by Glen Duncan
That night, lying on our backs side by side in a Motel 6 bed, I knew what was coming.
“I killed animals,” she said, quietly.
Nine moons, six human victims. Simple arithmetic.
“Yes.”
“Did you try that?”
“Yes.”
It was raining. The motel was almost empty. The room smelled of damp plaster and furniture polish. A truck honked on the wet highway half a mile away. She was thinking about her parents. Her mother dead and her father living alone in the big maple-shadowed Gilaley house in Park Slope. A lot of her strength had gone into not letting the Curse rob her of the warmth between her and Nikolai, who would without thinking run his hand softly over her cheek as if she were still a little girl.
“Of course it was no good,” she said. “I knew even when I was doing it it wouldn’t work. You can tell.”
You can indeed. Have no illusions, the Curse specifies: human flesh and blood. This isn’t a nicety. An animal won’t “do,” at a pinch. Refuse the Hunger what it demands and see what happens. The Hunger isn’t at all pleased. The Hunger feels it incumbent on itself to teach you a lesson. One you won’t forget.
“I thought I was going to die,” she continued. “Throwing up afterwards it felt like I was trying to turn myself inside out. I was relieved. I thought I’d solved the problem, poisoned myself, accidental suicide. But of course it passed.”
My hand rested just above her mons. The question was whether to use what was coming next erotically. I could feel she was aware of the option. She was undecided. Mentally, too much was mingling: her mother’s death, her father’s loneliness, we can’t have children, innocent victims, the prospect of a four-hundred-year lifespan.
“It got worse,” she said. “The next time. After the third month I knew I wouldn’t make it through another Change without feeding properly.” It cost her something to get that “feeding” out. Her voice hardened for the word. It occurred to me that this was probably the first time she’d had to put it into words. Kurtz’s unspeakable rites. “I was crazy,” she said. “Two hours before moonrise just driving around aimlessly in Vermont. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe get myself killed. Walk into a hotel and just go through the whole transformation routine in the lobby.” She paused. Closed her eyes for a few moments. Opened them. “Well, of course not aimlessly. You know what you’re doing but you pretend you don’t. There was this place I knew from a vacation years back. A big woods between two little towns. Houses far apart. I picked one at random. I wasn’t careful, just went straight in. The doors weren’t even locked. It was a nineteen-year-old boy. His name was Ray Hauser. It was the last week of his summer vacation. His parents were in town watching a local theatre production of Titus Andronicus. I read about it afterwards in the papers.”
I didn’t say anything. Therapists and priests and interviewers know all about not saying anything. When you die and go for judgement God will sit there and infinitely not say anything and you’ll do all the damning work yourself.
“Feel,” she said, opening her legs slightly.
Her cunt was wet. There was the killing. There was the eating. And there was this. The central monstrosity. The way it made you feel. What it did for you. You couldn’t live with it without living with this.
I kept my hand there. Stroked her. This central monstrosity had nearly made her kill herself. But she hadn’t. And once you don’t kill yourself it’s all over.
“I’m smarter when I Change,” she said. “In all the worst ways. In all the ways that matter.”
“I know, Lu.”
“You think some sort of red cloud would come down, some sort of animal blackness to blot everything out and leave just the dumb instinct, but it doesn’t.”
“No.”
“I know what I’m doing. And I don’t just like it—I don’t just like it …”
“I know.”
“I love it.”
We left a respectful silence. Her hair was a dark soft corona around her head on the pillow. Evil has to be chosen.
“I tasted it,” she continued calmly. “All of it. His youth and his shock and his desperation and his horror. And from the first taste I knew I wasn’t going to stop until I had it all. The whole person, the whole fucking feast.”
She moved her hips very gently in response to my stroking. The argument with herself about what she was, what she was willing to be, was effectively over. Her bigger self had gone on ahead and accepted it. These were residual emotional obligations.
“Then afterwards,” she said, lifting slightly as my finger slipped into her anus. “The big talk, the promises to myself I wasn’t ever going to do it again.”
It’ll get easier, I could have told her. It’s the story, the human story, the werewolf story, that the hard things get easier. Carry on and in a year or two you’ll be taking victims as you might grapes from a bunch.
“It’s the worst thing,” she said, turning towards me, forcing herself against my hand. “It’s the worst thing.”
We’re the worst thing, she meant. We’re the worst thing because for us the worst thing is the best thing. And it’s only the best thing for us if it’s the worst thing for someone else.
There are times when saying “I love you” is blasphemy worthy of the Devil.
“I love you,” I said.
Much later, after we’d lain for a long time listening to the rain in the dark, I felt the last barrier between us dissolve. It was as if the night’s tensile apparatus suddenly fell apart. She said: “You killed your wife, didn’t you?”
She already knew the answer. Had fucked me knowing. Was lying here with me knowing. Accommodating this, even more than accommodating her own slaughters, was the proof of having entered a new world.
“Yes,” I said.
