Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  After that I’d got organised, brought to libido the same management skills I’d applied to the restaurants and delis – until pregnancy and the Hunger started their war and my sex-drive died, albeit with the warning that it wouldn’t stay dead for ever.

  Two hundred years, you get around to it... Would I? I’d never had sex with a woman, though it worked often enough as a fantasy. Women together in porn turned me on too, although in the desperate days jellyfish together would have turned me on. (I knew what was wrong with pornography. But the part of me that knew was weaker than the part of me that didn’t care as long as it worked. Of course it was depressing – and responsible for making the question every twenty-first century female was sooner or later faced with Will you put in your mouth something that’s just been in your ass? Back when I might have wanted the cheap thrill of a guy’s contempt or the dreary high of self-degradation, maybe; but since the Curse I found I wanted different things... But when you needed to get yourself off it was hard to take the long view. Harder still when the long view in question was four hundred years.) I might have slept with a woman already if ubiquitous male coercion hadn’t put me off. (Richard, my ex-husband, made a monotonous art of it, allegedly mitigated by what he thought of as glamorously brutal honesty: I don’t want you to want to do it, for God’s sake. I want you to go down on a woman in spite of not wanting to. Jesus, where’s the fun in it for me if you want to? I thought everyone knew that.) Jake would’ve added his share, if he’d lived. He was wulf, but sufficiently wer so that he’d soon enough have been angling for a two-girl-one-guy fuckkilleat if my being the only female lycanthrope on earth hadn’t made it impossible.

  Fuckkilleat.

  I don’t just like it, I’d confessed to Jake. I don’t just like it. I love it. (And his hand between my legs had rewarded me. We’d exchanged horrors like wedding vows. Love and a shared nature could make any ugliness beautiful. Which left what was left when your lover was dead.) That was the inconvenient truth: killing and eating a victim felt very (pause) very (pause) good. And killing and eating a victim with someone you loved? It was as the heroin addicts said of their drug: if God made anything better, He kept it for Himself. The memory of the kill with Jake at Big Sur bubbled stickily around everything else in my head, caramelizing my brain. It had been bliss. That was the word: bliss. You don’t forget bliss. Especially when you know you’ll never have it again. Even if I got my appetite back it wouldn’t be the same. The Curse insisted there was no solo route to heaven. You needed a partner in crime. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Really? It didn’t feel like it facing four centuries of never draining the filthy Grail again. My mother once told me she thought hell would be nothing more than being given a glimpse of God – then having it taken away, for ever.

  Which thought led me back to the question I’d forbidden myself from asking, and which I couldn’t stop asking, and which I’d been asking since the first days after Jake’s death: Couldn’t I make myself a companion?

  Werewolves don’t reproduce sexually, the journal said:

  Howler girls are eggless, howler boys dud of spunk. If you haven’t had kids by the time you’re turned you’re not having any, get used to it. Lycanthropic reproduction is via infection: survive the bite and the Curse is yours.

  But here’s the thing, the old news, the stale headline: no one is surviving the bite any more.

  Thanks to a virus. For which WOCOP had found a cure. A cure they’d shot into me the night I was bitten. (The organisation had had an internal crisis: with werewolves at the brink of extinction the Hunt had all but cancelled its own paycheck; the guys who did their job so well they did themselves out of a job. Certain members had realised this and resolved on getting monster numbers back up. The World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena found itself facing an insurgent offspring, the World Organisation for the Creation of Occult Phenomena. The ideologues and old-schoolers, horrified, reacted by coming down hard on the rebel faction, but in the interim I’d been darted – accidentally – with what turned out to be an efficacious version of the anti-virus. I was bitten, I didn’t die, I changed.) So if any of my victims survived, wouldn’t they become werewolves too, the old-fashioned way? In theory it was as simple as finding a guy I liked then taking him for a moonlit stroll at that time of the month. If you go down in the woods today... Except of course for the minor snag of how his feelings towards me would change once he realised that every full moon he’d have to transform into a monster and rip someone to pieces and eat them. I know you hate me for doing this to you, but trust me, once you’ve experienced fuckkilleat you’ll be glad I did... Not a good start to a relationship. But what was the alternative? My libido was dead now but resurrection was only a matter of time. There was no kidding myself I was going to make it through the next four hundred years effectively – by werewolf standards – celibate.

