by Glen Duncan
“It happened to me in California,” she said, speaking out of the qualitatively different silence that had formed after the nomenclatural explanation. (It happened to me in California. We were talking about “it,” now. This was how it would be, I realised, these early hours would display gentle schizophrenia, the multiple realities of what there was to talk about, of what we were.) “Last summer. My decree absolute had come through and I’d taken a trip out there to visit a couple of old UCLA friends in Palm Springs. Allegedly to celebrate my new singledom. In fact I felt like shit. Sad and washed-up and ugly and sexually dead.” The divorce had been precipitated by the discovery that her ex, Richard, a high-school teacher and aspirant novelist, had been having an affair with the deputy head’s secretary. You know, Talulla had said, if it had been some nineteen-year-old twinkie with pneumatic tits I could have come out of it with a bit of dignity. I pity you, Richard, I really do. But this woman was forty-seven. You can imagine what a boost that gave me.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I got sick of things in Palm Springs and took a rental car out to Joshua Tree to lick my wounds. I stayed in a little cabana motel out on Route 62, hiked in the park during the day, drank tequila with the kids running the motel in the evening. It was a comfort, the desert. I think, by the way, we should order up some Cuervo, don’t you? I’m getting the feeling this is the calm before the storm, though what storm I don’t know.”
Lycanthropy had done things for her, licensed tangentiality, sanctioned intuition, loosened and altogether sexed-up the intelligence. She’d graduated with a degree in English and what turned out to be an insufficient interest in journalism. She started the career, but without much conviction, and after a couple of years drifted into helping run the Gilaley business. The education remained, humoured as a hopeless putz by the smut and savvy of her American trade self. I rang down for the Cuervo, half a dozen fresh limes, worried for the thousandth time Harley’s IDs were rotten, that my flight out of Heathrow had tripped a switch, that Grainer and Ellis were already hip to “Bill Morris” over at the Plaza, bunked up in luxury with his new howler squeeze.
“Then, one night,” she went on, “I wandered into the horror movie. I think it might have been the dumbest sequence of actions I’ve ever performed. For a start, I was driving alone at night in the desert. Off the main road too. I’d been out to Lake Havasu for the day and was determined to get back to my motel without the tedium of 62 West. It wasn’t late. Naturally the moon was up. Naturally the car broke down.”
The Cuervo and limes arrived. I found shot glasses in the suite’s bar and set us up. These, I knew, were the high-octane minutes, days, weeks, when anything she does can pluck the phallic string. Watching her toss back the shot. The pale female throat and her soft hair fallen back to reveal the flushed ears with their pearl studs. And this is nothing, wulf said. You wait. You just fucking wait.
“The horror movie’s always there,” she continued. “Just needs certain conditions to firm up. Mainly human stupidity. You’re driving around thinking the big thing is your poor broken heart and then suddenly the car dies and everything around you says, er, no, honey, the big thing is you’re all alone out here and your phone’s not getting a signal and you haven’t seen another car in over an hour and in any case this is America so the last thing you should be hoping for is another car to come along. Hit me again.”
I poured two more shots. Again the toss back, the taut throat, the breasts’ uplift, the pearls.
“You could have been dumb and ugly,” I said, as she wiped her mouth with her hand.
“So could you.”
“If we both were that would’ve been okay. It’s inequity causes the trouble.”
“What if I’d been smart and ugly?”
“Initially excruciating but better in the long run. Dumb and pretty I’d have ended up killing you. Or more likely you me. Anyway go on. You’d broken down in the middle of nowhere.”
She put the glass on the bedside table and lay on her side, propped on one elbow, facing me. We were over the first miraculous wave, her eyes conceded. Now a soberer relief, and the first shadows of realism. “I’d passed a one-horse town two or three miles down the road,” she said. “A diner, a store, a handful of houses. I was pretty sure I’d seen a garage, too. At the very least there’d be a phone. I’d call Triple A and that would be that. So I walked. I must have gone about half a mile when the helicopter appeared.”
