Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  ‘Kiss me,’ I said, since it was obvious when we stood face to face that he didn’t know whether some occult prostitutional code prohibited it. ‘Kiss me.’

  Kissing surprised him. He’d forgotten its intricate powers. He was unerect when our lips met, but I knew what I was doing, and he was hard by the time we took the first breather. He’d become very quickly intense, his concentrated sexual self, and was balanced now between pornography and all pornography wasn’t. Wulf was awake, greedily grabbing through my blood’s blur, wanting the moment for itself. My woozy strategist laboured as if against a powerful drug: Keep him on the pornography side of the line. If you let it be anything else to him he won’t want to share you and you need Wilson. You need at least Wilson.

  So I kissed him differently, with scorn for tenderness, and felt him shut something down in himself in response, felt his scorn, in fact, for the soft-hearted putz in him that had nearly wasted a tremendous pornographic opportunity. His odour was cinnamonish and his face had a tropical little force field. I got down on my knees, unzipped him, freed his cock. He’d washed, thank God. My wulf-sharpened nose at his fly got first canvas and a mild salt dash of urine then a burst of coconut-scented shower gel and melanin and clean pubic hair. He was the sort for shower-gel brand preferences and quality underpants, living in perpetual optimistic readiness for sex, for which the doting mother and sisters had prepared him. His cock was large, uncircumcised and had a downward instead of an upward bend. My look must’ve been too nakedly evaluative, however, because he softened slightly under my gaze. Remedially, therefore, I turned corrupted schoolgirl eyes up to him – yes, I really am going to, in full, dirty knowledge – and in steady, sly increments slid him into my mouth.

  ‘Uh,’ he said.

  Uh indeed, but don’t get too comfy there, hot-shot. It was a fine calculation (as far as calculation was possible through my blood’s giggling urgency) how long to keep sucking him. Long enough so that he didn’t feel short-changed when I stopped, but not so long that he ejaculated – and foiled the plan. And if I kept up this performance – oh, I am a dirty little girl, aren’t I? – he’d be off in the next half-dozen strokes.

  ‘No,’ he croaked, when I did stop. ‘Turn around.’ I’d pulled him down onto the mat with me and he’d torn off the condom’s wrapper with his gappy teeth. His face was moist and had new lights on. ‘Turn around.’

  Hoist by my own petard: I’d been so convincing in my omniscient slut act that he expected to proceed directly au derrière. Wulf was ready to give him an affronted slap, not because the area was off-limits, or because going straight there spoke so clearly of sexual selfishness (even if a girl’s got the mental twist that makes it fun there’s always so much more in it for the guy) – but because in that position I wouldn’t be able to execute The Plan.

  ‘In a minute,’ I whispered. ‘In here first. Please, just for a minute. Then anywhere you like.’

  Nervous calculation in the Devaz eyes. I was a modern girl; I knew the modern male math: if a woman was willing to let you fuck her in the ass you didn’t want to blow your load in her cunt. It was depressing how pornography had so emphatically demoted the vagina. The poor old vagina! No wonder the Monologues were such a success. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, licking his earlobe while he fit the rubber with trembling hands, ‘you’ll get what you want. Just don’t come yet.’

  He looked like a man not confident of his control (mouth open, eyes showing too much white) but with a little manoeuvring I got myself under him and eased him in. Thoughts and questions shot up like gun-startled birds. Would Zoë have got used to my absence? Caleb would have been back in the cage. Full moon nine days away. My children would change, crave flesh and blood, young as they were. Cloquet would have to call Madeline. What would the vampires do for Lorcan? Nothing? Add starvation to his sufferings? What was his reality? A world not warm enough, no scent of his kind but presences over him like cold cloud shadows. Like a careful rape. And I’d just let them. Fuck me, fuck me, oh God Jesus yes that’s it...

  Meanwhile, as wulf laid shameless grinning claim to my loins, my poor blood-blinded strategist staggered onwards in accordance with The Plan. I’d given Devaz a few preparatory nips mixed with kisses on his chest and shoulders, which he didn’t seem to mind, but I had to be absolutely sure he wouldn’t pull away at the crucial moment. And the only way to guarantee that was to render him incapable of volition. And the only way to guarantee that... I worked my left hand around his buttocks and down to his furiously puckered scrotum. A little fluttery stroking with the fingertips.

