Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  I passed out.

  When I woke the door was closed and there were at least twenty wolves lying in a circle around me. Their warmth quilted me but was spoiled here and there by the air from the broken window. I pulled out the last skewer and fresh blood oozed from the wound. Then another contraction came – and with it the realisation that the reason I felt as if I was still in labour was that I was still in labour.

  10

  My son, whom I’d lost the right to name, was born into violence and death. His twin sister, whom I named Zoë, was born surrounded by the warmth of wolves.

  I fell asleep after delivering her. In spite of the conviction the vampires would return I dropped down into darkness and darkness closed over me. It was wonderful to surrender. The last thing I remember was licking her snout clean, turning on my side and holding her close to my chest. That and three of the wolves dragging the vampire’s body and head out into the snow.

  •

  Hard to tell how long I was out. It could’ve been minutes or hours. At any rate it was dim daylight when I woke. In human form.

  With a human baby in my arms.

  I’d slept through transformation.

  I thought of how exhausted I would have to have been for that, how vulnerable I would have been if—

  Wait. Her too: she’d changed back. No sign of trauma. She was awake, quiet, blinking dark-eyed out of her bloodstained face.

  Then immediately there it was.

  What they’d done.

  Like a careful rape.

  And I’d just let them.

  I’d seen a news report a few years ago. A group of project-housing mothers in New Jersey who’d been charged with assaulting a neighbour when they found out he was on the child sex-offenders register. One of them had kept repeating: If you gotta kill to protect your kids then you kill. You got no right to call yourself a mother if you wouldn’t kill to protect your kids. You got no right to even have kids if you wouldn’t kill to protect them. The mob of women around her were ravished and pouchy-faced with righteousness. You ain’t no kinda mother if you wouldn’t kill for your kids.

  I lay still. Molecular renewal tickled my wounds. My jacket partly covered me and the child. A grey wolf lay pressed up warm and soft against my back. Another lay close to my front, keeping the baby snug. The room throbbed with the pack’s consciousness and the heat of their bodies and the not-silence of falling snow. All the animal corpses had been removed and the lodge’s front door pushed shut. Peace had returned to my womb, which for a moment made me feel small and sorry for myself and grateful.

  But there it was again like a reflex. What they’d done. And I’d just let them.

  Animal documentaries loved to linger over the horror of mothers who rejected their offspring. The robotically grazing ewe deaf to the shivering lamb’s cries. Now I’d joined the club. As with all appalling self-discovery it brought a thrill – and a feeling of déjà vu. And as with all appalling self-discovery there was nothing to do but accept it, like the first time a hairdresser holds up a mirror and shows you the back of your head.

  When I moved to ease the pins and needles in my left leg I felt something wet and pulpy between my thighs. The placenta is pushed out 5 to 15 minutes after delivery of the foetus. Two placentas, in this case. Zoë’s umbilical cord still attached her to hers – panic again – until I remembered reading that it didn’t matter: left alone the cord detached naturally. It was doctors who were in a hurry to get everything snipped off and tied up, with racquetball and call-girls waiting. There are no nerve endings in the umbilicus, therefore neither mother nor baby feels the cut. Still, the thought of cutting it myself gave me a twinge. Me, who ripped people apart and ate them. Serves you righ—

  Cloquet coughed, and I realised that was the sound that had woken me. I turned to see him sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, holding an improvised dressing against a wound in his left shoulder. He was pale and haggard and piebald with blood. His hands and face were badly cut from the crash through the window. One deep gash along the line of his brow needed stitches. His hair was greasy. Along with his body’s other woes, I knew, his scalp would be aching. There were these thoughts, but they were little details against the continuous pounding consciousness of what they’d done and I’d just let them.

  ‘How badly are you hurt?’ I asked.

