Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  ‘There’s been a development,’ I said. ‘Vampires are walking in daylight.’

  We’d judged going in with the sun up, as humans, the lesser of two evils. With Budarin’s four guys, Konstantinov, me, Trish, Lucy, Cloquet and Fergus (whom I’d only met for the first time two days ago: a big Irishman with a drink-darkened face and a physique like Baloo the bear) we had an armed force of ten. Walker was here too but had been sick on the flight, in and out of fever ever since. He’d refused to see a doctor. He’d refused to see anyone, except Konstantinov, and for the last twenty-four hours had been in his room in bed. He wasn’t likely to be fit for action. If Mia’s intelligence was sound there were seventy-nine vampires with a standing guard of twenty human familiars. Ten humans (assuming Walker’s absence) against twenty humans was better than ten against seventy-nine vampires, even if four of us were in all our transformed glory. But now, if Mia’s story of daylight vampires was true, the odds had worsened.

  ‘How is that possible?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Christ knows,’ I said. ‘Mia said three times now a group of four vampires have been selected from the congregation to “receive the gift”. Remshi takes them to his room. The following night there’s filmed footage of these four walking around the place in sunlight. After the first round of scepticism they had themselves filmed next to TVs showing live news to verify the date and time. Tough to fake. These are CNN and BBC news anchors. Any way you slice it we have to figure on a dozen wide-awake vamps in the place tomorrow when we go in.’

  ‘Should be interesting,’ Trish said.

  Lucy sat down at the table where the guns were piled up. ‘Don’t we need... You know, wooden stakes or something? Garlic?’

  I went out onto the verandah and phoned Madeline.

  ‘She’s absolutely fine,’ was the greeting. ‘Stop worrying.’

  The moon was up, low over the sea. Full tomorrow. Wulf was big and angular and impatient under my skin. I thought of those cartoons where someone swallows something and becomes the shape of the thing they’ve swallowed. There was a lovely smell of clean concrete and the pool’s chlorine and something like sage or rosemary in the shrubs nearby. All distinct beguiling counterpoints to the hunger’s bass throb.

  ‘I want you to know something: I trust you.’

  ‘Yeah yeah yeah. Here, listen to this.’ She moved the phone. Rustling, then my daughter’s breathing. Steady. Strong. A thousand miles away. ‘She’s fallen asleep watching a DVD with me.’

  ‘What are you watching?’

  ‘Don’t laugh. The Little Mermaid.’

  ‘You’re a good person.’

  ‘What, apart from killing and eating people?’

  ‘Apart from that, yes.’

  ‘What’s going on there, anyway?’

  I filled her in. I couldn’t ask her what I wanted to ask: Have you sorted out prey? Is it safe? Will my daughter be safe? Explicitness died in my throat. The little fey truthful indifferent bit of myself inside said let it go, there’s nothing you can do now and you’ll most likely be dead tomorrow anyway. Dead and gone to join the vast mathematical silence.

  ‘About the money,’ I said. ‘If I don’t come back—’

  ‘La la la la—’

  ‘Listen, seriously. I’ve spoken to my lawyer. He’s got the codicil. You’ll be okay.’

  ‘You’ve told me all this.’

  ‘I know, I know. Let me listen to her again.’

  ‘Hang on, I’m losing you...’

  ‘Oh wait, I’ll move. There’s a dead signal spot... Is that better? Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s better. Here you go. Don’t wake her up!’

  I listened, without making a sound. Without making a sound on the outside. Inside I couldn’t shut up. I’m sorry, angel. I made a mess of everything. I’m so sorry. This girl I’ve left you with, she’s a little crazy, but her heart’s in the right place. If I don’t see you again, I think she’ll take good care of you. It’s what my instinct tells me. We don’t have much going for us, but we’ve got good instincts. I love you. I love you. I love you.

  ‘Okay?’ Madeline asked, in a voice that said she’d heard as clearly as if I’d spoken aloud.

  ‘Yes. Thank you. Thank you for doing this incredible thing.’

  ‘Look, don’t get maudlin. You’ll be home with your boy tomorrow then we can crack open a bottle of Bolly. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘How’s Fergus the Lergus?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Lergus. Like the Lergie. How’s he behaving himself?’

