by Glen Duncan
He carried on methodically freeing the boat. “You’re not her,” he said. “Not literally. But you’re the call back to her. That was the part of her message I misunderstood. She said: And you will come back to me. That was the important part. The dead can’t come to us. We can only go to them.”
His calmness made me angry, suddenly. “This is fucking stupid,” I said. “You don’t have to do this. This is just … So you had a dream. So what? Dreams are … Fuck.”
“Dreams are prick-teasers non pareil,” he said. “They promise and promise but never put out. A friend told me that, once. He was right.”
“So don’t do this.”
“Listen,” he said. “Tell Justine …” But his voice faltered a little on her name. “Tell Justine she’ll find a copy of Browning’s Collected Works open face-down on the floor of the library at Las Rosas. Ask her to tell you what poem it’s open at.” He shook his head. Laughed again. Another belated realisation. “Ask Caleb what poem he was reading in the volume of Browning’s Men and Women on the plane.”
“That’s nothing,” I said. “That’s just what we put on random shit. That’s just us.”
“Tell her the house in Big Sur is for Mia and Caleb. With her. They’ll be good for each other. She needs a family. So do they.”
“Why are you doing this?”
He pushed the rowboat over onto its keel. The oars were strapped to the little seat. There was a fat, slimy rope tied to the bow. He looked at the eastern skyline. I couldn’t tell how long till the sun came up. But it couldn’t be much longer. Twenty minutes? Half an hour? We could get back to Olek’s in that time. I knew we could.
“Justine tried to keep me away from you,” he said, “because she thought getting close to you made me ill. Even when she left it was because deep down she knew I’d come after her.” He took a moment to absorb the comfort of this fact. It warmed him. A smile without tiredness. “Because she knows I love her. Thank God she knows that.” He looked at his hands, which were shaking. “But it wasn’t you. I was ill anyway.”
“Olek can fix you,” I said. “Yesterday you were fucking unconscious.”
He began unwinding the rope. “Vali made me promise her something, once,” he said. “She made me promise to live as long as I could. How strange that I’ve kept my promise! I never imagined I would. And now here you are, her message, to let me know she holds my oath fulfilled.”
It wasn’t easy for him to dislodge the boat. It took three attempts, and each visibly depleted him. I just stood there, watching, helpless.
“You know what my maker said to me before he died? He said: ‘I’ve seen this place in my dreams. It’s a relief to come to it.’ In my dream of this place I had the profound feeling of knowing that I knew something without knowing what it was. Now I know.”
“Please don’t go.”
He dropped the rope, came to me, took my hands in his. They were full of fluttering blood. “Talulla,” he said. “Such a pretty name. I’m glad you’re here with me.”
“You’re going because you think she’s waiting for you on the other side,” I said. “What if she isn’t? What if there’s nothing on the other side for you or anyone else? There is no other side.” But I thought of the way I’d known what Olek was going to say before he’d said it, the picture I’d had in my head, clear as an enamelled Station of the Cross, of the baby, the stone tablet, the mixed blood running through the hole. Down through darkness that wasn’t earth or space, that had no relation to time at all. Remembering it infuriated me. Because it didn’t prove anything. Of course it didn’t prove anything. Except that our imagination had habits. Except that we were inclined towards things. Get a Jungian on the subject. Get a fucking Structuralist. God—gods—and fairy stories were nothing but disposition plus desire. The desire for the whole bloody mess to be more than a pointless accident, the desire for it to be for something.
“You’ve got nothing,” I said. “Just dreams and coincidences. Just something that makes it look like there’s a … Like there’s some pattern, as if life’s like a stupid fucking movie or a stupid fucking book.”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he said. Then smiled, sadly. “I’ve reached the end of my psychology.”