  ‘The bullet went through. You?’ He was avoiding looking at me because despite the jacket a lot of me was on show and he was still weirdly delicate about all that.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘They took him.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  They took him. Having language back made it precise and ugly and real. Suddenly there was the scalloped space in me, the hole left by the scooped-out avocado stone, shocking, raw, basic. The room held a pungent memory of what had happened in it, like the smell of cordite after a gunshot. I saw them sticking the skewers in me and prising my fingers from his warm body and stuffing him in the bag. I saw myself pinned and felt the helicopter’s dark mass lifting, higher, further, quieter, silence, gone. The mental re-run filled me with anti-energy, a self-perpetuating mass of weakness. The scalloped space wasn’t empty after all. It was full of failure.

  I imagined myself saying to Cloquet: I’m going to get him back. I saw the future saying it would commit me to, all the things I’d have to do, Jake’s loathed rubbish heap of ifs and thens, the certainty that I wouldn’t get him back but would die trying and leave my daughter an orphan. I mustn’t think about her. Her brother had left her behind so I’d never forget what I’d let them do to him – and why I’d let them do it. Again I imagined saying to Cloquet: I’m going to get him back. I knew that’s what I should say. This calf, the animal documentary voiceover said, has been rejected by its mother. Weak and unprotected, it offers an easy target to predators on the lookout for a quick kill. I thought how long it would be before I’d be able to take pleasure in buying a beautiful pair of shoes, or walk on a beach in the evening, or sit at a café with a cup of coffee and a cigarette watching total strangers go by. Probably never. Amongst other things I hated him for having been taken. I could have laughed at that. A different hilarity, not dark, but the colour of nothingness.

  A wolf got up, stretched, yawned. A third time I imagined myself saying to Cloquet: I’m going to get him back. It made the nerves in my mouth wilt.

  ‘It was her,’ Cloquet croaked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The woman. The vampire. It was Jacqueline Delon.’

  Au revoir, Talulla. It had registered, that she’d known my name. Well, now I knew hers. Jacqueline Delon. Jake had fucked her, of course (and according to the diary got her off, orally, as I recalled), for which my obsolete self resented him, unfairly, since I knew all too well how it was on the Curse. The last he’d seen of her she was being used as a human shield by – ah, the little grey-haired vampire with the neat demeanour. But she’d survived. And somehow become his superior, if I’d read their dynamic right.

  ‘I thought she was dead,’ I said.

  ‘Moi aussi.’ He’d been in love with her. The ramifications of which were obvious. I was amazed he’d been able to deceive me. I could have laughed again.

  ‘Calme toi,’ he said, reading me. ‘It wasn’t me. I don’t know how they found us. You think I betray you? Ask your wolves!’ He said it with mad fracture, but he was right. The animals would have known if he was false. I could feel it in the current that moved between them and me. Power over canines Jake had used to get their young lady owners into bed. I missed him, his voice saying my name, his arms around me. The stupidest part of me still expected to see him soon. All this while being aware of what had happened like a gaping hole in the room, in the wall, in the fabric of things, knowing that if I looked into it I would see pure black nothingness, going on for ever in total silence.

  ‘Ahhh,’ Cloquet said. ‘Dieu est miséricordieux.’ He’d found yesterday’s not-quite-empty bottle of Jack Daniels by the side of
the couch. He took a swig, closed his eyes, sighed. His shoulders relaxed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I know you loved her.’ Gentleness. Out of the extremity of my failure. Out of the peace of having no further to fall. These amoral relations were available everywhere. He took another swig.

  ‘I have a feeling,’ he said. ‘Like when your body tells you you’ve hurt it with too much booze or coke or whatever poison. You understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s like that – but my soul. I feel sorry for what I let her do to my soul. I was nothing. I was un drogué, a fucking useless junkie.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Je suis libre.’