  Fergus had in fact just appeared on the verandah, one hand holding his phone to his ear, the other gripping a scotch and cigarette. ‘To make money work for you you’ve got to have contempt for it,’ he’d told me, apropos of nothing, about a minute after we’d been introduced. ‘You’ve got to have contempt for the stupid obedience of money. The problem is, to develop the contempt, you need to acquire quite a lot of money. When you’re ready to discuss your fortune, how to treat it with the necessary contempt, you let me know.’

  ‘Colourful,’ I said to Madeline. ‘Weirdly, there’s something about him that inspires confidence.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s greed. You know that as long as what you’re asking him to do will max his profit you can count on him to do it. What about Walker?’

  ‘Still sick. He won’t see me.’

  ‘You do know he’s in love with you, don’t you?’

  Pause. Well? Didn’t I?

  ‘Are you in love with him?’ Madeline asked.

  ‘What, we’re going to have this conversation now?’

  Our connection flickered shadowily over the line. It came to me that she knew what had happened to him while we’d been held prisoner. Something in her tone. Which brought again, whether I wanted it or not, the image, Walker bound and bent double, Tunner jamming the bloody nightstick deep, Murdoch observing glassily while conducting a conversation on his phone.

  ‘You could do a lot worse,’ Madeline said.

  There’s something better than killing the one you love.

  ‘I’m just saying,’ Madeline said, ‘there aren’t that many blokes worth having. But he’s one of them. I’m losing you again, babes.’

  ‘I should get back anyway,’ I said, as the Hunger sent a shuddering wave through my legs and I staggered. ‘I feel like shit.’ Madeline, courtesy of the same arbitrariness that ruled the other monthly curse, suffered nothing until a couple of hours before moonrise on transformation day. It was the other reason she’d been the obvious choice to babysit. The primary reason being that Lucy didn’t want the responsibility again. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ I said, moving into the darkness of the little olive grove beyond the pool’s paving, where for some reason the signal was strong. ‘Assuming I’m still alive, obviously.’ I saw Konstantinov come out of Walker’s room and leave the door open behind him. He was frowning.

  ‘Walker?’ he called.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Madeline said.

  ‘Walker?’ Konstantinov called a second time. I couldn’t see him now but I could hear doors opening and closing. Fergus, live to the shift in the air’s character, hung up his call and turned back to the house.

  ‘You still there?’ Madeline asked.

  ‘Something’s happened.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think Walker’s gone.’

  ‘Gone? What do you mean?’

  ‘Hang on a second.’

  Konstantinov came out onto the verandah.

  ‘Listen,’ Madeline said. ‘I wasn—’

  You always know a split second before. At all the big moments it’s as if, for the tiniest fragment of neural time, you realise your whole life’s been leading up to this.

  A figure didn’t spring or leap but seemed to walk very rapidly out of the darkness to my left. I had time. I had mute leisure to notice he was dressed like a cat burglar in close-fitting black, balaclava’d and gloved, leisure to recognise his packed scent, l
eisure to realise I was no longer visible from the verandah and to wonder where Walker could’ve gone and what Madeline had been about to say – before the man in black smashed his fist into my face.

  I felt my jaw break and my knees flood. My arms seemed to spend a long time softly churning nothing. Something jabbed me, hard, in my left thigh. I was aware of trying to hold onto the phone as the ground swung up. I tasted cool dust and heard the blood bang once in my head. Then what felt like a paving stone hit the back of my skull, and all my lights went out.

  55

  My first feeling, on opening my eyes, was relief: the hunger told me I hadn’t slept through transformation. It told me via wracking spasms and futile nausea, but still, it told me. Lorcan was alive, though there couldn’t (the hunger also told me) be more than three or four hours till moonrise.

  That was the end of the good news.

  I was lying on my back in a bolted-down cage in what I knew within seconds – the ribbed flanks and steel-flavoured cold – was a cargo trailer. My left ankle and left wrist were cuffed to one of the bars, my right mysteriously at liberty. Two brilliant storm lamps hung from hooks outside the cage. I could taste dried sweat on my lips.

  ‘Happy solstice,’ Murdoch said.

