The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin

  There were two guards standing by the metal gates in the wall. They looked at me in glum incomprehension and I showed them the piece of paper with the address on it. Then one them of nodded towards an unobtrusive porch with an intercom on it. I walked up to the intercom.

  ‘Adele?’ the voice in the speaker asked.

  ‘In person.’

  ‘Come up to the first floor, the last door,’ said the intercom. ‘You’ll see when you get here.’

  The door opened.

  It didn’t look much like a block of flats. There wasn’t any lift, or any real stairway either. That is, there was one, but it ended on the first floor, running straight up to a black door with no spy-hole or bell, but with the tiny lens of a TV camera glinting in the wall beside it. As if someone had bought up all the flats from the first floor up and made a single entrance. But that’s a vulgar comparison, owing to the absence of any legitimate culture of large-scale property ownership in Russia. I didn’t have to ring - as soon as I reached the door, it opened.

  Standing in the doorway was a solidly built man of about fifty, dressed like a bandit from the nineties. He was wearing an Adidas tracksuit, trainers and gold - a bracelet and a chain.

  ‘Come in,’ he said, then turned round and walked back down the corridor.

  It was a strange place that looked like some kind of business premises. One of the doors in the corridor was half open. Through the gap I could see a nickel-plated metal pole that disappeared down through a circular hole in the floor. But the client closed the door and I didn’t get a good look at anything.

  ‘Come on in,’ he said, letting me past him.

  The bedroom at the end of the corridor looked perfectly civilized, only I didn’t like the smell - it smelled of dog, quite unmistakably, like in some dogs’ love hotel. As well as a bed, the room contained a low coffee table with a drawer and two armchairs. There was a bottle of champagne on the table, with two glasses, and standing beside them was a telephone with a large number of keys and a blue plastic document folder.

  ‘Where’s the shower?’ I asked.

  The man sat in a chair and indicated the one beside it.

  ‘Wait, there’s no hurry. Let’s get to know each other first.’

  He smiled paternally, and I decided I must have got stuck with one of those soulful clients. Those men who don’t just want your body for their two hundred bucks, but your soul as well. They’re the ones who really wear you out. To stop a soulful client getting carried away, you have to be morose and unsociable. Let the nice man think the girl’s got adolescent problems. During the period when their personalities are taking shape, teenagers are unsociable and uncommunicative, as every paedophile knows very well. Therefore, that kind of behaviour rapidly inflames a pervert’s lust, which results in a saving of time and is helpful in obtaining better payment for your work. But the important thing here is to shut yourself in the bathroom in good time.

  Some foxes who live in America and Europe take a scientific approach to the use of this effect. That is, they think they take a scientific approach, because they prepare by reading the literature that ‘reveals the soul of the modern teenager’. They are particularly fond of reading alleged fifteen-year-old authors who specialize in removing the panties from the inner world of their generation with a shy blush on their cheeks. It’s ridiculous, of course. Teenagers don’t have any common internal dimension - just as people of any other age don’t. Each of them lives in his or her own universe, and these insights into the soul of the young generation are simply the market’s simulacra of freshness for the consumer who’s surfeited with anal sex on video, something like the chemical scent of lily-of-the-valley for toilets. A fox who wants to imitate the behaviour of a modern teenager accurately shouldn’t read those books: instead of making you look like a teenager, they’ll turn you into an old theatrical queer acting out a travesty.

  The correct technique is quite different. And like everything that really works, it’s extremely simple:

  1. In a conversation you should look off to one side, best of all at a spot on the floor about two metres away.

  2. Never answer what people say with more than three words, not counting prepositions and conjunctions.

  3. Every tenth utterance, or thereabouts, should break rule number two and be slightly provocative, so that the client doesn’t get the feeling he’s dealing with an imbecile.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Adele,’ I said, squinting at the floor.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘You sure you’re not lying?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Where are you from, Adele?’

  ‘Khabarovsk, in the Far East.’

  ‘And how are things back in Khabarovsk?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘So why did you come here?’

  I shrugged again.

  ‘Just felt like it.’

  ‘You’re not very talkative.’

  ‘Can I go to the shower?’

  ‘Hang on. We have to get to know each other first. What are we, animals?’

  ‘It’s two hundred dollars an hour.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t it disgust you doing this kind of work, Adele?’

  ‘I have to eat.’

  He picked the folder up off the table, opened it and spent a while looking at it, as if he were checking some kind of instructions. Then he closed it and put it back on the table.

  ‘And where do you live? Are you renting a place?’ he asked.

  ‘Uhu.’

  ‘And how many of you are there in the flat, apart from the madam? Five? Ten?’

  ‘That depends.’

  At this stage the ordinary pervert would already have reached boiling point. And it looked like my employer wasn’t too far away from it either.

  ‘Are you really seventeen, little girl?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, daddy, I am,’ I said, raising my eyes to look at him. ‘Seventeen moments of spring.’

  That was a provocative outburst. He snorted in laughter. What I should have done then was to go back to the short, vague phrases. But it turned out he knew how to be provocative as well.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If that’s the way our chat’s going, it’s time for me to introduce myself.’

