Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  I wasn’t intending to listen, whatever the story was; it was just to give him something to do while I continued groping after what I’d felt a moment ago (fear? déjà vu? a kind of abstract arousal?), but once he started talking I got drawn in in spite of myself...

  Konstantinov, he told me, grew up on a State Farm in Morshansk and at fourteen fell in love with the director’s daughter, Daria Petrov, who was his age, and had his depth, and was in love with him.

  ‘And when I say in love,’ Walker said, ‘I mean unholy intensity. These two could’ve sat down with Romeo and Juliet and held their heads up. You can’t talk to Mike about it, or at least you couldn’t, for years. Even now you’ve got to pick your moment and watch your tone.’

  The young lovers were in the habit of sneaking out late at night for erotic trysts in a nearby woods. One such night, in the summer of 1980, they were joined by an uninvited guest. A vampire.

  ‘It was one of those lousy synchronicities,’ Walker said. ‘Up until then they’d fooled around, but they’d never actually fucked. That night, for the first time, under a big oak tree, they went all the way. It changed Mike for ever.’ Walker shook his head, as in sad amazement. ‘I guess there are only a handful of first times like that per millennium,’ he said. ‘Everyone else’s seems to be a horror story. Or a comedy.’ He gave me a quick look.

  ‘Horror-comedy,’ I said, thinking in spite of the lingering disturbance of my first time, when I was sixteen, with Luke Peters in the dunes at a Rehoboth beach party. Everything was going okay until a breeze blew a torn garbage bag onto his bare ass and he got the fright of his life, and I couldn’t stop laughing, then had to crawl away and throw up because the evening’s booze and weed had caught up with me.

  ‘You were lucky,’ Walker said. ‘Mine was straight horror. Anyway, as far as Mike was concerned that was it: this was the girl he was going to spend the rest of his life with. It’s a Russian thing, that epic certainty. Americans aren’t built for it.’

  Blissfully razed, sensually reinvented, the young Konstantinov had walked a few paces off to empty his bladder. When he came back, he saw a strange sight. Daria seemed to be asleep, but with her back arched and her head several inches off the ground. Her arms were limp. It was as if an invisible magician was halfway through levitating her. For a moment Konstantinov stood, uncomprehending. Then he perceived the large white hand at the base of her neck, and cried out – at which the vampire looked up, and the visual puzzle solved itself. The creature – a mature male, dark-haired, long-bodied – was hanging upside down from the lowest bough, one hand under Daria’s back, the other under her neck. It must have been in the tree the whole time, watching them. It stared at Konstantinov for a few moments, then raised Daria further off the ground and returned its teeth to her throat.

  ‘He could’ve run,’ Walker said. ‘She was dead anyway. Anyone else would’ve run. I would have.’

  Konstantinov didn’t. He bent, searched the ground, picked up in his left hand what he knew was an inadequate bit of dead wood, and advanced on the creature.

  ‘He had a pencil in the other hand,’ Walker said. ‘In his jacket pocket, hidden. That’s Mikhail. A pencil. He’s going to feint with the deadwood in his left and punch this pencil in as hard as he can with his right. I asked him why he didn’t run. You know what he said?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said: “Have you ever been in love?”’

  We passed Kew Bridge station, and in a moment were crossing the bridge itself. Londoners were under umbrellas, or hurrying, shoulders hunched, faces crimped, or steaming in shop doorways, talking on cellphones. The human world I wasn’t entitled to any more but couldn’t ditch. Have you ever been in love? The words had softly alarmed both of us, in the van’s little fan-heated space. I had a piercing feeling of love moving through history like a thin glimmering waterway. Suddenly in the middle of things you suffered these poignancies, found yourself blinking or swallowing or having to look the other way.

  ‘According to Mike,’ Walker said, ‘the vampire was surprised, maybe even a little moved. He put the girl’s body down and dropped to the ground. Mike was five feet away. He could smell Daria’s blood. He said that was the first time he realised blood had a smell, you know?’

