by Glen Duncan
Alongside these ruminations I kept up a more or less continuous self-harangue. You fucking idiot, you’re going to get yourself killed. They’ll torture Talulla and rape her and do experiments and mate her with animals and if you’re not already dead force you to watch and this whole fantasy of rescue and survival you’ve cooked up is obscene and preposterous and even Charlie at Aegis had trouble not laughing at you down the phone and only didn’t because he knows you’ve got the money and it’s your fucking funeral you stupid cunt she’s going to die and so are you—
The Ellis phone rang.
“Jake, you’re en route I hear.”
“Is she with you?”
“Not yet. Calmez-vous. You’ll see her tonight. Now listen. To confirm: Moonrise is 18:07 tomorrow. It’ll just be me and Grainer. He’s already up there, so don’t deviate: Stay in the hotel. Llewellyn’ll pick you up at 14:30 tomorrow and drop you in Beddgelert. You’re on foot from there. Obviously you know the way.”
“Aren’t you going to be on the drive-by tonight?”
“Can’t. I’m going up to meet Grainer now. After that he’ll want me with him. I do the weapons check. There’sa routine, a set of rituals. Don’t worry, Jake, she’s in safe hands, I promise. Just stay in your hotel room until you get the call.”
The rest of the journey was febrile peaks and troughs. Moments of vividness—the huge wheels of a truck very close; a crow flapping up from fresh roadkill; a green verge covered in crocuses—and long blurred stretches, pre-Curse hypersensitivity that amounted to perceptual distortion or fuzz. My face tingled, eyes itched, limbs lost their edges to the pins-and-needles ghost of the wolf. The memory of killing with Talulla was a root that clutched from balls to brain. Neither fear nor fatigue obscured it. Wulf went out from it, ranged to tearing point, searching. She was here, somewhere, close, somewhere …
Just after three o’clock, under a pied sky of cumulus and silvery blue, we arrived in Caernarfon.
54
I MANAGED AN hour of reiterative calls to Aegis before the batteries on Russell’s and Wazz’s mobiles died within minutes of each other, like an ancient couple who couldn’t bare to be parted. Daren’t risk the room phone. It’s probably bugged, but there’s also the possibility they’ll call in on it for the drive-by with Talulla. Either way I’ve left it alone.
Of course without the calls there’s nothing to do but wait. Smoke. Pace. Write. Look out. Drink. I’ve allowed myself one bottle of Scotch between now and tomorrow afternoon. Eighteen-year-old Talisker’s the best the Castle’s got. Shame not to go out on something classier, if going out’s what I’m doing.
The room is as I remember it. Seems a decade ago. Poor Maddy’s white shoulders hunched and her face full of immediate belief though she’d said, Is that real? That’s not real, is it?
It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick.
I’m sorry, Harls, for the mess I made of your life. For costing you your life. Vengeance, now, late, shamefully overdue, but vengeance nonetheless. Grainer. Ellis too, eventually. I’m sorry it’s taken so long. I’m sorry the bare fact of what they did to you wasn’t enough. I’m sorry it took loving someone. Someone else.
•
Dark. I watched the last of the light over the Irish Sea. Now the window shows only the street. No call.
•
The whole of one’s being reduces to listening for the sound of a ringing phone.
•
Something nags when I think of Madeline here. This room’s hauled it to the edge of memory but can’t quite heave it over the border.
•
22:50. Still no call. It’s raining again. I’ll have to open the window to see her clearly.
•
Thank God.
I was beginning to give up hope. Just after midnight the room phone rang. Not Ellis. An older-sounding male.
“Take the handset to the window. ETA two minutes. Now hang up.”
Time, as the twee verse has it, is too slow for those who wait. I opened the sash. The two minutes swelled and warped. Car after car that wasn’t them. Then a mirror-windowed people-carrier pulled up across the road. The handset rang again.
“Hello? Lu?”
“Listen carefully,” the male voice said. “You get thirty seconds, precisely. Not negotiable. Go.”
