by Glen Duncan
One morning (or rather the time when the lights came on) I woke to find Hugh preparing a hypodermic. I was still strapped down, but they’d removed the restraint that normally held my head still. Fear, it turned out, hadn’t really gone away. It was right there, immense and immediately available. He must have felt it coming off me, because I remember him saying: ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a relaxant’ – before all the lights went out again.
43
The hunger dragged me awake. Even before I opened my eyes I knew full moonrise was less than twenty-four hours away. Wulf, impatient to fill her lungs, was all but crushing mine. Transformation’s preamble crunched and popped in my muscles and bones. My spine wanted out, craved its full lupine length. Nerves shivered in the sockets of my fingers and toes and there, like a heavy helmet, was the ghost of the monster’s skull around my own. I had one hand in the pocket of my smock, where, perhaps as a joke, perhaps as a no-hard-feelings gesture, Clint & co. had shoved Jake’s journal.
No mistaking where I was: Caleb’s freshly repulsive odour and the bucket’s mean spirit of piss, vomit and bleach, yes, home sweet home – but with a new olfactory twist: the suggestively pressing smell of human flesh and blood. I opened my eyes.
I was, of course, back in my old cell – but I wasn’t alone. Walker, thin, bruised, unshaven and stinking not just of living meat but stale excrement, urine and sweat, lay curled up in wrists-to-ankles restraints looped by a steel cable around the bars. He was so clearly incapable of doing anything the cuffs were an act of satire. Of the clothes he’d had on when they caught us only his pants remained, now filthy. His face was drained. The blue-green eyes were big and bright and fractured. One of them – the left – had a badly infected sty. It was the sort of irritant I knew he’d stopped noticing, the sort not big enough to register above the constant noise of the other injuries.
‘Oh God,’ I said.
‘Don’t touch me.’
Small words that said a big piece had shifted. Or died. It would’ve been less awful if his voice had changed, but it hadn’t. It was still him, deeply altered.
‘They brought him in today,’ Caleb whispered, not out of delicacy but because he could barely speak. I looked over at him. He was still in nothing but the white Adidas sweatpants. The pinkish sweat had dried. His skin was tight and translucent, veins livid. How many times in the cage since I’d been gone? A detached part of me was surprised to find him still alive. A not-so-detached part relieved. Don’t get soft, idiot. You need him alive, that’s all.
I turned back to Walker. ‘Hey,’ I said.
He didn’t respond. He didn’t want me. I was sending signals to everything in him he thought he’d let die. If he’d had a silver loaded gun at that moment he might have shot me just to stop the appeal to his dead self. He was terrified it might not be entirely dead, might start placing horrifying demands on him, or rather just the one horrifying demand: that he find room for what had happened to him without becoming someone completely different.
I wondered what he thought had been happening to me. Here I was, good as new, no scars to prove anything had happened to me. There he was, utterly changed. It was a betrayal, to have your own body erase the evidence of the abuse it had suffered. It made the evidence on the inside harder to bear. The evidence on the inside was like getting raped in broad daylight in a crowded street without a single witness.
Getting raped. Telepathy like the shadow of a bird passing over us. Our eyes met. He looked away. I thought of a news story from years back, a Haitian prisoner sodomised with nightsticks and a fire hose in NYPD custody. Then a tumble of other images. The pictures of stripped and hooded detainees at Abu Ghraib. The peculiar glazed mirth of the MPs looking on. I wondered if Walker had it in him to recover from that kind of violation. If you were a woman a portion of your fear was given over, in installments that began when you were still a little girl, to rape. How not? Women got raped all over the world, every day. It was a structural latency. But not if you were a man. If you were a man you didn’t start worrying about rape until you were on your way to jail. Did that make it harder to absorb it when it happened? Men would think so.
The uselessness of saying anything was with us in the cell like a grinning genie. Walker ran his tongue over his cracked lips. His aura was meagre and wrongly concentrated, an effect like the bad breath of very ill person. All the charm and the glimmering history of the women who’d desired him was gone. It was as if someone had found the last hidden gold of his boyhood and ripped it out of him. I thought of him saying my name that night in the dark, unguardedly – Talulla? – the tenderness and delight that had ambushed me. I wanted to put my arms around him and I knew it was the last thing he wanted me to do. He didn’t want to be touched by anyone ever again, except perhaps brutally, to honour the vicious god who had visited him.