  That isn’t going to be the problem, Lulu, I imagined my mother saying. The problem is going to be finding a man worth Turning...

  I was shivering so badly now I couldn’t hold the journal steady. I set it aside and crawled onto the bed, hands swollen, body jabbering with cramps. Random memories detonated: lying with my face on the Brooklyn stoop watching a bee sipping a puddle of spilled Pepsi; my mother laughing at something grown-up; my first period, that warm trickle like a big teardrop but I put my fingers there and it was blood and Mrs Herschel saying in a smokey sisterly way you’re a young lady now Talulla, which just made me think of Lady Diana and creepy big-eared Prince Charles.

  ‘It’s time,’ Cloquet said from the doorway.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘As we decided?’

  ‘Yes.’

  As we decided. We hadn’t decided anything. We’d made hypothetical observations. Outside would be easier to deal with. We shouldn’t forget we have sedatives. It would be better if I went out first. Behind these were bald specifics: Cloquet would give her a sedative. I would go into the forest. He would bring her out and tie her up. I would come out of the dark and take her life, quickly. Or as quickly as the hunger’s tastes allowed.

  At the thought of which wulf gave me a jolt of demand that nearly threw me from the bed.

  ‘You better go,’ I said. My watch showed 16.42. Moonrise was 17.11. Twenty-nine minutes. I wondered if Kaitlyn was awake. What sort of life she’d be leaving behind. No one who gives a shit about me’s got any money. The sour-smelling jeans and the chipped nail polish and the trying not to see the contempt the guys had for her even when they were holding her head and going Oh yeah baby, that’s it, just like that, you could still tell it was contempt just beneath – but the hunger interrupted with a flash of her midriff punctured and the soft white meat opening with helpless obedience (the word ‘flensing’ suggested itself, though I wasn’t even sure I knew what it meant) and I couldn’t lie still any longer but got up and staggered with unstrung knees downstairs and watched Cloquet draw the sedative into the syringe and we couldn’t quite look each other in the eye.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked. I stood in the doorway, flesh heavy with the sordid basics of my needs. My old voice inside still sometimes objected: You can’t do this. It’s the worst thing. You have to stop. My old voice was a machine that didn’t realise its own obsolescence. Because while it went on the new voice eloquently didn’t say anything, knew it didn’t have to, knew the argument was already won. And in any case, this wasn’t the worst thing, killing Kaitlyn. I knew what the real worst thing was. I’d known since the night I met Delilah Snow.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. He’d left me blankets on the couch. So I’d have something between me and the cold when I stripped. Practicalities, like biology, endured.

  ‘I’ll go downstairs now,’ he said. Gentle. For my benefit. So I’d be kind to myself and not mind the murder.

  When I change I change fast. The moon drags the whatever-it-is up from the earth and it goes through me with crazy wriggling impatience. I picture it as an electri
cal discharge, entering at my soles and racing upwards in haywire detonations that shock the bones and explode the neurons. The magic’s dark red, violent, compressed. I get random flashes of mundane memory – pushing a shopping cart around Met Foods; opening my apartment window; standing on a subway platform; saying to someone, No, that’s carbohydrates in the evenings – intercut with images of the kills: a white male body on an oil-stained warehouse floor; a solitary trailer with a storm lamp burning; a female thigh releasing a dark arc of blood; my clawed hand scooping out a still-hot heart. This is the Curse’s neatest trick: one type of memory doesn’t destroy the other. It’s still you. It’s still all you. You wouldn’t think you were built to bear such opposites, but you are. You’d think the system would crash, but it doesn’t.

  Meanwhile, the freak biology show. My lungs expand, threaten to burst against the ribs – but never do. My spine elongates in three, four, five spasms and the claws come all at once, like speeded-up film of shoots sprouting. I’m twisted, torn, churned, throttled – then rushed through a blind chicane into ludicrous power. Muscular and skeletal wrongness at an elusive stroke put right. A heel settles. A last canine hurries through. A shoulder blade pops. The woman is a werewolf.

  And she’s starving.

  I stood, transformed (jaws open, tongue as thick as a baby’s arm, breath going up in signals of dreadful life), half a dozen trees back from the edge of the drive. Moments ago I hadn’t wanted this. Now I wanted nothing else. Same every time: you forgot the Curse was an exchange, took your speech and your mercy but gave you in return the planet’s dumb throb and your own share in it. Lilac shadows on the snow, the fine-tuned trees, the Eucharist moon and the victim’s heart like a song calling you home.

