Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  That was an option, of course, to take it as poetic justice, a penance earned from my own mortal sins. Aunt Theresa had a big thing about offering your sufferings up to God. I’d overheard my mother arguing with her: What kind of lousy sadist God wants my sufferings? Don’t be such a retard, Theresa. A flash of love for my mom went off like a gorgeous firework – and I laughed out loud.

  I know how uplifting it would be to say the laugh unnerved my rapist, but it didn’t. He was past all that. Laughter might have had a chance in the raw interim, but not now. Now he’d dropped deep into his blood and only outside force could stop him.

  He was less than two feet away. His body’s heat touched the cold sweat on my face. Wulf was outraged at the timing. An hour, maybe two, and she could tear him in half. But that was part of the Murdoch design. He wanted me as close as possible to the Curse’s gift of physical strength without being able to use it. Think what you could do to him if only the moon was up! Oh, but it’s not up. Of course. Shame.

  Without warning String Vest slammed into me, hurling me back against the bars. His weight was a momentary eclipse – but shot through by a sudden distinct pain in my left flank, just under the ribs. For a second I thought he’d stabbed me, albeit with an absurdly small and blunt knife. Then I realised: there was something in one of my pockets after all.

  I’d stopped wearing make-up when I was pregnant. Not on principle, but because most of the time my skin was so sensitive that dragging cosmetics across it would’ve been plain masochism. But here, from the days before maternity, was an eyeliner pencil. I remembered. One night in Palm Springs while I was still pretending to feel great about the divorce I’d tripped, drunk on margaritas, getting out of a cab, and half the contents of my purse had ended up on the sidewalk. A friend had handed me the eyeliner pencil I’d missed, and I’d shoved it into my pocket on my way up the steps to the club. It had been there, with its nib stuck in a tiny hole in the lining, ever since.

  Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all. There isn’t one.

  No, there wasn’t. But I couldn’t help thinking of the young Konstantinov and the pencil he’d had in his pocket the night his beloved Daria Petrov was attacked by a vampire. Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they’d fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn’t help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.

  Out of sheer reflex I’d been struggling, without much success, to keep my free hand free. I’d smacked him a couple of times ineffectually on the side of his monumental head, tried kneeing him in the groin, but the cuffs ruined my balance. He only needed his left hand to pin my right. He only needed to lean on my right thigh to keep my legs open.

  You know what you have to do, my mom’s voice in me said.

  He tore my shirt and yanked at the bra until my breasts were exposed. The trailer’s air on my bare flesh was a blunt indecency. He made a noise of mild animal approval, as if he’d unwrapped a box of chocolates and, though he was full, was going to eat most of them anyway. My head was hot. He looked me in the eye. He wanted me to see there was no hope. Of course that’s what he wanted to see. Who knew better than me? I closed my eyes, turned my face away, and let myself go completely limp. I had a choice: I could let him put it inside me, let him get going, so his reaction time would be at its slowest, or I could do whatever it was I was going to do (you know what you have to do, Lula) before he put it in me, and spare myself the seconds or minutes of – euphemism failed – being raped.

  His cock was out of his fly, the head of it pressing my abdomen. It was dark, hard and pornographically huge, with an odour of Vaseline and piss. I didn’t want it inside me. I really did not want it inside me.

  I turned my face back to him, met his eye, then let him see me look down at it, with ambiguous disgust, then back up at him.

  ‘No cheating,’ Murdoch said. ‘You need to be aware, my friend, that she’s got a hist—’

  A cellphone rang. Murdoch’s. He looked. Had to take it. I heard him say: ‘Sir?’ then he took a pace back beyond the light.

  ‘Please don’t,’ I said. ‘Please... please...’ I let my legs buckle. Slid towards the floor. He hit me, hard, in the mouth. My bottom lip split against my teeth. I cried out. Off-balance, dragged down by trying to hold me up, he let go of my free hand.

  The screaming imperative was to make my move right then, but I overrode it, just. ‘Oh God,’ I whispered, sobbing. ‘Oh God, oh God... ’

  I imagined my mother standing close. Sell him the idea you’re not going to fight, angel. Come on, sell it. You can do this. This piece of shit doesn’t know anything. This piece of shit is a human.

