Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  ‘She’s gone,’ he said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘The pipe was loose. There’s water all over the floor. It’s my fault.’

  She’d seen both of us.

  ‘I’ll go and look for her,’ Cloquet said. ‘Maybe she never made it to the highway.’

  I put the last of the journals in the bag and zipped it up. It had stopped snowing. ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘We don’t have time.’ It wasn’t that I believed she’d reached the highway safely, it was that if we found her we’d have to kill her, and for better or worse I couldn’t face it. Just couldn’t. I should never have pictured her feral bedroom and sad acceptance of the lousy demands guys made on her. ‘Go and lie down for a minute,’ I said. ‘I need to feed the baby before we leave.’

  Which I did not want to do. I hadn’t fully admitted her existence. Even through the appalling intimacy of washing her I’d kept her in peripheral consciousness only, a trick of self-misdirection that had given me the emotional equivalent of eye strain. It hadn’t worked, either. There she was, small and clean and absurd in her plastic laundry basket, radiating power to recreate the world. Every humble atom glorified, Jake had written of Heathrow’s vivification when we’d met. Now here was the soft grey sky and the pink curtain and the oak floorboards and room’s smell of dust and mothballs and old linen all wondering why I wasn’t accepting their beatification.

  I undid my shirt, tried to feel nothing, then raised her carefully to my breast.

  The physical sensation was shockingly literal, once the tough little anemone mouth had found my nipple and latched-on: a living creature sucking nourishment out of my body. (Essentials said milk proper might take three days to come in; meantime colostrum, the pre-lacteal secretion rammed with antibodies and who knew what lycanthropic extras.) I went in and out of bearable horror, as if a six-pound parasite had attached itself to me, but also in and out of the feeling of having come bloodily into an inheritance. All those Madonnas with Child; my dad’s Compendium of Greek Mythology showing Hera’s breast-milk spurting out to create the Milky Way; connection to every female animal I’d seen with an offspring tugging at its teat (the dismal word ‘teat’); Richard coming back from a visit to his sister who’d just had a baby and me saying So how was she? And him saying ‘fucking bovine’; the Polaroid of my mother breastfeeding me under the maple tree and you could feel my dad’s thrill and pride and fear of her through the photograph back into his hands holding the camera and his man’s beating heart that still held the awed and jealous little boy in it.

  Meanwhile the baby stared at me like an emotionless deity. That was the Divine trace, if we carried one, a fragment chipped-off from God’s infinite capacity for neutral observation. Or so it seemed, as long as she stared at me – then she’d blink, long-eyelashed, or her face would twitch, and God would vanish, leaving a blank human infant, barely more than the instinct to suckle made flesh and blood. There was the seduction I’d read about, the rhythm of succor that lulled the glands, but there was revulsion too, and a riffle of pornographic breasts and silicone implants gone wrong, and the time in biology class when Mr Shaeffer said feeding babies was what breasts were for and Lauren said, Listen, mister, these are my boobs, which means I get to choose what they’re for, and Jennifer Snow’s pale breasts splashed with blood and a detached sadness at what a crucifixion by contraries the story of the human female had been so far. Followed by a little cheap self-pity, because I – of course – wasn’t even a real human female any more.

  12

  ‘What do we do about the vampire’s body?’ I asked Cloquet. The baby, in her laundry basket, had been transferred to the couch. She was gurgling, quietly, pouring out the godlike recreative energy I had to keep ignoring. I had an image of Jacqueline Delon slowly inserting a wire into my son’s eye. There were dozens of similar images queuing up, bristling with detail.

  ‘Rien,’ Cloquet said. ‘Go and see for yourself.’

  I opened the front door and looked out. At least a dozen wolves occupied the front yard. I knew there were more surrounding the house. Where the young Bob Dylan’s corpse had been was a declivity in the snow covered with a greyish residue and a few blackened strands of what looked like intestinal tissue. In another hour there would be nothing. I closed the door. Wulf set off a dozen tiny remnant firecrackers in my spine.

  Cloquet was in no condition to drive, so I took the wheel, with the baby in the laundry basket wedged between us and the wolf on the back seat. Even with snow-tyres it was a tense, nosing crawl through the woods, but we made it to the highway without incident. We had a back-up car (plus a bagful of wigs and glasses and false moustaches, standard precautions) in a parking garage in Fairbanks. The plan was to change vehicles and get the first available flight out of Alaska.