  ‘Like that?’ I asked him.

  ‘Too much.’

  I was wet enough to provide my own lubricant. Nimble manoeuvring with my right hand...

  ‘Are you going to stick your cock in my asshole?’ I whispered in his spicy ear.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ he said.

  ‘You are, aren’t you? You’re going to fuck my nasty little hole—’

  ‘Please... don’t...’

  I slid my moistened middle finger up against his nasty little hole.

  ‘You know I want it, don’t you?’ Faster fluttery ball-stimulation with left hand.

  ‘Wait—’

  ‘Deep in my dirty, sweet, tight little—’

  ‘You’ve got to sto—’

  ‘Oh, angel, come for me, come for your little whore—’

  His universe stopped. He said: ‘Oh, my God,’ with metallic neutrality – and in I went with the prepped finger, all the way up his thank-God empty anus to the hapless prostate. Simultaneously I locked my mouth onto his neck.

  ‘Ahhgggh,’ he said. ‘Fuck... fuck... fuck... ’

  I sucked and bit. As hard as I dared, but not so hard it would be taken for anything more than crazy bitch passion. ‘Ummm,’ I said, still biting, still sucking. ‘Ummmm.’

  ‘Holy mother of Christ,’ he said, seemingly on the edge of tears.

  Then, as his universe reassembled and flowed again and the squandered anal opportunity took fresh hold: ‘God dammit.’

  ‘Shshsh,’ I consoled. ‘Never mind... never mind. We can do it again tomorrow.’

  ‘God dammit.’

  Holding the condom on, he withdrew. He was dazed, not ready for the world. He’d lost his chirrup. His face looked pouchy. ‘You didn’t...?’ he said.

  No, I didn’t. And though my strategist was sobbing with relief, the Whore of Babylon was frowning and breathing exasperatedly through her nostrils. This was the downside of The Plan: if it didn’t scratch the wulf itch it would only make it worse. At the very last second I stopped myself from saying: Just fuck off and send Wilson in, will you?

  ‘It’s fine,’ I lied. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘No, it’s not. Lie down.’

  Good Lord, the man had completely forgotten where he was! Christ knows how many selves I had in play just then, but one of them was struggling not to laugh out loud. However many selves it was, wulf was the biggest and loudest of the lot, and delighted to find Devaz sufficiently a creature of the absurd to feel it his masculine duty not to leave a woman unfulfilled. Not that I was capable – once he was down there sucking and licking my clit with touching enthusiasm and surprising efficacy – of anything other than grabbing his head and enjoying the ride (I considered trying to get the finger that had been up his ass into his mouth, for the Sisterhood, for revenge, but didn’t trust myself to do it subtly) but in any case what, other than composure, had I got to lose? If my theory was correct then so far everything had gone according to plan.

  And in any case, fuck it, I deserved it.

  He did, after perhaps ten minutes, make me come, though I nearly took his teeth out with my pubis in the throes. I felt a little giddy afterwards, and, moron that I was, better disposed towards him.

  ‘Hurry up,’ he said. ‘That’s twenty minutes. You should be back in your cell.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The shower. I need to wet my hair so they’ll thin
k—’

  ‘Okay, do it – but hurry up.’

  He disappeared. A moment later, Wilson entered. He stood, half-blushing and half-smirking as I fastened my smock. Sexually he was less secure than Devaz, needed clear parameters and someone else to be unambiguously in charge. So for him I’d been clipped and schoolmistressy, annoyed by my needs, manifestly the sort of will he could surrender to for twenty minutes. His mother hadn’t doted on him. I doubted he’d had sisters. There was – of course – a pornographied man in him too, but unlike Devaz he wasn’t at ease with it. I could probably have made him fall in love with me, given a little more time.

  ‘Let the camera see you put me back in the cell,’ I said. ‘And don’t forget the leg-cuff.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You’re coming to see me tomorrow, yes?’

