Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  The weird thing was, he told me, he never really believed he was going to die.

  ‘I could see it in the other kids, the way they looked out of the windows at the grounds and the sky, I could see they were slowly grasping it, that they were going, that this world and all the things they’d taken completely for granted was going to be gone, and they’d be wherever, heaven or hell or whatever the fuck. They all thought they’d be somewhere, even if it was just floating around like a mist in space or walking the earth as miserable ghosts. There was only one girl, Hannah, who didn’t think she was going anywhere. Dead and burned up to ashes, she said. Finished. No fucking fairy stories.’

  There had been young feelings between him and Hannah, the little pause here said.

  ‘I went back,’ he continued. ‘Afterwards, when I was a vampire. I was going to Turn her, if she wanted it. But by then she was dead.’

  I wondered – but resisted asking – how many child vampires there were. It was obvious from Caleb’s core of oddity there weren’t many.

  ‘But that’s jumping ahead,’ he said. ‘Before all that my mother began visiting me in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘My maker,’ he said. ‘Mia Tourisheva.’

  Mia. I knew the name. The beautiful blonde vampire Jake had flamethrowered at Harley’s. Too much to hope – the name being uncommon, God being dead, irony still etc. – that this was a different Mia.

  ‘I’d wake up and she’d be there,’ Caleb said. ‘Standing by the window or sitting by my bed. Her hair was the same colour as mine.’

  She visited him every night for a week.

  ‘It was like déjà vu that went on for days,’ he said. ‘Everything she said, everything we talked about, the sound of her voice, the hospice smell, her white skin and her hand like ice on my forehead – it was as if all of it had happened before. She knew everything about me. She knew about my mother, and Jeff and Rochelle, and the cancer. She said if I wanted her to, she could cure it, and that I could go and live with her.’ He paused. Talking, and perhaps what he was talking about, was taking it out of him. The circulatory net had darkened in his skin. He was wet with the pink-grey sweat. He swallowed, an effort like clambering over something. ‘She wasn’t lying,’ he said. ‘In a film she’d be lying. In a film an eleven-year-old boy wouldn’t really understand what he was being offered. In a film she’d be sly, evil, mugging at the fucking camera or something. She wasn’t any of that. She said – ’ another powdered glass swallow – ‘she said she couldn’t have children like a normal woman. I understood. You tell yourself later you didn’t really understand, but you did. She never used the word “vampire”, but it was in everything she said. I could live with her and never get sick again. I knew it was true. I can’t explain...’ He had to stop for a moment. The last of the blood’s benefit was going. A convulsion took him for a couple of seconds. His odour sharpened, started to get to me again. ‘I can’t explain how I knew. It just seemed like the most obvious thing in the world. I asked her if it would hurt. She didn’t – ’ a spasm that lifted him almost into a sitting position – ‘she didn’t lie about that, either. She said it would hurt at first, but only for a few seconds. Then it would feel like drifting off to sleep.’

  I wanted to hear the rest, of course, but I wanted to flick back to the Mia sections in the journal too. She’d made this child. Jake had set fire to her. I’d been Jake’s lover. Now here I was in jail with her child. Connections. Life with the plot again. Which will prove harder for humanity? Jake had written. The shift from a meaningful universe to a meaningless one – or the shift back? There are only these two modes, endlessly passing us back and forth like Tweedle fucking Dum and Tweedle fucking Dee...

  ‘It did hurt,’ Caleb said. ‘A lot. But like she said, only for a few seconds. Then it was like sinking into darkness and warmth. She told me to imagine a rope fastened around my wrist, so that no matter how far down I sank I was still connected to the surface. When I felt a tug on the rope, no matter how... No matter how tired I was... I must start to climb.’

  Which, when the first drops of her blood touched his lips, is what he did.

  ‘It’s really hard at first. As if all your bones and muscles have gone. Then it gets easier. Then really easy. Then happiness. It’s not... climbing then. It’s like... being pushed up by a force... from underneath...’

