Talulla Rising (24 page)

‘Through here,’ Walker said.

I followed him into what might once have been the house’s kitchen, where Pavlov stood guard at a doorway from which more stone stairs led down to a basement.

‘We wait for the upstairs clearance,’ Walker said.

It was a peculiar few minutes. There was nothing to say. The house, since it had no choice, started offering us its ruined details: a sunlit patch of yellowy green lichen; bits of rotten wood; gothic cobwebs; the smells of damp stone and cat piss and mould. As with strangers waiting for an elevator every second increased the absurdity. Then Konstantinov came through the doorway, followed by Carney and Hudd. The rooms upstairs were empty.

‘Okay, so what I’m thinking here is—’

Konstantinov wasn’t waiting. He went past Walker without a word and started down the stairs.

‘Pav, take point here,’ Walker said, then followed Konstantinov into the gloom. I went after him, with Hudd and Carney on my heels.

Cold air came up. The stairs were narrow, steep, mossed and damp, but the two men ahead and Hudd behind lit the way with torches. Fourteen steps. Buckling heat and an adrenal stink from the four human bodies.
Wulf
swelled and jabbed in the liminal zone under my skin. Memories of the kills popped and bloomed: the French widower’s cock on the floor like a king prawn in a puddle of blood; the Mexican pimp’s bare leg kicking, repeatedly, despite my arm rummaging elbow-deep under his ribs. Something was struggling to come forward in my mind, had been trying to form while we’d waited by the door at the top of the stairs.

‘Mikhail!’ Walker hissed. ‘Jesus, slow down.’

Konstantinov had moved quickly away from the steps and was opening the darkness section by section with his torch. The space underground appeared to occupy half the house’s footprint. Undressed stone walls and floor, what looked like the remnants of broken crates and bottles, rusted oil cans, shelves hanging, more fantastic cobwebs.

‘Okay, check it,’ Walker said. ‘Easy does it, gentlemen. Miss D, stay close. Pavlov, you good up there?’

‘Good,’ Pavlov answered. ‘Take your time.’

The team moved around the cellar’s perimeter, guns and torches trained. Konstantinov’s silent furious energies were palpable through the darkness. The rest of us had dropped away for him: he was alone in the inscrutable universe.

For as long as it took to cover the ground we kept up a token suspension of judgement, but no one was really in any doubt: there was nothing down here.

Konstantinov was on all-fours searching the floor – for a trapdoor or hidden way to a lower level. Out of awkwardness Carney and Hudd joined him. The thing that had been struggling to come forward in my mind got through, with a strange inner sensation of
wulf
suddenly falling, clawing space. I couldn’t believe it had taken this long. ‘Walker,’ I said. ‘If he was here I would have felt him by now.’

‘What?’

‘My son. And the vampires. They’re not here. There’s no smell.’

Konstantinov’s method was unravelling. He got up off the floor and began running his hands over the nearest section of wall.

‘Mike?’ Walker said. ‘Something’s not right here.’

Konstantinov ignored him.

‘Pavlov,’ Walker said. ‘Anything your end?’

No reply.

‘Pavlov, are you reading me?’

Silence.

Carney and Hudd leaped to their feet, weapons readied. Konstantinov rested his head against the wall. The torch in his hand made a pointless fierce ellipse of light on the wet stone.

‘Here,’ I said to Walker, giving him the pistol. ‘You might as well have this. You need it more than I do.’

At the top of the stairs we found Pavlov unconscious with a tiny dart in his neck. The land around the house was attentive again.
Wulf
in me was muddled and fiery, as if a burn had swollen its eyes shut. My human had to re-establish itself, haul control back to the inferior system.

‘Fuck,’ Walker said. ‘We’re in troub—’

I don’t know what deployment reflex the four men were about to manifest, but I never got to find out, because at that moment a figure appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and the next room, paused for a moment, attempted a step forward, then collapsed.

34

It was a man and he was naked. He was also, courtesy of what had happened to him, barely recognisable
as
a man. It was hard to understand how he’d been on his feet. In the mess of his injuries – the facial swellings like a cluster of grotesque fruits, the bruises psychedelically curdling yellow and puce – two details registered: that the ulna of his left arm was sticking out of the skin just above the wrist, and that his penis was covered in what looked like venereal sores but which the context made clear were cigarette burns.

