The Last Werewolf

ALSO BY GLEN DUNCAN

Hope

Love Remains

I, Lucifer

Weathercock

Death of an Ordinary Man

The Bloodstone Papers

A Day and a Night and a Day

Copyright © 2011 by Glen Duncan

All rights reserved.

For Pete and Eva

First Moon

Let It Come

Down

1

“IT’S OFFICIAL,” HARLEY said. “They killed the Berliner two nights ago. You’re the last.” Then after a pause: “I’m sorry.”

Yesterday evening this was. We were in the upstairs library of his Earl’s Court house, him standing at a tense tilt between stone hearth and oxblood couch, me in the window seat with a tumbler of forty-five-year-old Macallan and a Camel Filter, staring out at dark London’s fast-falling snow. The room smelled of tangerines and leather and the fire’s pine logs. Forty-eight hours on I was still sluggish from the Curse. Wolf drains from the wrists and shoulders last. In spite of what I’d just heard I thought: Madeline can give me a massage later, warm jasmine oil and the long-nailed magnolia hands I don’t love and never will.

“What are you going to do?” Harley said.

I sipped, swallowed, glimpsed the peat bog plashing white legs of the kilted clan Macallan as the whisky kindled in my chest. It’s official. You’re the last. I’m sorry. I’d known what he was going to tell me. Now that he had, what? Vague ontological vertigo. Kubrik’s astronaut with the severed umbilicus spinning away all alone into infinity … At a certain point one’s imagination refused. The phrase was: It doesn’t bear thinking about. Manifestly it didn’t.

“Marlowe?”

“This room’s dead to you,” I said. “But there are bibliophiles the world over it would reduce to tears of joy.” No exaggeration. Harley’s collection’s worth a million-six, books he doesn’t go to anymore because he’s entered the phase of having given up reading. If he lives another ten years he’ll enter the next phase—of having gone back to it. Giving up reading seems the height of maturity at first. Like all such heights a false summit. It’s a human thing. I’ve seen it countless times. Two hundred years, you see everything countless times.

“I can’t imagine what this is like for you,” he said.

“Neither can I.”

“We need to plan.”

I didn’t reply. Instead let the silence fill with the alternative to planning. Harley lit a Gauloise and topped us up with an unsteady hand, lilac-veined and liver-spotted these days. At seventy he maintains longish thinning grey hair and a plump nicotined moustache that looks waxed but isn’t. There was a time when his young men called him Buffalo Bill. Now his young men know Buffalo Bill only as the serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs. During periods of psychic weakness he leans on a bone-handled cane, though he’s been told by his doctor it’s ruining his spine.

“The Berliner,” I said. “Grainer killed him?”

“Not Grainer. His Californian protégé, Ellis.”

“Grainer’s saving himself for the main event. He’ll come after me alone.”

Harley sat down on the couch and stared at the floor. I know what scares him: If I die first there’ll be no salving surreality between him and his conscience. Jake Marlowe is a monster, fact. Kills and devours people, fact. Which makes him, Harley, an accessory after the fact, fact. With me alive, walking and talking and doing the lunar shuffle once a month he can live in it as in a decadent dream. Did I mention my best friend’s a werewolf, by the way? Dead, I’ll force a brutal awakening. I helped Marlowe get away with murder. He’ll probably kill himself or go once and for all mad. One of his upper left incisors is full gold, a dental anachronism that suggests semicraziness anyway.

“Next full moon,” he said. “The rest of the Hunt’s been ordered to stand down. It’s Grainer’s party. You know what he’s like.”

Indeed. Eric Grainer is the Hunt’s Big Dick. All upper-echelon members of WOCOP (World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena) are loaded or bankrolled by the loaded for their expertise. Grainer’s expertise is tracking and killing my kind. My kind. Of which, thanks to WOCOP’s assassins and a century of no new howling kids on the block, it turns out I’m the last. I thought of the Berliner, whose name (God being dead, irony still rollickingly alive) was Wolfgang, pictured his last moments: the frost reeling under him, his moonlit muzzle and sweating pelt, the split-second in which his eyes merged disbelief and fear and horror and sadness and relief—then the white and final light of silver.

“What are you going to do?” Harley repeated.