  He couldn’t continue for a while. Again I thought of the twenty-one or probably now twenty-two days he’d been here at this level of suffering, all alone underground. Like my son, wherever he was – though as soon as I thought it I told myself the idea of them torturing him made no sense. They couldn’t risk something going wrong with him. They’d want him healthy for the sacrifice. I told myself this while my facetious self said, Yeah, you tell yourself whatever you need to hear, hon.

  ‘She’d told me she’d need my help afterwards,’ Caleb went on. ‘Said I’d be strong and she’d be weak. I saw it all like a film, what she was saying, how she was telling me it would be. I took her to the room next to mine. There was a boy... I remember thinking... at school – oh, fuck—’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Rest. We can talk later.’ But he wanted this. I remembered the relief, telling Jake about the night I was attacked in the desert, about my first kill in Vermont. You can’t live if you can’t accept what you are, and you can’t accept what you are if you can’t say what you do. The power of naming, as old as Adam.

  ‘At school,’ Caleb said, ‘before I got sick, people had started giving each other lovebites. It was a... craze. You were... cool... if you had a... lovebite.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  I could have laughed. I almost hadn’t asked Murdoch for the journal back.

  But I had. And he’d given it to me. Keep reading, Lula, Jake had said. Well, I had kept reading. I thought of Lauren’s face when Mrs Maguire in English class had said that if a book wasn’t worth reading twice it wasn’t worth reading once. Lauren had waited till her back was turned then said, Yeah, ditto guys and fucking, but unfortunately there’s only one way to find out.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you later.’

  ‘Tell me now. What is it?’

  How many days since they’d brought me in? No more than two. That meant at most fifteen or sixteen days to full moon. Two weeks. Maybe just over two weeks. With a lot of work to do. God being dead, irony still rollickingly alive.

  ‘I think I know how to get us out of here,’ I said.

  40

  ‘Science’ was three lab-coated unapproachables, all male, two (in obedience to the god of stereotypes) in their sixties, bespectacled and bald, but a third who looked like a young Clint Eastwood – or rather, given his polished skin, a waxwork of the young Clint Eastwood. No good. He had a bright, steady, impenetrable obsession with his discipline, impenetrable being the key word. The baldies’ age and aesthetic low-scores ruled them out. Even leaving my preferences aside there was an obvious credibility gap: they’d have to be narcissists or unfeasibly stupid not to realise something was afoot. If what I had in mind was going to work it wouldn’t be thanks to the men in white.

  Fortunately, there were guards.

  ‘I don’t see any cameras in the corridor. Is that right?’

  It was day three since my transfer to laboratory quarters. No amputations (yet) but I’d had swine flu, hepatitis C, HIV and TB, all of which my immune system had dismissed with a languid swat. Endless blood and urine tests; no stool (thank God) courtesy of wulf throwing up everything they force-fed her, although they bagged the vomit and carried it away with religious reverence. The great relief was that they gave me a battery-operated breast pump. Not out of compassion, but because they wanted the milk for analysis. I was drying up. By the third day I was down to a couple of spoonfuls. Not humanly normal, but then we all knew what the response to that was. I hadn’t looked in a mirror since leaving the Dorchester, but I could tell the las
t of the post-partum weight was almost gone. A world record, presumably, another random and redundant boon from the Curse – and a condition that (vanity or obtuseness) I hadn’t realised the plan depended on.

  My new room wasn’t quite the minimalist luxury bedsit of Poulsom’s white jail (no TV, no en suite, no Harrods toiletries, no bath robe), but it was an improvement on Murdoch’s hospitality. The same concrete windowless walls, but a floor of blue gym mats that evoked, comfortingly, high school; a pillow, a woollen blanket, and a nifty little camping toilet that smelled of brand new plastic and bleach. My clothes were confiscated (though I was allowed to keep the book) and replaced with a stiff white hospital smock. Restraints depended on the guards. There was a single leg-cuff on a steel cable bolted to the wall that allowed me to pace-out my little square, or there was the wrists-to-ankles contraption, or, for the ultra cautious, both. All sealed behind a steel door with a food hatch and a viewing plate an observer should’ve been able to slide open or shut but which was in fact jammed permanently open. Beyond my cell door was a corridor – cameraless, it appeared – containing three more (empty) cells and at the end a tiled recessed shower cubicle, where I was allowed to wash (and brush my teeth – joy!) when my stint in the lab was done. From the corridor another door led to a small white-walled antechamber, where one of three rostered guards sat with laptop and com-unit at a fold-out table and chair.

