Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  ‘Forty seconds gone!’ Murdoch shouted.

  Caleb took two steps forward and went down on one knee – but got up again immediately. The blood-ration was still taking effect. Tunner came close, hesitated, came closer. They circled each other. ‘I don’t know what you’re getting so embarrassed about,’ Tunner said to him. ‘It’s not as if it’s any use to you, is it? I mean it’s just as well it’s not a whopper, really, because what a waste that’d be.’

  The boy staggered forward. Tunner dummied him left – then came in from the right and cracked the nightstick hard and fast on his kneecap. I heard the bone shatter. When Caleb went down Tunner marked him on the back and shoulder – once, twice, three times with the felt pen – to another cheer and a smattering of applause.

  ‘Sobel!’ Tunner called. ‘Give him another bag. He’s slower than my fucking nan.’

  Sobel looked at Murdoch. Murdoch held up two fingers. Two more. Sobel grinned. Tossed the pouches in.

  This time Caleb caught them, both, with astonishing hand-speed, tore into one and sucked.

  ‘Nuncle, that’s not fair!’ Tunner said.

  Murdoch ignored him.

  Tunner kicked at Caleb’s hand – and the unopened pouch flew to a corner of the cage. Caleb turned to go after it and Tunner pounced on him, actually landed on the boy’s back and began whacking his head with the nightstick. Caleb took three or four steps – an eleven-year-old giving a one-hundred-and-seventy-pound man a piggy-back – then went down on both knees. Tunner had marked him ten or twelve times with the felt-tip pen.

  ‘One-minute-thirty gone,’ Murdoch called.

  Tunner dropped the pen behind him and with the now-free hand grabbed Caleb by the hair and yanked his head back. Caleb was six inches from the blood pouch, straining to reach it. The circulatory webbing was fainter now. Tunner smashed the nightstick across the boy’s trachea. Caleb, gagging, shoved himself to his feet – then launched himself backwards, jamming Tunner against the razor wire. Tunner screamed and twisted, ripping the flesh on his back and speckling the nearest Hunters with blood. Several of them were looking at Murdoch. Murdoch, lips pursed, kept his attention on the watch.

  Caleb was weakening again. It took both his hands to tie up Tunner’s nightstick arm, which left the Hunter’s other arm free. With a strange precision he reached around, got a grip on the side of Caleb’s head, then dug his thumb into the boy’s eye.

  ‘I shouldn’t worry too much,’ Murdoch said to me, when the eye – or rather half of it – was out, ‘he’ll have another by tomorrow morning. You know how it works.’ Then to Tunner: ‘Two minutes gone. Aesthetically very poor, Mr Tunner. Aesthetically very poor.’

  The rest of the contest was leaden and repulsive. Tunner gouged Caleb’s other eye enough so that the boy could barely see, after which the Hunter could strike virtually at will. After kicking the unopened pouch out of the cage he had leisure to retrieve his felt-tip pen, and by the time Murdoch stopped the clock the boy lay curled semi-conscious on the floor covered in dashes of red ink, face a mess of black blood. As a final insult Tunner yanked the sweats down again and made a big red tick on one bare buttock. It took Caleb, sightless, limbs hot and confused, three attempts to pull his pants back up.

  ‘Cheers, fuckhead,’ one of the warming-up Hunters said, as Tunner exited the cage. ‘He’s not much use to the rest of us blind, is he?’

  38

  What felt like several hours later Murdoch came to see me. I’d been put back in my cell and given half a loaf of bread and some cold chicken, which, after a clash and wrestle of hungers, I’d eaten. I’d spent the time trying to express milk and pinballing off the same few thoughts: I was going to die in here. The vampires would kill Lorcan. Cloquet would abandon Zoë. The Hunt would find her. I’d never see my dad’s face again. I had to get out. I was going to die in here...

  My rhythms were scrambled. Wulf surged, came with confused violence right to the edge – the sudden deep strength in the chest and haunches, the iron in the eye-teeth, the shriek in finger- and toe-sockets – then exploded, left its ghost like a mist on the human machine. I kept wondering if, changed, I’d be able to bend the bars. I kept knowing the answer: No. The steel told my human hands exactly how far short wulf’s power would fall: not much, but enough. And anyway I’d be dead by then, or a vegetable on a gurney.