All wolf and no gang. Humour darkens. I looked out of the window. The snow was coming down with the implacability of an Old Testament plague. In Earl’s Court Road pedestrians tottered and slid and in the cold swirling angelic freshness felt their childhoods still there and the shock like a snapped stem of not being children anymore. Two nights ago I’d eaten a forty-three-year-old hedge fund specialist. I’ve been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants. My last phase, apparently.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You’ll have to get out of London.”

“What for?”

“We’re not going to have this conversation.”

“It’s time.”

“It’s not time.”

“Harley—”

“You’ve got a duty to live, same as the rest of us.”

“Hardly the same as the rest of you.”

“Nevertheless. You go on living. And don’t give me any poetic bollocks about being tired. It’s bogus. It’s bad script.”

“It’s not bad script,” I said. “I am tired.”

“Been around too long, worn out by history, too full of content, emptily replete—you’ve told me. I don’t believe you. And in any case you don’t give up. You love life because life’s all there is. There’s no God and that’s His only Commandment. Give me your word.”

I was thinking, as the honest part of me had been from the moment Harley had given me the news, You’ll have to tell it now. The untellable tale. You wondered how long a postponement you’d get. Turns out you got a hundred and sixty-seven years. Quite a while to keep a girl waiting.

“Give me your word, Jake.”

“Give you my word what?”

“Give me your word you’re not going to sit there like a cabbage till Grainer tracks you down and kills you.”

When I’d imagined this moment I’d imagined clean relief. Now the moment had arrived there was relief, but it wasn’t clean. The sordid little flame of selfhood shimmied in protest. Not that my self’s what it used to be. These days it deserves a sad smile, as might a twinge of vestigial lust in an old man’s balls. “Shot him, did they?” I asked. “Herr Wolfgang?”

Harley took a fretful drag, then while exhaling through his nostrils mashed the Gauloise in a standing obsidian ashtray. “They didn’t shoot him,” he said. “Ellis cut his head off.”

2

ALL PARADIGM SHIFTS ANSWER the amoral craving for novelty. Obama’s election victory did it. So did the Auschwitz footage in its day. Good and evil are irrelevant. Show us the world’s not the way we thought it was and a part of us rejoices. Nothing’s exempt. One’s own death-sentence elicits a mad little hallelujah, and mine’s egregiously overdue. For ten, twenty, thirty years now I’ve been dragging myself through the motions. How long do werewolves live? Madeline asked recently. According to WOCOP around four hundred years. I don’t know how. Naturally one sets oneself challenges—Sanskrit, Kant, advanced calculus, t’ai chi—but that only addresses the problem of Time. The bigger problem, of Being, just keeps getting bigger. (Vampires, not surprisingly, have an on-off love affair with catatonia.) One by one I’ve exhausted the modes: hedonism, asceticism, spontaneity, reflection, everything from miserable Socrates to the happy pig. My mechanism’s worn out. I don’t have what it takes. I still have feelings but I’m sick of having them. Which is another feeling I’m sick of having. I just … I just don’t want any more life.

Harley crashed from anxiety to morbidity to melancholy but I remained dreamy and light, part voluntary obtuseness, part Zenlike acceptance, part simply an inability to concentrate. You can’t just ignore this, he kept saying. You can’t just fucking roll over. For a while I responded mildly with things like Why not? and Of course I can, but he got so worked up—the bone-handled cane came back into play—I feared for his heart and changed tack. Just let me digest, I told him. Just let me think. Just let me, in fact, get laid, as I’ve arranged to do, as I’m paying for even as we speak. This was true (Madeline waited at a £360-a-night boutique hotel across town) but it wasn’t a happy shift of topic for Harley: prostate surgery three months ago left his libido in a sulk and London’s rent boys bereft of munificent patronage. However, it got me out of there. Tearily drunk, he embraced me and insisted I borrow a woollen hat and made me promise to call him in twenty-four hours, whereafter, he kept repeating, all this pathetic sissying cod Hamlet bollocks would have to stop.