  Walker had forgotten what I was again. I didn’t answer. Then he remembered. Yes, she knows about the smell of blood. Still, there was part of him that didn’t care, that had gone on ahead and was waiting for the rest of him to catch up. If it ever did there was no telling what shape his life might take. I imagined my mother saying: Have him, Lulu. Do you know how few men there are worth having? I imagined the feel of his hard waist between my hands, the sweet shameless sensation of wrapping my legs around him, around all the delicious complications...

  Konstantinov never got to find out if his pencil plan would’ve worked. Something disturbed the air very close to his head. Simultaneously, he saw the vampire jerk, as if someone had jabbed him with a cattle prod. At that moment the moon slipped clear of the clouds and he saw the wooden shaft – thicker than an archer’s arrow – stuck in the monster’s chest. A man’s voice said, in Moscow Russian: ‘For Christ’s sake, kid, I nearly took your fucking head off. Why didn’t you run?’

  ‘And the rest,’ Walker said, ‘is history.’ The vampire’s killer was a member of the Hunt’s Soviet division. He and his partner had been trailing the booch for a week. Mikhail would’ve left with them there and then, but they wouldn’t let him. It took him two years to track the organisation down and get in, but once he’s set his mind on something...’

  Since then, for thirty years, Walker stressed, Konstantinov had refused to get close to a woman – until twelve months ago, when he’d met Natasha. ‘Who knows?’ Walker said. ‘Maybe there was a specific enormous amount of not loving anyone he’d set himself to do, a penance he had to complete. I think he didn’t even know himself until he met her. But when he did meet her he reacted as if she’d been sent to him by God.’

  And since God was never satisfied, Konstantinov had lost her to the Undead, too.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Walker said, as the Thames reappeared on our left. ‘He was only two verified kills away from a serious bonus, and the money would’ve been a big help to him and Natasha. They were going to buy a little bar in Croatia or Turkey or Greece. He wanted to get out as soon as he met her, but I talked him into holding out for the bonus.’

  Which was my cue to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but my mind had gone back to someone walked over my grave. I still couldn’t pin it down, not even whether I’d been afraid. The only thing I knew for sure was that Zoë had felt it too.

  ‘The vampire body back at Merryn’s,’ I said. ‘You said it was one of Jacqueline’s priests. What’s the story there? You think one of Merryn’s goons killed it?’

  ‘Well, it was decapitated, so I’m guessing not. There wasn’t anything there it could’ve been decapitated with, as far as I could see.’

  ‘So... ?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe there was someone else there we don’t know about. I’m waiting for a call from my WOCOP guys. They’ll have discovered it by now. They’re slow, but they get there eventually.’

  We drove back to the parking lot under the Hammersmith mall. The place smelled of freezing concrete and aluminum ducts and exhaust fumes. Now it had come to getting out of the car I didn’t want to. The thought of the journey back to the hotel made me feel exposed. The city’s spaces would be full of abrasive surveillance. I wondered what Walker would do if I kissed him. Amongst other things he’d think of all the human flesh and blood my other mouth had chewed-up and swallowed.

  ‘You okay?’ he said.

  No, I’m not. I’m lonely and exhausted and no kind of mother and on top of all that migrained with fucking idiotic desire.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, and opened the passenger door.

  At which moment a silencered bullet went with an unmistakable tch clean through its window and just past the side of
my head.

  22

  Walker yanked me towards him and slammed the vehicle into gear. ‘Stay low,’ he said, very calmly. A second bullet – daintily audible despite the gunned engine and screeching tyres – pierced the windshield and buried itself in the back seat. Silver? Zoë’s head had just missed the stick-shift. I swivelled quickly to get myself between her and the dashboard as the van lurched and swerved out of its bay, passenger door still open.

  ‘Watch her head,’ Walker said. There were other tyres squealing somewhere behind us. The passenger door smacked a concrete pillar and slammed shut. Its window shattered – as if it had just remembered what, being glass, it was supposed to do. My face was in Walker’s lap. Khakis with a washed smell that reminded me of the laundry room in the basement of the 11th Street brownstone – this and the connotation of fellatio, since even in these moments the connections are the connections, the brain says Don’t ask me I just work here. Zoë, startled by the slam and crash and live to my shot-up heart rate, started crying. Which added the precise minor torture of not being able to comfort her properly.

  ‘Hold on,’ Walker said.

