Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  The bed was a third watchful presence with us. Is that good? Oh God, yes. Yes, it is. The memories of the two of us together were like children he’d been forced to disown. I got to my feet and moved towards him. He didn’t object. I straddled him in his chair and put my arms around him, drew him close. He let me. As an experiment on himself. To see if anything was left, viable. I held him tighter, willing him back. Tiny, faint neural impulses... resulting in nothing. Which meant that in a matter of seconds my holding him was ugly. I got off him. The loss of his body heat was a peculiar distinct bereavement. Downstairs I could hear Cloquet setting plates and cutlery for himself and Konstantinov. Someone uncorked a bottle. Zoë made a single melodious noise of surprise, then went quiet. I wondered if Walker would stay, once he was well enough to travel, and if he left, where he would go. Nowhere would be right for him. He’d have to keep moving. Never stay long enough for anyone – especially himself – to start asking the questions that mattered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. He looked at me, but as if I was an image on a screen, something broadcast to him from light-years away. Remarkable what they could do with technology, nowadays. It disgusted me, the brokenness between us, that there was nothing I could do. Or rather that there was something I could do, but daren’t. ‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated – at exactly the moment he reached for the bottle and his chair ticked, loudly, and the slight clash of the synchronicity snapped something and I turned and walked out of the room.

  In the front hall I found Konstantinov and Budarin speaking together in Russian.

  ‘Either way we’re going to need personnel and weapons,’ Konstantinov said to me, switching to English. ‘Alexi might be able to help.’

  ‘Either way’ referred to the intractable logistics. If Mia located the Disciples there were two possible scenarios. One was that we went in immediately, as a squad of humans. The other was that we waited till the night of the ritual – full moon, winter solstice, lunar eclipse – and went in as werewolves. If we went in as humans we could go in in daylight, which, obviously, would eliminate the problem of dealing with the vamps. On the other hand we’d be laughable opposition to any half-decent guard of familiars. Only Konstantinov and Walker had combat skills, and Walker was fragile. But if we waited till full moon (making the nauseous assumption that Konstantinov and I could wait, could bear waiting once we knew where they were) to go in at full lupine strength, we’d have to go in after moonrise (ergo after sundown), which would mean God only knew how many vampires to deal with. And the window would be small. Moonrise was 21.03. Eclipse was maximal at 23.14. Two hours to gamble with my son’s life. Madeline, I knew, had been picturing a re-run of the assault on Murdoch’s place in Berkshire, a free-for-all pushover fuck-and-feed fest. All of them had, with the exception of Lucy, who in any case had subtly made it known she didn’t consider herself committed to anything. Either way, as Konstantinov said, we were going to need help.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Get whoever you can.’

  ‘These are not good men, you understand?’ Budarin said. ‘These are not soldiers.’

  ‘I don’t care who they are or what they’ve done. If they’ll fight for us they’re hired.’ I thought of Delilah Snow, for the first time in what felt like years, and heard myself laughing and saying, Who the fuck am I to care?, though I didn’t, in fact, laugh or say that out loud.

  ‘Very well,’ Budarin said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  For the second time since Alaska I entered the hell of waiting.

  Nothing helped. There sat the cellphone. There yawned around it the whole universe for me to reach out into looking for some way to make what I wanted to happen happen. You get up, walk from one room to another, sit down. Eight seconds have passed. Nothing’s changed. You can’t believe you have the reservoir to cope with thousands more seconds, hours, days. Every moment you enact the koan of bearing the unbearable.

  On day five of this, Konstantinov said: You’re going to have to raise the incentive.

  I said: Not yet.

