Fear of pursuit grew in inverse proportion to evidence of pursuit. The back of my head and neck developed a blind hypersensitivity. I got eye ache from repeatedly checking the rearview. Abnormal scrutiny of every desk clerk and chambermaid and store manager and waitress. The world was vampire or WOCOP until proven innocent.
But the miles passed with no sign we were being followed or watched.
We drove west through the Rockies. A bad idea, wulf so close. The latent creature yearned and strained for the sheer spaces. Flaring mountain flanks gashed with snow. Big stone knees bent up out of pools of forest. When we stopped and got out the air was thin and mineral. Talulla suffered spells of fever, in the worst of them sweated and shivered, wrapped in a blanket, but passed from these fugues into picked-clean awareness, like a child after its evening bath. We needed less and less to speak. The dusk sky with the first sprinkle of stars became our element. Mile after winding mile of rich silence in the car. I watched her when she drove, her dark eyes’ incremental submission to what was coming, what she was. It was the look of a little girl who’s assimilated a secret she knows can bring the grown-up world crashing down.
Sex stopped. Without verbal agreement we found ourselves numbed, a pitch of desire so extreme, perhaps, that it nudged or bled into its opposite, as all extremes must. I could barely touch her, she me. Neither of us was surprised. Wulf had its occult necessities, demanded now that the great consummation was close a small fee of purity, a little swept-clean antechamber before the hall of majestic filth.
In the early hours of our tenth day from New York, road-burned and red-eyed, with the Hunger forcing lupine life through human exhaustion, we left Nevada’s share of the mountains and crossed, just south of keen-aired Lake Tahoe, into California.
Transformation was two nights away.
42
MY LAST KILL in the Golden State was thirty-two years ago, in the summer of 1977. Led Zeppelin had played the Oakland Coliseum and a vanload of fans had driven up to Muir Woods after the show to drop acid and screw. I’d planned to go farther north into the Napa Valley (the woods here a tad too close to the city and occasionally ranger-patrolled) but when a young hallucinating gentleman, gamine, with pre-Raphaelite blond curls that would have given Robert Plant’s a run for their money, injudiciously wandered away from his hallucinating friends and all but fell into my lap … Well. No pain felt he. I am quite sure he felt no pain. Had I not been long past the days of self-comfort I would have comforted myself with the thought that to him I’d been nothing more than an alarming—and final—hallucination. Altogether a lazy kill. I barely took pains to bury what was left of him. Of course the remains were found, three days later, but by then I was in Moscow.
Talulla was sick. We checked into a motel on foggy 68 just east of Carmel and I left her soaking in a hot bath. A risk, but unavoidable: Moonrise tomorrow would present its necessities. There was reconnaissance to be done. Besides, I’d seen absolutely no sign of pursuit since we left New York. We had new phones; check-in would be every hour. If she saw or felt anything—anything—suspicious she was to get among the public and call me. “Is it this bad every month?” I asked her. She was pale in the tub, dead-eyed, shivering. Her little breasts were goosefleshed despite the water’s warmth, nipples prettily puckered.
“At least.”
“Jesus, how’ve you managed?”
She just looked at me, jaws clamped, on behalf of womankind. My own pre-Curse blood-bubble and bone-burp routine was under way. The premature hybrid hands and feet were ghost-fucking with me (extra care behind the wheel, Marlowe), lupine previews flashing in my human shoulders and hips. I deal by keeping on the move. Sitting still makes things worse. Not so for Lula. She looked like she never wanted to move again. Her makeup was smudged. She’d started taking it off then given up. She stared at me with the baleful resignation of a seventeen-year-old suffering the sort of hangover she’ll come out of with a feeling of humble spiritual enlargement—if she comes out of it at all.
“I’ll wait awhile,” I said. “We’ve got time.”
She shook her head. “Don’t bother. This is just what happens to me. It’ll last till this evening then I’ll be full of beans. Come this evening you’ll wish I was like this again.”
It still wasn’t easy leaving her. Several false departures. “If for any reason something happens to me,” I said, turning back for the fourth time at the door—then realised I didn’t have anything useful to offer.
“Just go,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
I left her a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, three packs of Camels, a dozen Advil and a pot of lousy motel coffee. Also Cloquet’s Luger, which I’d hung on to, though I’d replaced the silver ammo with regular rounds. Useless against boochies (should I not be back before sundown) but fine for familiars and agents. “Anyone comes through that door who isn’t me,” I said, “shoot them.”
