Talulla Rising Read online

  I mouthed back: No fucking way.

  It must have taken us fifteen or twenty minutes to go around the lodge, stopping, listening. In places the snow was so deep we had to wade. There was frantic cellular activity in my chipped knee. Cloquet used night-vision binoculars for a sweep of the trees. Nothing. Nevertheless the ether trembled. Whatever it was it was still here, moving as we moved, preserving the distance between us, an odour or vibe maddeningly just out of range.

  We made it back to the driveway, exhausted, without incident. Cloquet’s face looked scrubbed awake. A dewdrop hung from the tip of his nose. I knew what he was thinking: if I’d sensed a vampire then a vampire had sensed me. Our cover was gone. We’d have to move. Right now. That thought – flight, again, the energy it would demand – filled me with fervent weakness. I tried to see myself rushing upstairs and throwing essentials into a bag. The image drained me. I closed my eyes and rested my head gently against the Cherokee’s passenger window. I wanted to sleep. For ever. Lie down in the snow and go out. Go out, go out beyond all doubt—

  Then the scent hit me full force, and I knew what it was.

  I opened my mouth to tell Cloquet – didn’t need to: a wolf, lean and dark and silent, dropped like a long dollop of molasses from the roof to the pitched porch, sprang from there onto the bonnet of the Jeep, paused, didn’t look at me, then leaped down and took off along the drive.

  We watched without a word until it disappeared into the trees.

  Smiling, I realised it was the first time I’d smiled in days, maybe weeks. I’d got one glimpse of his green mineral eyes and a big pulse of his alert masculine allegiance. I’d felt myself extending into him, seeing through his eyes and (paradox like a zen koan) my own, simultaneously. An invisible nervous system stretched through and beyond him to an unseen wolf pack. They were with him, with me, we were part of the same tense consciousness.

  ‘Is that why we’re out here?’ Cloquet whispered.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mon Dieu, he was big.’

  ‘You won’t believe this,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never seen one in real life before. Not even in a zoo.’

  ‘How did it feel?’

  With the smile a few tears had welled, fallen, stopped. Not sentiment. Just the effect of respite from the pain, which, now the animal had gone, was returning. I blinked. It was a deep reassurance that he hadn’t really looked at me. He hadn’t needed to. His will had dissolved into mine, then out again.

  ‘I wasn’t quick enough,’ I said. ‘It’s like something going past in a fast-flowing stream.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I could have controlled him.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The baby, who’d gone quiet, now kicked again. I jammed my jaws together, closed my eyes, rode it out. Cloquet was still looking at the place in the trees where the wolf had disappeared. ‘Do me a favour, chérie,’ he said. ‘Make sure he knows I’m on your side, okay?’

  5

  There was a TV ad for diapers I’d kept seeing. A succession of ludicrously cute babies laughing or gurgling or crawling or lying on their backs kicking and flailing to a soundtrack of fruity clarinets. The last frame dissolved to a pretty young mother, blonde and fabulously wholesome in pale blue cardigan and white blouse, holding her freshly diapered infant in her arms, while the clarinets harmonised on a surprising, tender, intense note, to signify the bond of love between madonna and child, who stared into each other’s eyes, sacrosanct and eternal. There was no doubt this healthy young woman full of American calcium would kill to protect her baby, nor that she’d be greeted with a righteous species cheer if she did. I’d kept seeing this ad, couldn’t get away from it. Every time I heard those first clarinet notes fear surged from my scalp to my fingertips and the baby inside me took on ominous mass. But there was no changing channels. I was compelled to watch, even in the days before I met Delilah Snow – though it was only after I met her that I understood why.

  •

  Two hours before full moonrise I sat with a stack of Jake’s diaries in my bedroom window seat, wrapped in a blanket, sweating and shivering and being casually picked up then dropped by pain and wondering how much worse than this giving birth could possibly be. My cousin Janine said it’s like taking a rock-hard shit the size of a baby, Lauren had claimed. Imagine that. And it could be a huge baby. I looked it up. In 1879 a woman had a baby that weighed twenty-three pounds. That’s like twelve bags of sugar all stuck together in a lump... As kids Lauren and I had loved our dolls. But we’d pulled their arms and legs off too, or stuck pins in their eyes, fascinated by their trapped sentience, their utter paralysis in the face of our will. And when we’d tired of torture we went back to caring for them as if the abuses had never happened.

