Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  Konstantinov had gone with Walker in a separate car after dropping us here. Courtesy of my funding via Cloquet he had a crooked doctor on call and a place to hole-up. I hadn’t been able (physically, again) to say anything to him about what had happened to Walker in custody. I wondered if he’d know. Masculine rape-radar. Thinking of Walker hurt my heart. I supposed it was over between us. Not just because of what had happened to him, but because of what he’d seen: me in all my filthy glory. Richard used to claim Linda Blair never got laid after The Exorcist; guys couldn’t shake the footage. Nonsense, obviously – but maybe not when the footage was from real life. The goodbye between us had been a stare through the windshield. What else could it have been? An embrace? I was a nine-foot monster covered in blood. The woman in me was ashamed and the wolf around her was full of contempt. In any case, even if he wanted me (and hadn’t been left terminally impotent) what future was there? What future had there ever been? See you later, babe. Um-hm. Have a good kill. And that was before we got to the other bitterly laughable truth: that the more I felt for him the more likely it was he’d end up being the good kill.

  Unless of course I Turned him.

  Why not? If I didn’t get Lorcan back there’d be no end to the warped gestures I could make in the void. Well, I could imagine my mother saying, with arch reasonableness, why not? What’s he got left to lose?

  That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that if I Turned him he’d end up hating me. Sooner or later he’d forget he’d wanted it. Sooner or later he’d start to wonder how I could have done it to him. Sooner or later every shitty thing that happened to him would be my fault. It was a structural certainty. I knew it, the monster knew it, even Walker knew it.

  It was getting light out. Zoë was asleep in my arms. Bubbles of wulf were trapped in my veins and the ingested lives were standing around confused and weeping like children on their first day at school. Monster strands clung in my neck muscles, buttocks, calves. The virtues of victim blood and victim meat throbbed and glowed, a sensation like indoor warmth after freezing outside.

  Devaz, who’d taken longer in the shower than any of us, was stretched out asleep on the couch in the lounge. He hadn’t been expected, either, so there were no men’s clothes for him. Instead he’d had to squeeze into a pair of Lucy’s baggiest sweatpants. It was such an unappetising sight everyone was relieved when he conked out and we could throw a blanket over him.

  ‘Shouldn’t they be back by now?’ I asked.

  Madeline, also scrubbed, precisely made-up and in clean clothes (dark blue Levis, tight white t-shirt, black suede cowboy boots), had just come in and put the kettle on. There was a rich ambiguous atmosphere between us, wulf’s telepathy still volatile. I knew she was aware of me having turned over the sapphic possibility back in the WOCOP compound, though I couldn’t tell how she would’ve reacted if I’d reached out and touched her. I supposed she ‘did’ girls, professionally, if only because it was economically dumb not to, but for all I knew it was strictly business. Besides, there were Devaz and Fergus now, if I was looking for a loveless version of fuckkilleat, no need to resort to lesbianism. I heard this phrase – no need to resort to lesbianism – in the voice of our neighbour in Park Slope, Mrs Spears, who was brisk and brusque and always absolutely knew her mind and yours too and always told you what not just you but everyone in the world should do. Good Lord, Talulla, there’s no need to resort to lesbianism! At which I was forced to concede that I was more interested in Madeline than I was in either of the two males. Partly a little titillating masochistic jealousy. Partly an irritation with what suddenly felt like absurd (super-absurd, given my other activities) anachronistic bourgeois repression. Partly sexual curiosity that went all the way back to Lauren. Partly just the feeling that since it was going to happen sooner or later I might as well get on with it. Partly, of course, Jake between us. Jesus, he must be loving this. I imagined him settling down with a Macallan and a Camel and a big grin in front of his afterlife TV: and now, a little earlier than advertised, ultra-hot two-girl werewolf action. Fan fucking tastic. Where’s the slow-motion on this thing? Where’s the repeat?

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Madeline said, opening a fresh carton of milk. ‘Luce knows what she’s doing. They’ll be fine. Anyway, come on, you still haven’t told me.’

