Barking

by Tom Holt

  Duncan realised that he’d had about as much of Mr Loop as he could take. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Thanks. Now I know. What’s any of this got to do with me?’

  Mr Loop didn’t answer straight away. The expression on his face was hard to read, until you broke it down into its component parts. He looked a bit like a thoughtful man in a restaurant: eager, because he was hungry; guilty, because an animal had had to die just so he could eat steak; angry, because the steak was well done instead of medium rare. ‘It’s got everything to do with you,’ he said. ‘Apparently. I don’t know why. I’m just the messenger.’

  Mr Loop took a step forward. Duncan matched it with a step back.

  ‘Bowden Allshapes wants you,’ Mr Loop went on. ‘What for, I don’t know. Not my place to know, I’m only a lawyer. For lawyers, as you well know, there’s no right or wrong, just winning. The words dead or alive were mentioned, though that may have been intended as a joke. I wouldn’t know. I don’t really do humour.’

  Duncan stepped back again. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you, you lunatic,’ he said.

  ‘Lunatic.’ Mr Loop smiled pleasantly. ‘Interesting choice of word; originally meaning one whose behaviour is influenced by the phases of the moon. If you’d care to step outside, we could settle this quite easily, wolf to wolf. Or I could throw you against the walls a few more times, I suppose, if that’s what you’d prefer. It’d be pointless, though. We both know who’d win. Personally, I could never see the point in fighting a losing battle. The most that can be said for it is that it’s good exercise, but I’d far rather do ten minutes on the rowing machine.’

  ‘You think you can make me go with you? By force?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Duncan tried to step back again, but a wall was in his way. Stupid, stupid wall. ‘Bit crude, isn’t it? After all,’ he added hopefully, ‘you’re a lawyer, not a thug.’

  ‘Crude? Not a bit of it.’ Mr Loop advanced again. ‘All law is based on force. All our writs and court orders and injunctions are founded on the fact that if you disobey the court, policemen will come and take you away. If you resist them, they’ll hurt you. If you resist them a lot, they’ll kill you. We trade our subtleties and quote the decision of Lord Justice Lane in Peabody v Smallbridge, but really it comes down to which one of us gets to impose his will on the other. In this instance, me.’ He frowned. ‘And honestly, you can’t believe you’d stand any chance against me, even if you insist on being really boring and fighting to the death. Think about it. Even silver bullets wouldn’t hurt me, because I’m already—’

  ‘All right.’ Duncan raised his hands. Just the faintest sound, but loud as next door’s angle grinder on a Sunday afternoon to someone with super-hearing. The question was, had Mr Loop heard it too? ‘Point taken. I’ll come quietly.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Mr Loop smiled with genuine warmth. ‘I’m so glad. Otherwise, I’d probably have had to kill you, and then I’d be faced with the chore of lugging you back to headquarters gripped in my jaws. When you’re ready, we’ll be going.’

  Duncan went to the front door and opened it. Nothing there. Of course, he could have been mistaken, but who else sniffed like a cross between a pistol shot and tearing calico?

  ‘Once we transform,’ Mr Loop went on, ‘we’ll have to be careful not to be seen. I have a certain advantage over you in that respect, but—’

  ‘I won’t transform,’ Duncan interrupted. ‘I’m cured, hadn’t you noticed?’

  ‘Cured?’ Mr Loop looked at him. ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘Ah,’ Duncan said cheerfully, and stepped out into the moonlight. Mr Loop bounded after him, and as soon as the moonlight touched him, he vanished. In his place stood a huge grey wolf. ‘Heel,’ Duncan chirruped, as a couple of passers-by gave them both an anxious stare. ‘There’s a good boy. Walkies.’

  Mr Loop growled, then fell in beside him. ‘You ought to wag your tail a bit,’ Duncan whispered. ‘Just while there’re people about.’

  The red glow in the wolf’s eyes said don’t push your luck. Duncan smiled. If he could keep Mr Loop feeling annoyed and irritable, maybe he wouldn’t notice the smell. ‘If I’d thought,’ he said, ‘I could’ve brought along an old belt or something, for a lead. Or a rubber ball, perhaps.’ He felt in his pocket. For some reason there appeared to be a sausage roll in it; then he remembered. Moondollars, the bill. He broke off a corner and held it just in front of the wolf’s nose. ‘Here, boy,’ he said. ‘Treats for good dogs.’

