Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  Hudd was in his early thirties, squat, demonic, muscled, with a shaven head and a black goatee. Carney was younger, tall and thin, with a blond crew-cut and a gentle blue-eyed face. Put him in half-mast jeans and a check shirt and a straw hat and he’d be the likeable village idiot. The third renegade, Pavlov, was mid-forties, with straight, shoulder-length greying red hair and a placid, broad-cheekboned face. Narrow hazel eyes full of such amused nihilism that he couldn’t possibly be here for anything other than money. Don’t get ahead of yourself, I kept telling myself, but I had love for them, such a wealth of warmth for them piling up, ready, in case they were the men who helped me get my son back.

  We left the airport just after noon local time and headed southwest, Walker, Konstantinov (driving) and me in the Mercedes, the others in the Land-Rover. It was cold. Blue sky and shreds of white cloud. Konstantinov had a calmness and precision of movement that spoke of terrible potential.

  ‘It’s not far,’ Walker said to me. ‘You should have another look at the visuals.’

  These were a half-dozen satellite images from Google maps showing the ruined house and grounds, an enormous square stone building with a castellated roof and broken turret in seven untended acres backed by a low hill and edged at its southern boundary by a narrow belt of deciduous woodland. There were three outbuildings in various states of collapse, and a small overgrown orchard maybe twenty metres from the eastern side of the main house. That was as close as we’d be able get before breaking cover. ‘We’ve got no silencers,’ Walker had said. ‘So once we start shooting we better know what we’re doing.’ We did have, thank God, communications kit. Believe it or not you’re allowed to take walkie-talkies or transceivers on commercial airlines as long as you don’t use them on board, so each of us was equipped with a mic’d headset. The plan was that Walker and Hudd would go ahead to scope the place and make sure we weren’t facing more goons than we’d been warned of. Although the fact is, Walker had confided to me, it isn’t going to make any difference to Mike. One way or another he’s going in. (Which means I’m going in, he didn’t have to add.) After that it was simply a case of eliminating the familiars, locating the captives and bringing them out. Simply a case of, Walker had repeated. That’s my idiom of choice for these things. No point being negative. An hour into the flight I’d wanted to make love to him. Wulf, naturally, kept up its come-rain-or-come-shine demand, mouth open, tongue lolling, eyes glinting with honest filth, but the big aching pressure came from my human, from my girl, who’d only just woken up to the nearness of death and felt a great tenderness for herself and her body and all the rich finiteness that would be lost. She wanted, one last time, to get as close to another human being as it was possible to get. But contrary to what the movies say, it’s not so easy to have sex on a plane. For one thing the plane was tiny. The cabin crew’s work station was practically in the bathroom. For another there was a permanent line of people waiting to use it. I sat there next to him not saying anything about it and feeling increasingly absurd and desperate and ultimately, since it was obvious it wasn’t going to happen, crushed. The flight’s other reality slap was that I’d given no thought to having suddenly stopped breastfeeding. By the time what would’ve been Zoë’s third consecutive feed had come and gone the unsuckled milk had started a knifey protest. Look, I know we’re on a mission – but would you mind if we tried to find somewhere that sells breast-pumps when we land? I did what I could to express a little manually in the bathroom, dropped a couple of ibuprofen and told myself it wouldn’t be long before I’d need the milk for Lorcan.

  Along with the satellite images of the house was a Xeroxed portrait of Konstantinov’s wife, Natasha. All the guys have a copy, Walker said, so no one shoots her by mistake. The picture showed her looking straight into camera, not smiling, a slim-faced woman with dark hair pulled back and tied. No glamour, but black eyes there would be no deceiving. She sees right through you, people would say. She looked at least fifteen years younger than Konstantinov, yet I could imagine the two of them together. Same intensity. No fear of death – especially now they had love. If she was in a room with Madeline nine out of ten men would ignore her. Konstantinov was the one out of ten for whom there would be no one else in the room.

  ‘Okay,’ Walker said. ‘This is it.’