The vehicle’s rear window went down—and there was Talulla’s face, awake, expectant, full of her nimble consciousness. Not quite fully disguising fear, though I could see even in that first glance the work she’d put in not to let it show. She smiled at me.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“I’m fine. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m getting you out, okay?”
“Okay.”
“It won’t be long, I promise.”
“Be careful. You have to be careful.”
“I will. I’m coming for you.”
“Promise you’ll be careful.”
“I promise.”
“What happened to your face?”
“Nothing. A scrape. You look so beautiful.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too. You’re sure they haven’t hurt you?”
“They really haven’t. I miss you.”
“You’ll be seeing me very soon.”
“I could feel you close all day.”
“Me too.”
“I wish I could come to you right now.”
“Oh, Jesus, Lu, I—” A hand wearing a black leather driving glove took the phone from her. I saw her face’s effort collapse. You think: I should have spent days just holding her, kissing her, looking at her. The electric window closed. One last glimpse of her straining to see over it. The soft dark eyes.
“That’s it, chief,” the voice said—and hung up. Seconds later the people-carrier was gone.
55
SOMETHING’S HAPPENED TO ME. I’ve stopped abstracting. This is love: You stop bothering about the universal, the general, get sucked instead into the local and particular: When will I see her again? What shall we do today? Do you like these shoes? Theory and reflection are delicate old uncles bustled out of the way by the boisterous nephews action and desire. Themes evaporate, only plot remains. Madeline was right in her priorities all along.
I hadn’t realised my conversion until reading back over these pages, and now, when they ought to present themselves, conclusions desert me. For a werewolf facing what might be his last few hours your narrator finds himself woefully short of summative maxims. The great mysteries endure, unsolved, unseen-into (except love, which is really not a mystery but the force that eases mysteries into the hard shoulder); I don’t know where the universe came from or what happens to creatures when they die. I don’t know if the whole thing’s an unravelling accident or an inscrutable design. I don’t know how one should live—but I know that one should live, if one can possibly bear it. You love life because life’s all there is. And I only know that because I happen to have found—again—love. There’s no justice: that I know. Precious little to show for two hundred and one years.
My skull aches from where the moon spent the night under its cranium, like a lozenge of slowly melting ice. In a few minutes Llewellyn will arrive to take me to Beddgelert. I haven’t slept but in spite of the pre-Curse torments I’ve showered, shaved, trimmed my finger- and toenails. There are no clean clothes so I washed my socks and underpants in shampoo and dried them on the room’s radiator. Ellis tells me there’ll be fresh gear for me when the deed is done. I drank the last of the Talisker around noon. Since then coffee and Camels, the occasional glass of tap water. It’s raining, halfheartedly. This seat by the window’s become a dreary home. Its view is of the town’s grey edge: a road, passing cars, headscarved old ladies, dog walkers, now and then a flushed jogger. Beyond this a low grey wall, a narrow strand, the shifting colours of the Menai Strait, Anglesey.
Not for much longer.
My inner dead make their presence felt now like a silent congregation. Arabel
la, their priestess, has gone, so lately they’re still in shock. There’sa tenderness around her absence, like the soft blood-filled cavity of a pulled-out tooth. What can it mean that I killed and consumed my wife and unborn child and now have love in my life again—except that there’s no justice and that one must, if one can bear it, live?
Enough. My nerves are bad. Reflection no longer becomes me, has no place alongside love.
Besides, here’s Llewellyn with the car. For better or worse it’s time to go.
56
NO ONE RAPED ME. First because they were all scared of Poulsom and I guess he’d taken anything like that off the menu. Second because raping me would have meant killing me: A woman you’ve raped tracking you down is one thing, a werewolf you’ve raped is another. Within hours of my first abduction I stopped worrying about it.
Then the second abduction happened.
