Barking

by Tom Holt

  ‘That’s perfectly true,’ Duncan said. ‘But what the hell. If not her, someone else.’

  ‘Anybody so long as it’s not us.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Luke nodded. ‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘A solo werewolf. Can’t see it myself. You’ll forever be an unpaired sock in the laundry basket of eternity. And to be honest, I don’t see it working out - you and Little Miss Eyeshadow there. After all, there’s Them and there’s Us. Brave, upbeat words don’t change anything. The jury’s heard it all before.’ He stood up; wearily, no spring in his step this time. ‘I think I’d better go now, before I say something nasty. Take care of yourself, Duncan. You know where to find us.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The door closed. Duncan shut his eyes and counted to fifty, listening to the sound of Luke’s footsteps, tracing his scent through the corridors. His oldest, best friend. His past. Oh well, he thought. And the others . . . But they’d never really been friends, had they? Too close for friendship.

  He opened his eyes, made an effort to unclench his clenched muscles, sighed, sat down. It was only when he was leaning back in the chair with his feet on the desk that he realised he’d turned round three times first. Can’t be a lone wolf, he thought, they just don’t happen. Not a human being any more. Not anything, really. It’d be nice to be something, though.

  The phone on the desk rang. He frowned, then picked it up.

  ‘Me again.’

  He caught his breath. Bowden Allshapes. Now he really hadn’t been expecting to hear from her. ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘I forgot to mention,’ she said. ‘You do know I’ve got the power to turn you back into an ordinary human being again, don’t you? Easy as pie. For me, not for anybody else.’

  Duncan tried to breathe out, but something had got itself stuck. ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. I was going to mention it earlier, but then you ambushed me with your nasty, spiteful trick, and that drove it clean out of my mind. So sorry.’

  ‘You mean—’ Pulling himself together took an effort that was nearly beyond his strength. ‘You could really do that? Put me back the way I was.’

  ‘Absolutely. No more superpowers, of course, but so what? Everybody else makes do without them. And everybody else - practically everybody else - is happier than you. Now if I was a small-minded, petty, vengeful person who bore grudges, I’d say no, the hell with him, he’ll just have to get on with it. Why should he have his nice old life back again, after what he’s done to me? Especially since there’s nothing you can do about it, now that that dreadful Mr Eddison’s taken charge of the case. A lot of people in my position might think that way, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Duncan said quietly. ‘I suppose so.’

  A theatrical sigh. ‘I suppose it means I’m a small-minded, petty, vengeful person,’ she said, ‘because as far as I’m concerned you can stay a werewolf till you die of mange. Just thought you ought to know what your precious revenge has cost you, that’s all. Straight back to the office, George, and don’t take any notice of those silly red-and-green lights. Life’s too short for traffic signals.’

  The line went dead. Slowly and carefully, Duncan put the receiver back. Shit, fuck and bugger, he thought, but on the other hand, never mind. It’d only be really bad for a few days each month. (And if women could cope with that sort of aggravation, so could he, probably.) Apart from that; well. There may be troubles ahead, but while there’s moonlight and howling and love and romance, let’s face the music and chase lorries.

  ‘Where’s Luke?’ Veronica was back in the room. Her office, after all. He looked up and caught sight of the coffin. A vampire: he was in love (probably) with a vampire. Marvellous. Then he noticed that there were picture postcards Blu-Tacked on the side of it: white hotels standing out against royal-blue skies. Did the secretaries remember, when they sent holiday postcards to everybody at the office, that having a great time on the beach soaking up the sun wasn’t the most tactful message, in context? Apparently not. It was, after all, just an office. If you like your boss, it’s only polite to send her a postcard . . .

  If they can forget, Duncan thought, maybe I can, too.

  ‘You just missed him,’ he said. ‘She’s gone, then.’

  ‘Yes, I’m delighted to say. Horrible woman, and I don’t care if we have lost all that business. I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but there’re some people you’d really rather not work for, even if they do pay on time and don’t argue about the bill. Oh, while I think of it, what do you reckon to us getting married? ’

  Duncan frowned. ‘I don’t know,’ he said gravely. ‘I think, on balance, probably yes.’ He nodded toward the coffin. ‘Do you think there’ll be room for both of us in that thing? Only I’m blowed if I’m going to hang upside down from the ceiling all night, so—’

  ‘You can get double ones,’ Veronica replied. ‘Special order, and you get ever such funny looks in the showroom. Also they do lids that fold up the middle, like pianos. I prefer to sleep with the lid down, you see, but—’ She shrugged. ‘You do realise that that’ll be the least of our problems?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She nodded. ‘That’s all right, then. I’ll have to check my diary, but I think I’m free all day on the twenty-third, if that suits you.’

