by Glen Duncan
(“Not according to Stephen Hawking,” she said. “I watched this programme on PBS. He sees space-time as a four-dimensional, closed manifold, like the surface of a sphere, with no beginning and no end. It’s a nifty idea, but I still can’t stop seeing it the old-fashioned way, as if space-time’s a blob floating around in, you know, some other space, with some other time going on.”)
(“Come here,” I said. “Come here.”)
She was getting off the train, I was waiting to get on. Three carriage doors up from me she stepped high-heeled down onto the platform and in a moment found herself being helped up from the floor by the large-limbed Nordic couple in front of whom she’d inexplicably crashed to her knees.
Inexplicable to her. Not to me. I lip-read her going through the motions—Oh, my gosh … Oh … Thank you, thanks, yes I’m fine, I don’t know what happened, I’m such a moron, thank you so much—as the enormous Swedes or Norwegians or Finns covered in blond fuzz with gigantic sunburned gentleness helped her to her feet and handed her her wheelie case and purse—she went through these motions, yes, but she was looking elsewhere, everywhere, with a contained wildness bordering panic for the source of the power that had momentarily upended reality like that.
Me, in other words.
Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s a female.
Werewolf.
No preparation. No warning. Just the whole slab of myself fallen flat before her and all my eaten dead shocked into stillness. They’d thought the end of things—release, final dissolution, peace—was near. Instead this betrayal, Marlowe wrenched awake in a world blasted into renewal …
Meanwhile, back on her feet and free of helping hands she stood trembling, gripping her purse, face moist, body discernibly awry. She had the look of a foreign correspondent caught off-guard mid-report by an explosion. Early thirties, eyes the colour of plain chocolate and similarly dark hair in two soft shoulder-length waves. A single mole or beauty spot at the corner of her mouth. White-skinned but with a warmth and suppleness that betrayed—surely?—Levantine or Mediterranean blood. Certainly not “beautiful” or “pretty” but Saloméishly appealing, visibly smudged with the permissive modern wisdoms. This was a girl who’d been loved by her parents and grown vastly beyond them. She thought of them now, with a little searing pain of celebration, as children or simpletons. I had an image of generic homesick immigrants in the U.S. standing in a tenement doorway, waving her off, full of heartbroken pride. She wore a beige mackintosh over a white blouse and brown pinstripe skirt but with no effort at all (since there was no stopping me) I could see her dancing naked but for a veil and a navel ruby. Lip-reading her with the helpful Nords I’d made her American, and something about her relationship with the luggage and the raincoat and the purse reinforced this, the casual entitlement to useful things. While I was soaking all this up her consciousness was hurrying around the tunnel hastily manhandling the dispersing crowd, knowing that somewhere … somewhere very close …
I backed into one of the platform’s exits, managed—just—not to bound up and lay hands on her. Her! The pronoun had rocketed to primacy. Here was recognition as if from the hermaphroditic time before birth’s division. First sight of Arabella in the Metropole’s lobby had been a quickening of hope and fear: hope the recognition was mutual, fear it wasn’t. Here, now, was neither hope nor fear, just nonnegotiable gravity, a fall to the pure animal bitch like the guillotine’s blade to its block.
Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s a female.
She swallowed, plucked her blouse away from herself. Her scent was a hot perversion, a dirty cocktail of perfumed femme and the lewd stink of wolf. Fresh, of course, from transformation only four nights ago. She’d fed, too. Oh, yes. The ghost of her gorging was there in her eyes, though she retained something of the recent college grad ingénue making her way in the shocking world of work, determined to keep going, to assimilate the degradations, to master the atrocities.
A shaven-headed WOCOP agent lurked at the end of the platform. In the absence of vamp odour I had to assume a human familiar somewhere on the scene, though I hadn’t ID’d him yet. Could either Hunt or Undead know about her? Her! Hadn’t I known, somewhere at the back of the drift of days? Hadn’t I asked countless times: What are you waiting for, Jacob?
