The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin Read Free Book Online Page A

worm had set my home page to ‘rumours.ru’ and I’d never got around to changing it. I forced myself to read the article right through to the end:

    BUSINESSMAN FROM INDIA KILLS HIMSELF IN FRONT OF SECURITY GUARDS

    The public will soon start thinking of the National hotel as a high-risk zone. With the terrorist attack that took place right outside its door still fresh in the memories of Muscovites, another alarming incident has just taken place: yesterday a forty-year-old businessman from the Indian state of Punjab killed himself by jumping from a fifth floor window. At least that’s the story of the two security guards employed by the hotel who were with him at the time the tragedy occurred. They claim that the guest from India summoned them by pulling the special alarm cord, and then when they entered the room, for no apparent reason he took a run and jumped out of the window. He was killed instantly when he hit the surface of the road. It has been established that shortly before his death the businessman had received a visit from a female denizen of the demi-monde.

    Why the fifth floor, I wondered, when his suite was number 319? Ah yes, they had that swanky European way of numbering the rooms - the first two floors didn’t count, so number three nineteen was on the fifth floor . . .

    Then my thoughts moved on to that mysterious French word ‘demi-monde’ - the ‘half-world’. Why, I wondered, wasn’t it the quarter-world? If you followed that method of word formation, consistently you could define the precise depths to which a woman had fallen. After two thousand years my denominator would probably have been pretty impressive . . .

    And then suddenly, at long last, I started to feel ashamed of my own insensitivity. A man with whom I had, in a certain sense, been intimate, had died, and here I was counting floors and doing fractions. The intimacy may have been arbitrary, hallucinatory and temporary, but it was still appropriate to feel some compassion, even if it was as insubstantial as our intimacy had been. Yet I didn’t feel any at all - my heart flatly refused to generate it. Instead I started thinking again about the reasons for the previous day’s outrageous events:
    1. The reason could lie in the astral background of the hotel National, where the dancer Isadora Duncan and the KGB’s founder Felix Dzerzhinsky hung side by side in the photo-gallery of ‘honoured guests’.
    2. What had happened could have been a karmic echo of one of those bloody business rituals they’re so fond of in Asia.
    3. It was an indirect consequence of India’s recoil from the teaching of the Buddha in the Middle Ages.
    4. The Sikh had been a worshipper of the goddess Kali after all - why else would he have shouted ‘kali ma’ as he threw himself out of the window?

    I have to explain that sometimes I have as many as five inner voices, with each of them conducting its own inner dialogue: and as well as that, they can start to argue with each other over anything at all. I don’t get involved in the argument, I just listen and wait for a hint at the right answer. These voices don’t have any names, though. In that sense I’m a simple soul - some foxes have as many as forty of these voices with very long and beautiful names.

    The old foxes say these voices belong to the souls that we consumed during the primordial chaos: according to legend, these souls made their home in our inner space by entering into a kind of symbiosis with our own essential nature. But that’s probably all just fairy tales, because every one of the voices is mine, although they’re all different. And if you follow the old foxes’ logic, you could say I myself am a soul that someone else consumed some time in the depths of ancient antiquity. All this is no more than pointless juggling with the various summands, it makes no difference to the sum total that is A Hu-Li.

    These voices mean that foxes don’t think in the same way as people: the