  Wulf adjusted its position, squeezed my spine, momentarily split my elbows. My teeth chattered, then stopped. I took one of Jake’s diaries from the pile next to me.

  Meanwhile Bloomingdale’s and Desperate Housewives and Christmas and the government carried on, I read.

  She was carrying on herself, in extraordinary fusion. I could see it in her tense shoulders and flushed face and the care with which she’d applied her make-up. It hurt my heart, the unrewarded courage of it, the particular degree of her determination not to fold in spite of everything. In spite of becoming a monster. It hurt my heart (oh, the heart was awake now, the heart was bolt upright) that she’d had to be brave all alone.

  But she never believed she was all alone. She was enough of a romantic to suppose she couldn’t be.

  And she wasn’t.

  Now she is.

  I had all the journals. Six weeks after Jake’s death my dad had called to tell me there was a letter marked private addressed to me at the restaurant. (My dad. The necessary lies. Obviously I couldn’t stay with him. Anyone close to me was in danger. So I told him I was going back to school at UCLA to finish my Masters. Sweetened it by giving him the job of finding a third restaurant, of which he’d be in sole charge. But the money, Lu, for Christ’s sake, where’s the money coming from? Two friends in Palm Springs looking to invest. What, those two gay guys? No, not them. You don’t know these two. I was at college with them... And so on, an ever-expanding fiction struggling to cover the mad truth that would otherwise kill him: Nikolai, your daughter’s a werewolf. Hair, claws, fangs, the whole B-movie deal. Twelve victims. You don’t want to know. Little Lula whose diapers you changed and whose rapt face listening to Facts About the Planets or Tales of Ancient Greece was one of your purest pleasures. Oh, yeah, and she’s got a bun in the oven. The father was a werewolf too, but he’s dead. He left her rich, mind you. That’s where the dough’s coming from...) The letter, which I sent Cloquet to pick up, was from Miles Porter, President of the Coralton-Verne International Private Bank on Fifth Avenue and 45th Street. Jake had left instructions: if, after a certain date, the bank had received no further instruction, Mr Porter was to contact me. I’d been authorised to access the safe deposit box held in Jake’s name. I had Porter’s direct line and, as per Jake’s instruction, ‘should call when I had the six-digit security code.’

  Which I didn’t have. Which I had no clue how to get.

  A vampire ruse? A WOCOP trap? During our first week in Manhattan together Jake had told me he’d made arrangements aside from the twenty million, but the subject was so morbid we never went into details. Now he was gone and I didn’t know what to do.

  I called Miles Porter and told him I was travelling (in fact I was at a small overpriced hotel with too much dark wood in Cold Spring, having let my apartment go) but that I’d be in touch when I got back to the city. Then I hired a private detective to make sure ‘Miles Porter’ was who he said he was. He checked out. Unfortunately this guaranteed nothing. WOCOP used civilians and vampires used familiars. In any case, I didn’t have the six-digit code.

  A week passed. I rang the new tenant of my old apartment to see if there were messages or mail as yet unforwarded. Nothing. Then Ambi
dextrous Alison called. St Mark’s Bookshop had telephoned the restaurant. My copy of Heart of Darkness was ready for collection. Ask for Stevie.

  I hadn’t ordered any books.

  Heart of Darkness.

  Marlowe.

  Jake.

  Conrad, not Chandler. Literary snob to the end. I sneaked back into Manhattan in a blonde wig and red-framed sunglasses. Stevie was a pudgy young guy with bleached hair and rosacea and a stare that said whatever your particular brand of assholery he’d seen it a thousand times before. He wore a Pearl Jam t-shirt and a white nose-stud I mistook at first for an enormous zit. Customer paid for this five months back and told us to call you on the specified date. As in yesterday. Didn’t leave a name but said you’d know.

