Talulla Rising Read online

  ‘I’ll go and check downstairs,’ Cloquet said.

  ‘No, I’ll go.’

  ‘You should rest.’

  ‘I need to move. Ow. Fuck.’ The baby shimmied, scraped something in me. It sent these violent communiqués. The same communiqué, every time: I saw you. In the mirror. You and Delilah Snow. Mother.

  I waited for the pain to fold itself away again.

  ‘You sure you don’t want something?’ Cloquet asked.

  I shook my head, no. Then held out my hand to him. ‘But I don’t think I can get out of this chair by myself.’

  2

  One minute you’re little Lula, eight years old, sitting on the counter in the Tenth Street diner drinking a vanilla shake under the pink Coors neon – the next this, the stink of liver under your fingernails and the water in the shower running red around your feet. In the thought experiment you commit suicide. I wouldn’t do it. I’d kill myself. In reality you don’t. In reality you kill and eat someone else. You start at one end of the experience, go through it, come out the other side. You’ve killed and eaten a human being. Blood winks on your fingers, mats the hair on your arms and snout. The gobbled life flails and struggles in what it touchingly mistakes for a bad dream. The moon sets. The next day you wake up in sheets that smell of fabric conditioner. There is CNN. There is coffee. There is weather. There is your human face in the mirror. The world, you discover, is a place of appalling continuity. I ate his heart. It seems incredible the words don’t refuse, don’t revolt. But why should they? You didn’t. There’s your horror, yes. But your horror’s a tide going out: every wave stops a little further away. Eventually the tide doesn’t come in any more. Eventually there’s just the sighing delta, the new you, the werewolf. The last werewolf, as it happens.

  Jake had thought he was the last. He’d thought he was ready to go, too. One by one I’ve exhausted the modes, he wrote:

  hedonism, asceticism, spontaneity, reflection, everything from miserable Socrates to the happy pig. My mechanism’s worn out. I don’t have what it takes. I still have feelings but I’m sick of having them. Which is another feeling I’m sick of having. I just . . . I just don’t want any more life.

  Then he’d met me. Courtesy of the risible twist, the ludicrous coincidence. Love has come, he wrote.

  Full, incendiary, unarguable with. Love has come, and with it the renewed pricelessness of time. I think of an hour with her – then of my hundreds of thousands of hours before knowing her was possible, wasted hours, by definition. The life we could’ve had if she’d been around a century ago (or fifty years, or ten, or Jesus Christ five) is an obscenity in my imagination. The bigger obscenity, of course, is the question of how much life we’ve got. There’s no God but I know his style: he wouldn’t teach you the value of time unless you had fuck-all time left . . .

  He was right. We had two months. Careful what you wish for, he’d sent me, dying, in my arms. Before we’d met he’d wished for death. Death had listened. Death had made a note. Unerasable, it turned out.

  A century and a half of loneliness coda’d by sixty days and nights of love. Not much of an equation. Reversed, it looked a lot worse: sixty days and nights of love followed by hundreds of years of loneliness. No wonder I missed every abortion appointment I made.

  I had three recurring daydreams. One was of me with a twelve-year-old daughter living in a Los Angeles villa. Turquoise pool, cactus garden, sunlight, Cloquet in a straw hat and white bermudas teaching us French.

  Another was of a little werewolf boy in a shredded school uniform covered in blood, a leftover eyeball in his lunchbox, a human tongue flopping out of his blazer pocket. Of course it was darkly hilarious. Dark hilarity’s always an option, if there’s no God.

  I said three recurring daydreams.

  I know.

  Not yet.

  •

  Halfway down the basement stairs my legs buckled. I grabbed the banister, slid to my knees and vomited. Bile and water, since I hadn’t had solid food in twelve days. It hadn’t always been this way. I’d swanned through the first eighteen weeks of pregnancy symptom-free. Then, without warning, everything had changed. Cramps, vomiting, night sweats, visual disturbances, nosebleeds, back ache, diarrhoea, breathtaking uterine pains. Overnight, biology made me its punchbag. If I was lucky I got about a week’s grace post-transformation, when the bodily violence subsided, but when the moon hit first quarter it started up again, and the fiercer the hunger, the more maternity beat the shit out of me. A curse on top of the Curse: you’re starving, but your appetite makes you sick. (My last victim, an onion-and-whiskey-flavoured pimp in Mexico City, had brought on x-rated vomiting less than an hour after I’d eaten him. A pointless death. Now he was an oddity among my dead, confused and wraithy from having not been taken in properly – or from having been taken in and then half forced out again.) For a while I’d clung to a moral theory, that motherhood abhorred murder. But things had happened. Things had happened, and the theory had gone.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I croaked down to Kaitlyn. ‘It’s just me.’