Silence. But of cogitation, not shock. I could feel her trying to find a justifying angle—because sooner or later you’d have had to, the alternative would have been turning her, which would have felt as bad as killing her, with four hundred years for her to spend never forgiving you—then finding the unjustifiable truth: because nothing compares to killing the thing you love.
“It was good,” she said. Conclusion, not question. The insight that withers the old flower and lets the new one bloom.
“Yes.”
“Because you loved her.”
“Yes.”
And here we were at the delicate logic. I was thinking: She’ll be a much better werewolf than me. (And with this thought came the first true realisation that she was less than a fifth my age, that half her life would be lived after my death in a world beyond my imagining.) Already she had an understanding it had taken me decades to arrive at. Very soon, a year, two, I’d be struggling to keep up with her.
“Maybe you’ll kill me,” she said, pressing her hand flat against my chest. “Maybe that’s what I was hoping for.”
It had occurred to me she might want this, an exit strategy. But there was that past tense: Maybe that’s what I was hoping for. If she had wanted it she didn’t now. Or at least not cleanly.
“There’s something better than killing the one you love,” I said. I extricated myself from her embrace, gently forced her onto her back, held her wrists above her head, got on top of her, felt her bedwarm thighs softly opening. Her eyes and earrings and lips and teeth glimmered in the dark.
“Something better?”
I eased into her as she lifted her hips.
“Killing with the one you love,” I said.
It was only afterwards, when she slept (wondering what knowing the worst would feel like had been one of the things keeping her awake; now, having let it in and found room for it she surrendered to exhaustion, a blissful rapid unspooling into sleep) that I knew there would be no purpose served, indeed none, by telling her Arabella had been pregnant, and that in murdering and devouring my wife I’d also murdered and devoured the only child I’d ever have.
41
THE BIG OPEN spaces thin
the American gods: Elvis, John Wayne, Marilyn, Charles Manson, JFK. Out there they’re like frail clouds tearing, nothing behind them but blue emptiness. It sends some people mad. Americans know this and gather by collective intuition on the coasts.
Life reduced to the dimensions of a car. Lack of sleep and the deepening drift of miles blurred all our categories, yielded absurd conversational segues, from Tom Cruise’s career to WOCOP genetics to Obama to the fragmentation of feminism to the history of the Hunt to the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile Texaco, gospel, storm clouds, scarecrows, Jack Daniels, Camel Filters (the brand divinities prove surprisingly resilient), fucking, stars, vending machines and the constantly tightening torque of the Hunger. She wanted to know everything, Harley, Jacqueline Delon, Cloquet, Ellis, Grainer, the Fifty Houses. And that was just the contemporary matter. I had two hundred years’ worth of places I’d been, people I’d met, things I’d seen. No matter how much I told her there was always more. But she wanted to talk, too. The Curse had left her memories intact but not her sense of entitlement to them. They had become unspeakable. Now here I was, apparently having the cake of my past and eating it. Her unsalved grief was for the lost familial warmth. Her mother’s clan had been large, featured Irish characters, clichéd Irish in some cases, colossi of drinking and sentimentality and with the great bloodstained tapestry of Roman Catholicism to wrap everything in. The Uncles. When she was a child these men picked her up in massive sausagey hands and sat her on their shoulders amid whisky vapours and wild hair and talked fabulous nonsense. The women initiated her in gossip and the arts of masculine deflation. This had been her template for happiness. This and the deep cahoots with her long-suffering father, whose little sprite she was and who indulged her, recklessly, and who had not just heroes and gods to entertain her but black holes and comets and the precise weight of the sun. Among the Gilaley tribe Nikolai’s already negligible Greek Orthodoxy had disappeared.
“He started with capitulation,” Talulla said. “Went through the farce of converting to marry my mother. It made him smaller in her eyes, of course, though she’d never have married him without it. She held all the paradoxes, casually. Not that I can talk, the rubbish I’m still carrying around.”
“So you do believe in God?”
We were in Nebraska, south of the Middle Loup River, east of the Sand Hills. It was evening, cold, sleeting since we’d stopped for gas an hour ago. I’d seen the acned cashier give us a sidelong look. This was new. In human form I never failed to pass as simply human. Were we, together, palpably more Other?
“It’s not belief,” she said. “It’s just what you’re stuck with, the lousy furniture you can’t change. The educated me knows hell’s nothing, a fiction I happened to inherit. The other me knows I’m going there. There must be a dozen mes these days, taking turns looking the other way.”
“It’s the postmodern solution,” I said. “Controlled multiple personality disorder. Pick a fiction and allocate it an aspect of yourself.”
“But you don’t think the story in Quinn’s book’s a fiction, do you?” I’d told her what I knew, how close I’d been at Jacqueline Delon’s, the Men Who Became Wolves.
“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” I said. “Let everything else have its place in purposeless evolution but let my lot be exempt. It’s just a hangover from—” I was going to say “the days of being human,” but felt how it would bring the fact of infertility close again. “It’s just the same old shit,” I amended. “The desire to know whence we came in the hope it’ll shed light on why we’re here and where we’re going. The desire for life to mean something more than random subatomic babble.”