Her nostrils flared. Becoming a werewolf had nearly destroyed her, but hadn’t. Thus she’d discovered the Conradian truth: The first horror is there’s horror. The second is you accommodate it. And there in the espresso-dark eyes was the accommodation, the submission to experience she’d made in the silence of her heart, astonished at herself, once she’d decided to accept what she was, once she’d decided to kill others instead of herself. She suffered fiery Hunger and did vile deeds now, had begun teaching herself enlarging self-forgiveness. You do what you do because it’s that or death. She’d had a girlhood of secrets and now here was the Big Secret to justify them. She was—
Steady, Marlowe. For God’s sake, think! Practicalities. Could they know about her? How could they not know about her? Harley had known, I felt certain of it, and if Harley then why not the rest of the organisation?
No way of telling. Therefore assume they don’t. And from this moment do everything you can to make sure they never, ever find out.
Something else was going on. (Whatever is happening, as the late Susan Sontag noted, something else is always going on. It’s literature’s job to honour it. No wonder no one reads.) The something else going on here was my detached admission that the scales had tipped back—crashed back, with laughable immediacy—in favour of life. Detached admission—or deflated? Resignation to death at least simplified the living you had left. Now what? Complexity? Rigmarole? Bothering again? And something else was going on. (The number of these something elses is infinite, the hell literature faces every day. It’s a wonder anyone writes.) Underneath the first admission was a sullen second: One whiff of her had done what Harley’s torture and death could not. That was my measure, a giant standing stone of disappointment if I wanted to look at it. But there came again the sensational stink of her—dear God—and a new yokel leap of dick-blood. Let the factions of conscience quibble: I had work to do.
And the life without love?
My dead like a trade union in a silent phalanx with Arabella, shop steward, at their head.
The Heathrow Express pulled away. All but a handful of disembarked passengers had gone through the exits and were hurrying to the escalators. A sly peep showed me she was still there, apparently brushing at a speck of smut on her skirt, in fact with ravished consciousness still searching for the source of the scent that had felled her. My scent. Me. She had recovered herself, though her face still wore its sheen of sweat. She’d been blind-sided, yes, but now curiosity was at work, smart female lights in the liquid dark eyes. She reached up and with her little finger raked back a strand of hair that had stuck to her damp forehead. Very slightly raised her chin. She was breathing heavily, a lovely insinuation of her breasts against the blouse. I know you’re here, somewhere.
I waited until she moved through her nearest exit, left as much of a delay as I dared, then followed her.
35
THE CHALLENGE, TRAILING her down the aerated tunnels and moving walkways into the bright lights and echoing announcements of departures, was to keep my distance. Just once I got too near and she stopped, turned and took a few steps in my direction. I had to duck into a doorway to break the connection—and do it with sufficient casualness to keep the WOCOP tail in the dark.
There was a vampire, it turned out, a tall black male with greying hair and a gold hoop earring looking down from the check-in hall’s balcony. A further headache: I must keep close enough to my girl to blanket her scent without turning her head or treading on her heels. She’d taken off the fawn raincoat and slung it over her arm, revealing a trim figure and deportment projective of not natural but acquired confidence. I could not shuck the idea of her as the good daughter of immigrant U.S. parents, mindful of t
he toil and suffering borne to make her what she was, their bona fide American Girl, fluent in brand names and armed with education, health insurance, political opinions, orthodontic work, earning power—though this and all other inaugural projections were polluted by the vampire’s presence like hands pressing down on my skull from above.
She stopped under one of the information screens. I stopped, ostensibly to make a call on my mobile. Logistical problems were stacking up: In a moment she’d find her check-in desk, get her boarding pass and go through security into the sprawling purgatory of the departures lounge. How would I follow her? Obviously, I’d buy a ticket to wherever she was going. But unless her desk handled one flight only, how would I know where she was going? I hadn’t been close enough to read the label on her case. And what if she used self check-in?