  How I’d ended up with Devaz and the late Wilson, she meant, werewolves conjured up from the WOCOP faithful. Jake’s journal, incredibly, had survived the night, but she still hadn’t seen it. It wasn’t necessary. I knew the relevant lines by heart. I knew the lines and the scene: The Castle Hotel room, Caernarfon, night. Jake staring at the Harley phone in the wake of the Harley message. Madeline emerging from the en suite, post-coitally repaired, clipping up her hair:

  ‘Look at that,’ she said, turning her cheek and showing me a tiny lovebite on her pliable young neck. ‘That’s a mark, isn’t it?’

  I knew it well enough, having read and re-read it countless times once the penny – thanks to Caleb’s story of his making – dropped.

  ‘Jake gave you a lovebite,’ I said. ‘That night in Caernarfon. The night Grainer and Ellis turned up with Harley’s head in a bag.’

  I watched her thinking back. It brought the images again, Jake fucking her, her face’s worked-for look of professional collusion. Somewhere else in her the little girl (like Cloquet’s little boy on the dock) was waiting for the reunion that would never come. And yet maybe it could come now. My own childhood self hadn’t minded the monster much. It was the older versions that had freaked out. In fact it was like the little girl’s revenge: See? I told you it was like this. All these terrible and wonderful things.

  ‘He gave you a lovebite,’ I said. ‘It had to have broken the skin just enough. Meanwhile the anti-virus they’d been slipping him had worked. There’s no other explanation. The next night, full moon, you changed, just like he did.’

  A few moments while she took it in. ‘How do you know all this?’

  No avoiding the truth now. ‘He kept a diary.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  More cogitation. Here were the versions of her face her customers never saw. She arrived at something. ‘Don’t suppose he had much good to say about me. Dumb blonde. Never read a book in her life.’

  ‘He said he wished he’d kissed you more.’

  Which caused a sudden psychic traffic jam in her. Embarrassment. Curiosity. Pride. It would be a while before she stopped being fascinated by the effects she had on people.

  ‘You haven’t given anyone any, have you?’ I asked her. ‘Any lovebites?’

  She shook her head, still processing.

  ‘No one with a fetish for them?’

  ‘I don’t think so.

  ‘Because they come with a big price tag now. Just so you know.’

  ‘Did he know?’

  ‘Jake? No. He wouldn’t have done it if he had.’ Not to you, my mean-spirited realist could have added – which thought I hoped she was mentally occupied enough to miss. Jake hadn’t known what he’d done, but he – or wulf – had known there was something that made him uneasy when he thought of Madeline in those last hours in the Castle Hotel.

  Something nags when I think of Madeline here. This room’s hauled it to the edge of memory but can’t quite heave it over the border.

  It was there in the journal, practically the last thing he wrote before Llewellyn arrived to take him to Beddgelert Forest, to me, to Grainer, to his death. Something smarter than his human knew: You bit her. She’ll Turn. And if he hadn’t bitten her, I’d be dead now.

  Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all. There isn’t one.

  Maybe not, but life compulsively dangled the possibility. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn’t stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.

  ‘Don’t tell Fergus,’ Madeline said.

  ‘What?’


  ‘Don’t tell him you can Turn someone with a lovebite.’

  ‘He’ll start dishing them out?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s a loose cannon. In fact I wouldn’t mention it to Trish, either. Don’t get me wrong: I love Trish. But she’s like a kid with a new toy with this, seriously. Can’t blame her, mind, crap she’s been through.’

  Caleb coughed. Spat something out. His breathing was bad. I was going to have to find him blood. Would an animal’s do? I could always give him some of mine, I supposed – but who knew what that would turn him into?

  ‘So you just... bit them?’ Madeline asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How’d you manage that?’

  ‘How d’you think?’