  Kaitlyn wouldn’t see me waiting here. She wouldn’t see me until the last moment, but in all the moments before the last moment she’d know what she didn’t want to know, that the worst thing had come to her. The worst thing was a simple thing, an old thing, an ordinary thing – and here it was. She’d look for God, guardian angels, miraculous intervention – and get nothing. Just the trees and the snow and the moon – nothing from them either. She’d get the real universe, once, before the end.

  The two of them emerged from the front doorway, Kaitlyn tranquilised, Cloquet struggling to hold her up. He’d dressed her warmly, hat, gloves, fleece. Reflex kindness. Or else he didn’t want the cold to undermine the sedative. A few steps past the Cherokee her left knee buckled and she went down, crookedly. I could see him considering fireman’s-lifting her, the effort it would take to carry her all the way to the trees. He settled for uncuffing her and taking her arm over his shoulder, wrapping his other arm around her waist, her head lolling. As they staggered towards me, I thought, Like a guy and his drunk girlfriend.

  A voice with a weird accent said: ‘Twenty thousand years, you think you’ve seen it all.’

  I jumped. It was right behind me (how the fuck?) – but when I turned there was no one there.

  For a moment I stood still, breath moist and warm around my muzzle.

  Then my waters broke.

  6

  As with all dreaded things, once it happened it felt inevitable.

  Of course I’d known it was a possibility. Simple math determined an approximately one in thirty chance labour would coincide with a full moon. Cloquet and I had prepared. We had labour-inducing drugs: Pitocin, dinoprostone, misoprostol. We had (or would have had, if the consignment hadn’t been stuck at Anchorage) half a dozen amniohooks – little plastic crochet-needle type instruments used if the drugs don’t work to rupture the membrane of the amniotic sac – though the thought of having to resort to these terrified both of us. The plan had been to wait until the thirty-sixth or -seventh week then make a decision: induce and risk slight prematurity or leave it and risk having to give birth... like this. Radical prematurity I’d refused to prepare for. Radical prematurity would just mean – in the old universe where things meant things – that the baby wasn’t meant to survive.

  Well, now we’d find out.

  Ghost voice shoved aside, I looked down at the steaming splash my waters had made in the snow. The passing of the mucus plug from the cervix is known as the show. It is a sign that labour is soon to start, but it goes unnoticed by many women. Many women and one idiot werewolf. The amniotic sac ruptures either shortly before or at any time during the first stage of labour. The first stage of labour lasts on average 6-12 hours. The second stage of lab— I screamed. Yelped, rather. All the times you’ve heard women talk about this pain it’s remained a mystery. Then one day it comes to you. Your version. The only version that matters. I thought of my Aunt Vera telling my mother about the thirty-hour labour she had for my cousin Andy: They kept telling me to pant like a dog, but it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. I told that dumb-ass doctor why didn’t he try meowing like a cat... In Westerns it was men pacing up and down outside and trying to get in and being shooed away by a plain old housemaid suddenly filled with occult authority, or a sour grandmother everyone thought hated the girl but it turns out loves her and delivers her baby. There was this mental blur and flutter, images of people ripping up bedsheets and putting water on to boil, female screams and the sweaty big-thighed woman in the Sex Ed video, Lauren whispering, If your kid’s too big your pussy tears open and they have to stitch you up. It rewrites the contract, I’d read somewhere. Your self’s no longer central. This thing comes out of you and drags half your soul along after it like a blanket.

  Another pain went through me, an effect like the sudden splintering thunder of a fighter jet overhead. They kept telling me to pant like a dog. Like a dog. Ha ha—

  A moment of blindness, the world swung up. I found I’d fallen to my knees and bent forward, elbow-deep in the snow. My head was giant and wayward, too much for my neck. I crawled into the moonlight expecting its balm, but there was nothing. Just another contraction that doubled me, lips curled, fists clenched. I thought of the care Poulsom had taken of me in the white jail, the Harrods towels and beaming bathroom. In his own way he’d contributed, if this child survived. I wanted my mother. Her ghost, her voice in my head, anything of her so I wouldn’t be going through this alone and she could tell me it would be all right and because it was her I’d believe it.

  But there was nothing. Of course there was nothing.

  I got to my feet and lurched, wet-thighed towards the drive.