  The wolf paused for two seconds, then lifted his snout and snapped. It was probably just as well that Bowden Allshapes wanted Duncan intact, with the full set of fingers. ‘Wooza good boy, then?’ Duncan said desperately; because at all costs he wanted to keep Mr Loop from noticing the almost overwhelming smell, or look round and see the four shapes that had separated from the shadow of the bus shelter on the corner. He snatched a pen from his top pocket, threw it into the darkness ahead and yelled ‘Fetch!’ The wolf looked up at him with disgust and loathing in its eyes, as the four shapes came into the amber circle of the light of a street-lamp. Pete, Clive, Micky and Kevin - so where was Luke?

  ‘Good dog,’ Duncan said. ‘Kill!’

  Mr Loop stared at him, sniffed and spun round, jumping in the air as he turned. Pete sprang before he had a chance to land, reaching out his muzzle and snapping at the revenant’s throat. He missed, but Kevin crashed into Mr Loop and closed his teeth on the loose skin over his shoulders, pulling him down, while Micky and Clive went for his flailing paws. Mr Loop caught Clive’s ear in his teeth and shredded it, but Pete was there now, going for the throat again. All of them were snarling, yipping, growling. It was a strangely captivating sight, but Duncan had seen enough. He left them to it, and ran.

  Where was Luke? He hadn’t anticipated any sort of tactical subtlety. As he turned the corner he could hear claws scrabbling on paving stones, and smell fresh blood. It wasn’t working out the way he’d hoped, when he’d first heard Pete’s distinctive sniff and had known that the pack was coming to find him. He’d expected the battle to take place on the stairs, allowing him to double back to his flat, nip across the landing and vanish down the fire escape. From there he’d have had only a short way to go before he reached the station approach, with its life-saving cluster of pubs, late-night convenience stores and other people-magnets. Instead he was heading in the opposite direction, down streets that were empty at this time of night, where taxis never cruised. With Luke unaccounted for he felt desperately exposed. He lengthened his stride, running fast. (But could he outrun Luke Ferris, particularly tonight? Be realistic - no chance.) There was a pub around here somewhere. Would Luke risk making a scene in a crowded pub? Duncan grinned ruefully. There were certainly precedents.

  As he ran he tried to listen. The dogfight was apparently still going strong, though it was hard to make out who was winning. If he’d been a betting man, he’d probably have had to favour Mr Loop, in spite of the odds. He sniffed: if Luke was nearby he couldn’t smell him, but that didn’t really mean a lot. Someone as smart as Luke would think to disguise his scent . . .

  There was a thought. Frantically, he tried to recall his local geography. This was Huntingdon Street, he was fairly sure; in which case, the next left was Skinners Lane, leading to Fife Avenue, which carried on down to—

  Oh joy - to the canal. The dirty, yucky, smelly, neglected canal, with its floating crust of soggy cardboard and styrofoam burger boxes. The smell hit his heightened sense like a slap across the face. Nobody in his right mind would want to go paddling in that, let alone swim in it. Not unless he had a werewolf on his trail. Duncan looked both ways, to make sure that nobody was about, then closed his eyes and jumped in.

  It tasted worse than it smelled, which was quite an achievement for a mere chance accumulation of water molecules. He spat out a mouthful of the revolting stuff and kicked up his heels in the briskest doggy-paddle he could manage.

  He kept it going for just under five hundred yards, to b
e safe, then ploughed across to the opposite bank and hauled himself out. He was soaked through, of course, but the water was probably the least of his problems; at a guess, there was enough oil in the canal to keep Europe independent of the Middle East for a month. But oil smells; and so do all the other revolting things that wind up in city canals. Luke’s nose, precision instrument that it was, would have trouble finding Duncan’s scent under all that, even if they were standing next to each other. He grinned, shook himself hard, and trotted away up the nearest side street.