  He didn’t answer, but the heat around him was palpable. His hands shook as he locked the cuff.

  ‘Good,’ I said, not quite looking at him. ‘I’ll see you then. And make sure you wash, will you?’

  41

  Two days later, after I’d fucked Wilson once (and Devaz a second time) the scientists cut my right hand off.

  42

  I wish I could say the time that followed was a blur, but it wasn’t. It was dense with detail. I learnt two things. One was that no amount of violence you’ve done to others prepares you for violence done to yourself. The other was that you can’t escape the marriage with your body. Divorce isn’t an option. Even when you want to stop caring about it you can’t. Even when the solution to knowing they’re going to cut off your left breast is to disown it, you can’t. It’s yours. It’s a friend you never realised you loved so tenderly and completely – until they separate it from you. It screams in silence. It retains, for a while at least, its life, its bond with you. But then, when it understands you’re never coming to reclaim it, that the contract has been utterly broken, it dies, alone and betrayed, and becomes an inert, pathetic object, indecent and forlorn.

  The new totalitarian regime was pain. Pain was exhausting in its inane imperviousness to everything. There was nothing, no persuasion or bribe you could bring to it. It was a monolithic idiot, the dumbest thing in the universe given complete power over the smartest, a heartbreaking inversion. I got used to the sensation of my screams locked in by a gag, having to back-up and cash themselves out in my skull. I discovered pity for my body. It was endlessly renewable, this well of pity. Every mutilation drew its unique portion. Every amputation subtracted, poignantly, took away – literally – some of who I was. I cried. Not in front of them. Later, strapped to my bed, surrounded in the dark by the Christmassy lights of lab technology I cried first for my losses and second because who deserved them if not me? The scientists were indifferent to my suffering – but at least they didn’t relish it. It’s only the best for us if it’s the worst for them. Those were my words to Jake, in bed. It’s only the best for us if it’s the worst for them. Unlike the men in white we, monsters, wanted the person we were killing to know – through the blood-blur and the din of their own screams – not only that we knew what we were doing but that we loved doing it. We wanted our victims to see that our pleasure increased with their horror, that their horror was required, that their situation was hopeless. That was the dirty truth, the obscene heart of fuckkilleat: their hopelessness serviced our joy. In the court of human appeal the scientists were better off. At least they weren’t doing it for fun. At least it didn’t turn them on.

  Not that that made any difference to me when they cut my breast off or gouged out my eye or wrenched the teeth from my jaws. The flesh in pain isn’t interested in Old Testament justice or ironic justice or any other kind of justice. It isn’t interested in anything except the cessation of pain. I hated them and wept for my poor body and my lonely self in the winking darkness, even as wulf rushed the butchered cells into regenerative action, a sensation in bone and nerves and tissue like a mass of insects racing towards something. No matter what atrocities you’ve committed you rage at those committing them on you.

  They performed a hysterectomy.

  I slept, on and off, dropped into and struggled out of fire-buckled dreams: one (not surprisingly) of being eaten by ants; another of Jacqueline’s French-manicured fingers peeling back the skin from Lorcan’s skull; another of the diner on Tenth Street, with the Coors neon and the pink leatherette booths and the faux shellacked counter where Clay would let me sit with my vanilla shake and talk to me about the hell his girl was giving him as if I were an adult; another of the lab mixed with the night at Big Sur, Jake dipping his cock into the raw pulp where the torn-open scientist’s heart used to be.