It was still snowing when I stepped out into the street. Vehicular traffic was poignantly stupefied and Earl’s Court Underground was closed. For a moment I stood adjusting to the air’s fierce innocence. I hadn’t known the Berliner, but what was he if not kin? He’d had a near miss in the Black Forest two years ago, fled to the States and gone off-radar in Alaska. If he’d stayed in the wilderness he might still be alive. (The thought, “wilderness,” stirred the ghost animal, ran cold fingers through the pelt that wasn’t there; mountains like black glass and slivers of snow and the blood-hot howl on ice-flavoured air …) But home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don’t belong. They got Wolfgang twenty miles from Berlin. Ellis cut his head off. The death of a loved one brutally vivifies everything: clouds, street corners, faces, TV ads. You bear it because others share the grief. Species death leaves no others. You’re alone among all the eerily renewed particulars.

Tongue out to taste the cold falling flakes I got the first inklings of the weight the world might put on me for the time I had left, the mass of its detail, its relentless plotless insistence. Again, it didn’t bear thinking about. This would be my torture: All that didn’t bear thinking about would devote itself to forcing me to bear thinking about it.

I lit a Camel and hauled myself into focus. Practicalities: Get to Gloucester Road on foot. Circle Line to Farringdon. Ten minutes flailing trek to the Zetter, where Madeline, God bless her mercenary charms, would be waiting. I pulled the woollen cap down snug over my ears and began walking.

Harley had said: Grainer wants the monster not the man. You’ve got time. I didn’t doubt he was right. There were twenty-seven days to the next full moon and thanks to the interference Harley had been running WOCOP still had me in Paris. Which knowledge sustained me for a few minutes despite the growing conviction—this is paranoia, you’re doing this to yourself—that I was being followed.

Then, turning into Cromwell Road, the denial allowance was spent and there was nothing between me and the livid fact: I was being followed.

This is paranoia, I began again, but the mantra had lost its magic. Pressing on me from behind was warm insinuation where should have been uninterrupted cold: surveillance. Snow and buildings molecularly swelled in urgent confirmation: They’ve found you. It’s already begun.

Adrenaline isn’t interested in ennui. Adrenaline floods, regardless, in my state not just the human fibres but lupine leftovers too, those creature dregs that hadn’t fully conceded transformation. Phantom wolf energies and their Homo sapiens correlates wriggled and belched in my scalp, shoulders, wrists, knees. My bladder tingled as in the too fast pitch down from a Ferris wheel’s summit. The absurdity was being unable, shin-deep in snow, to quicken my pace. Harley had tried to press a Smith & Wesson automatic on me before I’d left but I’d laughed it away. Stop being a granny. I imagined him watching now on CCTV saying, Yes, Harley the granny. I hope you’re happy, Marlowe, you fucking idiot.

I tossed the cigarette and shoved my hands into my overcoat pockets. Harley had to be warned. If the Hunt was tailing me then they knew where I’d just been. The Earl’s Court house wasn’t in his name (masqueraded instead as what it was perfectly equipped to be, an elite rare book dealership) and had hitherto been safe. But if WOCOP had uncovered it then Harley—for nearly fifty years my double agent, my fix-it, my familiar, my friend—might already be dead.

If, then … If, then … This, aside from the business of monthly transformation, the inestimable drag of Being a Werewolf, is what I’m sick of, the endless logistics. There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be doing with all that anymore.

My face was hot and tender. The snow’s recording studio hush made small sounds distinct: someone opening a can of beer; a burp; a purse snapping shut. Across the road three drunk young men hysterically scuffled with one another. A cabbie wrapped in a tartan blanket stood by his vehicle’s open door complaining into a mobile. Outside Flamingo two hotdog-eating bouncers in Cossack hats presided over a line of shivering clubbers. Nothing like the blood and meat of the young. You can taste the audacity of hope. Post-Curse these thoughts still shoot up like the inappropriate erections of adolescence. I crossed over, joined the end of the queue, with Buddhist detachment registered the thudding succulence of the three underdressed girls in front of me, and dialled Harley on the secure mobile. He answered after three rings.

“Someone’s following me,” I said. “You need to get out of there. It’s compromised.”

The expected delay. He’d been drunk-dozing with the phone in his hand, set to vibrate. I could picture him, creased, struggling up from the couch, hair aloft with static, fumbling for the Gauloise. “Harley? Are you listening? The house isn’t safe. Get out and go under.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Don’t waste time.”

“But I mean they don’t know you’re here. They absolutely do not. I’ve seen the intel updates myself. For fuck’s sake I wrote most of them. Jake?”