  They’d brought Caleb back in a couple of hours after me. He was unconscious – or perhaps, if it was daylight outside, merely sleeping the sleep of his kind. His stink was dense and boiling. If I hadn’t already vomited myself empty I’d have been at it again. I’d watched the damaged tissue of his eyes blacken, shrivel, drop off. Murdoch was right, I did know how it was: the silent jazz of cellular regeneration. When he woke up he’d blink and look at me out of his big green eyes, good as new.

  ‘You’ll be wondering if you’re going to get raped,’ Murdoch said. His odour of leather and clean canvas had been joined by the smell of spruce male toiletries. He’d showered and shaved since the cage. ‘The answer is No. Science is coming tomorrow to begin a complete exam and analysis and my men are under orders you’re not to be touched. In any case, it’s not something I allow.’

  I almost said, That’s a shame, I could do with the action. I would’ve said it just to provoke him, but having thought it, there, like an embarrassing odour, was its truth. Desire was, whether I liked it or not, writhing around in me like an insomniac snake. Now, along with the struggle not to loathe myself for my fucking uselessness, plus the effort not to think about Lorcan and Zoë, plus despair like a soft white bed waiting for me to get in, plus the reality of death hitting me at random moments like blasts from a furnace – along with all this was the grinning idiot reliability of wulf lust. Yes, well, say what you like about the Curse, Jake had written, but don’t say it doesn’t have a sense of humour. Sadistic or slapstick or absurd, but humour nonetheless. In Poulsom’s white jail I’d had a room with a door and a light that could be turned out, and though deep down I’d suspected infra-red surveillance there was at least the illusion of privacy. Not here. The lights in the cells stayed on 24/7 and the CCTV never slept.

  ‘Sex is a force for chaos,’ Murdoch explained. He had a lovely mellow-toned voice. ‘I let it into this arena, pretty soon I’ve got distraction, conflict, insubordination. It’s a rogue energy. This is an insight I have.’

  I had a vivid re-run of him smashing Hoyle’s skull in. He’d done it with a peaceful face. The face he’d wear sitting alone in a café staring out the window at the rain. It made me wonder what state Walker was in, wherever he was.

  ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ I asked.

  ‘Up to Science,’ he said. ‘Research on lycanthropes was shut down a couple of years ago, but recent events have opened it up again. Poulsom’s work, mainly, the anti-virus. The eggheads’ll put you through your paces and take a decision on it. If it were up to me, obviously, I’d cut your head off. Whatever happens, you won’t be seeing the outside world again.’

  Sometime in the past women (via a woman) had failed to live up to what he thought they promised. I imagined unappreciated passions, an intensity first awkward, then desperate, then disastrous. He was all wrong for women in just the mysterious way Walker was all right. Which it turned out didn’t prohibit getting married or working alongside female agents. A woman was only a problem if she impinged, fundamentally. The wife, Angela, who’d seemed negligible enough, had in fact turned out to be an impinger. Analysing him and fucking other men. I might be an impinger. He hadn’t made his mind up yet.

  ‘Do you know where the vampires are holding Konstantinov’s wife?’ I asked him.

  ‘And your son? You don’t mention him in case we don’t know about him. But of course we do know about him.’

  Heat filled my scalp. A sudden fury and sickness and disgust at always being the patsy, at being every minute further behind the information. This was a version of hell: the closer to my son I thought I was getting, the further I was moving aw
ay. I imagined Jacqueline watching it, the Talulla Show, wincing with quiet delight at my fuck-ups. I imagined Jake, staring at the footage, unblinking, silent, burning.

  ‘Your little girl too, obviously,’ Murdoch said. ‘Thanks to Hoyle. Thanks to Walker. Why did Walker think it necessary to give all that information to Hoyle? The answer is he didn’t think it was necessary. He just didn’t think. He’s got a loose mouth.’