Nothing else for it: I had to approach her now.
As soon as I moved towards her she moved away—but only as far as the queue for the Travelex window. She was fourth in line.
“Don’t turn around,” I said, quietly. I still had the mobile to my ear. In the twenty paces it had taken me to reach her I’d sensed her sensing my approach, forcing herself to stay calm, willing herself not to turn around. Heat enveloped her in a rippling aura. Her scent was a ring through my bull’s nose. She was trembling. You had to be close to see it, in the high heels, in the wrists, in the hair. At the very last I pulled back from grabbing her hips and pressing my groin to her ass and filling my hands with her breasts and burying my nose in her nape.
“I know what you are and you know what I am. Do you have a cell phone?”
“Yes.”
“Give me the number.”
American, the accent confirmed as she recited it without hesitation. I keyed in the number but didn’t store or dial. “I’m being watched,” I said. “And for all I know you are too, so change some currency here then go to the Starbucks directly opposite and wait for me to call. Understood?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re feeling this, right?”
“Yes.”
A great darkness of relief went through me. I nearly fainted. She moved to the exchange counter and opened her purse.
36
GOD ONLY KNEW if the mobile was safe. Other than to replay Harley’s cut-off message I hadn’t used it, but since it had passed through the hands of Jacqueline Delon I had to assume it was compromised. I copied the number onto the back of my hand and deleted it from the Nokia’s screen. Travelex furnished me with ten one-pound coins and I stepped across to a pay phone.
She said: “Hello?”
“I can see you. Are you within earshot of those two guys with the backpacks?”
“No.”
“Okay, good. But don’t look too obviously in this direction.”
“You were on the platform.”
“Yes, sorry about that.”
“I felt it. This is … Who’s watching you?”
“Long story. Not here. Where are you flying?”
“New York.”
“That’s home?”
“Yes.”
“What time’s your flight?”
“Eleven-thirty.” She risked a direct look. Our first transparent exchange. It silenced us for a moment, since it confirmed we’d entered the realm of inevitability. “I can miss it,” she said.
You’re feeling this, right? Yes. Not just the foregone sexual conclusion but the transfiguration of the mundane: luggage carts; information screens; airline logos; ugly families. Every humble atom glorified. I can miss it. Mutual certainty trims speech and here was our speech, trimmed. She would simply not get on the plane. All that was selfish and weak in me lay heavily upon the very little that wasn’t. She’d get a room at an airport hotel. I’d lose the vamp and the copper. I’d go to the room. She’d be sitting on the edge of the bed when I entered. She’d look up.
“It’s not safe,” I said. “We have to know if they’re onto you.”
“That black guy upstairs,” she said. “There’s something—”
“He’s a vampire.”
Another first, her face and silence said. But also, after a slight delay: Why not? In fact, of course, of course vampires. She’d learned: The world pulled these sudden convulsive moves to reveal more and more of its outlandish self to a random cursed elite. Meanwhile Bloomingdale’s and Desperate Housewives and Christmas and the government carried on. She was carrying on herself, in extraordinary fusion. I could see it in her tense shoulders and flushed face and the care with which she’d applied her makeup. It hurt my heart, the unrewarded courage of it, the particular degree of her determination not to fold in spite of everything. In spite of becoming a monster. It hurt my heart (oh, the heart was awake now, the heart was bolt upright) that she’d had to be brave all alone.
“Did you feel sick?” I asked.
“I still do, a little.”
“When did it start?”
“Just now when I came into check-ins.”
“But nothing before that?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing ever?”
“Not like this, no.”
Good. If she’d never encountered a vampire before then chances were the boochie upstairs was for Jacob Marlowe only. Her scent would be churning his guts but without knowing there was another howler in the house he’d put that down to me.
“Don’t look until I tell you,” I said, “but there’s a Bruce Willis type in a brown leather jacket and a white T-shirt standing under the information screens to your left. I need to know if you’ve ever seen him before. Okay, look now.”