I was studying her hand, enjoying the thought of its history, relishing in the inane way one must in these beginnings the bare fact that it was hers. Full-fleshed with long unpainted nails. She wore a big opal ring on her middle finger. When she’d touched her clit, with healthy deft modern American entitlement, the sight of this ringed finger slipping with cunning purpose through the soft dark hair of her mons had almost finished me.
“It came up about fifty yards away, I guess out of a ravine. I thought it must be the police because of the searchlight. Obviously these were your WOCOP guys.”
“The Hunt.”
“Right. Well, anyway, it happened incredibly fast. I could tell they were chasing someone, something, but I couldn’t see what. It was bizarre standing there with suddenly no category to put the experience in. That’s why I just stood there, like an idiot. Then the searchlight swung and blinded me and suddenly—out of nowhere—the werewolf hit me.”
I thought back to the file I’d seen. Had the report mentioned a witness? It had not. Thank God.
“You’d hardly call it being bitten. More a scrape of the teeth. He really just ran me over. The claws did the real damage. I remember thinking, even in the split-second it took: Jesus, werewolves exist. You’d think you’d be stunned, wouldn’t you? But I wasn’t. I guess, you know, you see something enough times in the movies … I got one big gash on my chest and one on my cheek. It was so sudden, like a huge firework went off in my face. Then he was gone. I’ve never seen anything move that fast. Had never seen, I mean. These days I’m pretty quick myself.”
I almost said: We’ll see how fast soon enough, but didn’t. It would have left us both uneasy.
“Then it was over,” she continued. “The chopper was gone and there I was all alone in total silence again. I walked about twenty paces, in shock I suppose. Then I found the dart.”
“What dart?”
“For the werewolf, but they’d hit me. In the calf. A tranquilizer, presumably, since a moment later I was out like a light.”
“Did you keep it?”
“That would’ve been the smart thing, wouldn’t it? But you find something sticking in you like that you pluck it out and toss it. Or you do if you’re stupid. If you’re me.”
Darting? This is the Hunt. They don’t dart, they kill. They behead. Alfonse Mackar was one of Ellis’s. Grainer had been in Canada looking for Wolfgang. Was there anything in the file about darting for capture? If there was I didn’t remember it.
“I don’t know how long I was out,” she said. “When I woke up it was still dark but the moon was higher. I wasn’t quite where I remembered lying down, either. Must have crawled, I guess. I went back to the road and walked the two miles to Arlette. I seriously thought I’d died and this was the afterlife. By the time I got to the town the wounds had already started to heal. By the next morning there was nothing, no sign of any injury at all. But you know how all that works. Actually I do still get a slight pain in my chest sometimes. As if there’s a splinter in there. God, that tequila’s gone to the tips of my toes.”
A moment in which Manhattan quietened and turned its glittering consciousness on us. I felt the dimensions of the hotel room, the streets outside and the frayed edges of the metropolis unravelling into freeways and the newly hopeful country’s vast distances. And here we were on the bed together, warm as a pot of sunlit honey. With a very slight effort I could have settled wholly into peace. But now we’d gone through the first layer of sex all the wretched questions throbbed.
“The infection,” she said, wit
h mild telepathy. “Why me, now, after you’re saying, what, a hundred and fifty years?”
Build a fortress. Guards. An army of dogs. Victims brought in, paid, tricked. We’d never have to leave. I sketched this and other fantasies, felt the tingle of futility, heard the world’s forces like a billion-piece orchestra tuning up. Why in God’s name were they darting Alfonse Mackar?
“I don’t know,” I answered. “My information’s WOCOP information. They’re the authority, or were. Transmission’s supposed to have been stopped by a virus, which means either the bug’s died or you’re immune. Anything special I should know about you medically?”
“Nothing. I get hay fever and I’m allergic to almonds. Otherwise, nada.”
“There’s got to be something. Anyway it’s not the priority. The priority is … Well, there are several.”
“Not yet, please. Hit me again.”