  I lost all sense of direction. There was a pattern – accelerate, brake, sharp turn, accelerate – and I knew we were climbing the ramps to street level, but I was no better oriented than I would’ve been in a tumble drier.

  Suddenly a longer, straighter run, Walker’s abdominals tense, what felt like a moment of pure silence – then the windshield shattering as we crashed through the exit barrier, and the smell and sounds of London’s wet evening rushed in.

  ‘Are they still following?’ I asked.

  ‘Can’t be sure. Stay down. We’re in the goddamned high street here.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Can’t see. Murdoch’s guys, probably. Her ladyship okay?’

  The change in air and sound had shocked Zoë quiet again. ‘She’s fine,’ I said. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Got to ditch this van. It’s made, obviously. I think the best thing is... Wait. Hang on. Bump coming—’ How high Zoë and I came up off the seat told me we were still travelling fast. Car horns detonated around us. A pedestrian right outside my absent window said, ‘Fuck me.’ The air flowing in was cold, tasted of wet pavements and exhaust fumes and fried food.

  ‘Can you run?’ Walker said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fast?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay, in a minute I’m going to stop. We’re going to be right outside the Tube mall. We get out, we run through. There are cabs on the other side.’

  ‘Are you fucking crazy?’

  ‘Tougher to follow a car that’s got twenty-thousand doubles. Trust me. This shit-heap’s no good to us now. You got the clean phones?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay, when I tell you. Only when I tell you. Got it?’

  ‘Got it.’

  It happened fast but was filled with detail: the smell of Walker’s leather jacket; a pink and white ice cream van going by; Zoë’s moist hand like a little sea creature momentarily pressed to my lips.

  ‘Big bump then we go,’ Walker said. ‘Ready—’ We mounted a kerb violently. Pedestrians scattered with a weird collective sound, part fear, part outrage, part delight that something unexpected was happening.

  ‘Go!’

  People’s faces went by not, as the convention has it, in a blur, but in vivid snapshots. I had a brief awareness of London’s cold darkness and the softness and heat of the crowd, then we were through the entrance and racing down the central concourse, Walker with the gun tokenly concealed under his jacket, me clutching Zoë like a football, thinking any second now... any second now... you feel the bullet just that awful fraction before you hear the shot... Shop fronts were distinct and urgent and inane – WH Smith; Superdrug; Tesco Express; lousy soulless things to be the last things you see – then we were past the escalators and back out in the street.

  I looked behind us. If there was pursuit it was concealed by the trawling shoppers.

  ‘In here!’

  Walker was already opening the door of the first cab in a line of three. The lit interior was a thing of beauty. Holding Zoë close, I got in.

  23

  It took half an hour and a lot of side streets before Walker was satisfied we weren’t being followed, and even then he advised against going back to the Kensington hotel.

  ‘Were they shooting at you or me?’

  ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘It wasn’t Murdoch, though.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘He wouldn’t have missed. I’m just surprised he’s opened it up to the rank and file. I thought he’d want the pleasure himself.’

  ‘Maybe they were shooting at both of us,’ I said. ‘I mean it’s still WOCOP, right? It’s not like there’s been a werewolf amnesty.’

  ‘Either way we’ve got to assume your hotel’s made. My place too. Mike and I are running out of safe houses.’

  I was worried about Cloquet. I’d been gone hours. He’d be chewing the wallpaper by now. But if his cell and the room phone were bugged, how could I reach him and tell him to get out?

  In the end I called the concierge. By the grace of the God who wasn’t there he remembered me (I’d run out of diapers for Zoë the night we checked in and had to find the nearest twenty-four-hour store) and though it took a little persuasion he agreed to what I asked. He would call ‘Mr Malraux’ in Suite 472 and tell him to come to reception for an urgent message from ‘Ms Atwood’. I would wait ten minutes, then call the concierge on his own cellphone, which he would hand over to Cloquet. Even Walker’s suspicion didn’t extend to the concierge’s personal phone being tapped.

