Talulla Rising (38 page)

‘What do you want?’ I asked. My throat was sore. Dehydration was a dog doing the same shrill bark repeatedly in my head.
Wulf
, at the end of its patience, was trying to break the rules in my bones. But they were the moon’s rules, and by them my bones were condemned to hold their form. Since it was its departmental job a bit of my brain was racing through possibility flowcharts, Jake’s despised strings of
if
s and
then
s, in what the rest of me knew was a pointless exercise. There was no way out. There was no way out because there was nothing Murdoch wanted. Or rather whatever it was he wanted necessarily entailed me having no way out. In spite of which, and aside from the redundant calculations, animal motherhood launched a giant dumb imperative: plead with him. Offer him money. Offer him anything.

‘Reinstatement,’ he said.

Please, please, please
. Motherhood insisted there was some elusive tone that would do it, if only I could discover it. Idiocy at the cellular level. I pushed myself, quivering, to my feet. New sweat needled.
Wulf
breathed hot in my palms and breasts and scalp.

‘Do you remember our conversation about the relationship between sex and chaos?’ Murdoch asked.

Mentally I was going through the contents of my pockets. Nothing in the jeans, some euros, a tissue, a gum wrapper, fluff. The jacket? It was one I hadn’t worn much and didn’t particularly like, black canvas, a bit big across the shoulders. In fact it had only survived to Crete by never having been unpacked from the tote bag I’d been using since I left New York what felt like a decade ago. It had only made it out of the bag now because the island had turned out cold and it was the one heavy thing I’d brought. In any case I didn’t remember its pockets ever holding a penknife or a corkscrew or a hatpin or a screwdriver or anything that could conceivably serve as a weapon. I’d taken to carrying the Springfield in a shoulder holster, and had been packing it when he’d jumped me, but it had been removed, naturally, along with keys, watch, phone.

‘I’m sure you do remember it,’ Murdoch continued. ‘I said that sex was a rogue force. Let into that arena it would’ve meant distraction, conflict, insubordination. In a facility like that it’s not just an unaffordable luxury, it’s a potentially lethal virus.’

The moon was close. Astronomy was counting down via spheres and shadows to my son’s murder. All that time – vast bergs of it – since he was snatched, and now here we were down to the last melting lump, barely big enough to stand on.
The death of a loved one brutally vivifies everything
, Jake had written; here was my sickening preview of its truth, the violent still-hereness the world would inflict through its cars and vending machines and weather and TV ads, through my own stubborn body that would need its nails clipped and its bladder emptied and its itches scratched. The world betrayed the dead by continuing without them in it, and you, full of shamefully reliable life, collaborated.

‘But we’re not at that facility any more,’ Murdoch said. The sound of his own voice fascinated him because no matter what he said it bounced around in the vast mathematical silence. He didn’t smile or leer, cinematically. Just turned and walked into the darkness beyond the storm lamps’ glow. From the slight bounce as he moved I could tell the trailer was still on its truck. Where? How far from the Disciples? Did he even know they were here? He had to. Otherwise too much of a coincidence. But if he was here, who else was?
Reinstatement
. I understood. He’d been demoted or kicked out. We’d escaped on his watch. Our recapture was his only way back in. Herr Direktor, I present, for your consideration, Subject A, Talulla Demetriou, escaped werewolf, nymphomaniac, absent mother—

A cramp jack-knifed me, yanked my cuffed ankle and wrist. Someone had been killed in here before. Not recently, but there was no fooling the burgeoning bitch nose. The moon tugged at my blood. Closer than I’d thought. Maybe two hours. It was impossible to see past the wall of artificial light but a current of air with a flavour of dry grass and pine resin said the trailer door was still open. Since it couldn’t possibly make matters worse, I screamed for help as loudly as I could.

Murdoch, hopping back in, didn’t bother saying don’t bother screaming we’re miles from anywhere. It was more satisfying to him to let his silence make it obvious.