  A pause while she re-evaluated me. Now I was the sort of woman who could fuck strategically. I felt her realising she’d underestimated me – and felt her feeling that I felt it. These shivers and shadows of infinite-regress mind-reading. The forced mutual recognition was still fresh enough to tickle us – but we knew that wouldn’t last: down the line we’d have to find a way of keeping private what was private. As it was, just then I read her wondering if there’d been any pleasure in it for me.

  Not much.

  She nodded. Men who were no good at sex. She knew all about it. Which rushed the ambiguity back so that my skin tingled and my face went hot and for a moment it was obvious we weren’t looking at each other – but we were rescued by the sound of a car pulling up. A moment later Lucy and Cloquet came in, big-eyed and pale, smelling of residual wulf and mudflats and diesel and cold air.

  ‘Everything okay?’ I asked.

  ‘Who knows,’ Lucy said. ‘We’ve done what we can.’

  She was a tall skinny reddish brunette with warm, sad brown eyes, broad cheekbones and a wide but indistinct mouth. All her features slightly dissolved into her freckles. Her hairdo was a triangular shoulder-length bob with bangs. She’d look good in any shade of green, though right now she was wearing rust-coloured corduroys and a black roll-neck sweater. The majority of men would rank us in descending order: Madeline, me, Lucy, but for an alert minority Lucy would have more sex-appeal than Maddy and me put together. Updike would have rhapsodised about her oily skin and long fingers and freckled boobs.

  ‘I never got the chance before to thank you,’ I said. ‘For looking after Zoë. For everything.’

  ‘She was no trouble,’ Lucy said. ‘But before we go any further could you tell me what the hell that boy is doing upstairs in my spare room?’

  In the febrile communication available to us when we’d arrived all I’d got through to her was PLEASE. EMERGENCY. PLEASE. Enough to secure Caleb a roof for the night, but very plainly with objections deferred. Now the deferral was over.

  ‘He’s a vampire,’ I said. ‘A very sick one.’

  ‘That much I know,’ Lucy said. From Cloquet, who’d heard what Walker had to tell up front in the van. ‘Clearly you’ve got some investment in him, but would you mind sharing it?’

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ Madeline said. ‘They’ve got her son. They’re going to kill him. Now she’s got one of theirs. Bargaining power.’ She looked at me. ‘Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Unfortunately, that’s exactly right.’

  It was a either a coincidence or a baroque touch by the dramatist on speed that immediately the words left my mouth Caleb started screaming.

  50

  ‘Fuck, it’s the sun,’ I said, jumping up. ‘Quick – a dark place.’

  ‘Cellar,’ Lucy said. ‘But it’s full of crap down—’

  ‘He won’t care. Where is it? Madeline, can you take her for a second?’

  We’d closed the curtains in Caleb’s room, but they weren’t thick enough to keep out full daylight. When Cloquet and I got up there he was on the floor with the quilt around him trying to crawl under the bed.

  ‘We’re taking you underground,’ I said, grabbing him. ‘You’ll be safe there, I promise.’

  He couldn’t answer. The quilt was leaking wisps of smoke.

  Five minutes later he was in Lucy’s cellar (which wasn’t full of crap but was a small, clean orderly place stacked with airtight plastic boxes) wrapped in the comforter, curled up in the foetal position. His eyes were closed, his mouth was wide open and his breathing was terrible.

  ‘He can’t stay here,’ Lucy said, when we were back in the kitchen.

  ‘I know. I’ll take him with me tonight. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Take him where?’ Madeline asked.

  I looked at Cloquet.

  ‘South coast,’ he said. The place Konstantinov and Walker were holed-up in. London was too risky for us now.

  ‘Okay,’ Lucy said. ‘He stays till the sun goes down. Fine. But we need to talk.’

  A surreal morning and afternoon. Lucy wanted answers. Superficially to questions of science – disease immunity, lifespan, genetics, drugs – underlyingly to the quivering metaphysical cry in the void: What the fuck does it all mean?