  An official ID card appeared on the table in front of me, open. I read what was written in it very carefully, then compared the photograph with his face. In the photograph he was wearing a uniform jacket with epaulettes. His name and patronymic were Vladimir Mikhailovich. He was a colonel in the FSB.

  ‘Call me Mikhalich,’ he said with a smirk. ‘That’s what people who know me well call me. And I hope we’re going to get to know each other very well.’

  ‘To what do I owe the pleasure, Mikhalich?’ I asked.

  ‘One of our consultants complained about you. Apparently you upset him. So now you’ll have to recompensate for it. Or recompense for it. Do you know which is right?’

  He had a stereotypical appearance: a strong chin, steely eyes, a shock of flaxen hair. But a certain trapezoidal quality in the plebeian proportions of his features made his face look like the West’s cliche of its Cold War opponent. Movie characters of that kind usually drank a glass of vodka and then ate the glass as a snack, muttering through the crunching that it was ‘an old Russian custom’.

  ‘Fuck it,’ I muttered. ‘A freebee?’

  ‘Hey,’ he said, offended, ‘don’t you confuse the FSB with the pigs. You’ll get your money all right.’

  ‘How many of you are there?’ I asked in a tired voice.

  ‘Just one . . . Well, two at the most.’

  ‘And who’s the other one?’

  ‘You’ll see in a moment. And don’t worry, I won’t cheat you.’

  He pulled out the drawer of the table and took out a box with all sorts of medical bits and pieces - little jars, cotton wool and a pack of
disposable syringes. One syringe was loaded - the bright-red cap on the needle made it look like a cigarette someone has dragged on so furiously that the flame has extended all the way along it.

  ‘I not shooting up with you,’ I said. ‘Not even for quintuple fees.’

  ‘You fool,’ he said merrily, ‘who’s going to give you any?’

  ‘And I want the money up front. Who knows what you’ll be like in half an hour?’

  ‘Here, take it,’ he said and threw me an envelope.

  Members of the Russian middle class often give me dollars in an envelope - the same way they get them when they receive their ‘unofficial’ salaries. It’s exciting. As if you’ve been raised aloft on the wheel of social insight and offered a glimpse of the intimate linkages in your Homeland’s economic mechanism . . . I opened the envelope and counted the money. The promised triple fee was there, plus another fifty dollars. Effectively the same level of pay as at the National. A client like that ought to be cherished - or at least I ought to pretend to cherish him. I smiled enchantingly.

  ‘Okay, if I have to recompense, I’ll recompensate. Where’s the bathroom.’

  ‘Just wait, will you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got plenty of time. Sit tight.’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Sit tight,’ he repeated and started rolling up his sleeve.

  ‘You said there’d be another one. So where is he?’

  ‘Just as soon as I shoot up, he’ll be here.’

  He put a rubber strap round his biceps, then clasped and unclasped his fist several times.

  ‘What are we shooting?’ I enquired morosely.

  I had to know what to prepare myself for.

  ‘We’re taking a ride down the Kashirksy Highway.’

  I realized the syringe was full of ketamine, an extremely powerful psychedelic that only a psychopath or someone trying to commit suicide would ever inject into a vein.

  ‘What, intravenously?’ I asked, unable to believe it.

  He nodded. I suddenly felt afraid. I couldn’t even stand the ketamine junkies who injected it into the muscle. That stuff had a gloomy kind of effect on them. They became like trolls from beyond the grave, crushed by the weight of some eternal curse - like soldiers in the ghost army in the final episode of The Lord of the Rings. And this guy was about to take it intravenously. I didn’t even know anyone did that. That is, I knew for certain that sane people didn’t do it. A second stiff in less than a month was definitely the very last thing I needed. It was time to clear out.

  ‘Listen, why don’t I give you the money back,’ I said, ‘and we’ll call it a day.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘It’s okay for you, you’ll be dead. But they’ll drag me round the courts. I’d better go.’

  ‘I said sit tight!’ Mikhalich growled.

  He got up, went over to the door, locked it and put the key in his pocket.

  ‘Get up and you’ll regret it. Understand?’

  I nodded. He came back to the table, sat down and took a strange device that looked a bit like a Soviet-designed paper-punch out of his medicine box. The device consisted of two semi-circular plates connected by a simple mechanism. There was a large rubber sucker attached to the lower plate, and the upper one was stamped with a star and an inventory number, like a pistol. Mikhalich brought the two plates together, licked the rubber sucker obsessively and stuck the device on his forearm. Then he set the syringe in the gap, carefully introduced the needle into a vein and checked - the liquid in the syringe had turned dark-red. Then he touched a little lever on the strange device, and it started ticking very loudly. Mikhalich frowned as if he was about to take a leap into water, set his feet wide apart, bracing them more firmly against the floor, and pressed the plunger all the way into the syringe.

  Almost immediately his body went limp in the armchair. For some reason it suddenly occurred to me that that was the way the high priests of the Third Reich had left the world. I listened to the mechanical ticking in alarm - as if it were a bomb that was just about to explode. After a few seconds there was a click, and the paper-punch and syringe sprang off his arm and fell on the floor beside the chair. A small drop of blood appeared in the crook of Mikhalich’s elbow. A clever little invention, I thought. And then it suddenly hit me.