  A plan with a big problem: the baby. We might be able to get her on domestic without ID, but not international. And even for domestic I guessed she’d need a birth certificate. Which was one of those ostensibly simple things that would turn out to be incredibly difficult. No doctor, no midwife, no pre-natal care... How, exactly, could I prove she was my child? DNA testing? How long would that take? (And on immediate second thoughts: DNA? Not an option.) I imagined the authorities’ reasonable questions: if I knew I was having a baby what was I doing in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness? Was I crazy? On the run? Did I have a criminal record? Reasonable questions would become suspicion. Suspicion would become investigation. Investigation would become, eventually, horror.

  So no bureaucracy. My forger was in New York. His had been the first name on Jake’s list of people I could trust: Rudy Kovatch – DOCUMENTS/IDENTITY. I knew his number by heart and I’d been trying to get cellular reception since we’d left the lodge. So far, nothing.

  Twenty-five miles down the highway I pulled over. The road was bordered on both sides by soft-snowed forest. An avenue of fleecy grey sky above. No other traffic. Cloquet looked at me for explanation.

  ‘Edge of his territory,’ I said. ‘He has to go. Much as I’d like to keep him.’ I opened the back door to let the wolf out. Again the animal and I barely exchanged a glance. It wasn’t that there was no need for thanks, it was that thanks would be meaningless. I’d be thanking myself. As his being morphed back into separateness I felt it as a slight physical bereavement. He shook his coat, sniffed the ground, then made a low-shouldered dart into the shadows under the trees. Gone.

  13

  ‘I can’t eat any more,’ Cloquet said. We were at the Grand Hotel in Anchorage, in a third-floor room overlooking the lights of the rail depot. It was just after midnight. Prussian blue sky with dark patches of cloud over the big cold sentience of the nearby water, the Knik Arm, which as the light faded had gone blue-silver, then slate grey, then black. ‘It’s making me feel sick.’

  Staying in Fairbanks would have been asking for trouble, but in any case the thought of sitting still and doing nothing (Jacqueline’s scientists raring to go) was suffocating. So I’d driven three hundred and fifty miles to Anchorage, stopping only to feed the baby, while Cloquet, morphined, dozed on the back seat. I’d spent the journey in shock that made random mundane chunks vivid: a Texaco sign; red cattle in a field of snow; a crow taking four springy steps to get into the air; the giant wheel of a passing truck. I felt what a small detail my whole life was, how the planet had seen so much that now things like this didn’t even register. Only wars and earthquakes were still drowsily noted. When something happened that was everything to you you realised it was nothing to everything else. Meanwhile I kept feeling the younger interior versions of myself full of fascinated disappointment at what they’d amounted to. Me. The modern adult, Jake had written, has really only one thing to say to its inner child: I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry... And the same thing to say to its biological child, too, I thought. I bought disposable diapers and Vaseline from a gas station. Money. Items. Change. Have a good one. You too. It all still went on. Of course it did. Kovatch called. He could get ‘Zoë Demetriou’
and her half-dozen aliases birth certificates in twenty-four hours and overnight them. Fax no good, they’d want the originals, or rather what they took to be the originals. In two days we could fly to London. The number Cloquet had for Vincent Merryn reached an answering machine at V. M. Antiques and Fine Art in Bloomsbury, one of a dozen European dealerships that formed Merryn’s trading front. I rehearsed my message – My name was Lauren Miller; I had several items of significant value and would deal only with Mr Merryn directly – and left it. A plummy English woman, Althea Gordon, called back four hours later. All prospective vendors met with her in the first instance. Subject to her assessment (for which read assuming it could be established you weren’t undercover or a crank) a meeting with Mr Merryn might then be arranged. Was Mr Merryn in London? I was going to be there for forty-eight hours only. Yes, Mr Merryn was in London, but she must repeat, any meeting would be subject to her etc.