  The road name was unfamiliar. Duncan was off his small patch, with only a vague idea of where he was, but since he had nowhere to go until Crosswoods opened its doors in the morning it really didn’t matter very much. He felt painfully hungry and thirsty, but he dared not set squelching foot in a pub or a chippie smelling like that. It occurred to him that (if he was really lucky) when he’d hauled himself out of the canal he’d walked into a completely new life: werewolf- and zombie-free, maybe, but he couldn’t actually lay claim to anything from his past except (possibly) the only girl he’d ever really loved and a suit of wringing wet, oil-soaked clothes. That thought would have depressed him if he hadn’t caught sight of a patch of silver light on the pavement ahead. He glanced up at the full moon, staring down at him like an angry headmaster, and came to the conclusion that there are worse things in life than being wet.

  He followed the alley until it came out into a wide shop-lined street, where he paused beside the front steps of a bank. Just for fun, he took a cashpoint card out of his wallet and stuck it in the slot. The machine flashed a green light at him and switched itself off. Bowden Allshapes, presumably: he was impressed. There were security cameras built into these gadgets, weren’t there? In which case, his presence there was now recorded, time-franked and visually confirmed. Probably a good idea to be somewhere else as quickly as possible.

  Far away in the distance, a wolf howled. He quickened his step.

  Now, if only he could find a change of clothes . . . If this was a nice old-fashioned neighbourhood, with rows of back-to-back houses, each with a little snippet of garden just wide enough to accommodate a washing line, he might be in with a chance. (Though that would mean stealing, and he wasn’t sure he’d ever stolen anything in his life; not from a stranger, anyhow. Some desperado he was turning out to be.) But he was in flat-and-bedsit country, so he could forget that idea. Every step he took sounded like a rotten tomato hitting a Cabinet minister, and he was leaving a trail of oily footprints.

  Duncan walked for fifteen minutes or so, just to put as much distance as possible between himself and the end of his scent trail, then flopped down on a low wall. Delayed panic, he assumed: he was shaking as though he’d got the flu, and his head hurt. He tried to collect his thoughts, but they wouldn’t hold still. They kept scampering in all directions, like chickens. Mr Loop and Bowden Allshapes; vampires; where was Luke; the kiss. Ah yes, the kiss, which had cured him of lycanthropy but generously left him those amazing superhuman senses. But he couldn’t really bring himself to be interested in any of that stuff. The kiss . . .

  In films, when the hero and heroine are escaping from the bad guys, dodging machine-gun bullets as they leap from exploding buildings or weave cars through traffic at breakneck speeds . . . In films, just as the chase is getting desperate, and any sane person in such a situation would only have room in their mind for panic and terror, there’s always a lull, a pause in the headlong chase and special-effects barrage, while the boy and the girl take time out to discuss and untangle their relationship, declare everlasting love. Those bits always spoiled the film, as far as Duncan was concerned, because it stood to reason that when hot lead filled the air and the wolf pack was on your trail, you simply wouldn’t be in the mood for any of that stuff, it’d be the last thing on your mind. So unrealistic, was Duncan’s view. So untrue to life.

  Just goes to show; truth stranger than fiction. Sure, his old life was irredeemably over now, one way or another. He’d gone AWOL from the pack, the undead were after him with a butterfly net and a killing bottle, vampires were shooting at him in coffee shops. If this was a movie, it was one of those lemons where the producers haven’t been able to make up their minds which big action sequence to go for, and have therefore compromised by including them all. But here he was, a fugitive hunted by terrifying monsters whose existence he’d have refused to believe in a few weeks ago, and all he could think about was whether she still—

  ‘Excuse me.’

  A long black car had pulled up beside him, and the back window was winding down. Mirror glass all round, he noticed, very Californian; wasn’t it illegal in the UK, though? A smart-looking middle-aged woman was looking out at him. He raised his head.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the woman repeated, ‘but is this Van Helsing Avenue?’

  Duncan shrugged. ‘Sorry, no idea,’ he said. ‘I’m sort of lost myself, actually.’

  ‘You poor thing. And you’re all wet. Has it been raining?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Actually, I fell in a canal.’

  ‘Good heavens. No wonder you’re soaked. Why don’t you go home and get changed, before you catch your - oh, I forgot, you said you’re lost.’ She frowned sympathetically. Nice woman, Duncan thought. ‘You’re not having a particularly good evening, are you?’