She nodded, teeth chattering, then closed her eyes and waved me away. I locked the door behind me. It was just after noon.
Novelists, notoriously, are always working, eyes and ears open for anything they might be able to use. Ditto werewolves. Not for quirky characters or snippets of dialogue but for murder locations, places that lend themselves to the secret kill. I’d had this stretch of coast—the hundred miles between Monterey and Morro Bay—in the file for years. Along with the requisite geography and the ghosts of Steinbeck, Miller and Kerouac, Big Sur’s got isolated houses and a glut of whacked-out residents with more money than sense. In the late sixties I’d rented a place here for a few weeks (flew to Alaska for the kill) and been struck by the potential richness of its pickings. Odd I’d left it this long, really. You were saving it for her, my romantic insisted—and in my new generous idiocy I didn’t wholly dismiss the idea.
It’s a strange craft or art, finding the where and the when and the who of the kill. Naturally one develops a nose for it over time, a sensitivity to variables. In the early years I used to spend weeks as it were casing the joint. Now you can drop me anywhere there’s human habitation and in less than twenty-four hours I’ll give you the optimal target.
Of course there are soft options. The Western world’s so mad these days you can put an ad in the paper and some desperate self-harmer will answer it. Wanted: Victim for werewolf. Must be plump and juicy. Non-smoker with GSOH preferred. No time-wasters. I’ve had my share of drug addicts and alkies, the blind, the deaf, the crippled, the infirm, the mentally ill. I’ve hired escorts (male and female), doped them, driven them out to the countryside, let them wake up and make me a chase of it. All of which will do (the Curse being unencumbered by aesthetics or fair play) but there’s a peculiar profound satisfaction in the straight—one wants to say traditional or clean-lined—mode of predation: You stalk a perfectly healthy human being, confront them, give them plenty of time to really take it in, then do what you do.
I spent the day driving and hiking, equipped with knapsack, bush hat, state-of-the-art Van Gorkom walking boots, binoculars and a paperback copy of Birds of the Western United States, officer. Tourist season was a month away and the trails were quiet. I had the place to myself. The odour of redwoods and damp earth made my eyeteeth and fingernails throb.
By three in the afternoon the fog had lifted and the sun had come out. I worked with free-form fluidity, and with an hour still to go before sundown I’d lined up a hit and two backups. It would mean a sixteen-mile on-foot round-trip and smart timing but we could do the whole thing without breaking cover once—and it doesn’t get better than that.
Talulla phoned as I was climbing back into the Toyota.
“You’ll be sad to hear,” she said, “I’ve entered the full-of-beans phase.”
“Good.”
“Don’t get excited. It’s basically ADD, with fever and hallucinations.”
This is another purpose of civilisation, so that we can exchange love-packed banalities over the phone.
“Everything’s set,” I told her. “I’ll be home in
an hour.”
The sun was setting over the Pacific and the mountains were lit pink and gold. The car was warm with evening light and spoke in its fuel and vinyl odours of America. I drove carefully, holding focus. Wulf heckled, spooked my hands and face with claw and muzzle. My scalp loosened and shrank, hot and cold by turns. Close, now, brother, very close. But I drove to my beloved, carefully.
43
THE FOLLOWING EVENING we parked the Toyota, now with its California plates, in a twenty-four-hour gas station and diner just off Route 1 about a mile north of the Andrew Molera State Park. Talulla wore a blond wig while I sported a false moustache and a Yankees baseball cap. Sunglasses for both of us. The disguises felt excessive but the gas station had CCTV. It was cool and damp. Moonrise was three hours away. Lu’s mode had changed again. Last night’s fidgets had subsided. Now she was quiet, clear-eyed. This was her penultimate pretransformation stage. The final stage would come ten minutes before Turning. Not pretty, was how she’d described it.