Impossible in the falling snow to get a lock on my footpad. If he’d seen me cross he’d have got into a doorway. There was a dark-haired artfully stubbled fashion-model type in a trench coat across the road ostensibly arrested by a text message, but if that was him then he was either an idiot or he wanted me to see him. No other obvious candidate.

“Jake?”

“Yeah. Look, don’t fuck about, Harley. Is there somewhere you can go?”

I heard him exhale, saw the aging linen-suited frame sag. It was upon him, suddenly, what it would mean if his WOCOP cover was blown. Seventy’s too old to start running. Over the phone’s drift of not silence I could sense him visualising it, the hotel rooms, the bribes, the aliases, the death of trust. No life for an old man. “Well, I can go to Founders, I suppose, assuming no one shoots me between here and Child’s Street.” Founders was the Foundation, Harley’s satirically exclusive club, sub-Jeeves butlers and state-of-the-art escorts, priceless antiques and cutting-edge entertainment technology, massage therapists, a resident Tarot reader and a three-Michelin-starred chef. Membership required wealth but forbade fame; celebrity drew attention, and this was a place for the rich to vice quietly. According to Harley fewer than a hundred people knew of its existence. “Why don’t you let me check first?” he said. “Let me get into WOCOP and—”

“Give me your word you’ll take the gun and go.”

He knew I was right, just didn’t want it. Not now, so unprepared. I pictured him looking around the room. All the books. So many things were ending, without warning.

“All right,” he said. “Fuck.”

“Call me when you get to the club.”

It did occur to me to similarly avail myself of Flamingo, since there it was. No Hunter would risk so public a hit. From the outside the night club was an unmarked dark brick front and a metal door that might have served a bank vault. Above it one tiny pink neon flamingo none but the cognoscenti would divine. In the movie version I’d go in and sneak out of a toilet window or meet a girl and start a problematic love affair that would somehow save my life at the expense of hers. In reality I’d go in, spend four hours being watched by my assassin without figuring out who it was then find myself back on the street.

I moved away from the queue. A warm beam of consciousness followed me. One glance at the glamour boy in the trench coat revealed him pocketing his mobile and setting off in my wake, but I couldn’t convince myself it was him. The ether spoke of greater refinement. I looked at my watch: 12:16. Last train from Gloucester Road wouldn’t be later than 12:30. Even at this pace I should make it. If not I’d check in at the Cavendish and forgo Madeline, though, since I’d given her carte blanche with room service over at the Zetter, I’d most likely be bankrupt by morning.

These, you’ll say, were not the calculations of a being worn out by history, too full of content, emptily replete. Granted. But it’s one thing to know death’s twenty-seven days away, quite another to know it might be making your acquaintance any second now. To be murdered here, in human shape, would be gross, precipitate and—despite there being no such thing as justice—unjust. Besides, the person tracking me couldn’t be Grainer. As Harley said, his lordship prized the wulf not the wer, and the thought of being despatched by anyone less than the Hunt’s finest was repugnant. And this was to say nothing of my one diarist’s duty still undischarged: If I was snuffed out here and now who would tell the untellable tale? The whole disease of your life written but for that last lesion of the heart, its malignancy and muse. God’s gone, Meaning too, and yet aesthetic fraudulence still has the power to shame.

All of which, my cynic said, as I stopped under a street lamp to light another Camel, was decent enough, unless it was just a fancy rationalisation for the sudden and desperate desire not to die.

At which point a silenced bullet hit the street lamp’s concrete three inches above my head.

3

COGNITIVE PILE-UP. On the one hand I was busy cataloguing the perceptual facts—Christmas cracker snap, puff of dust, clipped ricochet—to confirm I had indeed just been shot at, on the other I was already past such redundancies and springing—yes, springing is the correct present participle—into the doorway of a former Bradford & Bingley for cover.

One wants clean, 007ish reactions at times like these. One wants all sorts of things. Backed into the urinous doorway, however, I found myself thinking (along with oh for fuck’s sake and Harley can publish the journals and what will survive of us is nothing) of the refreshing abruptness with which financial institutions—B & B among them—had collapsed in the Crunch. Ads for banks and building societies had continued to run days, sometimes weeks after the going concerns had gone. For many it was impossible to believe, watching the green-jacketed lady in black bowler hat with her smile fusing sexual and financial know-how, that the company she represented no longer existed. I’ve seen this sort of thing before, obviously, the death of certainties. I was in Europe when Nietzsche and Darwin between them got rid of God, and in the United States when Wall Street reduced the American Dream to a broken suitcase and a worn-out shoe. The difference with the current crisis is that the world’s downer has coincided with my own. I must repeat: I just don’t want, I really can’t take (in both senses of the verb) any more life.