  Which choice of words he regretted, a tiny shift in the hawk eyes conceded. Walker’s mouth. On his wife’s mouth. On her breasts, between her legs, all over her. Not that that was the root of the enmity. The root of the enmity was that both of them, he and Walker, had the same boredom, the same aloneness, the same certainty that what you did didn’t matter – and yet Walker had a kind of virtue, if only the virtue of being likeable. For Murdoch that was the annoyance that had bloomed into monomania, that Walker casually proved there was another response to the vast mathematical silence. And fucked Murdoch’s wife.

  ‘Also,’ Murdoch said, ‘his birth certificate was in your backpack. Along with...’ He pulled the journal out of his jacket pocket... ‘Jake Marlowe’s diary. I hadn’t known killing and eating people was sexually arousing for you.’

  I wanted to say something flip – but I wanted the book back more.

  ‘I know the answer to this is probably no,’ I said, ‘but could I have that back? I mean you’ve made copies or scanned it for the files or whatever, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, could I have it?’

  The question brought us to a curious silence. There was no reason for him to comply. Except the pleasure it would give him to confound my expectation that he wouldn’t comply. Which he knew I expected. So he’d do the opposite. Which he also knew I expected – therefore the inclination was to confound that expectation... And so on, potentially ad infinitum. It was as if we were having this hypnotic conversation out loud – yet I knew if I actually said anything out loud – Please, just to keep me company while the kid’s asleep – he’d simply stare at me with the calm unhinged dignity... then turn and walk away without a word.

  He handed the journal to me through the bars. The mind-reading made the gesture intimate. It was as if he was testing his own hatred. These were the curiosity margins he operated at.

  ‘To answer your other question,’ he said, ‘no, I don’t know where the vampires are holding your son, or for that matter Konstantinov’s wife. Once we’ve dealt with Walker et al, and the lab-coats have decided your fate, I’ll give this Remshi business a proper look.’

  ‘You know the legend then?’

  ‘We all know the legend. Everyone goes through a Book of Remshi phase at one time or another. “Phase” being the operative word. It’s an appealing idea, the oldest living vampire – think of the stories he could tell! – but the book’s boring. No one actually reads it.’ Jake would have added (or I would have, or Grainer or possibly even Ellis): It’s WOCOP’s Finnegans Wake. But Murdoch didn’t read. Like women books had failed of what they’d once seemed to promise him. Like women books were sly and false and in the end no kind of antidote to the emptiness he’d been falling through screaming all these years. Like women, books couldn’t stop him.

  ‘But do you believe he exists?’

  His headset clicked. He held a finger to the earpiece. ‘Go ahead.’

  Pause.

  ‘All right, I’m on my way.’ Then to me: ‘Duty calls.’ He crossed the corridor. ‘If he does exist,’ he said, ‘he won’t make any difference. He won’t know where he came from or where he’s going. He’ll have stories... He will have the stories. But that’s all they’ll be. Ultimately he’ll be one more freak living off human beings, which means, in the end, it’ll be my job to find him and kill him.’

  He swiped the card, got the sequence of blips and the hydraulic sigh. The door closed behind him with the subdued sounds of precision technology. I rested my head against the bars. Realised, amongst other things, that I was getting used to Caleb’s smell.

  39

  I read Jake for a while. Self-lacerating escape: Heathrow, the Plaza, the long drive west to Big Sur; love, love, love – but some of the Madeline material too. I couldn’t help it now that I’d met her. Not a good idea in my state. The love hurt my heart and the sex (mine and Jake’s, but if I’m truthful his and hers as well) got me pitifully turned-on. Walker wove in and out of all of it. I wanted to see his face and hear his voice. I contemplated – with an inner smile for how much Jake would’ve sympathised – just biting the bullet, lying down in the corner and having a hand-job. I didn’t, however. I couldn’t stand the thought of Murdoch watching. With the same look on his face as when he beat Hoyle to death. For what felt like a long time I lay on my back trying to think of anything – the formula for quadratic equations, the novels of Graham Greene, the sequence of US presidents – other than sex. Eventually, because even the werewolf body is an honourable machine, I fell asleep.

