by Glen Duncan
Six hours later, Konstantinov having been stitched and medicated by a twenty-two-year-old student, who despite white coat and stethoscope looked like he should have been practising with his band in a garage, we boarded Aegean Airlines flight 341 from Chania to Heathrow, London, England, where Madeline – and my daughter – would be waiting for us.
66
Konstantinov spent forty-eight hours in bed, attended by Budarin, then went missing. Not a word to anyone. No note, no message, no answering his phone when we called.
‘It’s Natasha,’ Walker said. ‘He must have heard from her.’
It was around ten in the evening on the third day since Crete; Christmas Eve. We were in the house Madeline had taken for us in the Dart Valley in Devon, a big, detached dampish place half a mile from Dartmouth, on a hill of gorse and feathery pine overlooking (in glimpses through the trees) the river. It smelled of old beds and mould and the ghosts of a thousand meals. We were lucky to get it: a Christmas booking had fallen through at the last minute. Madeline, with Zoë in a new electric-pink carrier, had met us at the airport with rental cars ready and we’d driven south as the first snow was starting to fall. By midnight there was ten inches on the ground, and by morning a little imagination could make you feel snowed-in. Happily snowed-in. With your children. With your lover. With your pack.
‘Either that,’ Walker said, ‘or he’s gone off somewhere to kill himself.’
We were in the big sitting room with a garrulous log fire going. (In one of the diaries it said: Listen carefully to fire’s soft babble, its Tourette’s cracks and sparks. Listen carefully: Fire speaks in tongues. Now I had our children with me Jake’s absence was renewed, the irreparable brokenness, the unredressable loss. I had images: the twins, aged five or six, listening, rapt, to some preposterous story he made up, or him presenting them with evidence of nefarious activity and saying: And what, exactly, would you say this was? Or the two of them making fun of him, riskily, just out of range of a swipe, or the two of them holding his hands walking down a street, feeling utterly secure and oblivious to any danger because there he was and there was the heat and strength of him in his hands and his existence was their freedom to delight in the world, the sunlight, the city, his stories, the moon...) The owners had decked the place out for Christmas, with a big fairy-lit tree and tinsel on the mantelpiece and holly wreaths on the doors. The rooms winked and glimmered and reminded me of being a kid and hurt my heart because I hadn’t seen my dad for what felt like years, though it was only six months, and he had absolutely no clue what I’d become. Risk or no risk, in the New Year I was going home and introducing him to his grandchildren. As human beings only, for now. One shock at a time. It would first amaze him, then reopen the wound of my mother’s death, then begin to delight him, then fill him up with love like brandy saturating a cake. He’d want to see them all the time. It was all going to get more complicated.
‘He shouldn’t be out of bed,’ I said, ‘let alone wandering around in the snow.’
‘Yeah, well, this is Mike. This is the Russian thing.’