  ‘I understand.’ I did understand. He’d replaced Jacqueline with me. Not a beaten addiction, just a different drug. And I wasn’t even sleeping with him. Maybe I should sleep with him, haul his sexual self back to the land of the living to seal the allegiance, fuck his brains out and to hell with the werewolf protocols. Either that or kill him. I’d have to if I couldn’t trust him. Meanwhile distance unravelled in the helicopter’s wake. Miles already. Hundreds. I thought of all the things the vampires knew that I didn’t, all the preparations they would have made, all the powers they had at their disposal. Their advantage was laughable. It was a joke. Couldn’t I just forget him? Take my chances with my daughter and run? I conjured the first recurring daydream, the two of us a few years from now in the white Los Angeles villa – Brentwood or Marina del Rey or the West Hollywood Hills – with bougainvillea and the cactus garden and the turquoise pool, quietly going on with our life. We’d get tennis lessons and take trips to the mall and have occasional parties and somehow manage to kill and feed once a month without anything going wrong or anyone finding out what we were. I’d love her tan legs and arms and good balance and shyly-worn jewellery and her plucking up courage to ask me difficult things.

  But the first recurring daydream only brought the second, of the little werewolf boy in a shredded school uniform, covered in blood.

  And the second brought the third. With compliments of Delilah Snow.

  Cloquet closed his drained eyes. Right up until I opened my mouth I didn’t know what I was going to say.

  ‘I’m going to get him back,’ I said.

  As soon as I’d said it I knew it was hopeless. Knowing it was hopeless was a relief. The relief of discovering after all your rushing and madness to get to the departure gate you’ve missed your flight, and now there’s just the weight and heat of your own body and time stretching ahead.

  ‘Yes,’ Cloquet said, opening his eyes. ‘Of course.’

  ‘If you don’t want to help me against her, I understand.’

  He stared at the floor for a few moments, as if receiving something from the underworld. Eventually blinked, took the bottle’s last mouthful, smiled – then abruptly stopped smiling. Looked at me. ‘She’s dead to me,’ he said. ‘C’est tout.’

  With a struggle I managed to get the jacket on and myself into a sitting position, the baby cradled in the crook of my left arm. The placentas slid to the floor. They looked like a pair of revolting purses. (I had wondered if I’d want to eat them. Animals did. Some humans too, I’d read. I didn’t.) My wounds ached, but had stopped bleeding. In an hour or two there would be barely a sign of them. Twenty thousand years, you think you’ve seen it all. Blood in the eardrums. Aural hallucination. Wulf fucking with me. One of my victims talking in his sleep. Whatever it was it shrank next to what lay ahead. I dismissed it.

  ‘I know you’re hurt,’ I said to Cloquet, ‘but do you think you could boil the kettle and sterilise a knife? I need to cut this. If you open the door the wolves will go out. It’s okay, they won’t do anything to you.’ The animals stood en masse as I spoke. Cloquet wobbled to his feet and let them outside. The majority would stay close to the house. A few would patrol. The black stayed inside with me. My will was still loose in him a little, like last wriggles of electricity after a giant shock. Cloquet worked gingerly but efficiently, and took a moment while the kettle was boiling to hand me a throw from the couch. He also dug out the lodge’s First Aid kit I didn’t even know existed. Latex gloves, hydrogen peroxide, iodine, dressings, band-aids, sutures.

  ‘I’ll hold her,’ I told him, ‘you cut.’

  A moment of silence. His bleeding hands shook. His breath was raw with whisky. I had a vivid image of him plunging the scissors into her tiny chest.

  ‘Aie,’ he said, very quietly. But the job was done.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re good to help me.’

  He did a shy, ducking movement with his head and looked away, embarrassed, and suddenly I knew if I let myself I could cry.

  I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.

  So I swallowed, swallowed, swallowed.

  11

  At least half a dozen of Cloquet’s injuries – most obviously the bullet’s exit and entry points and the long deep gash on his forehead – needed stitches. All I knew was you had to get the wound as clean as possible, sew the two halves together, then keep it covered and sterile until it healed. I gave him five milligrams of morphine. The effect was rapid.

  ‘Does that hurt?’

  ‘No. Go ahead.’