  I have to explain one thing. I can’t read people’s thoughts. And no one can, because people don’t have anything resembling a printed text inside their heads. Not many people are capable of noticing that ripple of thought that runs incessantly across the mind - even in themselves. So reading somebody else’s thoughts is like trying to make out something written on muddy water by a pitchfork in the hands of a madman. I don’t mean the technical difficulty involved, but the practical value of the procedure.

  But thanks to our tail, we foxes often find ourselves in a kind of sympathetic resonance with somebody else’s consciousness - especially when that other consciousness is performing an unexpected somersault. It’s rather like the reaction of peripheral vision to a sudden movement in the dark. We see a brief hallucination, a bit like an abstract computer-animated cartoon. This kind of contact is no use for anything at all, and most of the time our minds simply filter out the effect - otherwise it would be impossible to ride in the Metro. Usually it’s weak, but when people take drugs it’s amplified - that’s why we can’t stand drug addicts.

  When FSB colonels inject ketamine intravenously, strange things happen to them. The ‘ride down the Kshirsky Highway’ was no metaphor, but a rather realistic description: although Mikhalich’s limp body looked like a corpse, his consciousness was hurtling along some kind of orange tunnel filled with spectral forms that he skilfully avoided. The tunnel kept branching sideways and Mikhalich chose which way to turn. It was like a bobsleigh - Mikhalich was controlling his imaginary flight with minute turns of his feet and hands that were invisible to the eye, not even turns really, simply microscopic adjustments of the tension in the corresponding muscles.

  I realized that these orange tunnels were more than just structures in space, they were simultaneously information and will. The entire world had been transformed into an immense self-operating program, like a computer program, except that the hardware and the software couldn’t be told apart. Mikhalich himself was an element of the program, but he possessed freedom of movement in relation to its other components. And his attention was moving through the program towards its beginning, towards a hatch behind which there was something terrible lurking. Mikhalich went flying into the final orange tunnel, reached the hatch and resolutely flung it open. And the terrible thing that was behind it burst out and went hurtling upwards - towards the light of day, up into the room.

  I looked at Mikhalich. He was coming back to life, but in a strange, menacing kind of way. The corners of his mouth were trembling - little spots of either saliva or foam had appeared on them - and I could hear a sound like growling from somewhere in his throat. The growling kept getting louder, and then Mikhalich’s body twitched and arched, and I sensed that in another second the mysterious, terrible power from the bottom of his soul would burst out and be free. I had no time to hesitate - I grabbed the bottle of champagne, swung it hard and hit him on the head.

  To look at, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Mikhalich slumped down in the chair again, and the bottle didn’t even break. But in his internal dimension, with which I was still in contact, something remarkable took place. The bundle of evil power that was rushing up and out from his inner depths lost control and crashed into a complex combination of thought-forms filling the orange tunnel. There was a flash, with pulsating stars and stripes of flame receding all the way to the horizon like the markings on an infinitely long runway. It was blindingly beautiful and reminiscent of a news report I saw in the 1960s of a trimaran speed-boat that crashed: the speedboat lifted up off the water, performed a slow, thoughtful loop-the-loop and shattered into small fragments against the surface of the lake. Almost the same thing happened this time, only instead
of the speedboat it was the lake that was smashed into tiny pieces: the transparent structures filling the orange tunnel fell to pieces and went flying off in all directions with a melodic tinkling sound, fading, shrinking and disappearing. And then the whole universe of orange tunnels went dark and disappeared, as if the electricity lighting it up had been cut off. All that was left was a man lying limply in a chair and a melodic sound that was repeated over and over again until I realized it was the phone.

  I answered it.

  ‘Mikhalich?’ a man’s voice asked.

  ‘Mikhalich can’t come to the phone right now,’ I said. ‘He’s very busy.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  I couldn’t think of any short and simple answer. After a few seconds of silence the person on the other end of the line hung up.

  What a crazy idea that was - to change the name of the KGB. One of the greatest brand names ever was simply destroyed! The KGB was known all over the world. But not every foreigner will understand what the FSB is. One American lesbian who hired me for the weekend kept confusing ‘FSB’ and ‘FSD’ all the time. ‘FSD’ is ‘female sexual dysfunction’, an illness invented by the pharmaceutical companies in order to launch the production of the female version of Viagra. Sexual dysfunction in women is a bluff, of course: in female sexuality it’s not the physical aspects that are important, so much as the context - candles, champagne, words. And to be completely honest about it, the most important condition for the modern female orgasm is a high level of material prosperity. You can’t solve that with a pill - as Bill Clinton said: It’s the economy, stupid. But I’m digressing again.

  Although the name of the KGB was changed, the personnel remained the same as before, disciplined and tough. Any normal man would have been out cold for a long time after a blow like that from a bottle. But Mikhalich started to come round quite soon. Perhaps that was because he received the blow in an altered state of consciousness - when the physical properties of the body are transformed, as any alcoholic can testify.