Talulla Rising (10 page)

Because nothing compares to killing the thing you love.

Of course it wasn’t Cloquet who’d sold us out to the vampires. It was me. They’d come because I’d obscurely called them. Wasn’t that the tradition, that a vampire couldn’t enter uninvited? The first steel skewer going through my throat was a consummation devoutly to be wished: better someone else killed my child than I killed it myself.

I was very close, just then, to total breakdown. It’s amazing how close you can be, without realising you’ve been going that way. It’s right there. You can see yourself as through a two-way mirror, broken down, liberated, not counting the cost because only the ego counts that and the ego’s gone. You can see yourself in a room of warm soft harmless chaos where everyone’s stopped expecting anything of you.

Everyone except your children.

I was on the floor, curled up on my side, though I didn’t remember lying down. I wasn’t crying, but I knew I couldn’t move. Something like my own voice kept talking to me about what a complete disgusting failure I was, but I had silence – a share of the vast mathematical silence I’d discovered the night I met Delilah Snow – to blot it out. If I lay there long enough I’d be able to summon a share of the impenetrable darkness as well. Then I wouldn’t be able to see or hear anything at all. Longer still and the other senses would go too.

PART TWO

THE THIRD RECURRING DAYDREAM

‘And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire – and it would come to absolutely the same thing.’

Albert Camus –
L’Etranger

14

It happened in upstate New York, under a full August moon, when I was six months gone, making what I knew would be the last kill before pregnancy put me in need of Cloquet’s hands-on help. The victim was George Snow, seventy-four-year-old retired attorney at law, widower, father of four, grandfather of six,
great
-grandfather of three, who lived alone with two cats, walked three miles every day, fished, kept up with Current Events, read the odd literary novel, ate a low-fat diet and listened to forties jazz for himself and Joni Mitchell in loving memory of his wife. The family house was a sprucely kept six-bedroomed property in its own four acres of meadow grass and woodland between Spencertown to the south and Red Rock to the north, just under two miles from Beebe Hill State Forest, and in about five years it was going to be too much for George to manage, which he tried not to think about, though if he noticed an oblong of sun on the oak floor in the hall or the dry timber smell of the back porch or the deep-carpeted calm of the upstairs landing it hurt his heart, because to leave here would be a second brutal bereavement, after the loss of Elaine.

The murder logistics had been simple. Country Road 22 ran straight through the forest and there was luxuriant cover virtually all the way to George’s front door. Cloquet had dropped me close to the change site an hour before moonrise, and would pick me up at the arranged rendezvous on the east side of the forest three hours later, from whence we’d hit the highway. Three hours was a small window – and there’d be five hours of cooped-up
wulf
to deal with in transit afterwards – but increasingly my preference was for getting as far away from the crime scene as quickly as possible. (The long lunar nights had proved tricky. You had to weigh the difficulty of staying concealed till you were human again against the risk of being spotted – nine feet tall and covered in blood – getting into the back of a van. And while not sticking around for moonset let you put some miles between you and your victim’s remains, it also left you exposed to the risks of the road: engine trouble; an accident; getting pulled over for a faulty brake light. Okay sir, I’m going to need to take a look in the back of the vehicle...) In any case that was the plan, and in accordance with it, just after nine p.m., high on hunger and the relished creep through the moonlit forest, I opened the back door, ducked my giant head for the lintel and entered the house.

It’s a delight to sneak into a stranger’s home, to feel its appalled paralysis, all its helpless historied objects made naked by your unauthorised eye. Here was a big clean kitchen that murmured in its atoms of sunlit family breakfasts, American plenty, manageable dysfunction, love. But long ago now. The room knew its glory days were over. I crossed it and went silently down the hall to the study.

The door was open. Grey-haired George, in pale green flannel shirt and grey corduroys, was sitting in a leather swivel chair at a pine desk, illuminated by an angle-poise lamp, going through some envelope files. His back was to the doorway, to me, to death. Everyone’s always is.

