Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  ‘Sorry about back there,’ she said, grinning. ‘Got a bit distracted. You know how it is.’

  What was there to say? I did know how it was.

  She and Fergus had left the detention facility maybe half an hour after we had (with a backpack full of Hunters’ gear and about eighty pounds in cash – thanks, you lot, for leaving us completely bloody stranded, by the way), gone for a romp on the downs, dozed in an empty barn till moonset, washed in a water trough, then got dressed, strolled into the nearest village and taken a bus. Fergus had made his own way back to London by train. The place names involved – Wantage, Swindon, Lambourne – meant nothing to me. She had clothes to change into after her shower, which freed-up the WOCOP gear for Devaz. As soon as he was dressed, he demanded to be let go.

  ‘No one’s keeping you prisoner,’ I said. ‘Fuck off.’

  He didn’t. Instead he sulked and prowled the cottage. I observed him shooting glances at Madeline. Observed her shake her head: No. As in, No, willingness to fuck you last night does not translate into willingness to fuck you now. Back off, dickhead.

  I called Konstantinov. He and Walker were installed at the house on the coast. Walker had been treated by the doctor. Wounds cleaned, stitched, dressed, ribs strapped, antibiotics. He was sleeping. The doctor had left twenty minutes ago.

  ‘Get him back,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell him to get hold of whatever kit he needs for a blood transfusion. We’re bringing the boy with us. Listen.’

  Konstantinov didn’t interrupt. When I’d finished, he just said: ‘Good. What time will you be here?’

  I looked in on Caleb in the cellar. The vascular web was dark in his face and hands, but I’d seen it worse. In the confined space there was no escaping the ugliness of my intention. For weeks his life had been imprisonment and suffering. Now, thanks to me, it was going to continue. He’d thought I was his friend. I had been his friend. Some of his guilt and longing for his mother had been diverted my way, and I’d accepted it. Naturally: I had divertable guilt and longing of my own. He’d let his mother down, I’d failed my son. The surrogacy that dare not speak its name. Now, with the power to reunite vampire parent and child, I was going to keep them apart. The only Old Testament comfort was knowing that however things turned out Mia would come after me for revenge.

  ‘You’re going to need us,’ Madeline said, when I was back upstairs. ‘To get your boy back. You’re going to need all of us.’

  We were in the lounge. Trish was upstairs talking to someone on her cell. Lucy, Cloquet and, rather sheepishly now, Devaz were in the kitchen with the back door open to the bright morning, smoking and drinking vodka’d coffee. Outside was a high blue sky with static shreds of white cloud, cold fresh air shivering the leaves and grass.

  ‘I already owe you my life,’ I said.

  ‘Bollocks,’ she said. ‘Had to be someone. Might as well be those fuckers. Anyway, point is, don’t worry. We’ve got to look out for each other.’

  I opened my mouth to say, I’ll make it worth your while, meaning I’d pay, but I didn’t say it. It would’ve been vulgar. It wasn’t that Maddy wouldn’t take money – of course she would – it was that this was something else. Without me realising it the feeling of being with (it was a warm shock in the blood now that I did realise it) family had crept in. The little collective consciousness, with its insights and occlusions, moved like a soft current between us. It was partly why Devaz was still here. Madeline – I got it, glimpsed the thing she’d been guarding in our peeled moments – was lonely. I saw her in a hotel bathroom touching up her make-up. At home in her flat, sitting on the loo and staring at the floor. In the back of a London cab, looking out at the liquid lights. Alone. Always alone. Now there was this, us, kin, the pack.

  Lucy appeared in the doorway, hands wrapped around a red coffee mug, thin shoulders hunched. For a moment the three of us looked at each other. ‘I suppose this is all actually happening,’ Lucy said, shoulders going down. ‘I keep thinking...’ She shook her head, let it go. We knew what she meant. In spite of the hard evidence there was a certain amount of pointlessly asking yourself if it might not, even now, all turn out to be an illusion, a dream, a fabulous and revolting mistake.