  ‘I expect so. After all,’ he added, ‘the rest of my life’s my own.’

  Then she smiled at him; a big, sunny smile. He hadn’t actually seen the teeth before. He decided they weren’t too bad. Suited her, if anything.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ she said.

  George was waiting in the car.

  It was a nice car. The seats were real leather, the dashboard was real burr walnut, the floor carpet was real wool. It was quite probably the realest car in the world, or at least outside California. But humans, even dead humans, can only stand so much reality, and George spent a lot of time waiting in the car. Because he was brain-dead, his muscles, nerves and tendons operated by an external power source and guided by an external intelligence, it shouldn’t have mattered terribly much. The George (it wasn’t his real name) who’d once been a racing driver no longer existed in the eyes of the law, which held that once the brain stopped working, life was extinct, and the parcel of meat wrapped in skin that was left over was neither here nor there. Quite so. You couldn’t argue with that.

  George’s hands, folded in his lap, twitched. Very slowly, his thumbs began to move, circling each other like wary boxers.

  The thing about the law is, though, that from time to time it contradicts itself. There was no George, because he was dead. But the driver of the car existed; and, because the traffic police have this tiresome habit of pulling people over from time to time and asking to see their papers, George had been issued with a driving licence. It gave his full name (George Non Cogito Ergo Non Sum Watson), an address, a date of birth, stuff like that. It told the world that George was qualified to drive cars, motorbikes, passenger-service vehicles, articulated lorries, combine harvesters and tanks. There was also an endorsement for speeding.

  George’s thumbs slowed down and stopped turning. Then, as the wind stirred and the moon broke through the heavy layer of black cloud, they started turning the other way.

  Someone with a lively imagination, reading George’s driving licence, could make up a life based on those sparse facts. He’d been born - well, you could picture the scene. Father standing out of the way looking petrified, mother pulling faces and yelling for more pethedine, nurse calm and brisk, various relatives sitting glumly on the vinyl-covered benches in the corridor. At some point he’d learned to drive; an examiner had shown him a page of colourful symbols and he’d said, ‘I think that one’s beware of migratory toads crossing a dual carriageway.’ And so many different classes of vehicle, everything from milk floats to self-propelled artillery. You couldn’t help being intrigued by that.

  George’s hands clenched. The knuckles showed white.

  And the point was, the law
believed in the man in the licence. The traffic policeman wouldn’t hand it back with a sad smile on his face and say, pull the other one, it’s got bells on it. The law had faith. It trusted itself; because if you can’t trust the creation of lawyers, what could you trust?

  George glanced at the clock on the dashboard. She’d said, Wait here, I’ll only be a minute, and that had been five hours ago. A little voice that shouldn’t have been there clicked its insubstantial tongue and muttered, women.

  Impatience: a human trait. George felt in the inside pocket of his jacket and took out the driving licence. He looked at it for a moment, then put it back, reached forward and turned the key in the ignition.

  There was no voice in his head telling him where to go, but he drove anyway. The name he’d read on the licence was a joke at his expense, he knew that: George I-Don’t-Think-Therefore-I-Am-Not. She liked to make little jokes like that. Lively sense of humour. Well.

  I drive, therefore I am. You can’t not be and still manage a gearbox. He headed down a slip road onto the dual carriageway and let his foot snuggle a little more firmly on the accelerator. Because the moon was full and the moonlight was as bright as day, he turned off the headlights. His eyes, expertly maintained by the finest technicians, didn’t need great vulgar jets of artificial brightness. He wound the window down and felt the slipstream on his cheek.

  And he thought, I’m thinking.

  The same technicians had done a bang-up job on his brain, too. He thought: if I’m thinking, it implies that her power is waning, something to do with the trick the werewolf played on her, the one we’re not supposed to know about. But his dead ears had taken in every word she said into her mobile phone as she sat in the back, oblivious to his presence; he knew that she was - dying? Not the right word, but the effect would be the same. Her power was slipping back like the tide (influenced, he vaguely remembered, by the phases of the moon; now there was a coincidence) on the ebb - he was suddenly thinking once again.