Zoë and Lorcan were asleep side by side in a new (bigger) bassinet close by me. (It was an excusable madness that I literally wouldn’t let either of them out of my sight. Temporarily excusable. Soon, if I didn’t break the habit, it would turn toxic. Watching them sleep close to each other was an endlessly renewable joy. I’d stand there, transfixed, unutterably happy, happy in my fingernails and teeth and stomach and palms and breasts, then move away to close the curtains or put another log on the fire and when I came back there the same joy was all over again, completely refreshed and brand new and self-incredulous. The beauty of a meaningless universe is that you don’t get what you deserve.) Fergus was already back in London, treating his money with profitable contempt for its stupidity. Lucy and Trish were in the kitchen midway through a second bottle of Bordeaux, Trish trying to teach Lucy not just how to smoke, but how to roll her own cigarettes, now that we’d convinced her, Lucy, that unless they were cigarettes containing silver they’d do her no damage. (If smoking were completely harmless, Jake wrote, everyone would smoke.) Madeline was in the upstairs bathroom making languorous and epic preparation: Cloquet didn’t know it yet but tonight he was going to get comprehensively laid. Dangerous, everyone agreed, but we were reckless and giddy after what we’d been through, and Madeline, I knew, felt sorry for him. Besides, she said, I’ve never done it with a Frenchman. She wouldn’t take money. Don’t be daft. I probably need it more than he does. It’s all right for you, with the big lovey-dovey. In case you forgot, I was babysitting your sprog when I should’ve been you-know-what. Yes, she was. She’d made it all possible – and given me the gift of Walker, too, no strings attached. Do you have any idea what a good person you are? I’d asked her. It had been an odd moment. We were alone in her room, her sitting at the dressing table, me standing by the window with a cup of black coffee, in that peculiar afternoon light you only get from snow outside. I hadn’t meant it to come out so seriously, but I’d been thinking of Jake writing he wished he’d kissed her more, and simultaneously got an intimation of a wretched period in her life when she was seventeen or eighteen, new to London, scared, lost. She’d worn a big leather jacket because it felt like a friend she had with her all the time. She’d found herself in wrong situations. Then met people. Then started the Life. And until the Curse she’d lived in perpetual loneliness and boredom and fear. I hadn’t meant it to come out so seriously, but Pharaoh’s heart, unhardened now, was erratic in its wellings-up. She was just about to dismiss it – Yeah, yeah, fuck off – but found she couldn’t, because we were looking at each other and she knew I meant it, and no one had ever said that to her and meant it, and suddenly the two of us were nearly in tears, and had to try to laugh it off, but the laughter made it worse, and then we both did shed some tears, laughing, and knowing there was nothing to do but just let this moment come into being and pass away. Somewhere in the middle of it she said: It’s okay, you know, I don’t do it with anyone now unless I want to. Then she laughed again and said: It’s just that I want to all the bloody time. Can’t lose, really.
I could hear Cloquet now, moving about in his room above us, humming Jacques Brel’s ‘Amsterdam’, thinking he was having an early night. It gave me pleasure to think of the erotic wealth that was coming to his poor neglected body. And because every small good feeling connected to the big one, I got up to look at the twins again.
Walker came to me and put his arms around me from behind. We hadn’t had sex yet, but it was close. He was scared he wouldn’t be able to, in spite of manifest erections when we kissed and touched each other, and he knew it would get mentally tougher the longer he waited. Like standing at the edge of a diving board, he’d said to me last night, when we’d been fooling around, and he’d got hard, then panicked and retreated, and a silence had expanded between us.
For a while we stood without speaking, pressed against by all the newness. We were afraid, both of us, that now there was nothing to stop us being together we wouldn’t want to. We both knew I was attracted to people who were bigger than me – smarter, deeper, less afraid; Jake, most recently and most obviously, but even before him, all the way back to the Very Bad Dirty Filthy Little Girl at college, that was the pattern. Even Richard had been the type, although in his case I’d mistaken vanity and articulate cynicism for depth. But any way you looked at Walker and me, I’d gone ahead, I was waiting for him to catch up.
‘How did you do this alone all those months?’ he asked.
Madeline, of course, was flamily connected to him, though she did her best to keep out. It wasn’t her fault. Turning someone created an unreliable psychic umbilical. She was in him, erratically, whether she wanted it or not. It was, I thought, the real reason she’d decided to give Cloquet the loving-up of his life, to give me as much room as possible with Walker. How Jake had underrated that woman!
‘I never really thought I was alone. I always thought... I mean there was the o
ne who Turned me, for a start.’
‘And then Jake, eventually.’
‘Yes.’
And so it had begun: he’d have to compare himself, have to know who was better. In spite of everything it irritated me. It irritated me because it demonstrated the inevitability of masculine competitiveness and it irritated me because Jake was better and he was dead and I didn’t even have his ghost to talk to.
But Jake had had two hundred years to perfect himself. Walker was only four days old.