I wasn’t going to help him with the boat. But he fell, halfway to the water’s edge. I suppose I must have looked ridiculous, crying, dragging a boat. Still, I went with him, into the surf up to our knees. In spite of everything the ocean’s raw fresh smell excited a part of me. The big sky and the deserted beach. I wondered if I would ever have had enough. The world, the things that happened. The people you got close to. The honest warmth of flesh and blood. Both kinds. I thought of how much I’d hurt Walker. I thought of how disgusting it was that Jake was gone. Cloquet, Trish, Fergus. Never coming back. The dead can’t come to us. We can only go to them. That’s what life is, after a while, I thought. Choosing not to go to the dead.
“This is wrong,” I said. “This is just stupid and wrong.” It felt stupid and wrong, too, the two of us standing in the wobbling water, the optimistic little boat, the faint line of light on the horizon saying the sun would rise, another day would come, things would keep happening, the fucking world would go on.
But he laughed and took my hands again. “All these years,” he said, then seemed unable to find the words. “Life drops terrible hints. We call it the Beguilement. When we drink …” He looked up. Hardly any stars still visible. “When we drink, we see so many of them, coincidences you’ll say, the connectedness of things. Humans see them, too. It’s our shared curse, that these things won’t leave us alone. Dreams aren’t much. It’s not dreams. It’s beauty. Metaphor. Love. Mainly love. Love’s the big hint life can’t stop dropping, the biggest beguilement of all.” He looked out towards the burgeoning light. “I was going to say I’m tired of not knowing,” he said. “But that’s not right. It’s better than that. I’m ready to find out. That’s not such a bad thing, is it? Being ready to find out? Come on now, don’t cry, please don’t cry.”
But I was crying. Not only for him, but for myself, for the mess I’d made of everything, for all that I’d wasted and all that I’d lost. And of course, of course, because I wasn’t ready to find out, couldn’t imagine ever being.
“They say your life flashes before you when you die,” he said. “That’s going to be some flash. It’ll probably kill me.” He looked at me, smiling, daring me to laugh, and because there’s no end to the opposites we can make meet, the grotesqueries and farces we can find room for, I did, with a sort of anguish, find myself laughing.
“Give me a kiss,” he said. “One last one. For luck.”
I kissed him. Tried to make it last. But you can’t. It ends, sooner or later. You love, you lose. That’s the trade.
He got into the boat and dipped the oars. Lost his balance for a moment. Righted himself, laughing again. “It must be a hundred years since I’ve done this,” he said.
We looked at each other. Whatever it was that had gone into me from him tingled, fanned out in my blood.
“You should go now,” he said. “Please don’t stay.”
I didn’t go. I watched him pulling away, finding the rhythm with the oars. Ten strokes. Twenty. Thirty. I turned, sloshed back to the shore, my jeans and boots soaked, my eyes burning, my chest emptying. The last of the soft weights dropped from me. For a few moments I stood with my back to the water, looking down at the glimmering sand.
Then I turned.
He was much further out than I’d imagined he’d be by now. It had only seemed a matter of seconds, but the little boat was barely bigger than a matchbox.
It was hard to tell at this distance, but it looked as if he was standing up, facing the horizon. I thought, I never said goodbye. Just thinking of the word, “goodbye,” imagining how it would have felt saying it, brought tears again. I wrapped my arms around myself.
And watched.
He had a few moments. Perhaps even a minute. Deep red and orange light, low
feathery clouds in bloody, membranous flakes, water the colour of mercury, flecked with blue, pink, peach. Not pretty, but spectacular, a terrible indifferent statement of the scale of things out there, the giant heat involved, the vast, soulless mathematics that gave incidental rise to everything we knew here, all our murders and poems, our dreams and epiphanies, our boredom, our love.
I think he saw the first segment of the sun ease up over the water. I think he shouted something, laughing. It might have been: “It’s beautiful!”
Then the boat dipped for a second, rose again, and I saw him. A bright tuft of violet-edged flame, a brief, soft flare of brilliance—then he was gone.
90
CARDINAL SALVATORE DI Campanetti, with a big surgical dressing on his nose, was waiting for me when I got back to the BMW. He was holding a gun.
“It used to be, in the old days, that only the wolf’s head would do,” he said. “It was a point of honour with the old Soldiers of Light, to take the monster in its monster form. Even the heathens in WOCOP tried to keep up the tradition. Nowadays we’re a little less fussy.”
