by Glen Duncan
‘Well,’ the sales assistant said (thinking Okay, fuck you both), ‘the seat’s there if you need it. I’ll be back in a moment.’
And even when she’d gone, and the girl and I were alone face to face, time and silence solidified around us. Meanwhile the world quietly rearranged itself like a CGI effect on a planetary scale. Alarming sorority flowed between and through and around us. (How do we really know there aren’t any others? I’d asked Jake. He’d said Harley would have known. But Harley was nine months late finding out I existed.) Somewhere in the store I’d passed the ad slogan for the latest iPhone: This changes everything. Again.
At last I made my mouth move. ‘Who are you?’ I said.
She swallowed. Opened her mouth, closed it. Started again. ‘Who are you?’ she said. Her voice surprised me: working-class London, East End I supposed. From the horsey get-up I’d been expecting public-school posh.
‘It’s not “who”, is it?’ I said. ‘It’s what.’
‘Fucking hell,’ she said. ‘Fucking hell.’
Someone tutted in one of the other cubicles.
‘You’re American,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Who did it to you?’
‘Maybe we should—’
A cubicle door opened and a heavy woman in a quilted overcoat stepped out between us, arms laden with items. Her face was flushed. She wasn’t the tutter. She was deep in her own schemes and anxieties. I had to stand aside to let her by. When she’d gone I half-expected the girl to have disappeared. Except the ether remained dense with her scent. So different from Jake’s. Breathing it caused a pile-up of feelings: excitement, familiarity, claustrophobia, arousal, a dash of shame. I could see the same in her face, the stunned compulsion, the forced immediate intimacy. It was as if someone had grabbed us and shoved us against each other.
‘Let’s go somewhere we can talk,’ I said. She stood motionless, face still struggling to accept. ‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘I can’t believe you’ve got a baby,’ she said.
Zoë had assimilated her. The small body had relaxed. Now my daughter was just a hungry infant again. If I didn’t feed her in the next few minutes she would start crying.
‘How is this possible?’ I said. ‘I mean how did this happen?’
‘Was that you on the Great West Road?’
‘What?’
‘Were you in Hammersmith the other day?’
‘Yes.’
‘I knew it.’
‘Were you there?’
‘I’ve been...’ She couldn’t complete it. Too many thoughts. Too much.
‘Ever since I got here,’ I said, ‘I’ve had this feeling, in different parts of the city. I thought it was... I don’t know what I thought it was.’ Relief – joy, almost – was like a physical presence nearby, because whatever else it meant it meant I wasn’t – we weren’t, me, my daughter, my son – alone. Not alone! The dressing room, the cubicle, her hands and face and voice and her tight-packed wulf stink – all of it formed the point from which the world shifted again to let me back in. It was like a broken love affair against all the odds getting a second chance. I could have lain down on the floor and slept with relief.
‘Do you know about it?’ she said. ‘I mean do you know anything?’
Again I could feel my Heathrow questions leaping up in her: What does it mean? How did it start? Is there a cure? I remembered the sudden conviction as soon as I met Jake that since it wasn’t just me, since it wasn’t just a freak occurrence, then someone, somewhere, must have the answers. I felt sorry for her, since I could only tell her what Jake had told me: Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all. There isn’t one. Unless of course Quinn’s Book turned out to be more than a bagatelle.
‘Let’s just go and sit down somewhere,’ I said. ‘There’s got to be a cafeteria in here, right?’ Zoë let out the first plaintive note. ‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Listen, I’ve just got to – oh, to hell with it, I’ll do it in here.’ I went into the dressing room and sat down in the cubicle she’d just come out of. The dress she’d been trying on was still hanging there, pale green Twenties-style in silk with a tasselled hem. There was an olive green chiffon scarf to go with it. ‘I’ve got to feed her,’ I said, making the necessary adjustments to the carrier and my clothes. ‘Look away if it grosses you out.’ In a Wendy’s with Lauren once a woman had breastfed her baby in full view. Lauren had said: I think I’m going to puke my goddamned nuggets.