  He laughed. ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Well.’ The woman’s voice became brisker. ‘Tell me where you want to get to, and we’ll find it for you on this satnav thing; that’s if George can get it to work. He’s only had it a week, and - yes, dear, I know, the handbook doesn’t make sense. What was the name of the street?’

  ‘Thanks, but really,’ Duncan said. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Nonsense. It’s no trouble.’

  There was, of course, no street in London where he wanted to go - quite a few he wanted to stay well away from, but he could manage the navigational side of that perfectly well without any help from technology. But he couldn’t very well say that, could he? ‘Harpers Ferry Road,’ he said (he had no idea where that was, but he’d seen the name somewhere and it had stuck in his mind). ‘If you can just give me directions—’

  ‘Hang on. Is that - ah, here we are, well done, George, you’re getting the hang of it at last. I told you it was just a matter of not hitting the little box thing. Oh,’ she added, a moment later. ‘I’m afraid it’s rather complicated. You’d better come here and take a look at it for yourself. I don’t understand these funny little pictures.’

  Duncan really didn’t feel like moving from his nice comfortable wall, but he’d got himself tangled up now. He stood up and squelched over to the front passenger door, which swung open.

  ‘Hop in,’ a man’s voice said.

  ‘No, I’d better not, I’m all wet.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that, I’ve got seat covers on. Washable.’

  Some people are so nice it’s annoying. He climbed into the front seat, looking for a screen of some sort. There wasn’t one. The car door slammed.

  ‘What—?’ he said stupidly, as the engine fired and the car started to move. He would probably have gone on from there, but something small and hard was digging into the back of his head. If this was one of those stupid films he disliked so much, it’d be a gun.

  ‘Silver bullets, naturally,’ the woman said. ‘Did you know that we have to get them individually hallmarked, by law? It’s true. They’ve all got a little lion and some numbers stamped on them. Ridiculous, isn’t it? Oh, would you mind terribly putting your seat belt on?’

  The car tore round a corner, throwing Duncan hard against the window. He straightened up again. The driver, he noticed, was a short, bald, round-headed man who reminded him of someone. The hard, cold pressure on the back of his head was still there.

  ‘Suit yourself, then,’ the woman said. ‘Only George does so like to drive fast. Of course, you’re practically indestructible, so it doesn’t matter terribly much. Talking of which: Wesley’s fine, in case you were
worried. A few broken bones, and one of his feet came off, but nothing that can’t be put right in a jiffy.’

  Wesley. Wesley Loop. In that case—

  ‘We’ve met,’ he said dully. ‘Haven’t we?’

  ‘That’s right,’ the woman chirruped. ‘And this time it’s me chasing you, which is rather fun, isn’t it? Not that it makes any difference in practice. Oh, while I think of it, I’d just like to say thank you for all your hard work, looking after our legal business. Now I really don’t want you to think, just because it was all a bit of a sham and there was no way you could ever have got those silly accounts to balance, that we don’t really appreciate all your effort on our behalf. In fact, it was your sheer perseverance—’

  ‘It’s dogged as does it,’ the driver muttered.

  ‘Be quiet, George. It was your perseverance that convinced us that you were just the person we were looking for; which is why you’re here now, of course. Though we were just a little bit surprised when Wesley said you were - well, like that. We assumed you’d have transformed, but clearly you haven’t. That’s really very clever of you. George, did you really tell Wesley dead or alive? You know what he’s like. No sense of humour, but he does so love to show off.’

  The kiss, Duncan thought, hold on to it. If he could believe that the kiss was the only real thing he’d experienced that night, he felt sure that somehow he’d find a way out of all of it - wake up and discover it had all been a dream, something like that. But the kiss was slipping away, and instead he was being made to understand that reality was being driven way too fast in a car with a shape-shifting zombie gangmaster who probably didn’t mean him well. In a reality like that, kisses and everything they stand for couldn’t really exist, could they? You could want to believe in them with all your heart and soul, but deep down you’d always know that they were imaginary, as mythical as werewolves or unicorns. There are kisses at the bottom of our garden, you’d say, and your mother would smile faintly and say, That’s nice, dear, now go and wash your hands, tea’s nearly ready—