“And now the vampires have it,” she said. “Assuming you really think they do?”
“I really think they do.”
“I know this is crazy, but I can’t quite get over the whole vampire thing. That they really exist.”
“It’s the lameness of their having to sleep during the day. That and the not having sex.”
“They don’t?”
“They don’t. The desire goes. I mean, they’ll tell you screwing’s nothing to draining a victim but that’s always sounded desperate to me. It’s one of the reasons they hate us.”
Us. I felt the word evoke for her a tribe, a family, a kind—then the effect dissolved. A whole species gone to silvered dust.
“How do we really know there aren’t any others?” she said, off the back of this image, rolling her head a little to ease the neck’s knots of gathering wolf. “Alfonse Mackar turned me—okay. You say there must be some anomaly in me that made infection possible. But what if it was an anomaly in him? If the thing interfering with infection really is a virus maybe he was immune to it. In which case who’s to say he hasn’t turned others? There could be dozens, or hundreds—”
“Not hundreds. WOCOP would know. Harley would’ve known.”
“A few then. It’s possible, isn’t it?”
This had occurred to me. But for no reason I can dignify with anything higher than the authority of a two-hundred-year-old gut I didn’t buy it. “It’s possible,” I said. “Of course it’s possible.”
“But you don’t think so”
“No. I’m not sure why.”
Another silence, her intelligence working. Then a very slight smile. “It’s because it would be less romantic,” she said.
We drove long into the nights, since it gave at least the one behind the wheel some distraction from the Hunger. Our scents made a dirty brew in the car, went into us, absolutely refused to let desire sleep. Sex muffled the drum-thud for an hour or two. Then the beat struck up again—worse. Diminishing returns. I could feel her sometimes looking back to her werewolf life before we’d met and feeling a kind of retroactive vertigo or nausea that she’d survived it alone so long. It was as if the sun had come up and shown her for the first time how close to the edge of a thousand-foot drop she’d been walking in the dark. Despite which reflections (I could also feel) she was daily making the aesthetic or dispositional shift: As long as you’re still considering suicide the Curse can play as tragedy. Once you’re resolved on living only comedy will do.
Unless you fall in love, Jacob.
(Harley’s ghost? Arabella’s? Whoever, I ignored it.)
I bought things we’d need. A lightweight rucksack. Binoculars. Clip ropes. Talulla didn’t ask. Not, any longer, out of avoidance, but because for the first time in nine months she was enjoying being entirely in someone else’s hands.
The early hours of our eighth day from New York found us in a Super 8 motel in Wyoming.
“The more I think about it,” she said, “the more it doesn’t seem possible they don’t know about me. WOCOP, I mean.” It was just before dawn. My head rested on her thigh. The room’s one thin-curtained window was a lozenge of smoke-blue light. We were dry-eyed, wakeful. The Hunger had forced us off regular food. This, as Jacqueline Delon would no doubt have known, is the way of it: Human appetite occupies roughly the middle fourteen days of the cycle. The rest of the time you’re winding down from the kill, or winding up to it. Now, four days from the full moon (waxing gibbous), we were reduced to water, black coffee, liquor, cigarettes. Even chewing a stick of gum felt categorically wrong.
“It’s bothering me too,” I said. “I feel sure Harley knew, and if he did there’s no reason the rest of the organisation wouldn’t. But you’ve never felt yourself being followed or watched?”
“Would I feel it? Surely not if they’re any good.”
Quite. My own sense for surveillance had had a long time to develop. She was an infant. A conviction seized me suddenly that the motel was surrounded, that any second the door would be booted in. I leaped up from the bed, unlocked, looked out. Nothing. The parking lot’s winking mica. The road. The mountains, white on the heights. Clean cold air and the predawn feeling of the earth’s innocence. I went back inside.
“Maybe I’m wrong about Harls,” I said, as she lit us a Camel each. “It’s just tha
t when I saw you at Heathrow, the instant I saw you it seemed to complete his cut-off message. It was a tonal thing, you had to know his voice. But maybe that wasn’t what he was telling me. It could just as easily have been that he’d found out the vampires were after me for the virus. Or it could have been that he knew his cover was blown, that his own people were onto him. Christ, it could have been any number of things.”
“I’ve wondered if they even saw me that night in the desert,” she said. “I mean it was a matter of a couple of seconds. The chopper was having trouble keeping the light on him. They could have missed me. I mean they could have. Otherwise wouldn’t they have come back for me?”
“There was no mention of you in the report I saw,” I said. “And in any case they’d assume you’d be dead in twelve hours. There was no reason to come back. As far as they were concerned the only thing you were going to turn into was a corpse.”
She considered this for a few moments, staring at the ceiling. The effects of we can’t have children were still going on. She was wondering where the grief might go, what shape it might take. Anger—or rather focused malice—was a possibility. I could feel her considering it, the complete devotion of herself to only a handful of her aspects: intelligence, cruelty, destruction. She could become Kali. “Well,” she said, “that’ll teach them to be complacent, won’t it?”