  Three guards.

  Three men.

  ‘No, there aren’t any cameras in there. Why, what did you have in mind?’

  This was Devaz. Of Goan descent, in his late twenties, not much taller than me, with a schoolboy’s side-parting, a roundish face, bright brown eyes and a fruity little gap between his upper front teeth. He wasn’t good-looking, but there was nothing insurmountably wrong with him. He’d sneaked me the toothbrush and toothpaste, so I couldn’t hate him. Crucially, he was so plainly susceptible to sex (which was probably behind the toothbrush and toothpaste) that whoever was responsible for putting him on duty here would be in epic trouble with Murdoch if my plan worked – and if Murdoch survived it.

  ‘I see, sir, that you derive an ungentlemanly pleasure from making a lady ask.’

  ‘Madam, not at all. Not at all.’

  This was the established nonsense. He knew what I had in mind (though not why) because I’d told him on my first day under his guard. He’d overseen me showering, drying off, dressing, by the end of which I knew all I needed to know. Later, through my open door-plate, I’d spoken to him very quietly and reasonably, exactly in the manner of an intelligent woman mastering enormous self-disgust because she had to. The levity and decorum, I made it obvious, were in inverse proportion to the hateful lowness of my desire. Colonial memsahib in houseboy’s power. He loved it.

  ‘Did you talk to Wilson?’ I asked him, the next day, when he started his shift.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It would be lovely, I’m sure, if it weren’t for these notions I have about keeping my job.’

  Rhetoric. His having talked to Wilson told me it was a fait accompli. I could of course have talked to Wilson myself, but of the two of them Devaz called the shots. Plus the Goan’s ego was precious enough to have been miffed if I’d gone to Wilson first. He’d been adored by his mother and sisters. It was there in his eyes’ twinkle and the uncorrected tooth gap.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘You know where I am.’

  It was a two-part seduction. Part One was simple. It addressed, through or beneath or cunningly alongside the established nonsense, the pornographied man exclusively. All it required was me looking at him in a way that said I knew the things he wanted and would do most of them willingly and the remaining few with either arousingly obvious resentment or hot-faced surprise at myself. Part Two addressed the sceptic and the lousy WOCOP employee. It required persuasion, reasoning, argument. Didn’t he know what happened to my kind the closer we got to full moon? On top of everything else I was suffering – imprisonment, the loss of my children, the indignities of the lab, the certainty of death – was the non-stop assault by you know what. I told him, again very calmly, that in the world outside I wouldn’t look twice at him, but that these were extraordinary circumstances. In these circumstances, believe it or not (again calmly) he’d be doing me a favour. I’d even keep the restraints on, if it made it easier for him. The pornographied man had already said yes, yes, Jesus Christ, yes. The sceptic and the lousy WOCOP employee had a period of denial to work through.

  ‘How can you expect me to have relations with you when you’ve told me you don’t find me in the least attractive?’

  ‘Because I know that’s just the thing to pique a gentleman’s ardour.’

  ‘My God, what a thing to say!’

  ‘Not at all. We modern ladies know how things work.’

  ‘I’m shocked and stunned. I’m saddened.’

  ‘Oh, I can help you with that. I really can.’

  I had to remain playful and calm, a combination of convincing sexual readiness and resigned realism. Not easy, given the loudly ticking clock. If the amputations started I’d be in trouble. Bloody or bandaged or visibly regenerating stumps wouldn’t help. There were of course men who liked that sort of thing (Lauren’s brother had a stash of warped porn: one picture of a woman with amputated legs and two bearded men rubbing their cocks against the big satiny stumps) but Devaz didn’t strike me as one of them.

  ‘Really, sir, I do think Wilson’s agreement in this matter removes the last obstacle to our happiness.’