  Things went on in the background. New papers for Lorcan arrived from Kovatch. Lucy returned to London and handed in her notice, then went missing for a few days, then turned up back at the Lymington house, then went again. Trish came down on her new motorcycle (with word from Fergus that he was ‘professionally available’ when needed) but took off for Cornwall after only a day. Madeline went back to her flat in West London. Libido made all of us claustrophobic, but between her and me it was acute. We both knew if she stayed there was a good chance something would happen – which, while it might have thrilled Walker in his old life, would’ve been a misery to him in his new one. He kept to his room, though sometimes he walked by the Solent at night. I missed him so much it made me angry with him. Then angry with myself because I should never have started it in the first place. I thought of reneging and Turning him. Sure it would make him hate me, eventually, but at least I’d have him now. I don’t know what stopped me doing it. Possibly nothing more than the irrational conviction that in this brittle hiatus doing anything I didn’t have to would be dangerous, a provocation to the God who wasn’t there. Budarin kept the blood coming (no one knew from where and no one asked) and with it I kept Caleb weak but comfortable. He was allowed to talk with Mia Tourisheva just long enough to establish he was alive and unharmed. He stopped speaking to me when I went down to bring him the Camels (and eventually a TV/DVD, a stack of movies Cloquet picked up in town) until boredom drove him to start again. Konstantinov and Budarin were in and out. I met the guys they’d hired, ropey-looking men – three Russians, one Nigerian – with economic vocabularies and a physical self-containment that could have been instilled by an elite military training but intuition told me had been instilled by prison. I didn’t care.

  On day sixteen the BBC News ran a little lighthearted story on UK preparations for the full-moon winter solstice lunar eclipse. Bearded men and overweight women in robes and daisy-chains. Astronomers walked us through the math with graphics aimed at seven-year-olds.

  ‘You have to understand,’ Mia Tourisheva said to me on the phone. ‘I’m doing everything I can. These people don’t want—’

  Konstantinov snatched the phone: ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Tonight my chemist friend is bringing me a gallon of HS204. Do you know what that is? It won’t kill your child, but it will be excruciatingly painful for—’

  ‘God damn you, Mikhail, stop it. Stop it.’ I tried to get the phone back. Between us we dropped it. When I picked it up the line was dead. It rang immediately.

  ‘Please,’ Mia said. ‘Don’t. Don’t. I swear to you I’m doing everything I can. The Fifty Families are looking for them and they don’t know where they are.’ She sounded exhausted. The pleading in the normally calm voice was horrible to hear. I left Konstantinov and took the phone upstairs with me. Locked myself in one of the bathrooms. I was ready to reassure her, but by the time I opened my mouth she’d recovered her composure. ‘Do what you have to do,’ she said. ‘Just remember: I don’t die. I have for ever to find you, and after you, your children, their children. It’ll be a long time before I’m satisfied. Now, let me speak to my son.’

  ‘Get some fucking results,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll let you speak to your son. If he still has a tongue to speak with.’ Then I hung up.

  I slept with Zoë in her bassinet next to me, when I did sleep, when I wasn’t staring at the ceiling or pacing the downstairs rooms or (naturally: wulf doesn’t care) jerking-off. Ten days after her debut transformation my daughter had started taking milk from me again. I’d had nothing since drying-up in prison, but when she’d woken in the middle of the tenth night there it was, just as I’d known it would be in the dream I’d been having moments before. It was a unique grief, sitting with her at my breast, feeling the life and love there could have been. She stared at me with dispassionate comprehension, as if she knew my love was forced away from her but there was nothing she could do. Her primary hardwired connection was to her brother. Nothin
g could come from her to me while he was withheld. She wasn’t punishing me. It was impersonal, structural, necessary. If I failed – if he died but she and I survived – then something might be possible between us, if I could stand it. But not while he was alive, not while he was withheld. Until he was established one way or another – rescued living or discovered dead – her soul was on pause. I told myself, obviously, that none of this was coming from her, that all of it was my own projection. My thinking self understood this. It didn’t make any difference. Every time our eyes met, there it all was. It ought to have stopped me letting our eyes meet. Instead I couldn’t stop. The truth was addictive.

  Five days before the winter solstice I woke around four in the morning and knew something wasn’t right. The hunger was wide awake, had been waiting for me, jabbering, fidgeting, occasionally lashing out (it doesn’t recognise sleep, but eventually exhaustion outmatches it and your body crashes), but through my blood’s racket the house let me in on a new silence it was holding somewhere. My watch said 4.17 a.m.