  Cloquet was predictably hopped-up. He didn’t say it but it was obvious he thought I was planning to ditch him. He’d wrecked my trust and I’d absconded with my American beach boy. There would have to be reassurance, I knew – but not now. Now was practicalities. I gave him the clean cell number and told him what had happened. He had to get out of the hotel. We travelled light, so it shouldn’t be hard for him to leave discreetly. The concierge would arrange for a car to pick him up at the kitchen exit. From there he could join me at the Dorchester, the first hotel that sprang to mind, probably from a James Bond movie. Walker advised me to get out of London altogether, but I couldn’t face it. I wanted to be here when they got a lock on Jacqueline and the Disciples. Besides, my British geography was lousy. At least in London I could find my way around.

  I checked in: Jane Dickinson. (Cloquet would be Pierre Rennard again for a while.) Walker came up with me to what turned out to be a warmly lit art deco suite. Pink, cream, pale green, walnut trims and deep carpet the colour of Caribbean sand. The snug solid feel of a luxury liner’s cabin, a welcome shock after the raw evening and spent adrenaline. I closed the drapes. A fifty got the bellhop out to the nearest seven-eleven with a list of infant essentials, and twenty minutes later Zoë was back in Pampers and Sudocrem credit. I fed her (with my back to Walker; unembarrassed mutual understanding; and a nod to keeping the flesh’s erotic powder dry) while he called Konstantinov and filled him in. No news on Jacqueline from their WOCOP insider. I put Zoë over my shoulder, did the rubbing, the patting, the humming, the pacing, while Walker fixed himself a Laphroaig from the bar. Five minutes and one unladylike burp later my girl was asleep. In the absence of her bassinet the only place for her was the vast bed. I put her down in it, stabilised by four of the hotel’s monumental pillows. Then I rang reception with a message to be given to ‘Monsieur Rennard’ on his arrival: Check in. Go to your room. Wait for my call.

  None of which was lost on Walker.

  When I put the phone down there we were, looking at each other.

  The gunshots and the chase had rushed us here, but now that we were here postponement – which is all it would ever have been – was pointless. We stood facing each other, ten feet apart. I wondered if I was still too close to childbirth for him. Or, less vaguely, still too fat. The post-partum wei
ght had dropped at (how not?) freakish speed, but I was a way off my regular hundred and fifteen pounds. I’ve been a hundred and fifteen pounds since I turned eighteen, and the Curse had made no difference. (No difference to the human weight, that is. I’d only weighed myself transformed once, after my ninth kill: a widower in a high-ceilinged spidery house on the edge of the Parc National des Cèvennes, who for some reason had an archaic set of pharmacist’s scales in his kitchen. Blood-groggy and meat-slow, I’d clambered gorily on. The scale read 1 85 .5. That seemed impossible – until I realised it was in kilograms. I had to wait till I was human again to work it out. Four hundred and nine pounds. Hey, Lauren, it’s Lu. I know we haven’t seen each other in years, but I just thought you’d get a kick out of this...) I never bothered weighing myself when I was pregnant, but I must’ve been one-forty at least. Now I guessed I was around one-twenty-seven. Thirteen pounds shed in six days. A human record, if only I’d been human. I still had a cheeky little pot belly, and my breasts remained double their former size although 32B doesn’t double-up to much), but the rest of me was almost back to prepregnancy dimensions.

  So here we were, Walker and I, looking at each other the way you look at each other when there you are, looking at each other. I knew the longer we waited the more I’d start to think that no matter how good it was it wouldn’t be good enough, so I crossed the room to stand in front of him, sufficiently close for our bodies’ heat to touch. Deep gravity brought his hands to my waist. Wulf was making silent fiesta in my skin, yes, but it was humanly good to be touched too, to be alone with someone at the secret feast that went all the way back to Adam and Eve. You looked at each other and felt just how old the contract was, the warm-faced commitment to the adventure, the stepping together out of the light into the rewarding darkness.

  There were forces aswirl in him. Desire was one. Fear was another. The knowledge that if he did this he’d be leaving himself behind. The admission that leaving himself behind was what he had to keep doing. I was getting out anyway, he’d said of WOCOP. It was the pattern of his life all the way back to whatever it was that had first derailed him; he went into things for a while, let them give him a new skin, but always, sooner or later, shed it and moved on. Only the smile and the brightness were constant. That and the benign desirability, the infallible charm.