house my nose had noted, despatched to do the unsavoury necessaries. There was nothing to do but wait. I poured myself a Macallan and ran myself a bath. “Childe Roland” hummed a little, from the bedside table, but I felt sick at the thought of going back to it. Even when you knew the ending every reading would be the same hopeless circular triumph of loss. It was in keeping with the place, somehow, no matter how superficially different its landscape. It was in keeping with the sluggish, surreal quality of everything I’d seen and done since leaving the Last Resort. It was in keeping with the dream of the vampire. It was in keeping with me.
Bath and single malt didn’t take much of the edge off. Wulf was still wide awake, fighting the lunar law, teeth and claws dug into every grudged second, minute, hour. There was a huge, sudden temptation to phone Walker, to speak to the kids. But by the time I left the bath and dressed (jeans, a black cotton t-shirt, a pair of red DMs—impractical footwear in the heat, but the brand-new flip-flops Grishma had left by my bed would be worse than useless if trouble came my way) I felt as if I’d lost the right. Every moment I spent here—this slow-motion vertigo—dragged me closer to inertia—yet there was nothing I could do to pull myself out. By sundown, all I’d done was sit on the edge of my bed and stare at the floor.
When someone knocked at my door, I assumed it would be Olek—or Grishma to take me to him.
It was Konstantinov.
“Put it on,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
The damn nose-paste.
“What’s the matter?” I said, when we’d applied it. Confronted by him, I was relieved and sad. Because there was no lying to him. He never lied himself. And always knew when you were. He looked at you and your energy for lying just burned away.
“Listen,” he said. “I know things aren’t good between you and Walker. I’m not asking. It’s for the two of you. You go your separate ways, my friendship remains. You’ll both have it, always. Understood?”
It was a terrible refreshment, his plain way, the simple words, the absence of strategy. It made you realise how much of your life you spent not being like that. It made you realise what a waste not being like that was. My body, which I hadn’t known had been tense, sitting on the bed, relaxed into a kind of pleasant defeat.
“Understood,” I said.
“There’s a little disgust in you, right now,” he said. “It’s not for me to tell you not to be disgusted with yourself. That’s your business. But don’t let it make your decision for you here.”
“You think I’ll regret it? If I take the cure? If I give it to my children?”
“I think you’ll regret it if you make a decision out of disgust. That’s all.”
And that was all. Conversations that would last dreary, punishing hours with other people were over with him in a half-dozen exchanges. Truth forged economy.
For a few strange, purged moments we remained in silence, me sitting on the bed, him standing, dark and still and tall in front of me. He was a blessing in my life. My life was full of blessings. And one curse: That no amount of blessings was ever enough.
He went to the door, opened it.
“He’s waiting for you downstairs,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready. If you need us …”
“I know. Mikhail?”
He turned.
“Yes?”
“Do you trust him?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I can’t read him. At all. I’m sorry. All I can tell you is that so far everything’s been as he said it would be. But that doesn’t mean much, since we don’t know what he hasn’t said.”
Again we paused in silence, as if there were crucial information the room’s ether might choose to share with us.
It didn’t.
“Okay,” I said, getting to my feet, as a knot of wulf came undone in my shoulders. “Let’s go and see what he has to say.”
76
OLEK, BACK IN Levi’s and a new crisp white kurta with a Nehru collar, was waiting for me in the vault. On the steel table, the case containing the stone tablet was open. He was holding a sealed envelope in his left hand.
“In here,” he said, “are the remaining pages—bar one, which I shall retain until you fulfil your part of the agreement—from the journal of Alexander Quinn.” He dropped the envelope in front of me on the table. “They’re yours to read at your leisure, but I can summarise in the meantime. They tell the story, long after Liku and Lehek-shi had gone wherever the dead go, but still a thousand years before the First Egyptian Dynasty, of a gammou-jhi by the name of Ghena-Anule, a magician-priest who, for all his magical priestliness, got bitten by one of your ancestors when he was in his early sixties and thereafter devoted his energies to finding a cure for the Curse. He was one of the last of the Maru, and, as far as this record knows, the very last of the Anum, those members of the tribe who possessed the ability to travel—transcendentally, one must assume—between the Upper, Middle and Lower Realms. One of the last to be able to hold—as Quinn’s translation has it—‘converse with the gods.’ Feel free, by the way, to roll your eyes at any time. I can assure you that was my reaction. I must repeat: I’m a scientist. I’m not, to put it mildly, in favour of mystical claptrap. You look tired, incidentally. Are you all right? Are you rested?”