‘Do you feel him, at all?’ Walker asked, moving away from me. A glass of Laphroaig stood on the mantel. He picked it up, sipped, tasted, swallowed. ‘I mean the dead. That guy we... ’
That guy we ate. The victim we’d shared. His debut meal. He was feeling the first flickers of being inhabited in that way. Tank to the ethereal fish. You think you’ve felt it all. Then this. (Which thought produced something like déjà vu, for a second or two – then it was gone. The hairs on my skin had a little electrical moment.)
‘Not Jake, no,’ I said. ‘Not my mother, either. But the kills, yes.’
He looked down into his glass. ‘It makes us an afterlife,’ he said.
I knew what was bothering him. If the dead we ate went into us then the dead we didn’t eat had to go somewhere else. If there was a Somewhere Else then anything was possible: God, a scheme of things, morality, consequences. In which case...
‘I don’t think it’s like that,’ I said. ‘I think it’s that their lives don’t just flash before their eyes, they flash before ours, too. They pass away into nothing, but we’re left with the flash, like a snapshot, like an incredibly detailed echo that’ll keep sounding in us as long as we live. It’s not really them. It’s what they were. I don’t know.’
‘The ultimate download.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘So you don’t think there’s anything?’
I remembered the certainty I’d felt looking past Delilah Snow’s death into the void that would have swallowed her. I remembered the certainty of nothingness. Last night, in the small hours, I’d begun a journal. We’re alone in the darkness, I’d written, so we hold hands and tell stories of good and evil to comfort each other. It works, for a while, for a life, for a civilisation, perhaps for as long as the species survives. But have no illusions: it makes no difference to the darkness. The darkness swallows us all – good and evil alike – with monolithic disinterest.
An odd beginning, considering I was happy, but I’d put the pen down with a feeling of contentment.
‘Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all,’ I said. ‘There isn’t any.’
Not a conversational aphrodisiac. We took the twins’ bassinet and went to join Lucy and Trish in the kitchen. It was a big square room with an Aga and spotlights with a lilac tint and gold tinsel on the dresser. Trish and Lucy were at the dining table, an oak slab that looked as if it had been archaeologically unearthed from the days of Roman Britain. The radio, volume low, was playing Christmas carols, currently ‘Gloria in Excelsis’. I poured myself a large Hendricks. Zoë and Lorcan wouldn’t need milk (they both drank water now and then) for days. Wulf kept telling me I was being an idiot about these things, that nothing that didn’t harm me could possibly harm them, but enough of my human remained to keep the fires of paranoia going. Not until they’re weaned. Another couple of months, according to the internet, although obviously Google was assuming babies who didn’t change into monsters once a month and devour live flesh and blood.
‘I still can’t get over how easy it was,’ Trish said. ‘I don’t know why we didn’t make that the plan from the start. They were a bunch of wusses.’ She was, as ever in human form, full of compact energy. The green eyes were her face’s big treasure, set off punkily by the artfully chopped deep-red hair. She could drink anyone, it had been conceded manfully by Fergus, under the feckin table.
‘Yes, but without Mystery Marco we’d have been in trouble,’ Lucy said.
We’d gone over it countless times. Whoever he was, ‘Marco’ had power over the vampires. The armed boochies had dropped their weapons on cue. ‘Remshi’ – beyond doubt a fraud – had taken his slap like a gimp. Jacqueline had retreated. Even Mia had been compelled to earth apparently at his will.
‘Had to be an elder,’ Walker said. ‘There’s no other explanation.’
‘Unless he was the real thing,’ Lucy said, as one of us always said, sooner or later, every time we talked about it. The possibility excited us. (With the exception of Walker.) There’s something here, it’s true, Mia had reported. Very old. I don’t know. Of course she would have felt it, and since Jacqueline’s male model was being billed as its source, that’s where Mia would assume it was coming from. But ‘Marco’ was there too, as one of the Disciples. It could just as easily have been coming from him. I’d felt it myself, the nearness of a past that should have been remote, the appalling temporal compression. There was the odourlessness too, and the way he’d talked about the book.