‘You’re going to kill me,’ he said, still not looking at me. ‘Tomorrow. That’s why I’m here.’
I didn’t bother saying, What do you mean? I knew what he meant. I’d known while he was still saying it. Live victim. Premium entertainment. Maximally sweet for Murdoch, who’d watch, maybe bring his wife in and make her watch. Here’s your lover. Take a good look. Science would wait till I was back in my human shape then roll me in for another session. So far they’d had the chance to study the empty-bellied werewolf. Now they could learn all about her when she was full. They’d electrode me up to see what was going on in my brain while I watched the footage of myself killing Walker.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’
‘You won’t have a choice. And anyway I—’
‘It’s not going to happen. You’re not going to give them the satisfaction.’
Satisfaction. Bad word-choice. So many words now would lead him straight back to what had been done to him. He closed his eyes and drew his knees in to his chest. ‘You won’t have a choice,’ he repeated.
‘There’s always a choice,’ I said, quietly, gently. (Yes, there was. But it was always the werewolf who got to make it. Ask the victims. Ask Delilah Snow.) I wanted to wrap him in quietness and gentleness, let him sleep for a long dark season next to me. Except of course tenderness was cruelty to him now, anything that reminded him of the personhood that had been broken and defiled. He didn’t want to be invited back into caring whether he lived or died. If you care, then what they do to you – what they’ve done to you – counts double. I got an image of Murdoch’s face, a look of rage so resigned and extreme it appeared as mild boredom. Because destroying a person wasn’t enough. No matter what you did it wasn’t enough. You were still there after the last of the person’s dignity was gone. You were still there, unsatisfied, like God.
Caleb retched, shuddered, jammed his jaws together, subsided. ‘Kill me while... you’re... at it,’ he said. ‘I can’t... stand this... any more.’
‘I’m not killing either of you.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Caleb gasped, ‘I forgot. You’re getting us... out.’
Walker’s eyes opened, but only to stare at the floor.
‘She can’t tell you how,’ Caleb said. ‘Because they’re... listening.’
I’d had to assume they were listening. It was why I hadn’t risked telling Caleb what I had in mind before Science carted me off. There was no point saying anything now. If my plan worked they’d find out soon enough. If it didn’t then I’d spared them having their hopes butchered.
‘Mike got out,’ Walker said, still staring at the floor.
‘He did? How do you know?’
‘Overheard them...’ He paused, seemed to drift off. The word ‘them’. Certain pronouns had been reinvented. ‘They’, ‘them’, ‘he’, ‘him’. They stalled him, these words, reminded him he wasn’t himself any more. ‘Overheard,’ he said. ‘“The Russian got out.”’
I pictured Konstantinov drinking from a forest stream like an animal, his flesh white in the green gloom.
‘When?’ I asked.
Walker’s eyes closed again. It was an i
ncalculable weight for him to lift, this talking as if nothing had changed.
‘Walker?’
‘A week, maybe more.’
‘What about the others?’
‘Dead.’
The vault door opened. Murdoch and Tunner entered, bow-legged Tunner with his trademark ape-grin and delighted muscles, Murdoch placidly winding up an alarm clock with his large headmasterly hands. The clock was the old-fashioned kind, with twin half-bells on top. I used to have one just like it in my bedroom when I was a kid. Walker, haemorrhaging adrenaline, curled tighter in the restraints, face shut, trying to find a place to hide deep within himself. I pictured him naked, cuffed hands to feet, held by two Hunters in black while Tunner jammed a bloody nightstick in and out of his ass and Murdoch took a cellphone call and continued observing.
‘It’s nine minutes past three in the morning,’ Murdoch said, quietly. ‘Full moonrise will be in fourteen hours and two minutes.’ He put the clock on the floor, facing us, then stood over it, hands in his pockets. ‘At that time, of course, Ms Demetriou will change into a monster.’
‘A ravenous monster, Nuncle,’ Tunner said.
‘Ravenous, as you say, Mr Tunner.’
‘Bereft of morality.’