‘Oh, no,’ Walker said, quietly.

‘Who is it?’ I asked.

‘It’s Hoyle.’

He took a step towards the collapsed man. As he moved, the light altered slightly and everyone turned to the gap in the kitchen wall, where the goon in the blue soccer shirt and leather jacket stood, smiling. Walker, Carney and Hudd all fired – but the guy just stood there,
waving
, I thought, until I saw he was holding in his hand the torn remains of a small plastic pouch: formerly, it was now obvious, filled with blood. Animal blood. Stage blood. Either way not
his
blood.

‘The beauty of you relying on us for guns,’ a voice said, ‘is that it leaves us at liberty to load them with blanks.’

We all turned again.

Standing above Hoyle was a tall man in his mid-forties dressed in black Hunt fatigues and carrying a machine gun. He had close-cropped grey hair and blue eyes that seemed to have an extra iris. A slight frown you knew was perpetual gave him a bald eagle’s look of dignified madness. I felt Walker’s energy dip like a plane in an air pocket.

At least two dozen fully-armed members of the WOCOP Hunt filed into the building, some through the gap in the wall, others in the bald eagle’s wake as he stepped over the man on the floor and approached us. An odour of clean canvas and leather and medicinal soap preceded him. ‘I thought I’d bring Hoyle along,’ he said to Walker. ‘So you could see what you’d got him into. It’s been a long night for us all.’ He turned to me. ‘Miss Demetriou,’ he said. ‘You must be regretting getting mixed up with these men. Not that I blame you. Little one goes missing, a woman gets desperate. You take help where you can find it. That’s understandable.’

Little one goes missing
.

Did he know where the Disciples were?

I could feel what it was costing Walker to keep still, the ache for Hoyle; the heart that wanted to scream and the will that knew it would be a defeat if it did, useless to the man on the floor. Walker’s logical working-out was all but audible to me: Hoyle had suffered because he was Walker’s mole. But Walker hadn’t forced Hoyle. Hoyle knew the risks. Any tenderness that passed between them now would be an exquisite satisfaction to their enemy. Hoyle would have agreed, if he hadn’t been incapable of speech. Therefore Walker slapped his heart down and instead turned to me and said: ‘If you saw his wife you’d be amazed. She’s really pretty. Not to mention a
sorceress
with her index finger.’

Murdoch (Walker’s jibe explained) looked at him for a moment, smiling. Said nothing. Then to one of his team: ‘Mr Tunner, let’s get these people secured and on their way.’

Several Hunters equipped with hand- and leg-cuffs moved forward. Hudd leaped at one of them and was immediately shot in the hip. Carney dropped his redundant pistol and allowed himself to be secured. Three hunters approached Konstantinov. ‘Easy way or hard way, Mike?’ one of them said. ‘Up to you.’ Then before Konstantinov answered shot him in the leg with a tranquiliser dart. Konstantinov slumped to his knees, dropped his pistol. His dark face was slack. With an enormous mesmerising effort he got back onto one knee, got his right foot underneath him, pawed the air once, looking for a hold... then keeled over.

Murdoch returned to Hoyle. I could feel in Walker a kind of exhaustion because he knew how far away from certain things Murdoch had travelled, how pointless it was to hope for compassion.

I wanted Hoyle to be unconscious, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t move, but he was aware of the man standing over him. Feelings I wasn’t entitled to flickered.

Murdoch was at a familiar dead-end of irritation. It was always irritating, eventually, that you could find out exactly how much violence a body could absorb before it died. Every body was initially fascinating and unique. Every body was initially the body of a person. As in pornography. But like pornography’s rituals violence wore through the uniqueness so quickly. Soon the person was gone and all that was left was dumb finite flesh. And the dumbness and finiteness was a dead-end, because your will was infinite and impossible to satisfy. Your will needed the person to last for ever.

(Whereas for the werewolf... What? The person did last for ever? Certainly my victims never stopped being people. Certainly they lived on in me. Certainly the person was never separable from the flesh. Here was a new room in the house of many absurd mansions: I read the books, Murdoch burned them. I was erotica, he was porn. Jake would have been proud of me.)