  Konstantinov’s shift.

  Oh.

  I looked into the bassinet. Zoë was awake, but peaceful. I got out of bed, pulled on jeans, sneakers, a shirt, and without protest from her slipped her into the carrier around me. There was a Springfield and clip under my pillow. I took it.

  Walker’s door was shut but I knew he wasn’t asleep. I could smell scotch, unwashed clothes, his body’s misery. Cloquet’s door, wide open, revealed him asleep, fully clothed on his front, one arm hanging over the side of the bed, its immediate radius littered with cigarettes, crumpled bills, change, keys. His curtains were half-drawn, showed the plump belly of the moon – waxing gibbous – the clock that didn’t tick down but instead fattened-up to Lorcan’s death and the end of everything I knew.

  ‘Whatever you’re doing, Mikhail, please, stop. Please.’

  I was at the head of the basement stairs. Konstantinov was standing over Caleb’s bed with his back to me. He had my cellphone in one hand. On the floor next to him was an unmarked opaque plastic bottle with its cap still on. I couldn’t see Caleb’s face, but I could tell from the sound of him he’d been gagged. His wrists and ankles were cuffed to the bed – unnecessarily, since we didn’t keep him strong enough to get to his feet.

  ‘Mikhail, just wait, please. It’s still okay. You still haven’t done anything.’

  I came down the stairs, the Springfield stuck down the back of my jeans.

  ‘Come on, look at me.’

  ‘It’s the only way,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way.’

  ‘Seriously, Mikhail, come on. Look at me.’

  He turned. His face was pale and big-pored. His beard had grown. The rims of his eyes were rhubarb-pink. He looked mad-monkish, on the brink of leaving himself behind.

  ‘If you do this,’ I said, ‘you won’t be the same person. You won’t be the same person for Natasha. You have to think of Natasha watching you do this, because she’ll watch it in her mind just as clearly as if she was standing here next to you.’

  Caleb was watching me, through his sickness and fear. I was thinking: if you ever have the chance to intercede for me, please don’t forget this.

  I moved closer to Konstantinov. ‘This is just desperation,’ I said. ‘This is just the need to do something. I understand. I feel it too. But you know deep down it won’t make any difference, except to change you into someone else. Right now you’re still the person Natasha knows. Don’t turn yourself into someone who’ll be a stranger to her.’

  He looked down at Caleb. Not with compassion or enmity. With nothing. With the human face’s version of the vast mathematical silence.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Leave it. It’s passed. You don’t ever have to go through this again.’

  I like to think that was it. I like to think I’d talked him down, that whatever had happened next he wouldn’t have poured sulphuric acid on a young boy’s face so that the young boy’s mother could hear the screams. I like to think that, but there’s no way I’ll ever know, because what happened next was that the phone in his hand rang.

  It was Mia.

  She’d found the Disciples.

  PART FOUR

  LACUNA

  ‘Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.’

  Matthew 7:15

  54

  Konstantinov was checking the weapons when I gave him the news: ‘Vampires are walking in daylight.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just spoke to Mia. First it was only Remshi. Now there are at least a dozen.’

  ‘It’s a trap. Nothing changes. We go tomorrow as planned.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a trap.’

  ‘Nothing changes.’

  I was holding a half-cup of cold coffee. I threw it at the wall behind his head. It smashed, with a surprisingly loud noise. He put the AK-47 down on the couch and looked at me. Not much shook him. This hadn’t either, but it had registered, faintly, on the outside of his obsession.

  ‘Fuck you,’ I said, as a hunger cramp gripped my guts. ‘I know nothing changes. But I’m sick of this tragic Russian shit. Stop going on as if you’re the only one who’s got something to lose.’