I wasn’t tired. Or rather, I was, but a sort of dead, claustrophobic energy was forcing its way through the tiredness. The vault was full of it, like a subsonic noise you knew would, eventually, split your head. I was trying to picture Jake and my mother watching all this from their afterlife casino. I was trying to picture them smiling and shaking their heads in loving but pitiful incredulity. But I couldn’t. This was a show broadcast on a channel they didn’t get. This was their reception turned to pixel-snow and static hiss. This was Jake putting his drink down on the baize and whacking the set with his fist and saying, What the fuck?
Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all, Lu. There isn’t one.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Finish the story.�
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Olek smiled. I wondered, suddenly, if Devaz was still in his cell. Lingering wulf nose reported human presence not too far away, but it didn’t smell like him.
“So,” Olek continued, “Ghena-Anule begins by petitioning the Upper Realm. These would be the good guys of the cosmogony. This would be, in the moral economy, the appeal to mercy.”
He paused. I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at the floor. It was one of those moments—one of those situations—wherein the absurdity of the content vivifies the mundanity of the context, refreshes the humble molecules of walls, floor, table, light. These and the blameless pounding continuity of your own body. Yes, this is really happening, and here you still obscenely are. I was very conscious of the weights of my hands at the ends of my wrists. A vision flashed: Myself, in a cave, transformed—but with my hands missing. Amputated. For a moment I felt the cellular fizz of regrowth—with such convincing intensity that I actually looked at my hands to check it was an illusion.
It was. But it brought the dream back, the vampire’s face. I’m coming for you.
Olek’s pause, I knew, was to acknowledge our shared understanding of where appeals to Divine mercy got you. Nowhere.
“So,” he went on, “Ghena-Anule turned the other way, and began to petition the Lower Realm. Not for mercy, but for a transaction, for a deal. Eventually, apparently, he succeeded.” He raised his voice a little: “Muni?” he called.
An elderly Indian woman in thick dark-rimmed spectacles entered, smiling, with a baby-carrier strapped to her front. In the carrier, obviously, a baby. Very small. Weeks old, I guessed. The one that I hadn’t imagined hearing the other night. The one I’d dismissed. The woman, in baggy jeans, brand-new Nikes and a blue-and-white floral print smock, had grey hair in a plait that reached her coccyx. Grey-green eyes and deep lines from the curve of each nostril to the corners of her mouth. She smelled of jasmine oil and tobacco—but the baby’s odour, of clean diapers and Sudocrem and talc—had the bulk of my attention. The woman seemed wholly at ease. She stood just inside the vault doorway gently moving her hips from side to side, both thin-skinned elegant hands cradling the carrier, smiling.
“Muni doesn’t speak English,” Olek said. “Not, frankly, that it would make a difference if she did.”
The baby’s smell had detonated memories of Zoë and Lorcan as newborns, erased the three years between then and now. Three years. Impossible. I thought of Zoë saying to Cloquet one morning: “Your ears look like bacon.” It gave me a moment of vertigo. At the same time the vault’s subsonic hum went up a notch. The air was warm and pliable. My breathing wasn’t clean. I felt crowded. My face prickled. I knew what was coming. The dirty, disappointing things are always a little ahead of themselves, always make themselves known by the opening your brain makes to receive them, a neural pathway that’s always been there waiting for the shape that fits. I thought of Christ in Gethsemane, beads of blood on his brow, asking for this cup to be taken from him. Knowing already that it wouldn’t be. Couldn’t be. The Divine Chomskyan grammar in him had already guaranteed its necessity. I thought of Devaz, lying curled on his bunk, so obviously empty, so obviously at the end of himself.
“A child born on a full moon,” Olek said. “Less than three months old. There is a ritual, there are words, which sound, I’ll grant you, nonsensical, and which are written on the page I’m holding on to until you’ve done your part. In any case you speak the words … You place the stone on bare earth, you see …”
And shed a little of your blood on it, and slaughter the child, and the blood mingles and runs through the hole in the centre of the stone and carries the soul down to Amaz in the Lower Realm, who takes it in exchange for freeing you from the Curse.
Wittgenstein said we don’t really ever discover anything. We just remember it.
Which was what this felt like. A drearily dredged-up memory.
Olek laughed, having observed me intuiting it. “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” he said. “After all, what is one supposed to believe? That deities—which for starters one doesn’t believe in—deities from the ancient world are still knocking around up there or down there or wherever in some metaphysical fashion? I suppose there’s the notion that these things are outside time, as we understand it, but really … I mean, really—it’s risible. Exactly risible.” He was, if his face was any indicator, tickled immensely by how risible it was. “Believe me, you can’t possibly hold this in greater contempt than I do. But here’s the remarkable thing. It works. Look at Devaz. I can only say to you: Look, please, at Devaz.”