  Then the fluorescents would vibrate and flutter into life and the white coats would appear and another session would begin. I’d never known fear before. You don’t know fear – not the fundamental kind – until you experience knowing what they’re going to do to you and being utterly powerless to stop it. Invariably I wet myself when the lights stuttered on. The scientists didn’t mind. The scientists expected it. I saw my distorted reflection in a stainless steel kidney dish. The young Clint Eastwood leaned over me and I smelled garlic and an aniseed breath mint. They punctured my lungs and broke two of my ribs. One of the bald men was named Hugh. He had large deep-printed fingertips that smelled of latex. He lit an acetylene torch and held it against me, shins, abdomen, back. First degree. Second. Third. The main surgical lamp was like a War of the Worlds flying saucer. They pulled out my fingernails. A blue and white cardboard box on a gurney said ZENIUM X-ray detectable abdominal sponge. Sometimes a radio played a couple of rooms away. The Black-Eyed Peas; Kylie; Lady Gaga. The scientists’ shoes squeaked on the rubberised floor. It sounded like a language. Hugh lifted my severed hand as if it had broken off a holy statue. They were interested in everything. Primarily regeneration speeds (my breast took twenty-four hours, eye six, hand and foot forty-eight, skin two, internal organs a matter of minutes), but everything else too, from T-cells to C-fibres, from lymph nodes to hormones. Sometimes they used anaesthetic, sometimes not. I healed thirty per cent faster without it, they established. A particularly rigorous session with the acetylene torch and pliers revealed that up to a point – up to a point – rate of regeneration increased according to the increase in pain. They called that point the UPH: the Useful Pain Horizon. Sex with Devaz and Wilson receded, became years ago. All the life before the first amputation was distant and sealed. Cauterised. Eventually, even the first amputation seemed remote. My mind was a terminal any old rubbish could enter: advertising jingles; pop songs; scenes from obscure TV movies; the laminated alphabet chart from kindergarten.

  Meanwhile, through the haze, I knew days were passing: the hunger first stirred, confused, then woke, then despite the pain began to beat and scratch its distinctive demands. Wulf’s nose asserted itself, insisted on the scientists as living meat. Deodorants and the lab’s chemical fug were flashed through by stinks of their sweat and blood, an occasional whiff of stale piss or recent shit. Clint’s breath spoke now not just of a noon tuna sandwich or yesterday’s scotch but of his own deep and vital secretions. The moon was fattening and drawing the monster up through my human knit. I felt her in the join of my jaws, my femurs, my spine. I wondered what they had planned for transformation. Whatever it was it wasn’t the same as what I had planned. I spent my entire time secured in the lab now, and hadn’t seen any of the guards for days – but Devaz and Wilson were still around, not far away. I could tell.

  I tried not to think of my children. Failed. Would Cloquet have contacted Madeline? Had I been stupid to suggest it? There was no betrayal in her, but wasn’t she reckless? Would she take the necessary precautions? Cloquet procuring a victim for my little girl was risky enough, but at least he was careful. Of course Zoë wouldn’t be able to make the kill herself, not unless the victim was an infant. Cloquet would have to get his hands dirtier than ever. Was he up to it? Picking up Kaitlyn in a bar and bringing her to his mistress to be murdered was
one thing. Beginning the murder himself was quite another. Maybe that on its own would drive him to the London pack. And Lorcan? In a way he’d be better off. If the prophecy’s specification of sacrifice at midwinter was correct he had more than a month left to live. Since the vampires knew he’d have to feed I didn’t doubt they’d provide for him. (A perverse vision – God being dead, irony etc. – of them feeding him Konstantinov’s wife with a collective chuckle, but I ignored it.) If the prophecy was correct. Every now and then the size of that if made itself real. Unreliably translated and massively bowdlerised, Walker had said. Suppose the version of The Book of Remshi used by the faithful differed from the one WOCOP had acquired? Suppose it read not ‘midwinter’s day’ but ‘six weeks before midwinter’s day’? Suppose it said nothing at all about midwinter? Suppose Remshi could take his victim’s blood whenever he felt like it? My son could be dead already.

  Then, abruptly, the mutilations stopped. I had a long stretch of morphine-edged stasis. It was as if they’d removed a hot suit of armour and put me in a bath of chilled aloe. Delicious protracted shock. Everything they’d cut off or broken or burned renewed itself, via molecular bacchanal, seamlessly. Actually not seamlessly. For a while there was a debilitating sensation where new cellular matter met old, an effect like the blood’s shudder and buzz when you bang your funny bone. Clint & co. looked annoyed – not by the results, but by having to stop. I got the impression they’d been interrupted with plenty of science still to do. Once or twice through the drug’s soundproofing I caught reference to ‘they’ or ‘them’ in a tone that said a decision they didn’t support had come down from on-high.