Seeing Jake had been hard. He looked terrible. Those scratches on his face like an insult. He seemed so alone standing there in the hotel window. His shirt was wrongly buttoned, just one button out of line, the slightest effect of crookedness. The makeup on my face felt obscene. I’d wanted, among the million other things, to look pretty for him—and perversely the universe had cooperated. Earlier, back at the place they’d held me—“the white jail,” as I thought of it—one of the female guards had slipped me a paper bag with cosmetics in it. Eyeliner, mascara, lip gloss, eyeshadow, blusher. “I know you’re seeing your guy tonight,” she said. “Don’t say where you got it.” She was embarrassed. What was weird was that until then she’d been utterly stony. Hardass, I’d nicknamed her. I was so stunned I didn’t say a word. Afterwards, sitting on my bunk, I cried. I read somewhere that when you’re a kid it’s people’s cruelty that makes you cry, then when you’re an adult it’s their kindness. I hadn’t realised until that moment how completely I’d given up any entitlement to kindness. And then when I saw Jake, so visibly strung out, looking so totally alone, the makeup felt cheap on my face, a stupid girl’s gesture. (The girl’s still in there, waist-deep in the blood and guts of the monster’s victims. There might be something out there that’ll kill the girl but if so I can’t imagine what it could be.) Are you okay? I’m fine. Are you all right? I’m fine. Weeks of waiting and then when the moment comes you trade the plainest words. The nearness of him hurt, my heart, my head, my breasts, my womb, it felt like, started the wolf trying to tear itself free. Memory of the kill we’d shared in California opened in me like the warmth of hard liquor, starting in the chest and hurrying outwards, a secret ecstasy in my hands and teeth and scalp. Poulsom said, Careful, you’ll hurt yourself. On the cuffs, he meant. I hadn’t known I was straining against them.
I wish I could come to you right now.
Oh, Jesus, Lu, I—
Thirty seconds, we’d been promised. It felt like three. A glimpse. A blur. A joke at love’s expense. Then the car was pulling away, my neck twisted to see out the back, Jake in the lit window getting smaller. Going. Gone. That feeling like the first day at school, a ball of emptiness in my stomach because my mother had seen me crying but still turned and walked away to the car, the silver Volvo I couldn’t stand after that. You learn early the basic thing is loss. Then spend the rest of your life trying to forget it.
Jake says he stopped abstracting. Seems I’ve started. Writing this isn’t easy. I haven’t kept a journal since UCLA. Back then we all kept them, miles of young women’s handwriting like barbed wire, the full-time job of self-dramatisation. I don’t care what he says now. I’ve been fucked over by that asshole for the LAST TIME!!!
I supposed they were taking me from Caernarfon back to the white jail (“they” being Poulsom and two guards, Merritt and Dyson), wherever the hell the white jail was. I knew we were in Wales, but that was pretty much it. My European geography’s the standard American shambles and the place-names I’d seen on the way—Llandovery, Rhayader, Dolgellau—could’ve been in Wonderland for all they meant to me. The headache I’d had since first being captured was knowing I had to do something and knowing there was nothing I could do. I hadn’t bought the line that I’d be released once Grainer was dead any more than Jake had, but there was no choice except to play it out. The rationed phone minutes had carried Jake’s message in the spaces between words: Sit tight. I’ll get you out. In the good moments it was like having a powerful talisman in my pocket. In the bad it was like a voice (Aunt Sylvia’s, in fact, that bitch who fell on childhood optimism like acid rain) repeating, He won’t come, you stupid little girl, you’re dead. And these were bad moments, now, after seeing him. He’d looked so tired. Those scratches and the wrongly buttoned shirt.
We’d been driving maybe twenty minutes—a narrow winding road bordered by woods on both sides—when we found the way blocked by a traffic accident. A silent ambulance with lights sadly splashing the trees, two medics tending a helmeted motorcyclist down on the ground, the bike on its side nearby.
“Er …” Poulsom said. He was in the back with me and Dyson. Merritt was behind the wheel.
“Inconvenient,” Dyson said.
“Reverse,” Poulsom said. “Immediately.”