  Two hours later I’d done what I could. After washing the baby, wrapping her in a blanket and improvising a cot from a laundry basket packed with clean towels, I took a shower (locked her in the en suite with me), cursorily inspected my own whispering injuries and changed into fresh clothes. The post-partum weight-drop was disorientating. Fourteen, maybe sixteen pounds. My womb pulsed astonishment. Curse dregs snagged the blood in my shoulders, haunches and wrists, tingled where my teeth met my gums. The wolves’ collective awareness ran through and around the lodge like a live circuit. I could go into and out of it. Going into it offered the solace of scattered consciousness: the misery was distributed, my self’s edges blurred. Pointless postponement. Sooner or later I’d have to come back to my own lousy dimensions.

  I began packing, mechanically, listing the facts, trying and failing to come up with a first move, to turn this into a problem that I could take steps to solve: The vampires wanted him for the Helios Project, yes. Jacqueline Delon was one of them, yes. I had power over wolves, yes. Cloquet could be trusted, yes. There was my daughter to consider, yes, yes, yes – So what? I didn’t know where to start looking for him. That was the big ignorance.

  There was also the big obscenity.

  I’d felt nothing.

  A younger version of myself, the girl in her early twenties (I saw her: me with more make-up and less understanding and something that made me think of the old-fashioned word ‘ardour’), was somewhere near me, breaking her heart because she’d failed, because her future self – me – had turned out to be a dead-hearted bitch who didn’t love her babies. The mother and child from the diapers ad broke their trance of love to turn and look out of the screen at me. Serene condemnation. Between them and the moms from the projects was a quivering righteousness that wiped out their social differences. You got no right. You got no right having kids if you wouldn’t kill for them.

  Cloquet knocked on the open bedroom door.

  ‘I know where we can start looking,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a guy in London, Vincent Merryn. Antiquities. He handles the European merchandise for Housani Mubarak. Jacqueline used him. He knows vampires. He’s like un honoraire. He might know where they’ve taken him.’

  Housani Mubarak? I’d seen the name... Jake’s diary. Egyptian dealer in stolen antiquities. Not to be confused with Hosni Mubarak, though he’s probably got as much clout.... Someone broke into his warehouse and stole a crate full of junk. Not junk. Quinn’s Book. The Men Who Became Wolves. The origin of the species. Allegedly. Vincent Merryn I’d never heard of. Jacqueline used him. Harley had told Jake it was an inside job.

  ‘You know this guy?’

  ‘I met him a few times. I know where he lives. His London house, anyway.’ He c
ould feel it petering out. Lowered his head. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘It’s not much.’

  Too many things jostled: images of London from my last time there, the kill just before I met Jake; the vampire helicopter unravelling the miles; the hot sack closing over the small head; got her off, orally; immediate practicalities – passports, identities, airlines, tickets; and in spite of myself a faint rush at the thought of Quinn’s Book, The Men Who Became Wolves, the possibility of answers. Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all, Jake told me. There isn’t one.

  ‘Do you have a number for Merryn?’ I asked.

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘Why would he tell us anything?’

  ‘Because we make him. You’ll have to call him. He might recognise my voice.’

  ‘Call him and say what?’

  ‘We’ll think of something. You’ll have something to sell.’

  Feeble. Both of us knew it. My skin was a settled swarm of flies. The hole in the fabric of everything was in this room, now, the window into pure nothingness I daren’t look through. It would be in every room I was in from now on, until I got him back. (You? Aunt Theresa’s voice in me said. Get him back? A dirty, filthy little girl like you, who just lay there, who just lay there and let them take him? And we know why, don’t we? Yes, we—)

  ‘I’ll go and get the stuff loaded,’ Cloquet said.

  ‘I’ll do it. You’re still woozy. Go lie down.’

  He nodded, headed for the stairs – but he was back a few moments later. As soon as I saw his face I knew what he’d realised: we’d forgotten, both of us, Kaitlyn.