  ‘I was just telling her,’ Madeline said. ‘We’ll help her get her little boy back. Fergus and Trish are up for it. Although – ’ to me, with exaggerated disdain – ‘Fergus will want to talk money. You’ll help, won’t you, Luce?’

  Lucy’s eyes met mine. I saw what she wanted me to see, that she didn’t want anything taken for granted, that she hadn’t accepted this yet, that she’d done what she’d done last night for the money because she needed to buy space and time, that she didn’t have Madeline’s desperation, that there was a connection but it would only take us so far.

  ‘It’s no one’s responsibility but mine,’ I said. (Yes, I know. I understand.) ‘But I’ll take whatever help I can get. I don’t expect anything. You’ve all been so kind to me already.’

  Zoë, on her back in my lap, opened her eyes. My love went to her again, with hopeless panic because it knew it would have to fall away. It occurred to me, as it fell away (like the disintegrating tail-end of a Fourth of July skyrocket), that I’d never seen her brother in human form. If you showed me his picture I wouldn’t know who he was.

  Trish came bounding down the stairs. She’d changed into tight black jeans and a mohair sweater almost exactly the green of her eyes. Bare white feet, toenails painted cerise. She looked like she’d slept for a week and woken completely renewed.

  ‘You lot on the vodka already?’ she said. ‘Where’s mine?’

  51

  Lymington is a Georgian market town and sailing resort on the Hampshire coast. Immediately south, the Solent strait separates England from the Isle of Wight. To the north is the New Forest, a hundred and forty-five square miles of ancient heath and woodland. Southampton and Portsmouth lie to the east, and to the west is Keyhaven Marsh, a four-mile nature reserve ending at a long shingle promontory known as Hurst Spit. The house Konstantinov had secured was at the very edge of the town, just where the saltgrassed marsh began, a detached, five-bedroomed property, high-ceilinged, wood-floored, draughty, chipped, scuffed and generally knocked about by decades of vacationing families.

  The crooked doctor, Budarin, was a small Russian in his late forties, dark-haired but severely balding, with surprised pale blue eyes and a ridiculously cherubic little mouth. A functioning alcoholic. Konstantinov had known him for years. He didn’t ask me a single question. In fact he barely spoke at all, and when he did it was in Russian. As requested he drew a pint of blood each from Konstantinov, Cloquet, Walker, me (kept marked and separate) and, when I threw another three hundred his way, himself, though some joyless joke about its quality passed between him and his countryman. He was staying at a hotel in nearby Keyhaven, and, courtesy of our retainer, would be ‘on call’ indefinitely. He could get us more blood, but it would take forty-eight hours and ten grand. I told him to do whatever was necessary.

  Madeline and Lucy had come with us. Trish had gone back to London to take her motorcycle test. For her the rescue mission pay-day was going to finance a year’s travelling: South East Asia through spring, then the US and South America in summer and fall. Fergus’s plans were uncertain, but Madeline was confident we could get him at short notice. Devaz had gone AWOL.

  ‘Give me Mia’s number, hon, so I can tell her where you are.’

  Caleb was on a camping cot in the cellar. I’d given him a quarter-pint of Cloquet’s blood. Just enough to haul him into woozy consciousness. ‘I have a phone right here. You can talk to her.’ I moved his hot hair off his forehead, watched his eyes swim-up to focus. Lousy instinct told me he was sufficiently reduced to want his mother. Weeks of sickness and isolation and degradation and pain. He was seventeen. Seventeen was nothing. ‘You just tell her you’re okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell her where we are and she can come get you.’ His face dramatised a
brief inner struggle. A dark pink tear crept out of his left eye. Then he gave me the number.

  I let him talk to her for a minute – a slurred and confused narrative of our time incarcerated – then commandeered the phone and hurried back upstairs to the big lounge at the front of the house. The lights were off. It was dark out, but I could still see the long front lawn, the hedge, the fifty yards of saltgrass down to the water’s edge, where Lucy had gone, warmly wrapped, frowning, for a walk. Yellow boat-lights twinkled on the Solent. I could hear Madeline talking softly to Zoë in the kitchen. Something spicy for the humans was simmering on the stove: Cloquet’s handiwork. The phone was hot and heavy in my hand. Lucky I’d had all these months to get used to monstrosity.