  The stuff you come out with: It’s just me. Your other kidnapper. How reassuring. Kaitlyn didn’t reply. She was on her feet by the camp-bed, holding the restraining cable. Twenty-three, according to her driver’s licence. Pale skin, greasy blonde hair, slightly bulbous blue eyes and a blow-up dollish mouth. Overall a look of not being quite clean (I imagined a grimy navel and a bedroom like the site of a poltergeist freak-out) but slim and pretty enough not to have suspected anything worse than a one-night stand when Cloquet picked her up in Fairbanks. She’d resigned early into the belief that sex was the only thing she had to offer, spent a lot of time docilely doing things in bed she really didn’t want to do, but hey, you know, that was guys, that was the world. There were millions of young women just like her all over America. I’d never been one of them. Because as a child I’d had love and winter nights with my dad talking me through the constellations. Because I’d had catastrophic drunk uncles who’d blearily sought my eight-year-old opinion and sharp aunts (Theresa excluded) who’d marched against the war in Vietnam. Because I’d had The Iliad and Emily Dickinson and the fabulous spectacle of my mother’s ego, her outrageous sense of entitlement.

  ‘It’s a lie about the ransom, isn’t it?’ Kaitlyn said, when I reached the bottom step. ‘I mean I’m not stupid. No one who gives a shit about me’s got any money.’ She was through the crying phase. She was through all the dramatic phases: shock, terror, rage, grief. It had taken seventy-two hours. Now there was mechanical misery. If we held her long enough it would become boredom. Eventually acceptance. But of course we weren’t going to hold her long enough. Why do you keep going down there? Cloquet wanted to know. You don’t have to have contact with her. Why don’t you let me deal with it?

  ‘It’s bullshit,’ Kaitlyn said. ‘I know it is. There’s no fucking ransom.’

  The ransom story had been a kindness. To fill the hole. Which would otherwise have filled with terrible things. Though never in a hundred years the correct terrible thing. I felt sorry for her. The Curse didn’t purge empathy. It waited for transformation to alchemise it into cruelty. That was why I kept coming down here, to measure how much of my human remained. Too much. Always too much. That was the genius of lycanthropy: species divorce was never finalised. No matter what you did to humans their claim on your feelings endured. (Wulf rolled its eyes. Of course their claim on your feelings endures. If it didn’t, killing and eating them wouldn’t feel so unbelievably good, would it?)

  ‘Tell me,’ Kaitlyn pleaded.

  Her jeans smelled appetisingly sour. My hands were full of busy weakness. Three months back I’d eaten a twenty-four-year-old hiker in the Alleghenies. He was covered in russet fuzz and full of startling supple strength, the way a rabbit or a goose is when you grab it. He hadn’t ever been in love. He had a lot of love, waiting, undischarged. Courtesy of the dark hilarity, I thought Kaitlyn would be good for him. They’d be good for each other. When th
ey met. In me. Talulla the matchmaker. This was the thing with dark hilarity: once you started, there was no end to it.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, when I took a step closer. Without warning wulf had flared and bulged, pressed on her intuition like a thumb on a bruise. Fresh fear opened her pores, released fraught pheromones, a mouth-watering mix with the acrid denim. The animal moved in my jaws, rippled, swelled, for a second seemed to have torn through – that familiar trick, so convincing I put my hand up to where the giant muzzle should be. Nothing. Of course. Not yet.

  ‘Tell me why you’re doing this,’ Kaitlyn wailed, at the edge of tears.

  I didn’t answer, but I knew when I raised my head the monster was looking out from behind my eyes. Kaitlyn’s face crimped and trembled. The low room suddenly obvious and me like no woman she’d ever met. She put her hand up to cover her throat, where her skin was as pale as the flesh of an apple. The ghost claws tugged the nerves under my nails. They knew the body’s soft tensions and the joy of rupture. For a moment she sensed what was coming off me and thought not human – but nausea mugged me again and I turned away, heaved-up more bile. My fingers and toes strained in their sockets. My canines needled. A wall went up in Kaitlyn against what she’d thought because not human was, after all, crazy.