‘What? Oh, right, no, I don’t care. Jesus fucking Christ I can’t believe this.’
‘Language,’ the tutter said, half under her breath.
‘Fuck off, you stupid cow,’ the girl called out. She stood in the cubicle doorway, tense, both arms folded under the black coat. There was a lot of quick nervy life in her white hands and throat. I just sat there, incapable of picking a place to start. Milk came from the universe and bounded through me into Zoë – but the universe had changed. I thought: What if we don’t like each other?
‘How long have you...?’ she whispered. ‘How long have you been one?’
‘A year and a half,’ I whispered back. ‘How long have you?’
‘Nine months.’
Which brought the number of moons, the number of kills. What we were flared suddenly around us in the confined space. I got a mental flash of a teenage boy’s face with eyes wide and mouth full of blood. It’s only the best for us if it’s the worst for them. Incredibly, she blushed. Not so incredibly: I was blushing myself.
‘What about him?’ she said, nodding at the baby.
‘Her,’ I said.
‘What about her?’
‘She’s like us.’
‘Holy fucking shit.’
A cubicle door opened and closed. I couldn’t see who it was but I knew it was the anti-swearing woman. ‘Yeah?’ the girl said to her.
No reply.
‘Walk away,’ the girl ordered. I felt the woman obey. ‘God, it’s so weird,’ the girl said, turning back to me. ‘We knew there was someone. We’ve been saying for days.’
Stop.
We .
Plural.
An effect like an enormous fleeting change of light. A split-second eclipse.
‘Who’s “we”?’
‘Me and the others.’
‘What others?’
‘You know. Like us.’
‘There are others, like us, here?’
‘Aren’t there any in America?’
The milk and blood beat, steadily. My face was hot. In spite of everything I was still negotiating the effect of her scent. It was like the time in Lauren’s bathroom when Lauren had left the clothes she’d changed out of in a heap on the floor and because curiosity always won with me I’d picked out her underwear and smelled it. A cramped, profane little thrill with a fleck of disgust and delighted secrecy, but also a sprouting of species sympathy, a feeling of accommodating something you never imagined you’d have room for. At the time I’d thought: that’s what God wants us to do, find room for each other the way He finds room for Everything.
‘Are any of the other cubicles occupied?’ I asked.
She took a quick look. ‘No.’
‘Okay, one thing at a time. You’re telling me there are others, like us, here, in London, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How many?’
‘There’s four of us. I did it for Trish. Then Lucy was an accident. Then Trish fucked it up with this guy Fergus and now there’s him, too. He says he’s kept it to himself, but I dunno if he’s lying. Lucy, too, for that matter. I mean I don’t really know her, not as a person.’
You take a moment to establish you’re not dreaming. I had an image of them together in an unloved little meeting room. Like a support group.
‘We’ve all been feeling it,’ she went on. ‘You, I mean. We’ve been like: Something’s happening. Someone’s here. Trish said the other day she nearly fainted in South Ken. It’s like a whatsit, compu
lsion. She didn’t even know what she was doing there. It’s like me, now, in here. I’m not shopping, really. I just... You know?’
‘I was in South Kensington,’ I said. ‘I felt it too. This is... Wait. What do you mean you did it for Trish?’
‘She asked me to.’
‘Asked you to what?’
‘What d’you think?’
‘Turn her?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, it’s a long story. You’ve got to know the background. She’s had way more than her share of shit to put up with. Then she saw what I did to that arsehole... There was this tosser, Alistair. What he was getting away with, you know? It’s complicated.’
A calm detached incredulous part of me was filling in the narrative gaps anyway. Trish enslaved by tosser Alistair, the blonde girl paying him a visit one full moon, Trish seeing the short-cut to a life of never getting pushed around... I thought: Jake, you should have been here to see this. The New Feminism.
At which thought the most obvious question – the one that should have been first in the crowd – suddenly pushed its way to the front.
‘Who did it to you?’ I asked her.