Murdoch lifted his boot and stomped as hard as he could on Hoyle’s head. Hoyle’s eyelids fluttered. Blood ran from his mouth, exactly as the juice from a can of cherries I once pointlessly punctured with Lauren’s penknife. Murdoch swung his foot back and kicked Hoyle in the face. Hoyle’s head snapped back and a tooth flew out. Murdoch stood for a moment with his thin mouth closed, breathing through his nose. Then he unslung the machine gun and took hold of it by the barrel. He positioned himself carefully, swung the weapon up over his shoulder, then brought it down with all his force on Hoyle’s skull.

He did this repeatedly for perhaps a minute, fifteen or twenty blows, then stopped.

Hoyle was dead, of course. His left eye was on the floor and his brain was half out. A halo of dark blood had formed around what was left of his head. There was a Monty Python drawing it reminded me of, one of Terry Gilliam’s surreally compelling animations. Murdoch poked at the eyeball with his toe. There was a mass of silent energy in the men around us. Murdoch looked at Walker, emptily, for a few moments. It seemed one of them must say something, but neither did. I had a profound sense of all the time and energy I’d spent telling myself not to believe but believing anyway that this was going to bring me to my son. All that time and energy and belief poured into nothing, like trust into a traitor, like billions into a scam.

Then I felt a stinging sensation in my shoulder, and within five seconds everything went black.

35

I woke to the stink of vampires.

And disinfectant. Joined immediately by the memory of Murdoch’s bored face and Hoyle’s eye out on its optic nerve and Zoë’s hot fragile sleep-scented head when I kissed her goodbye.

I rolled over and vomited.

I was alone on the floor of a prison cell. Ten by twelve, bare concrete on all sides except one, which was a row of four-inch-diameter steel bars even
wulf
in all her glory wouldn’t be able to budge. A yellow bucket. A large plastic bottle of water. The hum of air-conditioning and the soundproofed feeling of being deep underground. A tired fluorescent buzzed, gave the light an irritating tremor.

Assume Walker’s dead.

The thought was there like a standing stone with me in the cell. I admitted it was there, but that was all. The thought was there and that was all. That was all I had to concede.

For a while I could do nothing but lie curled on my side with my arms wrapped around myself, breathing, humbled. It was like my time on the floor of the safe-deposit cubicle at Coralton-Verne. Every time I told myself, Right, get up, stupid, I found I couldn’t. If it hadn’t been for the smell tormenting me I might have dropped back into sleep.

Eventually, by degrees, I sat up. Dehydration banged in my head. Unsuckled milk stabbed my breasts.
Blocked ducts, abscesses, cancer.
Hardly mattered now. My neck was numb from where the tranquiliser had gone in. I crawled with what felt like audibly tearing muscles to the water bottle, found I
just
had the strength to unscrew the cap, then drank, all the while thinking,
don’t drink a lot, you don’t know when you’ll get more
, but too thirsty to take my own advice. When I lowered the bottle it was half empty.

I got, via a series of wobbling false starts and failures, to my feet. Let the blood in my limbs loosen. My backpack was gone. I stepped up to the bars and looked out.

There were six cells, three either side of a short corridor which was sealed by a bank vault door at each end. Card-swipe entry. A line of CCTV cameras along the corridor ceiling, one trained on each cell. My cell was the middle of the three. I couldn’t see if the ones on my left and right were occupied, but in the cell opposite me was a boy of maybe eleven or twelve, skeletally thin, lying in the foetal position on the floor with his arms wrapped around himself, staring at me. He had a skullish face, large green eyes and tangled white-blond hair. All he had on was a pair of dirty white Adidas sweatpants. His circulatory system showed through his skin. He looked like a thing of porcelain webbed with fractures.

The stink was coming from him.

‘Hey,’ I said.

‘Hey,’ he replied. He was wet with what looked like pale pink sweat, jellyish in places.

‘Is it just me and you down here?’

He nodded.

‘Where are we?’

He swallowed. Closed his eyes. Swallowing hurt. Existence hurt. ‘Don’t know,’ he said. An English accent I couldn’t place. Or an English accent interfered with by lots of places.

‘Where were you when they caught you?’

‘Scotland.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Twenty-one days.’

‘Are there other vampires here?’

With bizarre fluttery speed he got up onto his elbows and retched, shuddering. A single pinkish strand of what looked like mucus hung from his bottom lip. He spat it out. There was a small puddle of the stuff next to him on the floor.