  He thought: I hate my job.

  Which goes to show just how good those skilled technicians were; because very few of the millions of people who hate their jobs ever get around to admitting it in so many unambiguous words, and of that small minority, only a fraction ever take it into their heads to do something about it. Which was what George did.

  I’m driving without lights, he thought, and I’m doing, what, (his left foot pressed a little harder) eighty miles an hour in a forty limit. I could get busted. They’d have my licence. And no licence, no job—

  He checked his mirror and frowned. There’s never a copper around when you need one.

  No police car - but there was something in the mirror. He looked again, and made out five dark shapes, following him. Too small for cars, but moving fast. He slowed a little, and saw that he was being followed by what looked like five long black dogs. Big dogs. Enormous dogs with red eyes and lolling tongues, chasing behind him at seventy miles an hour and closing—

  He remembered being stabbed with the pencil. There had been a moment when her power had let go, and the man whose name wasn’t George had woken up inside the perfectly maintained dead body, realised where he was, and screamed.

  He checked the petrol gauge. Nearly empty. She’d said something about filling up on the way home, now he came to think of it. Running out of fuel while being pursued by wolves: the stuff of nightmares.

  The car had central locking, naturally. He leaned across and lifted the little peg thing. Down to lock, up to open. Five locks clicked simultaneously, like the heels of Prussian officers.

  He grinned. ‘Catch me if you can, boys,’ he said, and stood on the gas.

  In the white heat of the New Mexico desert, a long way from anywhere, there’s a small town. Nothing much: a diner, a gas station, a general store, a feed and seed merchant, some grim-looking frame houses and a small building right out on the edge of town where people only go if they absolutely have to.

  On the door of that building there’s a brass plate: Hughes & Hughes, attorneys-at-law.

  There’s nothing much to do in that sort of small town except spread malicious gossip about your neighbours, especially if they happen to be incomers, so it’s hardly surprising that there were strange rumours about the young couple who ran the law office. Odd things happened, they said, particularly at night, particularly at certain times of the month. Long-distance truckers had seen things they didn’t want to talk about. A few head of cattle had gone missing. Folks took care to get the chickens in at night, and not because of the coyotes.

  Some people figured it was because the young couple liked to go for picnics out on the old military ranges, where they’d done the secret tests back in the 1950s. Mostly, though, people reckoned it was because they were British. Enough said.

  It didn’t stop the townsfolk going to them when they needed their services. They had a reputation for being bright, cheerful and efficient, their charges were quite reasonable and their clients always paid on time, just in case. Maybe there was something a bit odd about them, but the same goes for everybody, to a greater or lesser extent. In small communities you get used to people after a while. You make allowances, even for late-night howling, fluttering black shapes in the twilight, calling cookies biscuits and drinking tea. But you keep your distance, all the same. (The way they see it in small desert towns is that everybody’s weird, deep down under the skin where it doesn’t necessarily show. Maybe it’s radiation, or something that bit you, or the intrusive surgery the aliens performed on you when they snatched you out of your car one moonlit night, or the side effects of a damp climate and tannin addiction; maybe it’s human nature. Inside every normal person there’s a strange person, a wacko; probably in no hurry to escape, because wackos don’t get out much, preferring to stay inside and brood on their particular obsession. Slice open anybody’s head, they reckon, and you’re more likely than not to find the walls of the skull papered with hundreds of photographs of the president or Jodie Foster, while ‘Mister Tambourine Man’ plays softly in the background on a continuous loop. But that’s no big deal, they say; because inside every wacko inside every normal person, there’s an even smaller normal person waiting to get out, and so on for ever, like Russian dolls. Of course, they would think that, living miles from anywhere in the desert, hopelessly inbred for ten generations, their poor brains fried by the fallout from the secret weapons tests. People like that are capable of believing in any damn thing. Werewolves, even.)

  And, when the full moon shines on Chiswick, five wolves stand motionless on the moonlight-bleached grass beside the dual carriageway. They sniff the air, and the biggest wolf lifts his head and howls. They wait, listening for an answer, which never comes.