  ‘Drink the water at least,’ I told Cloquet now. ‘You need fluids.’ I’d changed his dressings and ordered him up food (poached salmon, french fries, tomato soup) since he hadn’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours, but he’d barely touched any of it. Bizarrely, I was beginning to feel hungry myself. Or maybe not bizarrely: I hadn’t fed. Was this what happened? Miss a wulf meal and your human appetite returned in a day instead of a week? I tried the corner of a buttered roll from the tray. Not straightforward. For a moment after swallowing I thought I was going to throw up. But a deeper register said, No, keep eating, for the milk to come. I took another bite. The monster’s ghost-teeth objected. Muted wulf outrage from the other dimension.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Sleeping. You should too.’

  ‘Her wardrobe’s improved.’

  Earlier I’d been out with the baby – with Zoë; using the name gave me a feeling of sickening fraud – swaddled in blankets and my jacket, for essentials. Now she had clothes, more diapers, a bassinet and bedding, a carrier and, pointlessly, a small soft golden teddy bear. The department store had been hot and glittering and smelled of industrial carpet and I’d thought of the money at my disposal, all the things I could give her. And her brother. When I got him back. Except every cell in my body knew I wasn’t going to get him back. I kept remembering him – then feeling my scalp shrink because to remember you must have forgotten, and how could you have forgotten? How could it not be searing your heart every second of every minute of every day?

  Total self-disgust is a kind of peace, Jake wrote.

  Total self-disgust was available, a sleep I could enter while still awake. Only the baby’s presence in the room kept disturbing it.

  ‘Did you book the flights?’ Cloquet rasped.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wish I could have a flying dream. I used to have them all the time when I was a kid.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Did you ever have a dream you were dreaming?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know. In your dream... In your dream you’re having a dream. Dreams are the nearest univers parallèle. Like the universe next door. So when you dream, you’re really entering the universe next door. But if you dream you’re dreaming, that’s the universe next to the universe next door...’

  He fell asleep. His flesh heaved out its odours: stale tobacco, old sweat, greasy hair. A residue of his body’s recent efforts surrounded him like a subsonic hum. I fixed myself a cup of instant coffee and went, feeling slightly nauseated at the first sip, to look at the baby.

  She was asleep with her warm face turned to the left and her hands closed. Her cheek was as soft and downy as the skin of a peach. Until you have one of your own, you just can’t understand it. Naturally I’d rolled my eyes at new parents’ fascination with their infants. I’d loathed the helpless shrug, the fatuous surrender. Well, here I was, and here was one of my own, and here, too late and vetoed by my deformed motherhood, was the same appalled fascination. Look at the fingernails, the eyelashes, the nostrils, the mouth. Look at the dark shimmer and winking lights of her future. It was obscene, the love-fee a child could pull down just by existing, just by being there. A fee I couldn’t pay now, late, having failed to pay it on time. Wouldn’t. Mustn’t. Daren’t.

  Because nothing compares to killing the thing you love.

  Of course it wasn’t Cloquet who’d sold us out to the vampires. It was me. They’d come because I’d obscurely called them. Wasn’t that the tradition, that a vampire couldn’t enter uninvited? The first steel skewer going through my throat was a consummation devoutly to be wished: better someone else killed my child than I killed it myself.

  I was very close, just then, to total breakdown. It’s amazing how close you can be, without realising you’ve been going that way. It’s right there. You can see yourself as through a two-way mirror, broken down, liberated, not counting the cost because only the ego counts that and the ego’s gone. You can see yourself in a room of warm soft harmless chaos where everyone’s stopped expecting anything of you.

  Everyone except your children.

  I was on the floor, curled up on my side, though I didn’t remember lying down. I wasn’t crying, but I knew I couldn’t move. Something like my own voice kept talking to me about what a complete disgusting failure I was, but I had silence – a share of the vast mathematical silence I’d discovered the night I met Delilah Snow – to blot it out. If I lay there long enough I’d be able to summon a share of the impenetrable darkness as well. Then I wouldn’t be able to see or hear anything at all. Longer still and the other senses would go too.

  PART TWO

  THE THIRD RECURRING DAYDREAM

  ‘And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire – and it would come to absolutely the same thing.’

