Tara gets home and makes herself a large pot of coffee. With a deep breath, she opens the Word doc on her Mac, and pops a piece of nicotine gum into her mouth. She chews rabidly, ignoring the chaos in her rented Vasant Kunj apartment a la “A Hovel of One’s Own”.
Plants lifelessly droop in their unwatered pots, which double up as dustbins. She sits on her unmade bed, using a pillow and a balled-up blanket as an impromptu desk. A pile of her unsold books is stacked against one of the ugly mustard-coloured walls, while the other has a pin-up board that’s plastered with covers of Victorian bodice rippers – a shrine to all the dysfunctional romances that have shaped her writing. Each features a variation of the same archetype: the Bewitching Rake, the Wandering Wolf, the Philandering Count, the Reckless Viscount – shirtless and clutching catatonic semi-clad women on the brink of orgasm.
Tara can’t seem to conjure up any words today. She silently stares at her laptop until the screen goes dark, shuddering at her own reflection – spotty, dark-circled, hair like a bird’s nest – staring back at her.
She can’t help but recall Ahana’s worried words from last night, and her own disturbing dream of the beast taunting her. It chuckles in her head now, Just give up, Tara. You’re not just a talentless hack, but an emotionally damaged one at that.
Shaking off the negativity, Tara finishes her coffee and reawakens her laptop.
“Chapter 1”. The desolate words mock her from the screen. Tara glares back at them till they blur into foggy squiggles. Minutes later, hypnotized by her own lack of productivity, she finds herself on Twitter, masochistically curious to see what the trolls are saying today.
She’s been tagged over a hundred times in a bizarre article titled “Russian Tourist’s Tragic Death Gets Plot Twist With Werewolf Killer Theory”.
She clicks on it to find a cheerful photograph of the twenty-three-year-old blond woman named Oksana Petrova, who was visiting Goa for a yoga teacher training course, next to the beach where her body was discovered. The article adds that she was found washed up on the shore with her throat ripped out. The Goa police initially thought a wild animal had attacked her because of the bite marks on her body. However, at least five eyewitnesses had sworn to have seen a strange “wolf-like” creature on the beach the same night, walking on two legs – just like a man.
This wasn’t the first such incident; three months prior, the body of an Israeli woman, Sofiya Galil, who also came down to Goa to learn yoga, was found underneath a cliff on the same beach, impaled on a rock, carrying similar wounds to the other victim.
Scrolling down, Tara sees they’ve even included a sketch of said perpetrator – a black Hound of the Baskervilles-like creature standing on its hind legs, with blazing yellow eyes piercing through the page.
She glances through the comments accompanying the article:
“This murderer is right out of a @TaraT novel.”
“Hey @TaraT, come and get yo boy, Waris!”
“The Goan police have to be smoking the same stuff as @TaraT!”
As she mutes and blocks each of the commenters, Tara can feel the beginnings of an idea form in her brain.
Instead of channelling her demons, like Herpes had said, maybe it’s time she exorcizes herself.
She knows what she needs to do. Start afresh.
Tara begins untacking all the romance posters from her pin-up board, gathering them into a pile on the balcony. There, she lights a cigarette, taking a deep, dramatic drag before flicking it onto the heap. She watches as the fire licks at her heroes and heroines, distorting their conjoined groins, before making its way to their perfect abs, swelling breasts and faces frozen in half-moans, slowly reducing them all to ash.
By evening, the board is transformed. A printout of the Hound of the Baskervilles creature has taken centre stage, flanked by headshots of its two victims, a sticky note detailing their backgrounds and all the clues related to the murder.
The beast visits her again in her dreams that night.
They’re alone in a cave, somewhere dark and deep. All Tara can see are its yellow eyes, shining in mid-air. Its growls, low and guttural, echo off the walls.
Slowly but surely, her eyes make out the shape of the terrifying creature crawling towards her. There’s a hyena-like grin on its face now, both ferocious and mocking.
“Let me take a bite of you,” the beast teases and implores, as its mouth drips drool, its eyes glittering with hunger.
A hunger…for Tara.
Despite the fear slowly paralysing every inch of her body, Tara can’t help but be drawn to the beast. It looks at her like no other man has ever looked at her before. As though, despite all her flaws, it wants to possess her in a way no one else has ever wanted to. Like it wants to claim her flesh and tendons and bones and soul for itself.
And Tara’s so grateful it does. She wants to give herself up to it, so badly.
But she’s afraid. Not about the fact that it will hurt, but that the beast won’t like how she tastes. What if she’s too bitter or sour? What if she can’t live up to the other girls it has eaten before? Girls who were born sweeter, softer, naturally delicious.
Tara feels a desperate urge to season herself before the beast does whatever it plans to do with her. To sprinkle herself with salt and pepper, dip herself in exotic herbs, turn herself into a flavour that it will never forget.
But the creature looks like it’s in no mood to wait, so she ends up offering her arm to it, nervously.
It nibbles tentatively, then gnaws hungrily. She delights in the noises it makes – little growls and groans of pleasure. She finds herself getting wet at the sight of her flesh being ripped away, her soft tissues spilling out, the way her shining white bone glistens underneath.
“You taste exquisite,” the beast whispers, moaning in satisfaction. And Tara feels her heart dance in her ribcage. “Better than I had imagined in my head. I could eat you all night, in fact. But I won’t.
Because I want to savour you, Tara.”
Those words make Tara’s head and body explode into white, hot streaks of pleasure. She trembles uncontrollably with the knowledge that it’s going to rip her apart.
And all she wants is more, more, more…
Excerpted with permission from Wolfish, Kritika Kapoor, Pan Macmillan India.