  I struggled up, first onto my side, then with the aid of the bars into a sitting position. You give thanks for small things. I gave thanks that I was wearing jeans, not a skirt. People start trying to kill you, you stop wearing skirts. He moved into the storm lamps’ bleaching light and there was the height and the poise and the white crew-cut. He was still in the cat burglar get-up, minus the balaclava and gloves. He’d lost a little weight, but retained the facial expression of a calmly deranged hawk.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked. My throat was sore. Dehydration was a dog doing the same shrill bark repeatedly in my head. Wulf, at the end of its patience, was trying to break the rules in my bones. But they were the moon’s rules, and by them my bones were condemned to hold their form. Since it was its departmental job a bit of my brain was racing through possibility flowcharts, Jake’s despised strings of ifs and thens, in what the rest of me knew was a pointless exercise. There was no way out. There was no way out because there was nothing Murdoch wanted. Or rather whatever it was he wanted necessarily entailed me having no way out. In spite of which, and aside from the redundant calculations, animal motherhood launched a giant dumb imperative: plead with him. Offer him money. Offer him anything.

  ‘Reinstatement,’ he said.

  Please, please, please. Motherhood insisted there was some elusive tone that would do it, if only I could discover it. Idiocy at the cellular level. I pushed myself, quivering, to my feet. New sweat needled. Wulf breathed hot in my palms and breasts and scalp.

  ‘Do you remember our conversation about the relationship between sex and chaos?’ Murdoch asked.

  Mentally I was going through the contents of my pockets. Nothing in the jeans, some euros, a tissue, a gum wrapper, fluff. The jacket? It was one I hadn’t worn much and didn’t particularly like, black canvas, a bit big across the shoulders. In fact it had only survived to Crete by never having been unpacked from the tote bag I’d been using since I left New York what felt like a decade ago. It had only made it out of the bag now because the island had turned out cold and it was the one heavy thing I’d brought. In any case I didn’t remember its pockets ever holding a penknife or a corkscrew or a hatpin or a screwdriver or anything that could conceivably serve as a weapon. I’d taken to carrying the Springfield in a shoulder holster, and had been packing it when he’d jumped me, but it had been removed, naturally, along with keys, watch, phone.

  ‘I’m sure you do remember it,’ Murdoch continued. ‘I said that sex was a rogue force. Let into that arena it would’ve meant distraction, conflict, insubordination. In a facility like that it’s not just an unaffordable luxury, it’s a potentially lethal virus.’

  The moon was close. Astronomy was counting down via spheres and shadows to my son’s murder. All that time – vast bergs of it – since he was snatched, and now here we were down to the last melting lump, barely big enough to stand on. The death of a loved one brutally vivifies everything, Jake had written; here was my sickening preview of its truth, the violent still-hereness the world would inflict through its cars and vending machines and weather and TV ads, through my own stubborn body that would need its nails clipped and its bladder emptied and its itches scratched. The world betrayed the dead by continuing without them in it, and you, full of shamefully reliable life, collaborated.

  ‘But we’re not at that facility any more,’ Murdoch said. The sound of his own voice fascinated him because no matter what he said it bounced around in the vast mathematical silence. He didn’t smile or leer, cinematically. Just turned and walked into the darkness beyond the storm lamps’ glow. From the slight bounce as he moved I could tell the trailer was still on its truck. Where? How far from the Disciples? Did he even know they were here? He had to. Otherwise too much of a coincidence. But if he was here, who else was? Reinstatement. I understood. He’d been demoted or kicked out. We’d escaped on his watch. Our recapture was his only way back in. Herr Direktor, I present, for your consideration, Subject A, Talulla Demetriou, escaped werewolf, nymphomaniac, absent mother—

  A cramp jack-knifed me, yanked my cuffed ankle and wrist. Someone had been killed in here before. Not recently, but there was no fooling the burgeoning bitch nose. The moon tugged at my blood. Closer than I’d thought. Maybe two hours. It was impossible to see past the wall of artificial light but a current of air with a flavour of dry grass and pine resin said the trailer door was still open. Since it couldn’t possibly make matters worse, I screamed for help as loudly as I could.