  He hit me again, a sensation like when I fell going down Lauren’s concrete yard steps and smacked my skull on one of the slabs. Lauren had been date-raped when she was twenty-three. We were talking about it and she’d tried to make it sound like a wacky adventure, like a night with a hilariously terrible guy who said and did all the wrong things and even at one point spilled a drink on her – then she’d got up suddenly and run to the bathroom and I’d gone after her and found her throwing up and even then it took ages before she stopped trying to laugh it off as just another of her wild-child escapades and absolutely refused to go and report it to the police.

  He was unbuttoning my jeans, and – since I was whimpering and boneless with my face covered in blood and snot – using both hands to do it. He was at a rolling boil of excitement. It was as if there was an audible wordless incantation going on inside him. I remembered reading my mom’s copy of The Female Eunuch. ‘Women have no idea how much men hate them.’ That wasn’t true any more. My generation had a very good idea. My generation had decided to be cool with it, more or less. Yeah, guys hate women. That’s kinda... interesting. There are only two types of guy, Lauren had said. The type who feels lousy about degrading you and the type who doesn’t. Which leaves a girl a choice between getting degraded and hating it or finding a way to enjoy getting degraded. Or, obviously, just having nothing to do with guys.

  Very slowly, I put my free hand into my jacket pocket and withdrew the eyeliner. I bent my head forward and sobbed against his damp chest. My forehead touched the St Christopher, evoked the victim at Lucy’s, my own back catalogue of carnage. Wulf was at stilled attention, intrigued. The ghost jaws moved in mine. The nerves leaped under my nails. My mother said: Be accurate, angel. Believe you can do this, and be accurate. I’m so proud of you.

  He’d undone the buttons on my fly and shoved his hot hand into my panties. Calloused palms. I wondered what his hands did, in their other life, if there was another life. Then I wrapped my free leg around his thigh, tightened my grip, rushed one last set of calculations, and said: ‘Hey.’

  He looked at me.

  I thought: big eyes. Good. The left if anything slightly bigger.

  So I picked that one.

  56

  Hard, deep, accurate, fast. Cornea, pupil, lens. Most people would miss. Most people would miss because the concept would defeat them. The concept was nothing to me. Therefore I didn’t miss. I hit the back of the socket and pulled out, my free right leg locked around his as if we were posing to simulate the tango. His roar assaulted my face with hot breath that said dehydration, nicotine, coffee, a samosa. Since his reflex pull away was checked by my leg, we found ourselves in a stretched moment, me flushed, him suffering shock’s detachment. He stopped mid-scream, as if giving reality a chance to tell him it was kidding, the bitch hadn’t really just stabbed a pencil through his eyeball. But reality had no such news. His next move would break my leg’s hold and take him out of my reach. Both his hands had flown to cup the wrecked eye.

  So I jammed the pencil into the healthy one.

  Not as clean a hit. It went in under the eyeball, scraping the socket – and snapped as he wrenched himself backwards, fell over my leg, and scurry-dragged himself
, blind and screaming, as far away from me as possible. There wasn’t much blood, but it was more than enough to get wulf in a lather. For a second or two the animal hardened in the muscles of my back, sent the first no-nonsense signals of transformation through sacrum, heel and skull. If there’s blood it must be time. Surely it must be time? Precipitate lightnings in my leg-bones, elbows, wrists; for a moment I felt the whole giant head shoving up from behind my ribs, an air-starved diver kicking frantically for the surface. I forced myself to keep breathing. Not yet. Not yet.

  I looked over at Murdoch, who, having finished on the phone, had stepped back into the light. His expression remained undisturbed. The guy on the floor screamed.

  ‘Did you bite him?’ Murdoch asked, when the scream withered.

  ‘Tell me what’s going on in the big picture and I’ll tell you if I bit him.’

  He took out a handgun from his side holster. ‘Silver this time,’ he said – then shot String Vest in the head.

  ‘Now we can stop talking as if you’ve anything to bargain with,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s “Sir”?’ I asked.