A second silenced shot buried itself thud-gasp in the B & B brick. Silver ammo? I had nothing to fear if it wasn’t, but no way of finding out other than taking one in the chest and seeing if I dropped dead. (This was so typically unreasonable of the universe. Apart from a few days to do what I had to do I didn’t want any more life. What’s a few days after two hundred years? But that’s the universe for you, decades of even-handedness then suddenly zero negotiation.) I got down on my belly. The concrete’s odour of stale piss was a thing of cruel joy. Low, moving in tiny increments, I stole a look round the doorway’s edge.

The supermodel in the trench coat stood twenty yards away with his back to me. His left hand was in his pocket. Either he’d shot at me and was now making a suicidal target of himself for my return fire, or the shots had come from somewhere else, in which case only clinical moronism could excuse him from not having worked that out. The scene was an eighties album cover, his overcoated silhouette and the snow and the odd-angled cars. I was tempted to call out to him, though to communicate what, God only knew. Possibly words of love, since imminent death fills you with tenderness for the nearest life.

Hard to say how long he stood there like that. The big moments distend, allow intellectual expansion … a disused London doorway in a twinkling becomes a public toilet; the lower animal functions pounce the second the higher ones look away; civilisation remains in Manichean deadlock with the beast … but eventually he turned and began to walk towards me.

Flush to the wall I got back on my feet, inwardly loud with calculations. Hand-to-hand with me this marionette wouldn’t last three seconds but somehow I didn’t see it going that way. Between here and the junction with Collingham Road thirty yards away there was cover, four cars parked or ditched on my side of the road and a pair of old-style phone booths on the corner. Risky. But unarmed in the doorway I was a sitting duck.

Meantime my pretty young lord and his cheekbones had halved the distance between us and stopped again. For a moment he frowned slightly, as if he’d forgotten his purpose. Then, precisely as I opened my mouth to say, What the fuck do you want?, his left hand came out of its pocket, languidly, holding a silenced .44 Magnum, a tool of such prodigious bulk it was hard to imagine him having the strength to lift and aim it. He smiled at me, however—big sensuous mouth and brilliant teeth in a bony face ensouled by dark mascaraed eyes—then with a surprisingly steady arm raised the weapon slowly and pointed it at me.

The body gets on with things while consciousness prattles. Without realising it I’d bent my knees to leap (and there was the great futile ghost of wolf hindquarters, a feeling of exquisite useless memory); my hands were out, fingers spread, head full of gossip but a shame not to see the first crocuses and if there’s an afterlife but no just something like your mouth filling with soil then nothing—

His hand—hit by a bullet—jerked and spat blood as the gun flipped away. He did a queer little simultaneous yelp and hop, staggered two steps forward clutching his wrist, then sank to his knees in the snow. His face, far from the Tragedy mask you might expect, showed something like bewildered disappointment, although as I watched, his mouth opened and stayed that way. A pendulum of spittle (a phenomenon all but exclusively appropriated by modern pornography) hung from his lower lip, stretched, broke, fell. The bullet had gone through his palm, which meant bleeding from the superficial veins only. If it had severed the median nerve there might be lasting damage, but with today’s surgical top guns I doubted it. He sat back on his heels and looked about, vaguely, as if he’d lost his hat. The Magnum might have been a cigarette butt for all the attention he paid it.

The sniper’s message emerged: If I can hit our friend’s hand from here I could have hit you anytime. It was as if we’d been having a conversation and he or she just said this, quietly.

“Who are you?” I said to the young man.

He didn’t answer, but very sadly got to his feet, left forearm cradled close. The pain would be transforming the limb into something big and hot and beyond placation. With careful effort he bent, retrieved the Magnum, put it back into his coat pocket. Then without a word or further look at me he turned and began trudging away.