He wasn’t alone. At his side was a stale-looking, heavily built guy in his mid-forties in a black leather jacket, baggy khaki combats and a string vest. A St Christopher winked in his chest hair. He was full-lipped, in need of a shave, with big, wet, heavy-lidded eyes the colour of prunes. He didn’t say anything. Just looked at me with a sort of hopelessness that emptied me of everything except the certainty of what was going to happen. I’d wondered why I’d been left with the use of two limbs. Now I knew. Same reason they’d given Caleb the blood rations before sending him into
his
cage: maximal spectacle. Murdoch didn’t want me powerless, he wanted me overpowered, given just enough will to really feel it not being enough.

I thought, while String Vest took off his jacket and unzipped his pants, of all the times I’d heard or read about someone getting raped.
I decided straight away I wasn’t going to struggle
. Some rapists liked that.
I decided I was going to fight the sonofabitch with everything I had
. Some rapists liked that.
I fought him at first, but in the end I couldn’t stop him
. A lot of rapists seemed to like that. There was no kind of rape there wasn’t a rapist for. I had never been raped. Faced with it I felt the ghostly weight of all the women who had been, ranks upon ranks reaching back to the first sad loping female hominids. Incalculable numbers, a wretched sorority only truly visible when you found yourself about to join it. At the same time here again was the terrible aloneness I’d felt when my waters broke. However many hundreds of millions had gone through the experience, when it happened it was only your own version that mattered.

‘Here we are then,’ Murdoch said, quietly, unlocking the cage door.

I stared at him. ‘I’m going to kill you,’ I said, also quietly. ‘You’re going to turn me over to the organisation and I’m going to get out, just like I did before, and I’m—’

‘I find I have to do these things,’ he said. Which forced a weird pause between the three of us. ‘There’s a momentum,’ he said. ‘When I was a child I remember learning that if you gave an object in space just a little shove it would go on for ever. Assuming it didn’t hit anything. It would just keep going, for ever.’

String Vest breathed audibly through moist nostrils. I could smell him. The woman in me could smell cigarette smoke and beer and sweat, food fried in old fat. The wolf could smell his thrilled blood and riotous pheromones, stale piss, spiced meat breath and the first ooze of semen. He wanted this raw interim to be over. It was dangerous for him, my personhood like a shimmying or vacillating flame, one moment being the reason he couldn’t, the next moment being the reason he couldn’t
not
. I said to him: ‘Wait. You don’t have to do this. You know you don’t have to do this.’ But I knew it was pointless. The raw interim
was
over. It was over from the first step he took towards me. Now anything I said or did would be provocation. Now the bare fact of me was provocation. That’s the nature of rape. His face had thickened slightly, his limbs filled. This was what he’d been waiting for: the illusion of necessity, submission to the force of the dimming drug.

This man is going to rape you.

All the documentaries and articles and silhouetted testimonies. All the little intuitions I’d had about certain women. She has been. She has been.
She
has been. All this flared and billowed like a suffocating cloud around me and I realised that behind all of them was an actual event, an actual man closing actual distance between himself and an actual woman and shoving himself onto her, into her, through her, breaking the physical boundary and dirtily ransacking the soul’s house of priceless memories. Behind all those stories were the candid odours and needling palms and legs sick with adrenaline and the universe’s indifferent obedience to physics: physics said if you couldn’t fight and your thighs were open and the man was determined to put his cock inside you then that’s what would happen. Your body would accommodate it because your body was under the same pointless administration as stars and molecules. I’d seen it in my victims, of course, the shocked realisation that a claw applied with the right pressure would open the soft meat of a midriff and there was nothing the universe could do about it. Right, wrong, good, evil, cruelty, compassion... the universe just shrugged: I don’t know this stuff. I just know physics.
I’d seen it in my victims
. Let’s not forget that. Millions of women could have asked their rapists, legitimately:
How can you do this
? Millions of women who genuinely didn’t know. Not me. I knew how he could do it. He could do it because it was good for him if it was bad for me. He could do it because it was only the best for him if it was the worst for me. I knew the equation. The equation had integrity. The equation didn’t change. Only my place in it.

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.