  When I woke, Caleb was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling with his brand new eyes.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  He didn’t turn to look at me. Of course: The pants pulled down, the exposed genitals, the humiliation by a human male, the impotence and girlfriend taunts. A seventeen-year-old boy in a pre-pubescent body. The more I thought about it the more I saw it couldn’t have been much worse for him. And he’d been here twenty-one days. How many times had he been in the cage?

  My first instinct was to not say anything about what had happened. Give his ego time and room. But the more I thought about it the more I knew that wouldn’t do. He’d see it for what it was, was already seeing it, in the silence while I figured it out. It would patronise him. It would inflate the misery it was supposed to diminish. I had to keep reminding myself he wasn’t a child.

  ‘I’m sorry that happened to you,’ I said. I couldn’t think of anything less blunt. ‘If it’s any consolation, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be me next. We’ve got to get out of here.’

  He didn’t answer for a while. He was working out whether he could get past the shame. An alternative would be turning his back and never speaking to me again. I forced myself not to cajole him. Let it be his decision.

  After a couple of minutes, still not looking at me, he said: ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know, yet. But they’re going to move me tomorrow. Scientists are coming. Maybe it’ll give me a chance to get a look at the layout of this place.’

  ‘They’ll give you diseases,’ he said. ‘To see how your immune system works. They make you eat stuff to see what happens when you reject it.’

  ‘I can eat stuff,’ I said. ‘Just not all the time.’

  ‘They cut bits off you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Will that hurt you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’ll regenerate?’

  ‘Seems that way. Everything except the head, apparently.’

  ‘It’s another thing they bet on. How long different parts of you take to grow back.’

  ‘Don’t tell me any more,’ I said. ‘I’d rather not know. Did you get a look at any of the rest of this place when they moved you?’

  ‘No, they took me when I was asleep. It won’t make any difference. We’re going to die in here.’

  ‘Suppose Remshi comes?’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t he know where you were and come get you?’

  A pause. He’d forgotten he’d mentioned Remshi. I watched him mentally retrace his steps.

  ‘It’s not Jesus and the lost sheep,’ he said. ‘It’s not about love. I’d be no one to him.’

  ‘I thought you said this lot would be in for it when he comes.’

  ‘They will, but that’s nothing to do with me. Humans aren’t going to know what hit them. He can walk in the daylight. We’ll all be able to walk in the daylight again.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Jacqueline. But it’s in the book.’

  ‘Did Jacqueline... Was she your maker?’

>   Silence.

  ‘Is it bad etiquette to ask?’

  He still didn’t answer.

  ‘Well, it’s up to you,’ I said. ‘I just need something to take my mind off what’s coming to me.’

  For a few minutes we remained like that, me sitting with my back to the wall, him lying staring up at the ceiling of his cell. When he spoke, it was obvious he was choked. ‘We’re not supposed to just tell anyone,’ he said. ‘But if I’m going to die anyway I suppose it doesn’t make any difference.’ The green eyes were filling with what in a healthy vampire I guessed would be blood; in his case thin pinkish-grey fluid. ‘And if you get out of here,’ he added, ‘you can tell her I was sorry for being such a fucking idiot.’

  ‘Jacqueline?’

  ‘No. The one who made me.’

  He’d been in Trinity Hospice in Clapham, dying of cancer. Gastric cancer in the first instance, which took doctors so long to diagnose (it’s rare in children) that by the time they did he had tumors in his lungs, pancreas and lower bowel. He had eighteen months of radio- and chemotherapy, to no avail. His mother, a single parent (father a long since vanished one-night stand), had died in a car accident when he was four, and he’d been raised since then by his aunt and uncle in Wimbledon – not badly, it sounded like, but not with much love, either. ‘I wasn’t their kid. Jeff was my auntie Rochelle’s second husband, and he didn’t want me around. He worked in the City and she was training to be a psychotherapist. I spent my time with a string of au pairs and nannies. It wasn’t bad. Jeff and Rochelle had a lot of money and felt guilty about not loving me, so by the time I was eight I was drowning in fucking toys and gadgets. I’m pretty sure if I’d asked them for a coke dealer and Kylie on a retainer they’d have sorted it, somehow. Then I got sick.’