  We’d pulled over on a narrow, chalky road that ran along the side of a steep hill. Trees going up the hill on our right, open farmland going down on our left. Around a bend some seventy-five yards ahead, according to the map, the road ran past the entrance to Casa del Campanile. We’d follow Walker and Carney to the south side of the orchard and wait for their signal to proceed.

  ‘Obviously the vamps will be below ground,’ Walker said, once we’d grouped a little way under the trees. ‘So will the prisoners. They’ll have someone watching the kid, so however many familiars we make above ground we should assume at least one more and probably two in the basement. Everyone good?’ Silent tense collective affirmation, a diluted version of what I’d shared with the Alaskan wolves. Carney gave a slow thumbs-up, and for no reason, while I watched him make the gesture, everything caught up with me and gathered in my body: the lack of sleep, the flight, the foreign country, the nearness of my son, the realisation that this place – smelling of fallen leaves and cold stone and dead wood and drying grass – was where I might die. Exhaustion was there but wulf dismissed it. Not because its child was near, but because there was something to be stalked and killed. Transformation was eighteen days away, but the human in hunt mode had dragged the ghost animal hot and shivering to the surface. I could feel her in my fingernails and feet, backbone and scalp. I could feel her frustration at what she had to work with. But thanks to her all five senses had been violently upgraded. Gladness went through my limbs like fast-acting booze. Plus, the pain in my breasts subsided.

  Walker looked at Konstantinov. ‘Not long now, Mike.’

  Konstantinov said nothing.

  32

  We waited, me, Konstantinov, Carney and Pavlov, for what felt like a very long time at the broken fence where the wood met the orchard. Then Walker’s voice came through, quietly. ‘You guys reading?’

  ‘Roger,’ Konstantinov said. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Okay, we’ve got two goons, repeat, two goons visible, both armed with machine guns. First goon just inside the front entrance wearing a navy blue soccer shirt and black leather jacket. Second goon doing slow circuits of the roof, green sweatshirt, dark glasses, black woollen cap. Acknowledge.’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘On my Go, come ahead slowly through the orchard. Keep low and move fast and you’ll get here before the roof watch is back on this side.’

  ‘Roger that. On your signal.’

  It took us less than two minutes, and when we joined Walker and Hudd the roof goon still hadn’t reappeared. ‘We’ve got to get a closer look,’ Walker said. ‘This is a big house. There could be fifty guys in there.’

  ‘Intelligence says four,’ Konstantinov said, without emotion.

  ‘Mike, you know we only get one shot at this.’

  ‘We need to get closer,’ Hudd said. His bald head and bulging eyes and black goatee made him look like a chaotic deity. All he needed was to stick his tongue out, Maori haka-style. ‘Ninety percent of this place we can’t see. There’s three floors, for fuck’s sake.’

  I knew what Walker was thinking: even if they got closer and discovered fifty guys, it wasn’t going to stop Konstantinov going in.

  ‘Wait here,’ Konstantinov said – and before anyone could argue he was out of the orchard, going at an extraordinary low sprint across the open ground to the side of the house.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Carney said, quietly.

  After so much stealth Konstantinov looked appallingly visible. For the few seconds he was exposed it was as if the sun had turned up its dial, desperate for him to be seen. But he made it to the end of the building and got his back against the wall.

  ‘It’s not so bad,’
Pavlov whispered, covering his mic. ‘The front door guy can’t see him from this angle, and the roof guy won’t see him unless he comes to the very edge and looks straight down.’

  There was a window space – no glass – six feet from the Russian. He edged towards it. Got upright. In tiny increments stole a look inside. Signalled back. Empty. He moved quickly past the window to the building’s rear corner. Paused. Slipped around it.

  A minute passed. Two. Four. Five. Heat came off Walker’s flank next to mine. The Dorchester seemed weeks ago. For the first time since the kidnapping I had a sense of what pure relief it would be to have my son back – but wulf scotched it: it got in her way. She was impatient. The scents of the four bodies close to her tugged, prematurely, at the hunger.