My hands were big and heavy and electric. I thought of how all his body’s alarms would go off at once, the spectacular chemical chaos. He was just beginning to register the slight change in the light, the peripheral tremor of my shadow. The room stilled its details. He raised his head and removed his reading glasses.

I sprang across the floor and spun his chair around to face me.

You want them to see you. You want them to see you because horror fills the flesh with everything it’s going to lose. Memories mass in the cells, rush to final coherence, as if they know that for death only maximal life will do.

George wasn’t afraid of dying, but he enjoyed being alive. The seasons still spoke to him; his child self was still there when the leaves shivered or thunder broke. He loved his family, hopelessly,
hope
lessly, those little ones with the genes still being cashed-out, inexhaustibly. The smell of air and stone and grass on those kids when they came in from outdoors was the smell of life. He still allowed himself to get involved in HBO dramas. He still had friends in New York. Last year he’d had a six-month fling Philip Roth would’ve envied with divorced Chattham restaurateuse Amber Brouwer, a woman twenty-one years his junior. The first real sex since Elaine’s death almost four years ago. (There had been, in the deranged early months of grieving, when everything ugly had seemed not only allowed but obligatory, half a dozen desolate nights with call girls in Manhattan hotels, but it was a firework of inversion that had soon burned out.) They’d both known, he and Amber, that it wasn’t going anywhere, but known too that for a little while that wouldn’t matter and so made the most of it. Sunday mornings in her bed (his moribund Episcopalian deep structure still issuing vague guilt for not going to church, though he hadn’t been for practically his whole adult life) were slow and rich and astonishing. He’d forgotten how it could be. The mesmerising particularity of a lover’s body, the thin skin over her clavicle, the lilac scribble of varicosis in her thigh, the surprising graceful taper of her hands. The world had shuddered wider awake for him in those first weeks. But eventually their window had closed. He hadn’t realised how much he needed a woman, physically, until she’d said it had to stop. Now he felt sexually lonely all over again.

And how did I know any of this? Because after wrenching his head back and opening his throat (vocal cords, take the vocal cords) with my fingernails I threw him to the floor and sank my teeth into his shoulder, went in the first two ravenous bites through the carotid, subclavian and axillary arteries, mastoids and trapezius muscles, dozens of capillaries and a screaming multitude of nerves. His life, hurrying, grabbed all the above and countless other things on its way out (into me) but flashed between all of them was oh Jesus Jenny get out honey get—

I turned.

A skinny girl of around eighteen in pink sweatpants and a white bathrobe was backed against the flank of the staircase opposite the study’s open door. Her dark hair was wet from the shower. The look on her face was the look you get used to, the look of strained revision, the human system trying to accommodate something that seems to invalidate the system itself – the way everyone thought computers were going to feel at the Y2K moment, midnight 1999.

For perhaps two seconds we looked at each other. I was thinking that no matter what you did to eliminate risk, risk found a way. Between us Cloquet and I had spent a week watching George, establishing his routine. Today there had only been an hour, two hours max, he hadn’t been under surveillance. But risk doesn’t need hours. Risk can work wonders with five seconds.

Jenny’s eyes were full of me. Werewolf. Real. All this time. Horror movies.

A tardy
wulf
muscle popped in my shoulder, made me twitch. I packed my haunches for the leap. She turned and ran.

She didn’t get far, but that’s not the point. The point is that along with her own blood-delivered montage of kindergarten’s disinfectant smell and her mother letting her lick the spoon’s granular sweetness and the upside-down green world that time she fell out of the tree and Chris’s face when he came and how the vision she’d had of her future had come apart into uncertain pieces she couldn’t pull together the moment the peed-on indicator went unequivocally blue – in with all this like a repeated explosion was THE BABY THE BABY THE BABY and I realised (blood from her neck in rhythmic spurts like a magician pulling out silk hankies) that she hadn’t, as I’d thought, been going for the front door. She’d been going for the stairs.

For the baby.