  ‘“Sir” will be here shortly.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Hopefully within the next... twenty-two minutes. It’s a long time since he’s seen a live transformation, apparently.’

  ‘Tell me one thing. Do you know what I’m doing here on Crete?’

  ‘You mean are you still on Crete?’

  ‘Well? Am I?’

  I don’t know if he would’ve answered me. His phone rang again, and he took it, again. The truck’s weight-shift said he’d jumped down. The trailer door slammed shut with a boom. Twenty-two minutes to moonrise at (I knew) 21.03. I’d been unconscious for a night and a day. Plenty of time for Murdoch to get me off the island. Or was it? If he’d been fired he wouldn’t have choppers and planes at his disposal. Would he risk it by boat? But if WOCOP were in the region surely they’d know about the Disciples, in which case they’d be on Crete themselves and there’d be no reason for Murdoch to move me. I decided to assume that, for the time being, since there was nothing to be gained by assuming otherwise.

  Which got me nowhere. It didn’t make any difference whether I was on Crete or Mars if I couldn’t get out of the cage. Twenty-two – make that twenty-one minutes to moonrise: how long would Lorcan have, once he’d changed? And would the others go ahead without me? Konstantinov would, obviously – but the rest of them? For all I knew they thought I was dead. Walker would have accompanied Konstantinov and most likely thrown his life away, but Walker had gone missing, too. Why? I remembered Konstantinov’s face, dragged back down from its remote epic agony to the irritatingly mundane here-and-now. He’d looked annoyed; but by now, if Walker really had gone, he’d look desperate.

  Meanwhile the bitch was unpacking herself, in the fibres, in the bones. The nerves in my teeth yelped. I had a sudden wrong view from the monster’s head-height then snapped back down to my own. Hunger stretched my blood. String Vest would still be warm when I changed. There was food, if nothing else. You live. There’s no God and that’s His only Commandment. Fifteen minutes. Twelve. Murdoch was still on the phone. The cuffs would either break or lop off my hand and foot. They looked weaker (or at any rate slimmer) than the ones that had held me in the van with Poulsom, a lifetime ago in Beddgelert Forest, and those had snapped, eventually, after several seconds of excruciating pain.

  I was close. I turned and grabbed the bars of the cage. Something to hold on to, for as long as holding on was possible. Here, they said in the movies, bite down on this.

  The door opened. Voices. Murdoch got up into the trailer. Not alone.

  ‘I’m not promising anything, John. I’m one of six. You know this.’ Deep, rich, posh English accent.

  ‘I’m aware of that, sir. I know how much ground I’ve got to make up. This is a start.’

  ‘Well, now, here she is.’

  Murdoch’s companion – ‘Sir’ – was a big-bellied, round-shouldered Asian (Indian? Pakistani? Sri Lankan?) in his early sixties with thick, oiled grey and black hair swept back off his brow in a rippled quiff. The sort of heavy-lidded eyes that made me think of the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice. The face said the body had absorbed excessive pleasure as its birthright. Tailored black three-piece suit, white shirt, blood-red tie. An oblong gold pinky ring set with an enormous flat ruby. Superficial odours of Chanel pour homme, cigar smoke and jasmine incense around the deeper stinks of sweat, urine, shit. His flesh was heavy with booze and cholesterol, his sluggish gut packed. He’d had his fingers and face between a woman’s legs recently. I hoped it had been with her consent – which thought evoked Madeline. And so Zoë, and so Lorcan, and so time running out.

  He walked up to the cage, took stock of String Vest’s corpse. ‘I suppose I oughtn’t ask?’ he said.

  ‘Collateral damage, sir,’ Murdoch said. ‘In any case she’ll need to feed.’

  ‘“She” is here, by the way,’ I said, shivering. ‘If anyone’s interested.’

  Sir turned to me. ‘How are you feeling, Ms Demetriou?’ he asked.