  Pages three, eight, fourteen and seventy with corners turned down and digits circled. 3,8,1,4,7,0.

  A big risk, but I took it.

  Alone in one of the bank’s secure rooms I opened the metal case. Fifty-three journals, crammed with Jake’s tiny italic handwriting. Little black Moleskines in the recent years, further back calfskin or cloth bindings, half a dozen with broken jackets bound together with elastic or string, two or three water-buckled and freckled with mould. Some entries dated, others not. Long periods – decades, sometimes – when he gave up writing altogether.

  There was a sealed envelope placed to be the first thing I’d see on opening the box. On the envelope it said:

  In case we didn’t have enough time.

  Love you.

  Jake.

  Inside were instructions on how to access six Security Code Only bank accounts in Switzerland, plus a list of half a dozen names, phone numbers and services, headed: People You Can Trust. I didn’t recognise any of them.

  In case we didn’t have enough time.

  Love you.

  Jake.

  Until that moment I’d been in bereavement’s phase of smiling idiocy: I’d see him again and we could laugh about all this together. Now, suddenly, it was over. I sat down on the floor of the booth with a feeling of fracture in my chest. Life tolerated weeks, months, years of your denial – then snapped out of it and turned on you with contempt: You dumb shit. He’s gone. You’re never going to see him again. You think there’s a reward for not crying? You think if you hold grief in long enough death’ll be moved to let him back in to life? Wake up, sister. Last werewolf or not he was one more scrap of paper on its way to the furnace – and so are you. So shed the tears and get up and stop kidding yourself that death – or life, for that matter – gives a fuck.

  It was a bleak, detailed time in there under the fluorescents, inhaling the chemical smell of the carpet and the sad old odour of the books. Jake had made life bearable. Jake was gone. Draw the obvious conclusion.

  Every time I thought, Right, get up, stupid, I found I couldn’t, but instead closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around myself again.

  Eventually, I did get up. I had to, or wet myself where I sat. Biology’s indifferent to your big moments. Knocked-up biology doubly so. I had nothing to carry the journals in. Had to put them back and return with a wheelie case to collect them. (Silver-suited Miles Porter reacted to all these manoeuvres with barely restrained delight at their sanity.) You’d think I would have locked myself away and read the lot chronologically, but somehow I couldn’t. Going from start to finish would confirm that I’d had all of him there was to have. Instead, over the months, I’d dipped in at random. More like having a conversation. More like having him there with me.

  I keep thinking I should give Harley sex before I go, I read.

  I have, after all, had sex with men. Two hundred years, you get around to it, along with everything else you get around to. By the end of the 1800s I’d done what I could to render myself completely AC/DC (Oscar Wilde was in the dock, so my buggery acquired political credentials) and I pride myself as few men can on having given it the old college try. But by the dawn of the twentieth century I was forced to concede, nobly elastic of anus though I was, that I had an abiding soft spot, which is to say hard spot, for the girls...

  Until the second trimester turned my body into a war zone it had been sexual business as usual. A dirty business of diminishing returns. There was no arguing with Curse libido (really, no arguing with it) but most of the time it was like drinking when you couldn’t get any more drunk. I got sick of come-stains and the loveless smell of condoms and curtains drawn in the afternoon and guys who either didn’t know what to say or couldn’t shut up. Aunt Theresa’s pronouncement nudged me like a dog who didn’t understand I wasn’t its owner any more. Even as a child of the post-moral age I felt slutty and miserable a lot of the time, visited at moments – face twisted on the pillow, ass in the air, mouth slurring fuck me... fuck me... fuck me – by a vision of my doe-eyed dad (never my mom) standing in the corner shaking his head in sad disbelief. As a substitute, presumably, for him standing there shaking his head in sad disbelief when I yanked someone’s kidneys out and swallowed them like vol-au-vents. It didn’t take long for me to start relying on escorts, who at least didn’t expect smalltalk and left when they were told; but even that wasn’t straightforward. For one thing I didn’t have Jake’s knack of getting turned on by someone I thought was a moron. For another, the male nastiness that used to get me guiltily wet lost its erotic clout when I pictured these men meeting me in my other form. It was tough to take a guy’s cock-swagger seriously when you knew just the whimpering baby you could reduce him to come next full moon. Along with fear of what excessive screwing might do to my baby all this meant I ended up masturbating. A lot. Enough for a black comedy, if it hadn’t made me so lonely and miserable. At least, I told myself, when I could dredge up wryness, I wasn’t in any danger of falling in love.