She rolled her eyes, as if recalling a minor absurdity. ‘This guy I was seeing. He’s disappeared. So really that’s four others apart from me.’
‘What was his name?’
Zoë had stopped suckling but I couldn’t move for a moment. The air in the cubicle ached with our mutual intuitions. Her odour intensified, suddenly.
‘Jake,’ she said. ‘I never knew his second name.’
The world-sized CGI effect was almost complete. Beyond the feeling of inevitability, I was hurt: Why didn’t he tell me? And how did he do it? Didn’t he have the virus? Wasn’t he incapable of passing on the Curse? Wait. No. Ellis had told him WOCOP had been slipping him the anti-virus when they could. Drinks at the Zetter. The hotel in Caernarfon. Had it worked?
This guy I was seeing.
The Zetter. Caernarfon.
The last detail of the giant CGI metamorphosis resolved. We had our new shape.
‘You’re Madeline,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ she replied. ‘How d’you know?’
28
It was foolish to go with her openly back to the Dorchester but I was in no state for nice judgements. I’d told her we couldn’t speak in the cab, so by the time we were behind closed doors in my suite the questions were at a rolling boil. I explained what I knew as quickly (and simply) as I could: Jake; the near-extinction of the species; WOCOP; the vampires; the virus. She knew nothing about the Hunt, had never, to her knowledge, been pursued, and had never met a vampire, though she took the discovery of their existence without question. I left out any mention of the journals. She’d want to read them and Jake hadn’t been flattering. That we had him in common thickened the intimacy, of course, forced me to picture things, her neat little face’s concealments when he pushed his cock into her anus, the two of them drinking champagne, standing up, naked, her rolling over on his cellphone in the Caernarfon bed. It should have meant enmity, or at least jealousy, but it didn’t. Wulf trumped everything: we were mutually fascinated, like newly introduced sisters. There were the surface differences, nationality, education, taste (her human had me pegged as smart, maybe a bit stuck-up, crucially and gratifyingly not as pretty as her), but they burned away in the heat of the monster we shared, who sat with us now like a delighted paedophile uncle with his two corrupt nieces. In any case, for all Jake’s scorn of her faculties she’d registered the businesswoman in both of us, the smudge of commerce, the no-nonsense relationship with money. That and the commitment to self-preservation, to life at all moral costs. You love life because life’s all there is. There’s no God and that’s His only Commandment. Jake wouldn’t have needed to tell her that.
She’d Turned the night after their last encounter at the Castle Hotel in Caernarfon. She went back afterwards looking for him, but of course by then he was already in France.
‘He used to tell me about it,’ she said. ‘How he was two hundred years old, how he killed people every full moon.’ She was sitting in one of the suite’s cream leather chairs drinking a gin and tonic, one slim booted leg crossed over the other. Zoë, milk-stunned and with a perceptibly increased feeling of safety, was asleep in her bassinet. Cloquet was in his room. I’d rung him to say I was back but didn’t want to be disturbed. I needed Madeline to myself first; he would have complicated it. ‘Clients are always telling you things,’ Madeline continued. ‘Half the time that’s what they’re coughing-up for. Normally you take it with a major pinch of, right? But he was different. I mean when he told you stuff it was like he was reading from a book or something.’ ‘He’, Jake, kept flaring and subsiding between us like pleasurably shaming sunlight. It was as if she and I were seeing each other naked. ‘And then that poor bloke’s head in the bag,’ she continued. ‘Christ. And the other guy goes, “He’s a werewolf, honey, didn’t you know?” and I’m like: Fucking hell. I mean he tried to pass it off afterwards, make a joke of it, but I knew by then there was something seriously weird going on.’
‘I still don’t understand how he did it to you,’ I said.
She shook her head, shrugged. ‘At the time I just assumed...’ She made a face to indicate sex. ‘You know?’
‘But it’s not spread like that,’ I said. ‘As far as I know it’s got nothing to do with sexual contact.’
‘Look, you might be right, but what can I tell you? He didn’t bite me, that’s for sure. He didn’t change. All I know is it definitely happened after that last night we were in Caernarfon.’