  Naturally, Wilson, a tall, wiry twenty-six-year-old with red hair and an Adam’s apple that bent his gullet like a little elbow (but who was nonetheless the unit’s arm-wrestling champion) and who’d have to keep lookout while Devaz was with me, had wanted to know what was in it for him. What does he think is in it for him? I’d said to Devaz, having momentarily lost patience with the established nonsense. He’s not gay, is he? It’s not as if you and I are getting engaged. The fact was I needed Wilson. Devaz on his own might not be enough. The third guard, Harris, was the best-looking of the bunch, with angelic dark eyes and cruel cheekbones, but he was also, according to Devaz, Wilson and my own intuition, a stickler for protocol and a WOCOP idealogue in the making. It was a shame. I really needed three. Three was the number I’d had in my head from the moment I’d decided what I was going to do.

  ‘I don’t feel you fully appreciate the risk involved, madam. The atrocious risk to my reputation.’

  Shower time was the window. The eggheads quit the lab and some fifteen or twenty minutes could pass before I’d be expected to appear, scrubbed, fresh-breathed, wet-haired and smocked, on my cell’s CCTV. Fifteen or twenty minutes of alone time in the camera-free corridor with my armed voyeur. Wilson would man the antechamber and send Devaz word if anyone showed up. All I had to do was not lose my temper with Devaz.

  Harris the stickler wouldn’t speak to me at all. When he was on duty there was nothing to do but sit or lie in my cell, running through The Plan (which was really just a single idea, an all-or-nothing bet) or fretting about my children or mulling over everything that had happened. Caleb had gone quiet when I told him which gammou-jhi it was they were going to sacrifice. After a while, he’d said: If I knew where they were holding him I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Then after a further pause: So I’m glad I don’t know. Sorry.

  Mia, his ‘mother’, wasn’t a believer. As far as she was concerned the Disciples were fanatical idiots and Remshi was in the same bracket as Cinderella or the man in the moon. Like all cults Jacqueline’s at first gently discouraged, then frowned upon, then outrightly forbade contact with non-members. A crisis had come. Caleb had broken from Mia. And broken her heart, I read between the lines. Their last fight had been toxic. He’d railed at her for trapping him for ever in the body of an eleven-year-old, for turning him into a murdering monster, for making him hate himself, for robbing him of the chance to die with a clean soul. His last words to her before leaving were th
at he despised her, that he wished she were dead. Really dead. Three days later WOCOP had caught him.

  ‘Better than nothing,’ Devaz said, when, on the fifth day, without warning, he dropped the established nonsense and dragged one of the blue gym mats out of my cell into the corridor.

  I thought of all the times I’d been so close to screaming Will you just fuck me already, for Christ’s sake? – and thanked the God who wasn’t there for giving me patience.

  ‘Put your hands out. We don’t have much time.’

  The shift into plain speaking unnerved us. I wondered, briefly, if he’d be violent, then realised he couldn’t afford to be: violence would leave marks. Science would know. Science would investigate. Murdoch would find out.

  ‘I have to leave the com on,’ Devaz said, which conjured Wilson next door, listening. ‘No,’ he added, reading me, ‘just the headphones.’

  We were ambushed, somewhat, when it came down to it, Devaz, unlocking the wrists-to-ankles restraints, by my body’s hot aura, by my particular femaleness and personhood, me by lust’s sheer drop and drowning vision: this close to having sex, how much I needed it was no joke. The word ‘yearning’ presented itself, fresh and legitimate and surprised. My clit was fiendishly awake and calling the shots, the no-nonsense rep for all the intoxicated flesh and blood, for the whole dumb chorus of desire. Holding on to the plan would be like holding on to a talisman on a peyote’d visit to the underworld. I realised (as Devaz was removing the restraints) that we mustn’t lose momentum. Pausing or saying the wrong thing would spook him. Off the back of which thought I worried, suddenly (as I had with Walker; assume Walker’s dead, assume Walker’s – but please God let him not be) that milk would come if he sucked my nipples. The morning’s breast-pump had scored zero but who knew what a human mouth would do? No point mentioning it now. It’d be just the sort of thing to freak him out. Or maybe he’d like it? There wasn’t anything out there a guy might not like. If he did it wouldn’t be Walker’s Dionysian ease but a dreary kink, a secret kept in his psyche like a big rat in a too-small box.