  Albert Camus – L’Etranger

  14

  It happened in upstate New York, under a full August moon, when I was six months gone, making what I knew would be the last kill before pregnancy put me in need of Cloquet’s hands-on help. The victim was George Snow, seventy-four-year-old retired attorney at law, widower, father of four, grandfather of six, great-grandfather of three, who lived alone with two cats, walked three miles every day, fished, kept up with Current Events, read the odd literary novel, ate a low-fat diet and listened to forties jazz for himself and Joni Mitchell in loving memory of his wife. The family house was a sprucely kept six-bedroomed property in its own four acres of meadow grass and woodland between Spencertown to the south and Red Rock to the north, just under two miles from Beebe Hill State Forest, and in about five years it was going to be too much for George to manage, which he tried not to think about, though if he noticed an oblong of sun on the oak floor in the hall or the dry timber smell of the back porch or the deep-carpeted calm of the upstairs landing it hurt his heart, because to leave here would be a second brutal bereavement, after the loss of Elaine.

  The murder logistics had been simple. Country Road 22 ran straight through the forest and there was luxuriant cover virtually all the way to George’s front door. Cloquet had dropped me close to the change site an hour before moonrise, and would pick me up at the arranged rendezvous on the east side of the forest three hours later, from whence we’d hit the highway. Three hours was a small window – and there’d be five hours of cooped-up wulf to deal with in transit afterwards – but increasingly my preference was for getting as far away from the crime scene as quickly as possible. (The long lunar nights had proved tricky. You had to weigh the difficulty of staying concealed till you were human again against the risk of being spotted – nine feet tall and covered in blood – getting into the back of a van. And while not sticking around for moonset let you put some miles between you and your victim’s remains, it also left you exposed to the risks of the road: engine trouble; an accident; getting pulled over for a faulty brake light. Okay sir, I’m going to need to take a look in the back of the vehicle...) In any case that was the plan, and in accordance with it, just after nine p.m., high on hunger and the relished creep through the moonlit fo
rest, I opened the back door, ducked my giant head for the lintel and entered the house.

  It’s a delight to sneak into a stranger’s home, to feel its appalled paralysis, all its helpless historied objects made naked by your unauthorised eye. Here was a big clean kitchen that murmured in its atoms of sunlit family breakfasts, American plenty, manageable dysfunction, love. But long ago now. The room knew its glory days were over. I crossed it and went silently down the hall to the study.

  The door was open. Grey-haired George, in pale green flannel shirt and grey corduroys, was sitting in a leather swivel chair at a pine desk, illuminated by an angle-poise lamp, going through some envelope files. His back was to the doorway, to me, to death. Everyone’s always is.

  My hands were big and heavy and electric. I thought of how all his body’s alarms would go off at once, the spectacular chemical chaos. He was just beginning to register the slight change in the light, the peripheral tremor of my shadow. The room stilled its details. He raised his head and removed his reading glasses.

  I sprang across the floor and spun his chair around to face me.

  You want them to see you. You want them to see you because horror fills the flesh with everything it’s going to lose. Memories mass in the cells, rush to final coherence, as if they know that for death only maximal life will do.

  George wasn’t afraid of dying, but he enjoyed being alive. The seasons still spoke to him; his child self was still there when the leaves shivered or thunder broke. He loved his family, hopelessly, hopelessly, those little ones with the genes still being cashed-out, inexhaustibly. The smell of air and stone and grass on those kids when they came in from outdoors was the smell of life. He still allowed himself to get involved in HBO dramas. He still had friends in New York. Last year he’d had a six-month fling Philip Roth would’ve envied with divorced Chattham restaurateuse Amber Brouwer, a woman twenty-one years his junior. The first real sex since Elaine’s death almost four years ago. (There had been, in the deranged early months of grieving, when everything ugly had seemed not only allowed but obligatory, half a dozen desolate nights with call girls in Manhattan hotels, but it was a firework of inversion that had soon burned out.) They’d both known, he and Amber, that it wasn’t going anywhere, but known too that for a little while that wouldn’t matter and so made the most of it. Sunday mornings in her bed (his moribund Episcopalian deep structure still issuing vague guilt for not going to church, though he hadn’t been for practically his whole adult life) were slow and rich and astonishing. He’d forgotten how it could be. The mesmerising particularity of a lover’s body, the thin skin over her clavicle, the lilac scribble of varicosis in her thigh, the surprising graceful taper of her hands. The world had shuddered wider awake for him in those first weeks. But eventually their window had closed. He hadn’t realised how much he needed a woman, physically, until she’d said it had to stop. Now he felt sexually lonely all over again.