  Murdoch, hopping back in, didn’t bother saying don’t bother screaming we’re miles from anywhere. It was more satisfying to him to let his silence make it obvious.

  He wasn’t alone. At his side was a stale-looking, heavily built guy in his mid-forties in a black leather jacket, baggy khaki combats and a string vest. A St Christopher winked in his chest hair. He was full-lipped, in need of a shave, with big, wet, heavy-lidded eyes the colour of prunes. He didn’t say anything. Just looked at me with a sort of hopelessness that emptied me of everything except the certainty of what was going to happen. I’d wondered why I’d been left with the use of two limbs. Now I knew. Same reason they’d given Caleb the blood rations before sending him into his cage: maximal spectacle. Murdoch didn’t want me powerless, he wanted me overpowered, given just enough will to really feel it not being enough.

  I thought, while String Vest took off his jacket and unzipped his pants, of all the times I’d heard or read about someone getting raped. I decided straight away I wasn’t going to struggle. Some rapists liked that. I decided I was going to fight the sonofabitch with everything I had. Some rapists liked that. I fought him at first, but in the end I couldn’t stop him. A lot of rapists seemed to like that. There was no kind of rape there wasn’t a rapist for. I had never been raped. Faced with it I felt the ghostly weight of all the women who had been, ranks upon ranks reaching back to the first sad loping female hominids. Incalculable numbers, a wretched sorority only truly visible when you found yourself about to join it. At the same time here again was the terrible aloneness I’d felt when my waters broke. However many hundreds of millions had gone through the experience, when it happened it was only your own version that mattered.

  ‘Here we are then,’ Murdoch said, quietly, unlocking the cage door.

  I stared at him. ‘I’m going to kill you,’ I said, also quietly. ‘You’re going to turn me over to the organisation and I’m going to get out, just like I did before, and I’m—’

  ‘I find I have to do these things,’ he said. Which forced a weird pause between the three of us. ‘There’s a momentum,’ he said. ‘When I was a child I remember learning that if you gave an object in space just a little shove it would go on for ever. Assuming it didn’t hit anything. It would just keep going, f
or ever.’

  String Vest breathed audibly through moist nostrils. I could smell him. The woman in me could smell cigarette smoke and beer and sweat, food fried in old fat. The wolf could smell his thrilled blood and riotous pheromones, stale piss, spiced meat breath and the first ooze of semen. He wanted this raw interim to be over. It was dangerous for him, my personhood like a shimmying or vacillating flame, one moment being the reason he couldn’t, the next moment being the reason he couldn’t not. I said to him: ‘Wait. You don’t have to do this. You know you don’t have to do this.’ But I knew it was pointless. The raw interim was over. It was over from the first step he took towards me. Now anything I said or did would be provocation. Now the bare fact of me was provocation. That’s the nature of rape. His face had thickened slightly, his limbs filled. This was what he’d been waiting for: the illusion of necessity, submission to the force of the dimming drug.

  This man is going to rape you.

  All the documentaries and articles and silhouetted testimonies. All the little intuitions I’d had about certain women. She has been. She has been. She has been. All this flared and billowed like a suffocating cloud around me and I realised that behind all of them was an actual event, an actual man closing actual distance between himself and an actual woman and shoving himself onto her, into her, through her, breaking the physical boundary and dirtily ransacking the soul’s house of priceless memories. Behind all those stories were the candid odours and needling palms and legs sick with adrenaline and the universe’s indifferent obedience to physics: physics said if you couldn’t fight and your thighs were open and the man was determined to put his cock inside you then that’s what would happen. Your body would accommodate it because your body was under the same pointless administration as stars and molecules. I’d seen it in my victims, of course, the shocked realisation that a claw applied with the right pressure would open the soft meat of a midriff and there was nothing the universe could do about it. Right, wrong, good, evil, cruelty, compassion... the universe just shrugged: I don’t know this stuff. I just know physics. I’d seen it in my victims. Let’s not forget that. Millions of women could have asked their rapists, legitimately: How can you do this? Millions of women who genuinely didn’t know. Not me. I knew how he could do it. He could do it because it was good for him if it was bad for me. He could do it because it was only the best for him if it was the worst for me. I knew the equation. The equation had integrity. The equation didn’t change. Only my place in it.