We both fell silent – hit silence, actually, because what she’d just said had brought her kill from that first time – the teenage boy – into the room with us. We looked at each other – one moment of absolute transparency (yes, we knew what we’d done; yes, we really had done it) – then away, not embarrassed but shocked at the dirty thrill of mutual admission. I could imagine the first incestuous touch between siblings being like this. I also thought – had been thinking, practically from the first moment of recognising what she was: Should I let this be my first sex with a woman? What would fuckkilleat be like with her? Would she even want to?
‘Something’s wrong with you,’ Madeline said.
‘What?’
‘Something’s happened to you. What is it?’
Superficially I’d held back from telling her about the kidnapping to put wulf intuition to the test, to see if she’d pick it up. Not superficially because telling her would bring the totality of my failure back. Failure as a woman, as a mother, as a She. My own disgust had been bad enough. Now there’d be species disgust to contend with as well.
Heat swelled between us. The moment stretched. Our eyes kept meeting then looking away because neither of us was sure we were ready for the rough telepathy on offer. I was thinking of the Alaskan wolves, the way my will had gone into their shoulders and haunches and jaws and feet –
‘Stop it!’
She’d tensed in the chair. I thought the glass was going to break in her hand.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t real—’ But there she was, in the back of my neck and forearms, a shocking counter-intrusion.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know that would happen. Take it easy.’
We stared at each other. The panic and revulsion was human. Meanwhile wulf eased into delight. We balanced like that for what seemed a long time. Then both of us – out of a mix of embarrassment and sudden reciprocal trust – laughed. We withdrew simultaneously, a sensation like the thin dissolving edge of a wave receding over the sand. Shshsh.
‘Is it like that with the others?’ I asked her.
‘Yeah, it is.’
‘It takes getting used to.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘I want to meet them.’
‘What, now?’
‘Well... No, wait. We’ve got to think about this. We’ve got to b
e careful.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘What you said before, about there being something wrong, about something having happened to me? You were right.’
‘What is it?’
Zoë made a little staccato noise in her sleep, kicked her legs a couple of times, went quiet again. It started raining. I hated the words. Each one was like a big live insect in my mouth.
‘My son’s been taken,’ I said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. ‘I’ve no idea where he is. They’re going to kill him.’
29
I told her everything and she told me everything. Dusk deepened. The room became a secret place, with our voices speaking quietly. Our kills burgeoned through our blushes in silence around us while we talked. I knew she’d made the shift, recognised guilt as pointless since here she still was, in spite of what she’d done, what she’d kept doing, what she knew she’d go on doing. Here she still was in good clothes and Dior Addict, with money in her purse and people in her life. You tore into terrified human flesh, saw the satiny heart and rubbery liver, all the body’s hidden things it turned out obeyed the laws of your violence. You broke the bones and guzzled the blood. You took a life and the theft went unpunished. God didn’t strike you down. The sky didn’t fall. The morning after, you turned on the faucet and water still came out. Ad jingles still stuck in your head. It was still good when you raised your arm for a cab and one came towards you out of the flow like magic. You did things that were supposed to end you and found they were only things that changed you. It was a disappointment and a revelation and a bereavement and a new thrilling nudity. It was the basic prosaic obscenity: you kept going.
Impossible to know if she’d ever been the one-dimensional dolly Jake had portrayed her as, but either way the Curse – to state the obvious – had altered her. According to Jake her entire personality had been driven by insecurity: the vanity, the materialism, the tabloid clichés, the celebrity fixations and cosmetics lore. The whole thing was a nebula that had to be kept swirling protectively around a core of fear. Not any more. The vanity was still there, as was the impoverished vocabulary and complete absence of reading. But wulf, if it didn’t make you mad, made you smarter. Whether you liked it or not every victim forced you to absorb a stranger’s life. Your vision broadened. Strange perspectives became available. New sympathies surprised you. You deepened. The victims were the reading. She had an appetite for it now, this expansion she never knew existed.