I had the long-overdue confrontation with myself in the bathroom while she made phone calls. (Three years ago her mother had died of bowel cancer and Talulla had taken on running the business ostensibly with—latterly instead of—her father. Until “it” happened. Two months after Turning she’d hired a general manager, Ambidextrous Alison, to cut herself loose.) “Honey, just ignore him,” I could hear her saying, presumably of meddlesome Nikolai. “I’ve told him he’s out of it. He does it because he knows it pisses you off.” I lay naked on the bathroom floor. Cold marble and the starry light of inset halogens. Things had caught up with me. Chiefly the completeness of my reversal. The universe, I said, demands some sort of deal, so you make one. In my case to live without love. Without love. A hundred and sixty-seven years. Was it ridiculous to speak of love now? No, it wasn’t. Or only in that it’s always ridiculous—on Wittgensteinian grounds—to speak of love. Everything was the same and everything had changed. Outside the city and the voluble traffic and the millions of human eyes and talking mouths and crafty habituated hands testified: The accidental epic of ordinariness goes on. A godless universe of flailing contingency—now with the hilarious difference of not being in it alone. (Suddenly I missed Harley, guiltily.) Courtesy of shared specieshood—indeed sole species representation—we’d skipped the phase of incredulous delight and gone straight to entrenched addiction. It wasn’t a choice. I was for her, she for me. Wulf married us, blessed us, wrapped his arms around us like a stinking whisky-priest. What did I write of Arabella? “We would have killed together and we would have shone.” Yes, and the warmth of that shining lay upon me now like an afterglow. Foreglow rather, since it came back through time from a future rich with murder. Talulla had looked at me when I pushed my cock into her cunt, had looked at me, I say, and sensed something of Arabella, whose spirit lived in me, whose ghost looked out through my eyes, had detected this presence and understood as she lifted her pale hips in slow and complete and victorious compliance that the betrayal whether I liked it or not of course deepened my pleasure, sold me wholly into the new female ownership, pissed on the altar, shat on the grave, dug up and defiled the beloved body in exquisite fully conscious sacrilege under the laws of Eros.
We both knew this was a juvenile phase that would pass, or, if it became a monolithic perversion, cause trouble, choke the sexual stream, breed pestilence. For now, however, she’d looked at me in rousing collusion, yes, I know. How not? How should she, six victims deep, not know the joy of the fall beneath the Fall?
The floor’s chill had become unpleasant. I got up and took a hot shower. I wanted to go back to her clean and put my nose in her cunt, my tongue in her sweet young asshole, the cunning animal scent down there that answered the years of asking. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they loved it. But all the while and all the while and all the while the world. We couldn’t stay here. That business with the dart didn’t make sense. Grainer’s days of live specimen capture were long over. Although of course it had been Ellis, not Grainer, after Alfonse in the desert. In any case we’d have to move. Dumb to have come to Manhattan in the first place, where among the multitudes surveillance was harder to spot.
I brushed my teeth and went back into the bedroom just as she was wrapping up her call. She looked at me. We didn’t laugh, but if it was a movie that’s what the script would have settled for as a way of showing it was the kind of thing where seeing each other again after ten minutes in separate rooms was a return to the only reality that mattered.
“You’re all scrubbed,” she said.
“Maximal contrast. I want your dirt.”
“Yikes. Okay.”
I went to the bed and lay down next to her. “Tonight we can luxuriate,” I said. “Tomorrow we have things to do.”
39
PARANOIA MADE THE decisions over the next few days. We met only four times, never in the same place. She had to prep Nikolai for her absence (he was prone to quarrelling with Ambidextrous Alison, prone to interfering) and I had logistical matters to attend to. California number plates, an array of wigs, spectacles, false moustaches, centrally the procurement of a fake driving licence for and the transfer of assets worth approximately twenty million dollars to Talulla Mary Apollonia Demetriou. The po-faced spirit of political correctness put its head around the door but my girl dismissed it. Obviously I should feel whored-out or patronised, she said. Well, I don’t. I barely heard her. Even with the recent global mugging twenty million’s a minor prang in my ride. It’s walking-around money, I told her. I need more time to sort you out properly. Offshore. Swiss. This is just in case of … Yes. Well. The bad smell around the transfer of lucre was that it smacked of providing for her after my death. Neither of us could quite keep that out. Therefore we gave it its moment in the spotlight. I plan on staying alive, I said. But in case I don’t you’ll have what you need. Just promise me you’ll always buy beautiful underwear. You drive a hard bargain, she said, but okay.