  Cloquet knew immediately something was wrong, and almost simultaneously what was wrong. He let go of Kaitlyn (who collapsed) and came towards me, but I waved him back. (Waving, gesturing, miming. Not many worse times to lose the power of speech.) He stopped, suffered a moment of paralysis, mouth open, arms held slightly away from his sides, then turned, grabbed Kaitlyn’s hand, yanked her to her feet and all but dragged her back into the house. By the time I crawled across the threshold he’d cuffed her, semi-conscious, to the cistern pipe in the downstairs bathroom.

  ‘Merde... merde... merde...’ he said, neutrally, as if the emotions under the word were missing. His face was pale and not just clammy but wet. ‘ Oh, mon ange, mon ange...’ still without discernible feeling. ‘Jesus. Fuck. Merde.’

  I had enough strength to get to the couch, but I knew that would be the last of my legs for a while. Cloquet, now that we’d come to it, froze. Through the pain I could see that confronted with the central fact – you have to deliver a werewolf’s baby – he was capable of all sorts: fainting; taking a Ski-Doo and riding away; cutting my head-off; going for medical help; sitting down and smoking a cigarette.

  He needn’t have worried. I didn’t want him there. Not just because in the absence of any real knowledge (despite his bedside Essentials of Obstetrics and Gynaecology) there was nothing he could do, but because I couldn’t spare the consciousness his presence would demand. What was happening to me would require all the consciousness, all the being, all the anything I had. Which still wouldn’t be enough.

  A contraction came, and a last defiant surge of hunge
r met it head-on. One moment of balance – a salt whiff of groggy Kaitlyn; even Cloquet briefly risked a clawed swipe – then appetite went, seared away in the solar flare of another contraction, and I was left with the one priority, the womb’s screaming monomania: Get this fucking thing out of me.

  7

  I ended up under the dining table, though I couldn’t tell you how I got there. Your bitch will seek a covered over or tucked-away place to litter. She may ignore the whelping box, however comfortable you’ve made it, but this is normal. Let her follow her inclinations. A great hoot for wulf was doing away with any delusions of dignity your human half might have. Somewhere between hotel reruns of Friends and surreally perused Elles I’d gone to canine-health.com, the tone of which alternated between pseudo-clinical and gratingly down-home. Mom will NOT thank you for bright lights and crowds on her big day, however much the kids (and adults!) might want to watch. Give the little lady some PRIVACY. I’d visited the website in a moment of self-ridicule, and couldn’t have spent more than two minutes scanning its content, but it had gone in. Lycanthrope hard-wiring or a subconscious concession to my one-in-thirty chance of needing it. And now here I was, needing it.

  Push. Don’t push. Breathe. Pant. Push. Breathe. Don’t push. According to Essentials there was a technique, a method. I might have had it memorised once but I didn’t have it now. What I had now was the feeling of slowly splitting – starting between my legs – in half. (Plus irritation that there even was a method. What about the millions of women who’d had their babies without being told when to push and breathe and pant? This is all bullshit, Lauren had whispered in Sex Ed. Women in the Amazon just go off into the jungle and give birth on their own. They dig a hole and fill it with leaves and squat over it. They don’t have stirrups and enemas and fucking doctors talking about golf.) No position was bearable for long. I had to keep moving: all-fours; side; back; squatting. The contractions emptied my mind of everything, the way God must have felt before creation, when it was just Him on His own, without the angels or even Time going by. Between contractions was the terrible fact of my finiteness, the exact shape and size of the body that somehow had to accommodate all this. Mom will NOT thank you for bright lights. This turned out to be true. The lodge ceiling had angled spots on its exposed beams and for some reason Cloquet (more miming had got him out of the house, from where he could have continued to Disneyland for all I cared) had left all of them on. In the moments when I wasn’t God I was aware of them giving me a headache. My claws scored the oak floor. Blood gossiped and thumped in my skull. Random details came and went with pointless vividness: the little brass logo on the range door; Cloquet’s yellow road atlas of the USA & Canada; a small carved wooden bear on the mantle; my The North Face jacket on a chair, one red thermal glove hanging out of its pocket. The room was like something stupidly smiling in the face of horror. Was it the Vietnamese who smiled when terrified? Some movie. Platoon or Full Metal Jacket. I was aware of my own crammed silence. At one point I heard something like metal grinding rhythmically in the bathroom where Kaitlyn was tied-up, then it went quiet again.