“I don’t recognise him,” she said. “Who is he?”
“You don’t know about WOCOP, right?”
“What?”
“It’s an organisation that—Shit, there’s too much to explain like this. All you need to know for now is they’re no friends of ours. Neither are vampires. We’ve got to be careful.”
A pause. Then she said: “I’m not getting on the plane.”
Which forced me to risk a look of my own. She was staring at me with wide-awake consciousness. Whatever else was true it was true this was a relief to her, a vindication of all the hours and days of fierce holding on: You’re not alone. The ease with which I could hang up the phone and walk over to her and take her in my arms was a satanically reasonable temptation. I could see myself doing it, feel the lithe yielding fit of her against me. I know what you are and you know what I am.
“I don’t want you to get on the plane,” I said. “But we have to be sure they don’t know about you.” We were “we,” already. Of course we were.
“Was it you in the desert?” she asked.
“What?”
“California. Nine months ago. When I was attacked. Was it you?”
I’d seen the file. In late June 2008 the Hunt had killed werewolf Alfonse Mackar in the Mojave Desert. Which had left just Wolfgang and me on the books. Or so WOCOP had thought.
“No, it wasn’t me.”
She bit the inside of her lip for a moment. “No, it wasn’t you. I can … feel it.” A mix: pleasure, embarrassment, relief. Suddenly, with the two of us in the same room, even a room as expansively joyless as check-ins, she could feel all sorts of things. So could I. The intimacy was, literally, laughable. Laughter was laughably available.
“How many are there—of us?” A struggle for her to choose which question first, suddenly faced with the possibility of answers.
“I was supposed to be the last,” I said. “But now there’s you. I don’t know how. I don’t know what it means.” We kept looking away from each other, then back, away, back. It was hypnotic. For her as for me there was a vague awareness of all the things we didn’t, in our perfect certainty, need to say, as if pages of TV movie script—I can’t believe this is happening … I knew from the first moment I saw you—were scrolling on an autocue both of us were ignoring.
“I can’t go
now,” she said. “You can’t ask me to do that. It’s ridiculous.”
Imagine if a hundred and sixty-seven years ago I’d run into another of my kind at a railway station. Someone who’d lowered his copy of the Times, looked over his spectacles and said, Yes, I know all about it, but you’ll have to wait.
“I know this is hard for you,” I said. “It is for me too—” Our eyes met again and there it still was, hilarious mutual transparency, raging collusion. “But there’s no other way to be sure. Please trust me. I just want to know you’re safe.”
“What do they want you for? Us for.”
I told her what I knew, skipping all but the consequential chunks. Helios, the vamps, the virus. She listened with a slight frown, one arm wrapped around herself. She might have been a young mother hearing a report of her child’s out-of-character misbehaviour at school. The dark hair framed her face in two soft crescents. A vaguely 1970s sub–Charlie’s Angels look. I was thinking, with a mix of bitterness and joy: All these years. All these years.
“I’ll leave the airport,” I told her. “You stay. If they don’t know about you they’ll follow me. You take your flight to New York. I’ll join you when I’ve ditched them. Shouldn’t take me more than a day or two.”
“Wait. This is crazy. What if they don’t follow you?”
“They will. If they don’t, I’ll come back and we’ll rethink.”
“What if there are other vampires?”
“I’ll call you in thirty minutes. If there are others here you’ll still feel sick, and if one of them gets on the plane with you you’ll feel really sick. But that’s not likely. If they put anyone on the flight with you it’ll be a familiar, a human. They won’t do anything as long as you stay in public places, but keep your eyes open.”
“What about these WOCOP guys?” she said. “How will I know if they’re following me?” The charming frown of concentration remained. She looked now like a secretary taking in an astonishing amount of new instruction, forcing herself to stay calm, forcing herself to be up to the inhuman demand.