  I had nothing to give her beyond what Jake had given me. We existed. No more nor less mysteriously than leopards or seahorses or whales. Lucy sat and frowned and took it all in. She was ragged, aggrieved, disgusted, afraid – but hadn’t, I could tell, ever considered killing herself. She had an essence of stubborn entitlement. She’d thought the collapsed marriage (and apparent death-knell to child-bearing) would be her life’s defining event. Now there was this. Along with the other feelings was a profane thrill that all the information wasn’t, in fact, in, that for better or worse a new violent world was open to her. Grass still grew, birds still twittered, rain still fell. As long as you were prepared to stay in it life found room for you. Life was like that, helplessly promiscuous, a doorman who let everyone in.

  ‘Why silver?’ she wanted to know.

  I shrugged.

  ‘And if we abstain?’

  ‘Death. I managed two moons on animals. I wouldn’t recommend it. Jake told me he did four months and ended up ripping his own skin off.’

  Madeline opened a bottle of Absolut and poured shots. Since transformation my breasts had milk again, but Zoë had shown no sign of needing to suckle. Adult werewolves didn’t eat regular food for at least a week after the kill; intuition said it was the same for infants. Either way, one shot of vodka wasn’t going to do any harm. We drank. No toast, but a silent acknowledgement of the absurdity and horror and ordinariness of our condition. There was a profound temptation to laugh. Maddy’s diamante earrings glittered when she tossed back her shot.

  ‘It’s not supposed to be like this,’ I told them. ‘We’re not supposed to hang out together.’

  ‘Why not?’ Madeline asked.

  ‘I don’t mean it’s not allowed, I mean according to Jake we’re solitary, we avoid each other. He’d only ever met about half a dozen others, and he didn’t seem interested. He said it was competition for food and sex. They were all males, mind you. Maybe if there had been females it would’ve been different.’

  ‘Or he was just a loner,’ Lucy said.

  ‘He never mentioned anyone to me,’ Madeline said. ‘Most clients, they’ll mention a wife, or a girlfriend or a workmate or whatever, someone, at any rate. Not him. When those guys turned up at the hotel in Wales, I realised I’d never really imagined him knowing anyone.’

  ‘There’s something else. Jake said the number of females was tiny in comparison to the number of males. Something like one to a thousand. No one knew why. It can’t have been that fewer women got bitten. It can only have been that fewer women survived the bite. But look at us.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s London water for you,’ Maddy said, pouring refills. ‘Chin-chin.’

  Devaz woke up – lost. His face said he’d just had a terrifying dream. Then his face realised it wasn’t a dream. For a few moments he looked from one to the other of us, reconstructing his history. His psyche wobbled, flirted with collapse. Then the picture of his recent past set hard, beyond denial or escape. He
knew what had happened, what he was, what he’d done. He turned to me.

  ‘You fucking cunt. You did this to me. I’ll fucking kill you.’

  Cloquet, still armed, drew the Luger. ‘Silver,’ he said, quietly. ‘All silver rounds. The Russian insisted.’

  I knew he was lying. Devaz didn’t. His face was wet and his mouth was open, revealing the fruity gap between his upper front incisors. With a big moustache, I realised, he’d look like a low-rent Freddie Mercury impersonator.

  ‘None of us asked for this,’ Lucy said. ‘We’re all in the same boat.’

  ‘She did this to me on purpose.’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ I said. ‘Would you like to know what your colleagues did to me on purpose? You fucking dumb self-righteous prick.’

  Cloquet had the gun to Devaz’s head superfast. ‘Don’t think of it,’ he said. ‘Seriously. Don’t give it a thought.’

  ‘Everyone needs to calm down, please,’ Lucy said. ‘Right now.’

  Fortunately, at that moment, Trish arrived. She was a small, gymnastic, twenty-seven-year-old with short chopped red hair and large jade-green eyes. The too-big black combat pants and jacket made it obvious where she’d picked up her wardrobe. The men’s sneakers fit her like clown shoes. She couldn’t keep a straight face when Madeline introduced us.