  It was just after ten at night. We were in the large lounge of a two-storey villa three miles from the village of Falasarna on the island of Crete. Travertine tiles, limewashed walls, neutral contemporary furniture, odours of sandalwood and the sea. French doors opened onto a verandah with steps leading down to a pool area and olive grove. Our nearest neighbour was half a kilometre away, down a steep gravel road that hairpinned the hillside with barely room for two cars to pass. Cloquet had found the house by accident, attempting to book rooms for twelve people in a hotel in Chania. The manager had lowered his voice and asked if he wouldn’t rather take a house. His cousin’s. Beach ten-minute walk. Off-season rates.

  Konstantinov stared at me. The stare said, without malice: I’ve got more to lose because I won’t survive if mine’s dead. You will if yours is. He was right. I already knew Lorcan’s death wouldn’t kill me. If the price I had to pay for having a future with my daughter was accepting the blame for her brother’s death then so be it. We’d have a damaged love with my shame at its core, but it would still be love. That, of course, was partly why I’d thrown the coffee cup. That and the cramps, the sweats, the wolf’s thorned antics under my skin.

  ‘Tell me about the daylight vampires,’ he said.

  Sixty hours ago we’d got the call from Mia. The Disciples were on Crete, in the hills east of Ano Sfinari, in a former monastery now ostensibly being turned into a luxury hotel but in fact purchased and adapted by the believers to welcome Remshi back to the waking world. And Remshi, apparently, was back. By the time Mia joined up he’d been ‘among them’ (having appeared on cue with three priests and Jacqueline at midnight on December 12th) for several days, a handsome charismatic vampire who claimed he was ‘older than the first utterance of human speech’, who’d performed numerous extraordinary feats and produced one show-stopper: film of himself walking the grounds with a couple of familiars in broad daylight. In broad daylight. As his strength increased, he promised, he’d be able to give this gift to all of them, in return for loyalty to him and his queen-to-be, none other than our own Madame Jacqueline Delon. So is it him? I’d asked Mia. She’d said: Parlour tricks and bad poetry. But something in her voice conceded it wasn’t so clear-cut. I pressed her. There’s something here, it’s true, she said. Very old. I don’t know. This is irrelevant. Don’t waste time. Let me speak to my son.

  Finding and joining the faithful hadn’t been easy for her. The climate of paranoia was dense. Six months ago there had been a raid on a Helios Project lab in Beijing, and though the Disciples had denied any involvement the Fifty Families (having decided enough was enough) were using it as a pretext for prosecution. A judgement had been passed. Vampire death-squads had been dispatched, but by then Jacqueline and her posse were off-ra
dar. A few cult members were found and beheaded in Istanbul, but the leadership and its priestly cabal remained hidden. As they would have remained hidden to Mia, had her brother not been a member. They’d been made vampires together (she wouldn’t tell when) by the same immortal. It’s not telepathy, she said. But if I decide to find him sooner or later I will. It goes both ways. That’s all. Don’t ask me any more. If I asked any more I’d be likely to ask if she could be sure her brother believed her motives for joining were genuine; and whatever she said we’d both know it didn’t make any difference, because this was the only plan we had.

  And so had followed the phone calls, the regroup, the flight, the scramble to get weapons organised. The weapons, of course, had been delayed. We’d lost another forty-eight hours. Konstantinov was ready to go in, suicidally, unarmed. When the boat had at last arrived earlier this evening I’d had to stop him from attacking the people on it. Now (again of course, of course) we had no choice: tomorrow night was the full moon. Full moon, winter solstice, lunar eclipse. We’d run, with delirious, yielding inevitability, out of time.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Trish said, coming in from the verandah with Lucy just behind her. They were both in sweaters and jeans. In December it was cool here. (I hadn’t expected Lucy to be part of this. She’d let me know as much, over the weeks. And yet when it had come to it, Trish had got off the phone with her, turned to me and said: Luce is in. For months now I’ve been going back to bits of my old life like a bloody dog to its vomit, Lucy had told me, in the departures lounge at Heathrow. Last Wednesday I went to my reading group supper. Bloody Carol Shields who thinks you can make setting the table a religious act. And while they’re all prattling on about it I’m sitting there thinking about... Well. You know. Anyway something went. The last bit of denial, I suppose. There’s no old life for me now.)