‘Bereft of—’
‘Here’s a thought,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you skip the vaudeville and fuck off?’
Caleb laughed, wheezily. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh. I got a small detonation of pleasure from it, and from the effect of the interruption on Murdoch, whose mouth stalled for a sweet second or two. Then he said: ‘That was very well done. Like getting a slap. I’m slightly embarrassed.’
For a few not-so-sweet moments no one spoke. Murdoch had a power over silence, like mine over the wolves. He could summon it and make it an extension of himself. In it we saw the smallness of the point I’d scored against the size of what was coming to us.
‘Anyway,’ he said, when he knew long enough had passed, ‘I’ll be back in time to see everything. So until then I’ll say cheerio. Mr Tunner?’
When they’d gone, Caleb said: ‘Can you reach the clock?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Why?’
He swallowed. Another throatful of crushed glass. ‘That ticking... ’ he said. ‘Going to drive me... fucking mad.’
44
Walker slept. Eventually, at a quarter after seven (sunrise in the world outside, presumably), so did Caleb. Then it was just me and the clock and the hunger – and the two new questions.
The first new question was: what would Konstantinov do if he really had escaped? It was thrilling to imagine him gathering a team to come and get us – thrilling and unrealistic. He didn’t owe Walker. Walker owed him. All Konstantinov cared about was getting his wife back. Besides, there was no team to gather. Walker had already tried that for the Italian trip: only three takers – and they were all dead now. Any way I looked at it Konstantinov free was no more use to us than Konstantinov locked up. Which didn’t stop me looking at it all the ways, repeatedly.
The second new question was: what would happen to Walker if my plan didn’t work, if the theory it was based on turned out to be wrong, if I lost the big bet?
The answer was: I’d kill him and eat him. If not this month then next. If Murdoch was bent on Walker’s death-by-werewolf then sooner or later the hunger would give it to him.
There was of course a drastic way out for Walker, if my theory was right. But if my theory was right The Plan would work. And if The Plan worked he wouldn’t need the drastic way out. If I offered him the drastic way out now and he took it (which he would, the state he was in) and The Plan worked, the drastic way out wouldn’t seem like a way out at all...
Meanwhile the hunger went comprehensively about its business. Wulf paced its human cage, sometimes flung itself at the bars. The bars got the bruises. My blood packed. As always there was nothing to throw up. As always the dumb guts kept trying. As when I was in labour, no position was any good. The minute any part of my body realised I was lying on it it started to protest. I wanted a warm bath, painkillers, booze. Cloquet would have his hands full with Zoë. Assuming he hadn’t dumped her somewhere. I pictured a garbage heap with her bare leg sticking out, flies swarming around her foot.
LISTEN TO ME. CAN YOU HEAR ME?
I let myself examine the thought of both my children being dead. Wulf didn’t like it, slashed me from the inside. The monster bitch wasn’t ready to admit maternal defeat even if the human bitch was.
DON’T FIGHT IT.
I saw myself with my fangs in Walker’s shoulder and my fingers palm-deep in his thigh. Wulf pointed out the obvious: You’d be doing him a favour. What time is it?
Ten to three in the afternoon. The hungrier I got the slower the clock hands moved and the faster the monster paced her cage. Soon the nausea would pass and I’d be in the full-of-beans stage. Then I’d be on my feet, pacing with her. A cage with an animal in it that was a cage with an animal in it. An unsavoury version of a babushka doll.
YOU CAN FEEL ME. I KNOW YOU CAN.
Walker woke up for a while and didn’t move anything except his eyelids. He stayed curled up on his side, watching me.
‘Are your ribs broken?’ I asked him.
He blinked, slowly. He wanted out. Of existence. Every waking-up now was a waking-up to disappointment that the dream he’d been having was just that, a dream.
‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘When the time comes, I won’t be able to speak. You know that, right? You won’t believe it’s still me inside. You’ll think I don’t recognise you. But I will. When I change you have to remember I’ll know it’s you and I won’t hurt you.’
When he spoke his throat was so dry nothing came out. I got up and gave him some water. Kindness was cruelty to someone who wanted to go out as much as he did. Quite go out, go out, go out beyond all doubt.
