Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

‘Not even cynicism,’ he said, stopping. ‘Flippancy. A failure to understand the serious things you’re playing with, like a little child with a hand grenade. Let’s talk frankly, to the point.’

‘Okay, let’s.’

‘You say - the bestial essence of man, the horror of the first coitus . . . These are such terrible, dark things. If you want to know, even I am sometimes afraid to glance into those abysses . . .’

He really was funny after all - ‘even I’. He went on:

‘But you talk about it all like it was just peanuts. Don’t you have any fear of the beast in a man? Of the man in the beast?’

‘Not a bit,’ I said. ‘Mikhalich told you who I am, didn’t he?’ He nodded.

‘Well, then. If I had problems like that I wouldn’t be able to do my job.’

‘You’re not afraid of the intimate contact with someone else’s body - immense and ugly, living according to its own laws?’

‘I simply adore it,’ I said and smiled.

He looked at me and shook his head dubiously.

‘I mean physical intimacy? In the very lowest sense?’

‘For spiritual intimacy I charge an extra hundred and fifty per cent. How long can you go on chewing over the same thing? Do you always yatter on like this before you have a screw?’

He frowned.

‘There’s no need to talk to me as if I were a bandit. That’s because of the FSB uniform, is it?’

‘Maybe. Try taking it off. Including the trousers.’

‘Why do you talk that way?’

‘Don’t you find me at all attractive?’

I lowered my head and gave him an offended look from under my eyebrows, screwing my eyes up slightly and pouting my lips. I worked on that look for over a thousand years, and there’s no point in trying to describe it. It’s my own patented brand of provocation - brazenness and innocence in the same armour-piercing package: it zaps straight through the client and then ricochets back to get him again. The only effective protection I know against that gaze is to look in the other direction. Alexander was looking at me.

‘Yes, I do,’ he said with a nervous twitch of his head. ‘And how!’

I realized the critical moment had arrived. When the client jerks his head like that, the control centres of his brain are failing, and he can throw himself at you at any moment.

‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ I said. ‘Where is your bathroom here?’

He pointed to a round wall of blue semi-transparent glass. There was no door - the way in was through a passage that curled like a snail’s shell.

‘I’ll just be a moment.’

Once I was inside I took a deep breath.

It was beautiful on the other side of the wall. The gold stars on a blue background and the bath lined with mother-of-pearl reminded me of the baths at Pompeii - perhaps the designer had deliberately evoked that image. But the owner was unlikely to know about that.

It’s risky to push a client up so far so fast, I thought, some day it will end badly. And maybe Alexander was injecting something, like Mikhalich? Or taking something by mouth? There must be some reason for the strange way he kept sniffing the air like that . . .

I took off my jeans and put them on the floor, then took a look at myself in the mirror. My pride and joy was like a Japanese fan painted to look like a red brush. It was beautiful. And against the starry blue background it looked simple fabulous. I was more sure of my powers than I had ever been - I was simply brimming over with energy, just a little bit more and the hairs of my tail would have started shooting out little balls of lightning. I remembered the funny Russian saying ‘to hold your tail like a pistol’, meaning to keep your spirits up. I don’t know where it came from, but a fox must have been involved one way or another. Well then, I thought, all guns blazing . . .

When I reached the way out, I prepared for take-off by taking a few deep breaths, seized that one and only right moment when every cell in your body says ‘Now!’ and hurtled out of the bathroom like a tornado.

After that there was no time to think. I braked, turned my backside to the target, thrust my hands and feet hard against the floor and curved my tail above my head. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in one of the mirror surfaces - I looked like a menacing red scorpion prepared for battle . . . Alexander raised his eyes to look at me, but before he could even blink, my tail had delivered its precise, perfectly aligned, impeccably accurate blow to the very centre of his brain.

He put his hand over his eyes, as if to protect them against a blinding light. Then he lowered his hand and our eyes met. Something was happening that wasn’t right. My tail simply was-n’t able to sense him - and he was standing just a few steps away and looking at me as if he couldn’t believe that anything so beautiful could possibly exist in all the world.

‘Adele,’ he whispered, ‘my darling . . .’

And then the nightmare began.

He staggered, made a terrible howling sound and literally fell out of his own body - as if it were a bud that opened up into a sinister, shaggy flower in just a few seconds. It turned out that the man who was called Alexander was no more than a drawing on a door into the beyond. Now that door had opened, and the creature who had been watching me through the keyhole for a long time had come tumbling out.

Standing there in front of me was a monster, something halfway between a man and a wolf, with gaping jaws and piercing yellow eyes. At first I thought Alexander’s clothes had disappeared. Then I realized that his tunic and trousers had been transformed together with him: his torso was covered with ash-grey fur, but his hind legs were darker, and I could see the irregular traces of the stripes on them. There was an elongated mark on the beast’s chest, like the imprint of a tie that has slipped to one side. When my gaze moved lower I was horror-struck. I’d never seen how that place looked on a wolf that was aroused. And to my mind it looked more terrible than any gaping jaws.

At that point I realized I was still standing on all fours with my tail up in the air and my defenceless behind stuck out in his direction. Defenceless, because my antenna wasn’t working and I had nothing to stop him with. I could guess how my pose might be interpreted, but I was paralysed - instead of jumping back, I kept looking at him over my shoulder. That happens in some dreams - you need to run away fast, but instead you go on standing there and there’s just no way you can lift your leaden feet off the ground. I couldn’t even wipe the idiot grin off my face - like a burglar caught on the job.

‘’Grr-rra-rra,’ he said. ‘Gr-rrrrra...’

‘Hey, bro,’ I babbled, ‘wait. I’ll explain everything . . .’

He growled and took a step towards me.

‘Don’t you even think about it, all right? I’m serious, you big grey wolf, slow down . . .’

He fell gently on to his front paws or hands and took another step towards me. Entirely different words were required. But where could I find them?

‘Listen . . . Let’s discuss everything calmly, eh?’

He grinned, opening his jaws wide and raising his huge grey tail, almost copying my working pose.

‘Wait, grey beast,’ I whispered, ‘don’t . . .’

He jumped, and for a second I thought the world had been covered by a terrible, low storm cloud. The next moment the cloud collapsed on top of me.

Lying on the divan, covered with something like the skin of an albino mammoth, I sobbed into the pillow, unable to understand how there could have been so many tears inside me - the pillow was already soaked on both sides.

‘Ada,’ Alexander said and put his hand on my shoulder.

‘Go away, you monster,’ I sobbed and shook his hand off.