  ‘How can you do this?’ she said, not quite knowing what she meant. ‘I mean you’re fucking pregnant.’

  I’d thought she was going to say: I mean you’re a fucking woman.

  Technically I wasn’t a woman, but even I, dirty, filthy little girl that I was, had wondered if the Curse wasn’t an opportunity to offer the Sisterhood some belated help, by taking male victims only. Asshole male victims, wherever possible. But wulf’s tastes were aggressively catholic, demanded the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful – and everything in between. Jake had tried it, the forced diet of villains (he once ate five murderers on the trot) but the monster had backlashed, pushed him into a reactive run of innocents. Wulf’s got God’s appetite, Lu, he’d said. Or literature’s. It wants the full human range, from saints to psychos. You try to weight the scales, trust me, the fucker won’t have it. He’d had the dark hilarity. Dark hilarity had been his MO – but it wasn’t enough on its own. He’d needed a purpose, too. That was the werewolf survival kit, dark hilarity plus purpose. For a hundred and sixty-seven years his purpose had been penance. Then he met me – and his purpose was love.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ Kaitlyn said.

  I straightened, wiped my mouth, waited for the sickness to subside. ‘It’ll be over soon,’ I said. ‘I just came to see if you needed anything. He’ll bring you some food down in a little while.’

  3

  Richard, my ex-husband, once said: I hate that smug look a woman gets when she’s pregnant, as if her cunt’s gone on to the higher calling. It was the sort of thing he came out with to offend the po-faced, but deep down we both knew he meant it. I’d seen it in pregnant women myself, the new centre of gravity, the benign autism. Then, when I’d started to show, I’d seen people seeing it in me: a woman rich or dumb with certainty, glowing with inane self-containment. Even grief couldn’t touch it. I’d be lying curled-up on a hotel bathroom floor, face a mess of tears and snot because my idiot heart couldn’t stop reaching into the emptiness where Jake should have been – but a part of me always remained sealed, inviolate, wrapped like a force field around the new life I carried.

  Until the night I met Delilah Snow. After that the force field pretty much unravelled.

  •

  By the time I got upstairs to my room the cramps were so bad I couldn’t make it to the bed. My face was a neuralgic map. My teeth chattered. I got down slowly onto my hands and knees and forehead. The thin Inupiat rug had a friendly smell of dust and patchouli and mould. Thanks to pain I’d rediscovered the humble rewards of lying down in unlikely places. I could hear Cloquet weapons-checking downstairs. It was what he did to reassure himself. We had hardware stashed all over the lodge. Machine gun in the laundry hamper. Flamethrower under the sink. Crossbows in the closets. A dozen grenades. Tucked beneath my pillow were four wooden stakes and a Glock nine-millimetre. (Glocks, Colts, Springfields, Walthers, Tri-Stars, Magnums, Berettas. Until the Curse I’d been no more likely to own a gun than I would’ve been to own an elephant. Now I could’ve opened my own store.)

  It took me a long time to crawl to the en suite and begin running a bath. (I’d taken a lot of baths, less for physical relief than psychological comfort: they reminded me of my teenage self, the little white bathroom on the third floor of the Park Slope house, where I’d go and soak and read and brood and scheme and take stock of my body and jerk-off.) Undressing was a dreamlike ordeal. For a moment, I knelt in front of the mirror. Stone breasts webbed with veins I’d never seen before. Belly as big as a cauldron. Navel sticking out like a lewd gesture. It’s disgusting, Lauren had said of her sister’s enormous pregnancy. She used to be pretty. Now she’s just this fat, shambling cow. Lauren would rather not have had a body. As far as she was concerned her body was engaged in a full-time campaign to gross her out or embarrass her in public. I remember the way she reacted when I told her – a while before either of us had begun it – what menstruation was. What do you mean you bleed an egg out? An egg? Jesus Christ, Lu, that is so repugnant. Why do you make this stuff up? But even while she was objecting I knew she knew I wasn’t making it up. I missed her. She’d ended up siliconed and divorced from a Los Angeles gangster. It had been years since we’d caught up, and now, no matter how long we talked, we’d never really catch up again.