‘You’ll do what you do,’ he said, quietly. The dirty brown and gold beard made him look like John the Baptist.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will, eventually. I’ll be able to hold out for a few hours, but sooner or later, if nothing happens, I’ll kill you.’ I leaned close and whispered in his stinking ear. ‘But something is going to happen. Trust me.’
YOU KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO.
He opened his mouth but I put my fingers on his split lips. ‘Shshsh,’ I said. ‘Don’t talk. Just rest.’
Which was all well and good, but the smell of his flesh and the heat of his blood wasn’t doing wulf any favours. ‘Just rest,’ I repeated. ‘It won’t be long now.’
I got to my feet, arms wrapped around myself, and looked down at the clock.
Two hours and forty-five minutes to go.
45
In the fuzzed and jiggling seconds before transformation Caleb woke, much worse. His skin was almost transparent. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the twitch or shiver of an internal organ. The circulatory system was black and throbbing, a look of non-negotiable outrage.
‘You forgot to feed him, Mr Tunner,’ Murdoch said. ‘When we came in earlier and I got my verbal slap.’
I was on my hands and knees at the back of the cell. I’d thought there would be more spectators, but it was just these two, both in black combat pants and t-shirts, both with side-arms, Tunner with a nightstick.
‘It drove it clean out of my head, sir,’ Tunner said. ‘Such was the shock of it.’
My fault, in other words. Without the inner chaos I might have cared. As it was even my strategist’s flailing reminder that we needed Caleb alive was lost in the self-wrestling blood. Obscure instinct (to meet death standing?) had forced Walker to struggle to his feet against the bars. He couldn’t straighten up properly. The ribs. ‘Don’t forget what I told you,’ I said to him. ‘Look at me. Don’t forget. Trust me.’
He smiled, faintly, out of his wrecked face.
‘Trust me,’ I said again – then froze.
The alarm clock went off.
Oh.
Now.
/> The moon had found me, laid its ownership in the roof of my mouth and down the length of my spine and like a firm and expert hand between my legs. There was a little laughing admonishment in its touch, that I’d allowed myself to go down into the earth; a little mockery of the earth, too, that must know no matter how deep it swallowed me it would never break my lunar lover’s hold. Wulf breathed deep, crushed my lungs. Eventually, if nothing happens, I’ll kill you. Yes, the bitch reminded me, I will. She was the volatile adult, I was the child with the game it was mildly amusing to play along with for a while – until suddenly it wasn’t. I’ll be able to hold out for a few hours. That, she pointed out, was a foolish claim. She’d missed – had I forgotten? – her meal last month. She was already overdue. She was already owed double.
‘I think, Sir... ’
‘Be quiet, please.’
The hospital smock was intolerable, suddenly (and in any case there was the thought like a sputtering torch that I’d need it if The Plan worked), so I pulled at the fastener and tore it off. Naked. Bizarrely, it felt empowering. Tunner’s Murdoch-imperatives jammed: should he make a joke? Laugh? Pretend it hadn’t happened? Gawp? As it was he remained still, mouth slightly open, odour gone zooish. Murdoch, on the other hand, absorbed the gesture with barely a twinge in his aura. Sex’s money was no good there.
Blood hurried, backed, stopped, raced, broke its own laws to find non-existent room for what was coming. The first shock jerked my backbone. A precipitate canine shot through my upper gum and punctured my bottom lip. Hair sprang with a crisp sigh from the skin on my back, thighs, arms. Bone did what the Curse told it to. Imagine all those Plastisine figures you made then casually pulled and twisted until they were something else; imagine each one had a nervous system. Snapshots between spasms: the French widower shaking his head violently no, no, no, as his mouth filled up with blood; my mother fastening the strap on a pair of high-heeled shoes and then raising one eyebrow at me as if satirising her own glamour – then pulling a cross-eyed retarded face that made me laugh but at the same time slightly terrified me because the beauty momentarily disappeared; Jake’s hand next to mine in Drew Hillyard’s torn-open chest while America’s Next Top Model sobbed and yammered on the blood-covered screen; Richard coming up the stairwell in our old apartment building the day I found out about his affair, the little nautilus whorl of his crown and me emptily knowing that whole part of my life was over; the Mexican pimp’s face struggling to contain the horror of what he was seeing...