  Konstantinov reappeared at the edge of the rear corner. He held up three fingers. Walker said: ‘Pavlov, guy on the roof, now.’

  Pavlov stood, raised the AK-47, fired a short burst that seemed to splinter the sky. The man on the roof fell backwards. We heard his weapon clatter. ‘Go!’ Walker said – and everyone, including me, moved. Konstantinov swung himself up through the window into the house. The long grass was a maddening soft impediment. Carney tripped, swore, got up, felt a spray of bullets go past him and hit the turf. He looked at me with a face of mild surprise, as if being shot at was the last thing he’d expected. The three-second dash stretched, distended, took a dreamy hour. Pistol shots sounded from inside the house. Walker leaped through the window. Carney and Pavlov went around the back of the building, Hudd took position at the opposite corner for a moment, then he too disappeared. Another two shots fired. Then silence. Suddenly there was the Italian countryside in complete peace again. Wulf chafed and writhed in its human traps, the inadequate arms and legs, the laughably labouring muscles. I hauled myself onto the window-ledge and dropped into the big empty room on the other side.

  33

  Thirty feet across from me a doorway opened into the next room. Walker appeared in it, beckoned me to come ahead. The second room was bigger than the first. Daylight pencilled through several large holes in the brickwork. A precarious stone staircase ran along one wall to the upper floors. Konstantinov, Hudd and Carney were up there, going room by room. The soccer-shirted goon lay dead in the open front doorway. A second body lay by the stairs, and a third was visible, lying face-down in the adjoining chamber.

  ‘Through here,’ Walker said.

  I followed him into what might once have been the house’s kitchen, where Pavlov stood guard at a doorway from which more stone stairs led down to a basement.

  ‘We wait for the upstairs clearance,’ Walker said.

  It was a peculiar few minutes. There was nothing to say. The house, since it had no choice, started offering us its ruined details: a sunlit patch of yellowy green lichen; bits of rotten wood; gothic cobwebs; the smells of damp stone and cat piss and mould. As with strangers waiting for an elevator every second increased the absurdity. Then Konstantinov came through the doorway, followed by Carney and Hudd. The rooms upstairs were empty.

  ‘Okay, so what I’m thinking here is—’

  Konstantinov wasn’t waiting. He went past Walker without a word and started down the stairs.

  ‘Pav, take point here,’ Walker said, then followed Konstantinov into the gloom. I went after him, with Hudd and Carney on my heels.

  Cold air came up. The stairs were narrow, steep, mossed and damp, but the two men ahead and Hudd behind lit the way with torches. Fourteen steps. Buckling heat and an adrenal stink from the four human bodies. Wulf swelled and jabbed in the liminal zone under my skin. Memories of the kills popped and bloomed: the French widower’s cock on the floor like a king prawn in a puddle of blood; the Mexican pimp’s bare leg kicking, repeatedly, despite my arm rummaging elbow-deep under his ribs. Something was struggling to come forward in my mind, had been trying to form while we’d waited by the door at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Mikhail!’ Walker hissed. ‘Jesus, slow down.’

  Konstantinov had moved quickly away from the steps and was opening the darkness section by section with his torch. The space underground appeared to occupy half the house’s footprint. Undressed stone walls and floor, what looked like the remnants of broken crates and bottles, rusted oil cans, shelves hanging, more fantastic cobwebs.

  ‘Okay, check it,’ Walker said. ‘Easy does it, gentlemen. Miss D, stay close. Pavlov, you good up there?’

  ‘Good,’ Pavlov answered. ‘Take your time.’

  The team moved around the cellar’s perimeter, guns and torches trained. Konstantinov’s silent furious energies were palpable through the darkness. The rest of us had dropped away for him: he was alone in the inscrutable universe.

  For as long as it took to cover the ground we kept up a token suspension of judgement, but no one was really in any doubt: there was nothing down here.