  I hauled myself onto the toilet and slumped there, exhausted.

  I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself, my mother used to quote, lifting my chin with her fingertips, drying my tears with her sleeve. A small bird will drop frozen from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. It worked every time, until one day when I was seventeen and hungover and heartbroken and I turned on her and said that wild things were incapable, by fucking definition, of feeling sorry for themselves and it was a stupid bogus poem and D.H. Lawrence was an asshole. And she’d said, Oh, I didn’t know you’d become so literal. I guess you’ve joined The Humans. That’s too bad.

  A single big cramp dragged something out of me. I got, trembling, to my feet, and looked into the toilet bowl.

  Blood. Mine. A lot. For a moment I thought I’d had a miscarriage. Relief, panic, excitement, anger – then the realisation that of course I hadn’t, that a seven-and-a-half-month foetus couldn’t just slip out like that, that there were no limits to the sort of moron I could be. Meanwhile the toilet held my blood with a kind of pathos, something sad and ugly it was condemned to show me. Standing there looking down at it I felt sorry for the little girl I used to be, who’d had no idea of the terrible changes to be visited on her.

  I never saw a wild thing sorry... My mother said it one last time, between morphine fugues in hospital on her final day. My dad had gone to the bathroom. I was alone with her. I took her hand.

  What’s that, Ma?

  The disease and the drugs had given her a traumatized version of her beauty. When I was small one of my favourite things was watching her getting ready to go out, which she always did ironically, as if it was beneath her, until the very last moment, when she was ready and would give me a look of female collusion, woman to woman, in the mirror. I loved that look.

  You’re like me, she said.

  We stared at each other. For a distended moment it was as if we’d become one person. She said: I don’t want to go. Then the drug descended again and her eyes closed. It was the last time she spoke. Four hours later she was dead.

  I flushed the blood away. Goosefleshed, scalp aching, I stepped into the tub, lowered myself, eased my shoulders under the water. The heat took the edge off the pain, and the change in temperature surprised the baby into stillness. I thought of Kaitlyn saying, How can you do this? I mean you’re fucking pregnant.

  Then something heavy and alive passed across the roof, very cl
ose, travelling fast.

  4

  WOCOP. Vampires. Didn’t matter which. They’d found us.

  Adrenalin zero to sixty – instantly. (And a flash of surprising relief: they’ll kill me and it’ll all be over and I’ll be dead and with Jake or at least with Mom. I had a vision of the three of us in a beautiful Roman forum version of the afterlife, olive trees, blue sky, me carrying the baby, laughing.)

  I slipped getting out of the tub and chipped a bone in my knee. Ignored it. Dressed quickly, grabbed the Glock and a stake and went downstairs to wake Cloquet.

  ‘Did you see anything?’ he whispered. His face was pouchy from drunk sleep and his breath rotten with Jack Daniels but he had the Cobra’s safety off and was waking up fast.

  ‘Felt,’ I said. ‘Didn’t see.’ He understood: this close to transformation wulf made big inroads.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take this.’ A crossbow and quiver of wooden bolts pulled from the drinks cabinet. ‘Anyone comes through the door, you know what to do.’

  ‘You need me with you,’ I said. He started to protest, but I cut him off. ‘If it’s a vampire you’ll need my nose. I’m not asking.’

  He knew I was right. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but please stay close.’

  We opened the door and stepped outside. Cold assaulted us. Moonlit snow scintillated as if with delight. The drive, cleared by Cloquet days earlier, ran straight to the dirt road beneath the trees thirty yards away. At right-angles to the house was a stone outbuilding housing Ski-Doos, snowcat, mini-plough, emergency generator and miscellaneous tools. The Cherokee was dug-out and snow-tyred, ready to go. I put my hand on its flank as we passed, the way a girl would casually reaffirm the bond with her horse. We scanned the roof’s edge in silence. Cloquet looked at me. Is it still here? I nodded. Yes, but not close. Vampire? I couldn’t be sure. We don’t get on with vampires, Jake had warned me. Mutually assured revulsion. We’re inimical to boochies at the genetic level. Genetic or not, we couldn’t stand the smell of each other. If there was one nearby the reek would soon have me reeling. My dead pins-and-needled in my arms and legs. Cloquet mouthed, emphatically: You stay here.