My blood jangled. The sick taste in your mouth and the vibration like a tuning fork in your head.
Silver.
Bullets.
Nowhere to run. Nothing. Now. The reality of my children exploded in my heart. All my life rushed to this moment to see if there wasn’t some way, some way to—
Then the Cardinal raised the pistol and shot me in the chest.
I’d never been shot before. It was like I imagined being kicked by a horse would be. I felt myself falling. Just managed to grab the wing mirror and stay on my feet. The pain in my chest was hot and crushing, a detonation of heavy white light filling my lungs and head. I had, what? Seconds? I was remembering—as my eyes, which I hadn’t realised had closed, opened again and the big unidentifiable trees swam back in, vivified, outrageously full of detailed life—I was remembering holding Jake in my arms when he died. How long had it taken? I’d felt it in him, silver racing to map the system, veins, nerves, tissues, bones. I’d felt the silver’s delight, set free in him to do its thing, like a power cut knocking out block after block of a city’s lights. Five seconds? Ten? A minute? I was thinking, too (God being dead, irony still rollickingly alive), that this threw all my big talk of moments ago—of not being ready to find out—in the trash. Finding out didn’t wait until you were ready to find out. Finding out found you out. I imagined Remshi’s surprise, looking back and seeing me so soon on the afterlife road behind him. And of course if that were true, then Vali would be there too, eventually. As would Jake. As would my mother. Awkward disembodied introductions. How ludicrous! The little light dancing part of me laughed.
A second horse-kick. In my gut. Which unstrung my hand’s grip on the wing mirror and sent me, by what felt like pointlessly drawn-out degrees, down onto my hands and knees. Small twigs rolled under my shins, a minor but very distinct irritant. I was thinking of Zoë and Lorcan. Good that they were still young enough to forget me. Walker wouldn’t abandon them. Maddy wouldn’t. They would be all right.
Then I felt it.
Death looking up in the middle of its mardi gras and seeing Life bearing down on it like a tidal wave.
Death trying to recalculate, to assimilate, to grasp.
Reversal.
Giant water hitting giant fire in a deafening inner hiss.
And water always wins.
Something went into me from him.
I didn’t understand.
And of course did.
I’d known I’d never be the same. Just not in what way.
It was very quiet. I don’t know how long I knelt there, staring at the dust and stones of the track. I was aware of the day’s heat building, giving its heavy morning intimation of the suffocating weight it would bring by noon. Something in the BMW’s still-cooling engine tonked, softly. I raised my head. Got up onto my knees. Got one foot under me. Stood.
The Cardinal was, to say the least, surprised. His face had lost its guiding will. I stepped to within arm’s length of him. If I simply reached out and took the gun from him he’d be unlikely to resist. I could take the gun, point it at his head, pull the trigger.
And yet I knew I wasn’t going to. Not mercy. Disgusted exhaustion. The world’s infinite supply of action and reaction, cause and effect, Jake’s hated endless ifs and thens. The little boat and the rising sun and the flare of flame had emptied me. I was tired. I wanted to go home.
I got into the 4×4 and started it up.
Because the universe doesn’t suspend physics no matter your extremis, I had to go through the farcically cumbersome business of turning the car around in the narrow space. The Cardinal watched all of it, mouth still stupidly open, the gun dead in his hand. I thought, Jake would roll the window down for a parting shot: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
But I didn’t even have the heart left for that.
91
IT TOOK ME three attempts to find Olek’s. Grishma, toting an AK-47, was at the edge of the garden, looking out for me. When I switched the engine off and got out the cicadas went quiet for a few seconds, then started up again.
“Ah,” Grishma said. “Ah. Yes. Good. Come in, please come in.”
He filled me in on the attack as we went downstairs. With the exception of the Cardinal it seemed almost certain the whole Militi Christi squad was dead. Olek (now locked in his most secure room—I assumed weapons, escape tunnels; you didn’t make it to his age without covering the contingencies) had nonetheless recalled his security people, who were expected, Grishma assured me, imminently. The others were all alive, all sleeping. Caleb, Mia and Justine covered in blood. Natasha on a comforter in the lab. Konstantinov slumped against the wall next to her with an automatic pistol in his right hand.