  Jake never slept with Harley, as I knew now I wouldn’t with Cloquet. I’d found out the hard way, caught by Curse lust one evening only a couple of weeks after Jake’s death. Cloquet was taking a shower and the bathroom door was ajar. I was passing. I stopped. I looked. He stood in profile with his palms against the cubicle wall, head bowed, eyes closed, water pounding his back. Tall, pale, thinly muscled body, a tattoo I couldn’t decipher on his left hip. His cock (circumcised) wasn’t erect, but it wasn’t fully flaccid either. Wulf grinned and licked her lips. I pictured myself walking in, opening the cubicle door, his face, surprised, the moment of mutual visibility, my hand reaching through the steam and him rising, rising for me—

  No.

  Verboten.

  I knew it intuitively, and, since these were the days before Delilah Snow, I took it as evidence of a werewolf scheme of things, an unspoken catechism. A werewolf shall not enjoy carnal relations with her familiar. The bond had to be unequal, maybe specifically required unrequited—

  Just at that moment Cloquet looked up and saw me.

  We didn’t speak. He didn’t turn or try to conceal himself, but I knew from his look – part sadness for what was dead in himself, part relief to be free of it – that werewolf Commandments or not, he wasn’t going to be my lover. Someone had killed or broken the sexual man in him, though not, I knew, the need to submit to something he believed bigger than himself. (I knew who ‘someone’ was, too: Jacqueline Delon, gamine billionaire occultist femme fatale who’d stopped at nothing to get what she wanted. What she wanted was immortality. The non-figurative kind. She wanted to live forever and never look a day older. To which end she snared (and bedded) Jake Marlowe with a view to turning him and his prized sunlight-resistant blood over to the vampires, in exchange for their brand of eternal life. Cloquet had been her unhinged lover. He knew if she got what she wanted he’d lose her. So he’d tried to kill Jake. Twice, with farcical results. He needn’t have bothered. Jacqueline’s deal with the vamps never went down. Mid-transaction at her Biarritz retreat, WOCOP, who’d been tracking proceedings, launched an assault. Madame’s corpse was last seen playing human shield to one of her Undead business partners. From then on Cloquet stopped trying to kill Jake and started trying to kill the m
an responsible for Jacqueline’s death, WOCOP werewolf hunter, Eric Grainer. Life’s generally artless, Jake wrote, but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you’re in the final act of a lousy movie. A lousy horror movie, usually... Cloquet did kill Grainer – but not before Grainer killed Jake. On a night of full moon, five months ago, in a Welsh forest, where, when the carnage and death and vengeance and loss had done their thing to us, I offered him my hand . . .)

  I turned from the bathroom doorway and walked away, embarrassed. Phoned an escort agency and selected a guy who received in-call clients and took a cab to his apartment (we were in San Francisco at the time) and had two hours of depressing muscularly efficient professional sex, sans conversation. The next morning I went to Cloquet’s room. He was up and dressed, standing by the window, apparently doing nothing, apparently waiting for me. I said: I’m sorry. He looked at the floor and said: I’m your friend. It’s a great thing in my life, to have a friend. Then he looked up at me and suddenly he seemed the saddest, gentlest man I’d ever seen. There was a suspended moment in which we both knew this was a chance to separate as well as a chance to continue, then the awkwardness dissolved between us and we knew we were past what had happened. I said: I’m glad we’re friends. I understand. Now let’s go have coffee.