There was the look he’d given me, of deep recognition.
‘I felt sorry for that Olivia,’ Trish said. ‘You could see she’d totally believed.’
‘At least we know they can’t walk around in daylight,’ Lucy said. ‘Or not yet, at any rate.’
Evidently the raid on the Helios lab in Beijing had been the work of the Disciples after all. They’d come away with a flawed formula and administered it to willing zealots as the ultimate Remshi marketing tool. Recipients were shunted out of public view (according to Jacqueline and her puppet messiah, off into the world to enjoy their new daylight freedom), monitored, and killed as soon as they started showing serious side-effects. By which time members of the congregation were queuing up to be given the gift. It was no wonder the Fifty Families had called time: there would be no competing with an outfit that promised its members a release from nocturnality. Jacqueline’s gamble was that they’d perfect the formula before the side-effects jig was up, by which time her position as Queen to the magical King would be established beyond question. Also by which time the gift would’ve stopped being a gift and become a reward, earned only by complete and indefinite submission to the royal will. The old boochie oligarchy would give way to a new monarchy. You had to hand it to Jacqui, as Walker had said: she didn’t think small.
‘I want to know what the missing verb is,’ Lucy said.
Walker didn’t, I knew.
‘Whatever it was,’ Trish said, ‘it was enough to get one of their own priests done-in when he found it out.’
‘Something blasphemous,’ Lucy said.
Walker poured himself another.
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘The main thing is we all got out in one piece.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ Trish said, topping up her and Lucy’s Bordeaux.
‘Cheers.’
‘Sláinte!’
‘Stin iya mas,’ Walker said – just as his cellphone rang.
He looked at the number. ‘Holy shit,’ he said. ‘It’s Mike.’
67
Walker had known. I’d known myself, ever since Jacqueline had said Natasha was free, though not quite the woman she was when she came here. It was Madame’s style, to return her to her lover as everything he didn’t want.
But she’d underestimated both of them. She’d underestimated love.
‘Talulla Demetriou, Natasha Alexandrova,’ Mikhail said. ‘Without doubt the strangest introduction I’ve ever made.’
Odour, mutually repellent, was a farcical problem for all of us, though less for me after my time in close quarters with Caleb. I stepped forward and Natasha and I shook hands, forcing ourselves not to hold our noses. She smiled. ‘It might not look like it,’ she said, with only the slightest trace of a Russian accent, ‘but it’s an honour to meet you. Mikhail’s told me you’ve been a good friend to him. I’m in your debt.’
We were in the house’s big back garden, now a foot and a half deep in snow. Neither Natasha nor Konstantinov would ever feel the c
old again. Not many make it past a thousand years. These two might.
Trish and Lucy, with a blanket-wrapped and wide-awake twin each, were in the conservatory doorway, looking on. Suddenly Madeline appeared behind them, in a short silk robe over white lingerie. She looked like a porn version of the angel on the Christmas tree. ‘Christ, can no one else smell the – oh. Blimey. Right. Fuck.’
‘I just wanted you to know,’ Konstantinov said. ‘This is my choice. This is the only way it could be.’
He was a little paler, of course, but apart from that in perfect health. He’d shaved off the sick-bed stubble and in the nude face his polished black eyes were renewed jewels. On looks alone he and Natasha could’ve been brother and sister. Their love had a whiff of that, too, a thrilling, incestuous claustrophobia. It wasn’t vampirism that made these two transcendently indifferent to any law, it was love. Next to the love, the vampirism was small.
‘I’m happy for you,’ I said. ‘I really am. I owe you so much. Can you... Would you like to come in?’
There was a moment of fraught silence, then all of us laughed.
‘We have somewhere to go,’ Konstantinov said. ‘I just wanted you to meet Natasha, and to apologise for leaving like a thief in the night.’
It was Walker he’d come to see, I knew. And now suddenly between them there were no words.