My teeth had just met in her midriff. For a little while I kept them there while her pulse dimmed into mine and I saw it all, the unplanned pregnancy, the suspended college degree, the family shaking its collective head, Grandpa George taking her side (
any time you need to get away, honey, you come and stay as long as you like
) and the pain of labour like nothing else and the nurse saying you’ve got a baby girl and holding it up all covered in blood and gunk and despite months of not having the faintest idea of what she’d call it the name Delilah had sprung right out and she’d known straight away, under the hot lights, as if the baby itself had told her: Delilah Jane Snow.

But now
, she thought, as her heartbeat eased into mine and her blood waved feebly and the darkness closed like warm black water over her head,
a monster... a monster... that’s all my blood oh God it’s like sleep the way... sleep... steals... you...

Her heart gave its last soft shrug – and stopped. The house was in shock from the blood on its carpets and walls, my obscenely basic graffiti. I tore the flesh I had in my jaws (external and internal obliques,
transversus
and
rectus abdominis
) and felt her spirit slip not quite secretly into me. There’s always an obscure interim when the taken-in life struggles to find its place in the new prison. I chewed, stalling, thrilled in my palms, soles, anus, snout. A flicker of intuition in my clit.

One option (there was no denying it was a matter of options, of choice, of free will) would be to feed on Jennifer and/or George until I was full, until I literally couldn’t manage another bite. Then what? Leave the baby alone in the house? Take her with me and get Cloquet to deposit her on the local church steps? Call 911? Obviously I couldn’t speak, but if the line stayed open long enough they’d send a car. By which time I’d be gone. Or the nearest neighbour, half a mile down the road. There was cover. I could leave her on the porch, as in the movies.

Another bite of Jennifer. My fingernails had pierced her left breast. Blood and the close-packed odour of mother’s milk. The bulk of
wulf
strained and bucked, outraged at being held back from full plunge into the feast. But the slyest sliver of its being smiled, an effect like the pleasure of letting your pee out in a swimming pool, because it knew, it knew, it knew: these were only options because of the
other
option, the one that saw me going with thumping pulse and teased appetite up the stairs, to the pale pink room that had once been Jennifer’s mother’s, and had become – whenever she
needed to get away
– Jennifer’s.

And Delilah’s.

•

My third recurring daydream was of a werewolf turning to see its reflection in an unfamiliar mirror, a dead werewolf baby hanging from its jaws.

•

Wolves are not known to eat their young
, Google told me, every time I asked.

Not known to eat their young. Not
known
to eat their young.

Wolves are not known for killing the things they love.

That’s
were
wolves, honey.

•

I’d been waiting for this moment ever since I’d found out I was pregnant. And now here it was, God’s last chance. My last chance. There must be some things I couldn’t do. There must be some things a mother couldn’t do. A spacesuit of heat surrounded me. My head was a lump of soft fire.
Wulf
smiled in me, the deep reassurance that all manner of thing should be well. I moved as if choreographed, mesmerised by the sight of my long-muscled hairy thighs going up and down for each ascended step in time with the throb of the new life up there. My human self was in deep adrenal enchantment, repeating its mantra like a dazed priest: I won’t actually do this... I won’t actually
do
this... while my legs climbed and framed Snow family photos went by, one by one bearing witness to this thing that I wasn’t, actually, going to do, because if I could resist this then surely, surely with my own... and then the bathroom’s whiff of steam and damp towels and coconut body butter and Jennifer’s young wet skin as it used to be only minutes ago, and then the pale pink room with its smell of diapers and talc and laundered clothes and the thing that I wasn’t, actually, going to do.

Delilah Jane Snow. Two months old, quiet and awake in her cot. Jennifer’s dark hair (as dark as mine, as dark as my baby’s would surely be) and a neat, round, cleanly detailed face that made me think of God using a very fine sculpting tool. She was absurdly unique, involved in her own schemes, which required occasional punches, swipes and kicks, as if an invisible bluebottle was testing her patience.