It was an hour’s trek to the change site I’d selected. Redwoods mixed with coastal oaks at least a half mile from the nearest trail. From there a seven-mile romp to the target. Kill. Seven miles back. Two miles to the car. Timing was the issue. Timing’s always the issue. Moonrise was 8:06, moonset tomorrow morning at 7:14. Eleven hours and forty-six minutes on the Curse. Hunting alone I’d hold off till 4:00 a.m. Two hours for killing and feeding and an hour-fourteen to get back to base camp. Once you can manage the Hunger, whet and dandle and tease, you want the shortest possible time between werewolf crime and human flight—for the simple reason that if the remains are discovered and the alarm raised you don’t want to be nine feet tall covered in hair sporting a gory muzzle and bloody claws when the sirens start to wail. But I wasn’t hunting alone.
“It’s coming,” Talulla said.
“In here. Quick.”
I lifted a branch and she ducked under. Her face was strained and sweaty. “Get undressed,” I said. “Can you manage?”
No one near, according to my nose, and in any case we weren’t visible. Twilight on the roads and trails was coagulate darkness under the trees.
“Oh,” Talulla said, down to her underwear, holding her belly. She swallowed, repeatedly. Dry heaved, once. I got her out of the bra and panties and stuffed them with the rest of our clothes into the rucksack. Kit-checked: wet wipes, water spray, liquid soap, bin liners. I climbed fifteen or twenty feet into the oak (as rehearsed yesterday) and secured the pack with the clip cables. Back on the ground I found Lula on her knees, doubled up, arms wrapped around herself.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Very close.”
“I know. Me too.”
They were the last words we exchanged that night.
She was quick. Quicker than me. I had assumed—as a male? as an elder? (as a moron, Marlowe)—I’d be fully transformed and at her service while she was still in the throes. But no. Her damp face rendered an appalling small-eyed in extremis version of itself, she vomited bile, jackknifed, rolled onto her side, curled her pretty lips and went in less than twenty seconds with an extraordinary symmetrical fluidity through the Change, while I was still untidily crunching and popping out of my human lineaments. Cutting-edge CGI versus fifties stop-motion, an embarrassing discrepancy I wondered if we’d be able to laugh about later.
Not that there was much time for wondering, what with the fully released scent of a She filling my hybrid nostrils. Oh. Oh. The weeks of human-leaked olfactory hints were no preparation, really no preparation for the merciless clout of the female werewolf stink. Standing, I nearly fell. At the first inhalation my balls filled with a riot of libidinal jazz, my cock shot up like a sprung—like a booby-trapped—device. Talulla, still on all fours with her hindquarters raised, issued a low sound and slowly spread her legs for my questing snout. And there, dear reader, wet for my wet muzzle’s tip was her lupine cunt, larger, slyer, darker-skinned than its human sister, murder-silked and blood-fattened, firm and soft as a ripe avocado and releasing a sweet scent just at the evil edge of rot.
Not yet.
She growled at the injunction, delivered to both of us in simultaneous telepathy, but we knew the waste it would be to come together now, with the Hunger holding our innards at knifepoint and the gift of the kill not yet unwrapped. I let the tip of my cock nuzzle her for a moment, felt the slick entrance hotter than a fevered baby’s mouth, almost, almost failed the dalliance test at the last—but withdrew, and watched with a sort of vicious admiration as she rose to her full height, looked at me with her wiser animal eyes, grinned, and moved off ahead into the darkness. I shot one hot arrow of piss to mark the tree, then followed her.
We understood each other. Clairvoyance that in our human form was no more than the standard new lovers’ allowance increased posttransformation to near-total mutual transparency. She knew, for example, where we were going, though I hadn’t told her. The route I’d traced yesterday led her like an aboriginal songline; it was there in front of her as clearly as if I’d left a trail of phosphorus. Ditto, since she was at liberty to rummage any of the relevant mental files, the image of the house I’d selected, binocular-watched and eavesdropped-on long enough to establish a lone male inhabitant for whom the sub–Frank Lloyd Wright pad was a second home–cum–recording studio retreated to at times of creative crisis. “Look, if they’re going to keep changing the cue-points the whole thing’s a complete fucking waste of time, Jerry.” Under my surveillance yesterday he’d come out on the deck with a coffee, a joint and his cell phone. “No. No, I’ve got all the software here. It’s the same shit. The same useless shit if they’re going to keep changing the cues. I really … Seriously. Tell me how someone making his third feature thinks you can score from footage that isn’t the final fucking cut? I mean … Exactly. Seriously. Seriously. Yeah. Well. That’s the fucking indie wunderkind for you …” He was handsome, with dark blond hair chopped to create a look of boyish self-obliviousness, a good thin mouth, a hard jaw and a long-muscled body. More than enough success with women for resolved misogyny. Or so I thought, perhaps wishfully. I’d picked a man (and a looker at that) lest a woman complicate things for Talulla, which rationale I felt her now perceiving—she turned her head back to me with a grin—and being in equal parts touched and offended by.