I didn’t doubt my reading, my risk assessment, my temporary safety, but those first steps out from the shelter of the doorway called for force of will. I took three and stopped. Pictured the sniper watching through the cross-hairs and, since every mutual understanding gives some sort of pleasure, smiling. My back livened to all the clean cold space behind me for a silver bullet to fly through. The smell of the falling snow was a mercy, though I was sure my clothes had picked up the doorway’s vicious scent of old piss. I took four more steps, five, six … ten. Nothing happened.

The warmth of being watched never left me, but I walked to Gloucester Road without incident and boarded the last Circle Line Tube to Farringdon.

Harley had called and left a message while I was underground. He’d made it to the Foundation safely.

4

IT’S HARD NOT to think of 1965, the year I saved Harley’s life, as one of rising sexual anarchy. Anti–Vietnam War demonstrations brought young men and women together and revealed the erotic potential of political activism. Mailer’s taboo-breaking An American Dream was published. Brigitte Bardot was on all the U.S. magazine covers and in England it emerged that Myra Hindley and Ian Brady got turned on by murdering children. If not quite Anything Goes, then certainly Everything’s Going On.

It’s hard not to think this way, but to do so is to succumb to the compressions of popular history. The facts are true, the interpretation false. The 1965 contemporary humans imagine didn’t really come about till 1975, and even by that jaded year what happened to Harley that night would still have happened. It was still happening ten years later, twenty, thirty. It’s still happening now.

Wayland’s Smithy is a five-thousand-year-old megalithic tomb in the Vale of Uffington, a mile east of the village of Ashbury, just southwest of White Horse Hill in the Berkshire Downs. It sits hidden by a little gathering of trees fifty yards off the Ridgeway, a chalk track following the line of the Downs Homo sapiens have been walking (knuckles gradually leaving the ground) for more than a quarter of a million years. Local legend is that if you leave your horse by the tomb with a coin on the lintel stone you can return to find it shod by Wayland, the smith of the old Saxon gods. During the day people stroll up from White Horse Hill, take photos, poke around, lower their voices, don’t linger. The stones exude meat-freezer cold. At night the place is deserted.

They’d taken Harley there to torture him.

I shouldn’t have been there. I should have been behind my own bars in the cellar of a purpose-acquired farmhouse a mile away. (Ah, the machinations of those premicrotechnology days! My cell contained a cast-iron safe with the key to the door taped inside it. The safe was welded shut, but with a hole in it just big enough to admit a human hand. A human hand. Once I’d Changed I had to wait until I’d Changed back. The simplest solutions are always the best.) I should, I repeat, have been under lock and key, self-gaoled and self-sedated, but at the last moment I’d weakened. I was in a phase of one kill every other full moon (less ethics than fear of the Hunt, who’d been on a recruitment drive since the postwar revelations of Nazi occultism) but abstinence was agony, even with the barbiturates, the benzodiazepines, the chloroform, the ether. That night I’d paused at the top of the cellar steps, contemplated the hours ahead. You go down, you take the drugs, you suffer near-death, you come through. You’re still alive and you haven’t killed anyone. Well, yes. But. The bare walls, the bars, the stone-flagged floor, the cheerful solid fatuous safe. Even underground the rising full moon like the Virgin Mary on a bed saying please, please, please just fuck me, will you?

With a physical gurn and a mental bollocks to it, I turned and went back upstairs …

The initial impulse, to descend like the Angel of Death on the nearest farm or village, didn’t last. It was a mad little fantasy born of a month without live meat. Besides, I was an old dog by this time. I’d long since rarefied into dalliance and deferral. You let the Hunger run you for a while, give the lupine lineaments a workout. The muscles fire up, allow near-complete dissolution of consciousness into animal joy. You run and the night goes over you like cold silk. I crossed the Oxford–Didcot railway line north of Abingdon, swam the icy Thames, ran east into the Chiltern Hills almost as far as the London road. The Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” had that week been displaced from number one by the Beatles’ idiotic “Help!” Both songs went irritatingly round in my head like a pair of unshooable flies. The Hunger does this, seizes some arbitrary detail and makes it an incantation or totem, a maddening recurrence. Eventually I killed and ate. On the edge of the village of Checkendon an insomniac old duffer stood in his back garden smoking a roll-up, gazing blankly at his moonlit vegetable patch. He gasped, once, when I knocked the wind out of him, but that was the only sound he made. He’d survived the Somme, killed a man in a brawl in Ostend, discovered the peace of growing food in his own ground, the queer miracle of tubers torn up from the soil. Love, way back, was a scrawny Margate tea-shop girl with dark corkscrewy hair who’d sent him into a Lawrentian blood-drowse of certainty. They’d walked out together for three months and the night before he joined his regiment made long, dreamy love in a friend’s purposely vacated room with the window open and the smell of the sea coming in. Then war and the odd ordinariness of horrors. Limbs lying around like big doll parts. You lose things. Overhear them saying, He’s not the same. His libido remained a creature of frisky cunning: a stash of mouldy adult magazines behind the creosote tins in the shed, a blasphemous erection the other day with one of the grandkids on his lap, even Nell’s old fat arse after all these years grist to the shameless mill. God could go to hell after what he’d seen, Jones’s blown-off head rolling down the trench, Sterne with maggots living in his foot where the toes had gone—