“Mr. Konstantinov was keeping vigil for you,” Grishma said, head on one side, looking down at Konstantinov as might a proud mother at her wholesomely exhausted toddler. “But it became impossible. He’s had so little sleep over the last days.”
I felt as if I’d had none myself.
“There is also,” Grishma said, as we headed back upstairs, “something I’m sure you’ll want to see.”
What I wanted was to take a hot shower and get out of there, but I followed him into the lounge anyway.
The plasma screen was on, muted. CNN. Night footage. A derelict warehouse on fire. Armed figures in combat fatigues.
“They’ve been running this on all the channels,” Grishma said, pouring me a Macallan and handing me the glass. “A development. Absolutely a development.” He unmuted, just as I’d started to follow the rolling banner: BREAKING: CHICAGO—MILITI CHRISTI ATTACK ON WEREWOLF DEN … “TIME FOR DENIAL OVER,” REPUBLICAN SENATOR SAYS … TWEET YOUR VIEW …
The footage was hand-held, but professional. This wasn’t a jittery eyewitness with an iPhone. This was a crew, multiple cameras. This—the filming—had been part of the intention.
“… said the attack signalled the start of an open, global action,” a voiceover said. “I spoke to Squad Leader Martin Scholes, who had this to say.”
Cut to a dark-haired guy in his mid-thirties in black fatigues, face a mess of camouflage paint and sweat. He was breathing heavily. He looked elated. “This is what we’re here for,” he said. “This is what—” Another soldier, passing, slapped him on the back and shouted: “Gloria Patri! et Filio! et Spiritui Sancto!” followed by a whoop and what turned out to be a failed attempt at a high-five. “Sorry about that,” Scholes said, grinning, when the soldier had bounded out of shot. “That’s … You know, the guys have trained hard for this. This is … You can expect some high spirits. The point is there’s a job needs doing. No one can pretend this problem is getting better. It’s getting worse. Someone has to draw the line, you know? Someone has to … This is a threat not just to Christians, not just to Americans, but to the human species, to all human life, everywhere. If that’s not a clear enemy, I don’t know what is.”
“We’re not a political organisation,” Scholes was saying, when they cut back to him. “Our goal here is the eradication of this clear enemy by the grace of and for the glory of God. We’re not—”
“What do you say to those people accusing the Church of using this campaign as a credibility lifesaver in the wake of the multiple cases of abuse of young children by—”
“That’s ridiculous,” Scholes cut in as something exploded, off camera, making the interviewer jump into shot. Scholes steadied him. “You all right? That’s okay. That’s just … The point is that’s just an example of hatred of the Church. People have always hated the Church. They’ll say anything to try ’n’ discredit us. Here, look at this. Can you get this in?”
Someone handed him a bayonetted rifle. With a werewolf’s head jammed onto the blade. Again, it was obvious the bayonets had been thought through, for just this moment. For maximum visual impact.
“This,” Scholes said, “this is what we do.”
The report cut to Republican Senator McGowan at a press conference. Camera flashes. A thicket of microphones.
“That’s a misquote,” McGowan said. “What I actually said was that we’re going to need more than guns, not ‘more guns.’ We’re going to need more than guns and silver to defeat an enemy only the most willfully blind members of the administration still refuse to see for what it is. We’re going to need faith, we’re going to need a return to solid values. And everyone knows in their hearts what I mean by that …”
I hit the mute again.
Grishma hadn’t said a word.
“Tell Olek I’ll be in touch,” I said.
“But, madam—”
“Not for what he’s selling. But we may be able to work something out. Tell him to give me a couple of weeks.” If there was any way of synthesising what I had in my blood, he could be my best shot. Whatever else, he knew his science. Until we had a lab egghead of our own he might have to do. He wasn’t going to stop wanting what he wanted, after all. I’d just have to persuade him not to shop around.