However, the paranoia. I had business lawyers in Manhattan (four of my companies have their head offices here) but insisted on meeting for instruction and signatures out of town. (Such meetings are a palaver. My face is rubber masked—I’ve been Richard Nixon; Marilyn; the Wolfman—and I affect one of a dozen accents. The relevant identity’s established first by code numbers and secondly via fingerprint-recognition technology in a portable gizmo. All tiresome, and used only when there’s no alternative.) I hired a car from JFK and drove to Philadelphia. An opportunity, I deemed, to check for surveillance or pursuit. The results were uncertain. No sign of the undead, but I thought I made a couple of WOCOP agents in Philly. I left the car at the airport and took a flight to Boston, dodged around the city for twenty-four hours, then plane-hopped for three days getting increasingly dehydrated: Detroit; Indianapolis; D.C.; Philadelphia. I picked up the car, drove back to JFK and took a cab into the city.
Where I all but bumped into a vampire.
I was getting out of the cab on Fifth Avenue and he was exiting a deli, tearing the cellophane off a pack of American Spirits. The reek hit me when I was halfway out of the car. I went down on one knee on the sidewalk, an impromptu genuflection. Looked up to see him stopped in his tracks with an expression of outraged revulsion. I didn’t recognise him. Tall, long-faced, with short thick hair dyed deep purple. Skinny jeans, leather three-quarter-length coat, orange Converse boots. Humanly you’d say mid-twenties cyberpunk. I got up off my knee. For a few moments we just stood and stared at each other, gorges rising. He looked as if this was new to him, this business of how Jesus Christingly awful running into a werewolf made you feel. Manhattan, needless to say, flowed around us, honked, glimmered, flashed, steamed, whistled, whooped and subterraneanly shuddered. Eventually, shaking his head, he backed, turned, and stumbled away downtown.
“An accident, right?” Talulla said. “I mean he wasn’t following you?” We’d moved to the Waldorf Astoria, a suite overlooking Park Avenue. I was Matt Arnold again. Couldn’t rest easy in any of the aliases.
“I don’t believe he was,” I said. “I’m getting it. I�
��ve assumed all the vampires know about the virus. They don’t. This is one lot looking for leverage. Why am I so slow?”
Talulla sat in one of the room’s red rococo armchairs with her feet up on a footstool. We were playing this, our condition, what we were, with bright circumspection. The hideous central fact informed everything we did but only took full unironic ownership of us when we fucked. In the sack wulf was stinkily eloquent, the odorous truth around which everything else fainted away. Out of the sack we conceded it like a childless couple who’d agreed to invent a fictional son, the premise, now that I thought of it (God still being dead, etc.), of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It was as if each of us was daring the other to admit it wasn’t true. Actually it was her daring me. Or asking me. It reminded me how new she was to the Curse that she had such willingness to believe the whole thing—changing into a monster once a month and killing and eating people—might yet turn out to be a horrible dream. We’d avoided the question of what she’d gone to England for, though I knew: Five victims, however widely she’d spread them across the U.S., had started to feel too close. You go to another country—get in, do it, get out—the police are looking for a native, you’re long gone. England because they spoke English. You want maximum fluency. She knew I’d worked this out. It introduced me to the guilty version of her face, the look an anchor-woman would have on air when someone in her earpiece says he knows all about the abortions or kinky photos, a slight swelling of the cheeks and the mouth momentarily without its guiding will. Sexually becoming, of course, the ghost of Eve’s look, lips still wet with the juice of forbidden fruit.