What happened happened very fast. There was the tiny precise sound of a bullet going neatly through plate glass—and almost simultaneously Merritt’s head lolled on the back of his seat.
Intense dreamy fumbling followed: Poulsom wrangling his gun out of his shoulder holster, Dyson trying to clamber over both of us to the door on the opposite side from the shot, me trying—dreamily knowing it was pointless—to get out of the restraints. It would have looked like the Three Stooges if anyone had been there to see it. I took Dyson’s full body-weight—one booted foot on my thigh—as he launched himself through the rear door, then he was out, stumbling for the cover of the trees.
He didn’t make it. A short burst of automatic gunfire dropped him six feet away. In the silence that followed I felt Poulsom’s body next to mine softening into acceptance.
“Get out, slowly, Poulsom,” a man’s voice said. “Hands where we can see them.” I looked past Merritt’s body through the windscreen. The medics and the motorcyclist were now on their feet by the open back of the ambulance, armed with rifles. It had started raining.
“Well, Talulla,” Poulsom said, quietly, “this is going to be bad for me, I think.” He got out. I sat very still. Not that I had much choice: In my white jail cell I’d been free to move around, but for transportation they’d put me in Guantánamo-style restraints, the I-shaped wrists-and-ankles arrangement that allows short steps only. From the ankles another set of cuffs attached me to the bolted base of the seat.
“Drop the weapon,” the voice told Poulsom. “Get on the ground facedown, hands behind your back. Do it now.”
Looking to my left through the open door I watched Poulsom follow the instructions. A moment after he’d assumed the position an athletic guy in full black combat fatigues melted into view from the darkness behind the trees. A WOCOP Hunter, from the gear, with a dark crewcut and heavy-lidded eyes. He genuflected onto Poulsom’s neck while he cuffed him, then helped him, gently, to his feet.
“Miss?”
I started. The motorcyclist—helmet removed to reveal a young, cheerful face with a goatee and a silver nose stud—was at the other open door on my right, holding a heavy set of wire cutters. Cold wet air touched my face and throat. I was suddenly very thirsty.
“Don’t be alarmed. I’m just going to get your legs free. Excuse me.” He bent, and with hardly any effort clipped through the cable that fastened my ankle restraints to the seat. “Have to leave the others on for a moment,” he said. “If you’d like to take my arm, I can help you out of there. That’s it.”
In spite of the adrenaline rush and frantic figuring (was this Jake’s doing? Was I being busted out?) it was good to stand straight after the cramped hours in the car. I lifted my face to the rain. The night air was delicious with the smell of damp woodland, streaked with the odours of wet tarmac, cordite, diesel an
d the seductive whiff of the motorcycle leathers. This close to transformation the Hunger goes through me in surges that take all the strength out of my legs. I swayed, almost fell. The surge subsided. We were under thick cloud but the moon knew I was there. I get it in the roof of my mouth, my teeth, the palms of my hands, my belly, my cunt. (One of the hells of jail had been the dumb persistence of sex. Jerking off under the covers or in the shower even though I was sure there were cameras, despite Poulsom’s assurances otherwise. He’d said, “I know rising libido is going to be a problem for you as we enter the waxing gibbous phase.” For a terrible moment I thought he was going to offer me the use of his men, or a vibrator, or, God forbid, himself, but he went on: “Please understand, Talulla, surveillance stops at the door to your room. The space you occupy beyond it is one of complete privacy, I promise you. We have absolutely no desire to make things any more difficult for you than necessity dictates.” Which presented one of the other hells of jail: trying to be civil to Poulsom. Truth was I hated him on sight, and he knew it, but he also knew I wasn’t going to risk pissing him off. I read an interview once, someone—an actress—complaining that Christopher Walken—or it could have been James Woods—smelled or maybe even tasted of formaldehyde. Either way I could believe it, and Poulsom had the same deal, the fish eyes and the waxy skin, that look of having been under fluorescents too long …)