  I couldn’t answer. The penultimate phase was passing. The moon had already connected with whatever it was in the earth. My soles prickled. The first of the half-dozen big cramps hit, bent me as far double as the cuffs would allow. Hot bile rushed up and out. Murdoch lifted a digital camera. My scapulae squeaked, stretched, cracked. I shook my free arm from the jacket while I still could. Sir watched. He looked like God blinking out balefully from a cloud of cosmic boredom. Think of Konstantinov with three werewolves at his back kicking a door in and a crowd of vampires screaming. Hold on, angel. Hold on. They’re coming. But what if they weren’t? No point thinking that. The seams on my jeans exploded. Sir lit a slim cigar, fish-mouthed a fat smoke-ring that shuddered between the bars and floated towards me like a little spirit of mockery.

  ‘Sir,’ Murdoch said, ‘I know my opinion’s not important—’

  ‘Relevant, John, not relevant. You’re opinion’s always important to me.’

  ‘As you like, but in that case... I have to say... ’

  Whatever it was he wasn’t quite ready for its diplomatic articulation.

  ‘I know, John: the company we’re keeping. But you know yourself there’s a long tradition of cooperation.’

  ‘But they’re paying us.’

  ‘Handsomely. It’s called a global recession for a reason, John.’

  ‘I know, sir. But still.’

  ‘Flexibility, John. We’ve solved the Breakfast Club mystery, by the way,’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Formula’s flawed. Lethally. They die sooner or later depending on how many doses.’

  ‘But Remshi? He’s still going?’

  ‘He only appears in close-up clearly on the first two films. After that it could be anyone.’

  The first two films. They’d seen the footage Mia told us about. The Breakfast Club: vampires who walked in daylight. Which meant they knew the Disciples were here. Which meant almost certainly we were still on the island. Which meant which meant which meant?

  Nothing, if I couldn’t get out of here.

  Pain. Left wrist, left ankle. The cuffs had cut into the flesh. For a moment I had two fiery bracelets. Then the ankle-cuff burst. Sweet relief, though the wound immediately blurted blood.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Murdoch said. ‘They were just for the woman.’

  The wrist-cuff went. Another little blossom of eased pain. Wulf wriggled up through my shins, detonated in my knees and elbows simultaneously, with a sound of ice snapping dragged my jaws and nose into the muzzle and snout – at which the last of the human seal on smell ruptured and the gloriously stinking world spoke fully and freely again: String Vest’s adrenalin binge and cooling sweat; the cigar’s rich toxins; the trailer’s odour of murder and greased steel; the two living bodies’ rhythmic reek of thrilled flesh and blood.

  I threw myself at the cage door. No give. The bolts were solid and the bars were a finality. Neither man f
linched. I closed my eyes and saw moist turf passing under me, felt my daughter’s weight on my back. Farm fields dark and undulant, a moon-silvered stream. Opened them. Suffered the still-warm corpse’s pull. Closed them again and saw different ground, dust and shed pine needles racing under me at incredible speed, felt a heartbeat in my own and an ignored sixth sense in Murdoch hammering so loudly I couldn’t believe he just stood there holding the camera as the head I was inside lifted to see the back of a trailered truck flanked by cedar trees and lit by the risen moon and a lone guard in Hunt fatigues peeing into the shadows, rifle shouldered, and our mouths opened with joy as he I we leaped and felt the tiny rogue details of the air rushing past the hairs on our ears before the sweet impact and the cry my timed howl drowned out, and the night’s first taste of blood from the torn-out throat before his giant hands flung the door open and Walker, transformed, stood framed by the moonlit forest.

  57

  Listen. I wasn—

  Listen. I wasn’t going to tell you, but I bit him. I know why you couldn’t. I get it. But it doesn’t matter if he ends up hating me, does it? It’s what he wanted. And don’t fret. It was just a bite. No hanky-panky. Like I said, you need all the help you can get, and since I’m on fucking babysitting duty...

  SILVER! MURDOCH! PISTOL!

  Murdoch was on his way for it when Walker sprang. I saw Murdoch’s face. All his boredom vanished like a grace God had suddenly withdrawn, and there, left behind, was the desperate and wholly generic desire not to die. He’d thought he’d come to the end of himself years ago, through violence and the vast mathematical silence. Imminent death made a nonsense of the idea. He might as well have been eight years old.