Yes, I thought, look at Devaz.
There was something still missing. There was something the room was trying to tell me. Or rather the room was trying—with the stone as its little centre of intelligence—to savour withholding.
At a gesture from Olek the old woman, still smiling, still gently rocking the baby, exited. I heard her Nikes squeaking down the corridor.
“What’s the catch?” I said. My voice sounded slightly slowed down. Tape running just barely below speed. “I mean, it’s hardly a head-scratcher, is it? We kill and eat a human being every month. Babies are …” I was thinking of the night, transformed, I held a human baby in my hands, waiting for something inside myself to say: You can’t do this. This is too much. Her little head was silhouetted against the moon. I’d waited and waited. “Babies are no exception,” I finished.
Olek was watching me. Separate from what he needed out of this his disinterested clinician—his scientist—was fascinated.
Again his answer arrived in me fractionally ahead of him giving it. And I understood how Devaz had ended up in his state.
“You cannot perform the ritual on full moon,” Olek said. “You have to be human to do it.”
The room’s atmosphere emptied. All my muscles relaxed.
And, upstairs, something big crashed through a window.
77
I WAS AHEAD of Olek until the second flight of stairs—in spite of the alarm he didn’t neglect to lock the case and the vault door behind him—but on the landing he went past me without his feet on the ground. I could hear raised voices, objects being hurled and broken. It sounded like people throwing furniture around.
Then Olek’s voice, raised above the racket. “Stop this immediately! Stop! All of you!”
They were in the library. The big window was smashed. The asparagus fern was on the floor in a sad little disgorgement of soil. There were books all over the floor and both couches had been overturned. The stink of vampires almost kept me from entering the room.
Natasha, with a gash in her forehead, was on her hands and knees by the glass desk.
Konstantinov had someone pinned against one of the bookcases.
A young dark-haired woman—vampire—I’d never seen before was struggling to get up off the floor. Her hands and face were bleeding.
Suddenly Caleb—Caleb!—appeared outside the broken window.
“Let her go,” he shouted, leaping into the room. “You fucking let her go right now.”
“Please, Mikhail,” Olek said, quietly. “Do let her go. Let us all immediately calm down calm down calm down.”
A fraught moment of everyone waiting to see if this was sufficient. A piece of glass from the window fell and tinkled.
Then Konstantinov released his victim and stepped back, and I recognised her.
Mia.
“What the fuck, if you don’t mind, please,” Olek said, “is going on here?”
I’m coming for you.
“We need your help,” Mia said, straightening her jacket, brushing the fierce blonde hair off her face. She and I hadn’t seen each other since the uneasy leave-taking two years ago on Crete, though I’d sensed her from time to time, keeping an eye on me, weighing up whether to kill me. I’d saved her life. But I’d also kidnapped and threatened to kill her son. We were, at a distance, peculiarly and mutually fascinated.
“Remshi’s sick,” Mia said.
“Remshi?” Ole
k said.
“He’s outside.” Then to Caleb: “I told you to wait.”
“Good Lord,” Olek said. “Remshi is here? My good godfathers, how utterly extraordinary! For heaven’s sake, tell him to come in.”
No one moved. The room was in shock from the violence that had just exploded in it.
“He can’t come in,” Caleb said, stung by the rebuke and his own (relative) powerlessness and the shock of seeing me. “He can’t fucking walk.”
I’ll see you again, he’d said.
Well, I didn’t think he was seeing me now, though I was seeing him.
Olek carried him down to the laboratory.
“You’re going to have to let me see what I can do for him,” he said, when he’d laid him on the brushed steel table. Only the dark-haired girl (holding her nose, occasionally gagging) and I had followed him down, without exchanging a word. “Talulla, my dear, I take it you’ll … Please don’t go anywhere until we’ve had a chance to discuss things further—yes?”
I didn’t say anything, but he could tell I wasn’t going anywhere. I was thinking—in the storm of thinking—of poor Devaz. Who’d got his humanness back at the cost of his humanity. Ancient gods or not, something still had a black sense of humour.
“I thought it was your fault,” the girl said to me, in the hallway at the top of the stairs.
“What?”
“I thought it was your fault when he got sick like this the last time. Now I’m not so sure.”
A sudden stab of her scent made me remember one of the first things I’d discovered about him. On Crete we’d been surrounded by vampires, so it had gone unnoticed, but when he’d sat only feet away from me at our last encounter I’d realised: Remshi didn’t smell.