Moonlight blotched the forest floor, maternally soothed us when we moved though it. Lu stopped once to look up and let her werewolf face take its cold balm and I saw my lover silvered in all her sinuous beauty, the hardened breasts and fatless belly, the long deadly hands, the thin-haired muscles of thigh and calf. I shuddered at how close to giving up I’d been. Remembered Harley in the library saying, You’ve got a duty to live, same as the rest of us, with London’s snow hurrying and the whisky’s firelit gold. You love life because life’s all there is. The last two weeks, the motels, the miles on the road, Manhattan, Heathrow, all had the closed encrypted quality of a dream. This was the waking world, lust and hunger racing to the primal feast, my dead rapture brought back to life by the simple miracle of not having to do it alone …
Meanwhile we’d come too far too soon. A small stream broke into a steep valley, conifer-covered on its western wall (the great fresh flank of the Pacific just beyond it), mixed forest and stony outcrops on its eastern, snaked down through by a smooth, single-lane, new-smelling tarmac road, sparsely lit. Talulla stopped, breath going up in plumes. I stood behind her, wrapped my arms around her and filled my hands with her breasts and lightly bit her shoulder. She put her head back, licked my snout. I’m smarter when I Change, she’d said, and I could feel it in her, the deepened cunning and whetted nous. Inside the Hunger’s red din her predator was busy with angles and shadows, lines of cover, points of entry, how far a scream would carry. I’d underestimated her, in spite of myself, out of vestigial delusions of female delicacy assumed I’d have to help her through this. She knew, sensed my embarrassment. The lick was partly It’s all right,
I understand. Sweet of you. But you see what you’re dealing with now?
The house (lights on, black Lexus in the drive) was built like a chic bunker into the side of the hill, two storeys, a basement, a pool, a decked balcony running all the way round the upper floor, double garage, stone gateposts, electronic gate. Even without our advantages getting in wouldn’t be difficult. The downstairs doors were shut, granted, but it was too early in the maestro’s evening for the hi-tech lockdown his Shield 500XS Security System allowed. In the centre of the upper floor one of a pair of sliding glass doors was open, beyond which were visible an elephantine white leather couch and a plasma-screen TV with the sound down. Our friend, barefoot in Bermudas and a baby-blue rollneck fleece, reclined on the couch with the remote in one hand and his phone in the other, channel surfing and bitching, with a monotony implying defeated acceptance of the rest of the world’s unprofessionalism, about the director.
The plan said to wait several hours. The plan was dead. Hunger and desire had unceremoniously assumed control. We felt it go, both of us, with relief. Come what may conferred its mantric blessing as we moved silently up the eastern slope of the valley, in a single bound each across the empty road, and on, with all lupine stealth, towards the house.
I went first. One leap got me over the gates. A second from the ground to the balcony. A third from the balcony through the open door and directly onto the couch.
Hyperbole’s a writing vice, but I stand by the claim that I gave Drew (Drew Hillyard, the papers have since informed us) quite literally the fright of his life. The Old World snob in me thinks he screamed—or rather went maaah! in falsetto—because he was Americanly conditioned to do so by lifelong overingestion of television and movies. A woman dumps you, you go to a bar and get drunk. Someone cuts you off on the freeway, you shout “Asshole!” and give him the finger. A werewolf appears, you scream like a six-year-old girl. These are the scripts. In any case he not only went maaah! in falsetto but flung both arms up in the region of his head. The remote flew from his hand and sailed across the room to clatter against a chair, leaving America’s Next Top Model to keep us company for the duration. Perhaps by profound survival instinct he held on to his cell phone. I reached out, relieved him of it, and while he watched crushed it in my own ample monster mitt, which spectacle elicited from him a strange nasal moan. His face crumpled or crimped as in preparation for grown-man toddler tears, but from the distension of his mouth and his filling lungs I knew another bigger scream was coming. I thought, We can’t have that.