  Konstantinov was on all-fours searching the floor – for a trapdoor or hidden way to a lower level. Out of awkwardness Carney and Hudd joined him. The thing that had been struggling to come forward in my mind got through, with a strange inner sensation of wulf suddenly falling, clawing space. I couldn’t believe it had taken this long. ‘Walker,’ I said. ‘If he was here I would have felt him by now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My son. And the vampires. They’re not here. There’s no smell.’

  Konstantinov’s method was unravelling. He got up off the floor and began running his hands over the nearest section of wall.

  ‘Mike?’ Walker said. ‘Something’s not right here.’

  Konstantinov ignored him.

  ‘Pavlov,’ Walker said. ‘Anything your end?’

  No reply.

  ‘Pavlov, are you reading me?’

  Silence.

  Carney and Hudd leaped to their feet, weapons readied. Konstantinov rested his head against the wall. The torch in his hand made a pointless fierce ellipse of light on the wet stone.

  ‘Here,’ I said to Walker, giving him the pistol. ‘You might as well have this. You need it more than I do.’

  At the top of the stairs we found Pavlov unconscious with a tiny dart in his neck. The land around the house was attentive again. Wulf in me was muddled and fiery, as if a burn had swollen its eyes shut. My human had to re-establish itself, haul control back to the inferior system.

  ‘Fuck,’ Walker said. ‘We’re in troub—’

  I don’t know what deployment reflex the four men were about to manifest, but I never got to find out, because at that moment a figure appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and the next room, paused for a moment, attempted a step forward, then collapsed.

  34

  It was a man and he was naked. He was also, courtesy of what had happened to him, barely recognisable as a man. It was hard to understand how he’d been on his feet. In the mess of his injuries – the facial swellings like a cluster of grotesque fruits, the bruises psychedelically curdling yellow and puce – two details registered: that the ulna of his left arm was sticking out of the skin just above the wrist, and that his penis was covered in what looked like venereal sores but which the context made clear were cigarette burns.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Walker said, quietly.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s Hoyle.’

  He took a step towards the collapsed man. As he moved, the light altered slightly and everyone turned to the gap in the kitchen wall, where the goon in the blue soccer shirt and leather jacket stood, smiling. Walker, Carney and Hudd all fired – but the guy just stood there, waving, I thought, until I saw he was holding in his hand the torn remains of a small plastic pouch: formerly, it was now obvious, filled with blood. Animal blood. Stage blood. Either way not his blood.

  ‘The beauty of you relying on us for guns,’ a voice said, ‘is that it leaves us at liberty to load them with blanks.’

  We all turned again.

  Standing above Hoyle was a tall man in his mid-forties dressed in black Hunt fatigues and carrying a machine gun.
He had close-cropped grey hair and blue eyes that seemed to have an extra iris. A slight frown you knew was perpetual gave him a bald eagle’s look of dignified madness. I felt Walker’s energy dip like a plane in an air pocket.

  At least two dozen fully-armed members of the WOCOP Hunt filed into the building, some through the gap in the wall, others in the bald eagle’s wake as he stepped over the man on the floor and approached us. An odour of clean canvas and leather and medicinal soap preceded him. ‘I thought I’d bring Hoyle along,’ he said to Walker. ‘So you could see what you’d got him into. It’s been a long night for us all.’ He turned to me. ‘Miss Demetriou,’ he said. ‘You must be regretting getting mixed up with these men. Not that I blame you. Little one goes missing, a woman gets desperate. You take help where you can find it. That’s understandable.’

  Little one goes missing.

  Did he know where the Disciples were?

  I could feel what it was costing Walker to keep still, the ache for Hoyle; the heart that wanted to scream and the will that knew it would be a defeat if it did, useless to the man on the floor. Walker’s logical working-out was all but audible to me: Hoyle had suffered because he was Walker’s mole. But Walker hadn’t forced Hoyle. Hoyle knew the risks. Any tenderness that passed between them now would be an exquisite satisfaction to their enemy. Hoyle would have agreed, if he hadn’t been incapable of speech. Therefore Walker slapped his heart down and instead turned to me and said: ‘If you saw his wife you’d be amazed. She’s really pretty. Not to mention a sorceress with her index finger.’