  ‘Mia?’

  ‘Yes, who is this?’ Very slight Russian accent. Calm as a frozen lake.

  ‘My name is Talulla Demetriou. You need to listen very carefully.’

  ‘Where’s Caleb?’

  ‘Shut up and listen to me or you’ll never see your son again.’

  Silence. Immediate recalibration. No hysterics. She was used to things not being the way they first appeared. I stared out of the window, aware of the room’s normally shapeless sentience suddenly gathered tight. I gave her the instructions: She would find out where the Disciples were. She would join them. She would help us get in and get my son and Natasha out. Then her son would be returned to her. She listened without uttering a sound. Konstantinov appeared in the doorway.

  ‘What makes you think I’ll be able to find them?’ she said, when I’d finished and, like an idiot, asked: Are you still there?

  ‘Because your son’s life is at stake.’

  ‘Put Caleb back on.’

  ‘No, that’s all for now. You know he’s alive. We have blood. He’ll be comfortable and cared for, I promise you. I have absolutely no desire to harm him. But understand: there’s nothing I won’t do to get my child back. You fuck with me and I’ll make it very bad for him. Is that clear?’

  A pause. ‘If you’re going to talk like that,’ she said, ‘try not to make it sound like such hard work.’

  I had a vivid image of her from Jake’s journal: the fine-cut blonde woman dressed in black. White face, blood-covered mouth, blue eyes. Legs that would’ve been at home in an ad for quality nylons. Thank you, Jacob Marlowe.

  ‘It doesn’t help you to make me your enemy,’ I said.

  ‘You’re holding my son prisoner. You’re already my enemy.’

  ‘I also saved his life. Anyway, this conversation’s over. I’ll call you again—’

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you hurt him in any way, I’ll kill your child myself. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now let me—’

  Konstantinov took the phone from me and hit End. ‘Don’t let her talk,’ he said. ‘She’s three hundred years old. She’s smarter than you. You give her the instructions and hang up. That’s all. No good for us will come of speaking with her. Next time I’ll make the call.’

  He handed me the phone. There was a moment between us in which I didn’t say, Listen, it’s thanks to me we’ve got a chance of finding your wife, and he didn’t say, Listen, it’s thanks to me you’re not lying in a WOCOP freezer with a silver bullet in your head. We looked at each other, exchanged it all anyway, then mutually let each other off, without saying a word.

  I went to the cellar door and unlocked it. The stairs descending into the gloom depressed me. I took a deep breath, felt ten thousand microscopic threads of wulf snap as I rolled my neck, then, still not knowing whether I was going to tell the truth or lie through my tingling teeth, I went down to speak to my prisoner.

  52

  I told the truth, and it was as bad as it could have been. It was a wretched thing to see so much misery and betrayal with so little physical strength to express itself. He tried to get up, couldn’t, crashed from the fold-out onto the floor. I had to pick him up to put him back. He tried to hit and kick, but his limbs were like paper lanterns. He would have bitten me, so I held his head still by its nest of white-blond hair. He spat in my face.

  ‘Do you remember when I told you it was my son they were planning to sacrifice?’ I said, when what little energy he’d had was spent.

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘You said you didn’t know where they were keeping him, but that even if you knew you couldn’t tell me. I’ll just repeat that for you: Even if you knew you couldn’t tell me.’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘Yes, you did, and you remember saying it, so don’t bother denying it.’

  ‘It’s not the same.’

  ‘It is the same.’

  His face crumpled again for a moment: fury, impotence, losing the argument, remembering his humiliations in the cage – but always, first and foremost, being trapped in an eleven-year-old’s body. Always, first and foremost, looking like a child. It drove him to say the one thing that could hurt me.

  ‘I trusted you.’

  ‘I know you did.’

  ‘I thought you were my friend.’

  ‘I was. I am. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t harm you.’

  ‘What if my mother hadn’t agreed?’

  Yes, well, that was where the logic took us. You fuck with me and I’ll make it very bad for him. Would I? Go to work on him like the WOCOP scientists and film it and send it to Mia Tourisheva? Cooperate and I’ll make it stop.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  He hadn’t expected honesty. It burned his heart all over again. But he forced himself to go cold. ‘Well, you wouldn’t have to get your hands dirty, would you? Not with all your werewolf cronies around. This place fucking STINKS.’ The last word shouted, for the household’s benefit.

  ‘Is there anything I can get you?’ I asked. I didn’t like looking at him. It was so obvious how much this had hurt him, was still hurting him. It was so obvious how much he’d liked me.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Your daughter.’

  I absorbed it. Exhaled. Turned to go.

  ‘Cigarettes,’ he said. ‘Camels.’ Then when he saw me smile: ‘What?’

  ‘I used to smoke those.’

  ‘Congratulations. So fucking what?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ll get you some.’ It was a good job I’d had so much practice hardening my heart. Even so I paused at the foot of the stairs, wondered for the umpteenth time if there wasn’t another way. There wasn’t.

  ‘My mother’s going to kill you,’ he said, quietly, when I was three stairs up. The thought was ugly to him, amongst other things.

  ‘I’m sure she’ll try.’

  ‘You don’t understand. You can’t do this sort of thing to her.’

  ‘And yet here I am, doing it.’

  He closed his eyes. Surrendered, broken, to the new predicament. The new version of the old predicament. He’d been exhausted for such a long time. Not many make it past a thousand years, Cloquet had said. I couldn’t see Caleb getting through another ten.

  53

  Walker was sitting in the dark in a chair by his bedroom window, drinking a glass of scotch. The bottle – Glenmorangie – stood on the window sill, half empty. I sat down opposite him on the edge of the unmade bed. Our eyes met for a moment. The effect of all the times we’d looked at each other in shocked fascination was still there. But now a detached version of him stood over it, like a mortician over a corpse. I wanted to put my arms around him. He looked away.

  ‘I know what you want from me,’ I said, gently. ‘I can’t do it.’

  He didn’t answer. There was no comfort. Comfort by definition referred to what had happened to him. Comfort was logically self-defeating. In spite of which I wanted so much to put my arms around him. At these moments it was as if God said: ‘See? There’s a reason I put the soul in the body. The body is there for when the soul’s money is no good.’ But right now the body’s money was no good, either. We’d had no physical contact – I literally hadn’t touched him
– since Murdoch’s ambush in Italy. The loss was an ache, in my skin, in my heart. It had been so warm and collusive between us in the dark hotel hours. With a little practice we’d got the knack of coming, together, with him inside me. I remembered the first time it happened, the dark intuition, the sudden upgraded focus, the precarious rushing delight and at the end the second or two of astonishing unity that shears you both off into the void – then back, gratuitously enriched, stunned, deliciously finite.

  ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ he said, quietly.

  I imagined coming to his room in the small hours and starting to undress. I knew as clearly as if he’d said it aloud how cold and dead his Don’t would sound, before I’d got past the second button of my shirt.

  ‘You should eat something,’ I said. These things you say that you know are useless and yet not completely because their use is to be there when not saying anything is unbearable.

  ‘Did she go for it?’ he asked.

  Mia Tourisheva, he meant. This was an option. Discuss the objectives, the plans, the practicalities.

  ‘She seems to have.’

  ‘You know Natasha’s probably dead.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘When was the last time they sent Mike anything? The novelty’s worn off.’

  It hadn’t occurred to me. But now that I thought of it there was an occasional wideness to Konstantinov’s eye that said it had occurred to him. It had occurred to him, yes, but he was going to proceed as if it hadn’t. I didn’t see him surviving it if she was dead. He didn’t have Walker’s talent for staying alive on fascination with his own deformity. Maybe Walker didn’t either, any more.

  ‘It won’t matter,’ he said. ‘He won’t accept it until he’s seen her with his own eyes. And that’ll be the end of him.’