I left his remains among the blood-drenched cabbages. Slipped from the village back into the woods. Disgust came in the hour after feeding but the years had reduced it to a heavy suave embrace. Disgust doesn’t kill anyone. Loneliness, on the other hand …

At Wayland’s Smithy an hour before dawn I stopped to observe. There wasn’t, really, time to stop and observe. The farmhouse (for current purposes home) was a mile away through sparse cover. This was high ground at the mercy year-round to Valhallan winds. Trees were few. Hedgerows were thin. Darkness, or at the very least twilight, would be required to get home unseen. Nonetheless. Here were the prehistoric stones roused to sentience. Here was the air dense with human stinks, jabbering with primal energies. A Cortina was parked nearby. My flesh steamed. The last of my victim’s life found settlement in me.

By the entrance to the tomb—a soft oblong of deeper darkness between upright sarsens—two men were intent on something I couldn’t see. A third kept lookout where the trees opened onto the track.

“Terry, I should have the torch,” this third one hissed. “It’s fucking pitch-black over here.”

The balance of power was evident. “Terry,” in his thirties and older by perhaps ten years than the other two, was in charge. He was the bearer of the torch. The beam swung, picked out the sentry—a small-eyed face of boyish sweetness, fair hair, one hand raised against the glare—then returned with disturbing precision to its original object.

“Arse-bandit,” Terry’s nearer accomplice said, quietly. “He’s probably enjoying this.”

“Get him out again,” Terry said. “Come on, Fido, out you come.”

“Oi, bum-boy, chop-chop.”

“He’s … Gimmie a hand, Dez.”

Between them Terry and Dez dragged their victim into the open. A lean young man with curled-under long hair, a high forehead, slender wrists and ankles. They’d tied his hands and gagged him. His shirt was still nominally on his back but apart from this and one dark sock he was naked. He lay on his side, not unconscious, but beaten to the point where merely drawing his knees up—the reflex to protect the soft organs—was almost beyond him.

“Come on,” the lookout hissed. “It’s going to be fucking daylight soon.”

“One minute he’s moaning about pitch-black,” Terry said, “the next he’s on about daylight.”

“Shut up, Georgie, for fuck’s sake,” Dez said. He took a swig from a bottle of Haig, passed it to Terry. Terry sipped, poured a libation on the victim’s head, then kicked the victim in the face. As if the action had tripped a switch Dez immediately kicked the young man at least half a dozen times in the stomach and ribs. This was Dez: If Terry drank a pint Dez drank six and still didn’t end up being Terry.

The man on the ground made a blurred animal sound, not plea or protest, just a foghorn note of despair. Dez spat on him. Halfheartedly stood on his face for a couple of seconds, balanced, slipped off. Terry reached into his jacket and pulled out a six-inch knife with a serrated blade. “Well,” he said, in the tone of a patriarch at the end of a satisfactory Sunday lunch, “we know where he likes it, don’t we?”

Call it an aesthetic judgement. One admits beauty to consummate sadism, but this confused pudding of cruelty was an offence. Dez and Georgie, at least, wobbled with sentimental notions: blue-collar fellowship; the Queen; family; Mum; graft; this sceptred isle. Match days would find these two Englishmen in full voice on the terraces, open-armed, in tears. By contrast Terry had depth but lacked the courage and vision that might have usefully plumbed past it and out into the world of others. His imagination would stick forever at himself. I had a bizarre little image of him sitting on the toilet, face slack from absorption in his own schemes—then I was moving.

Fast. Laughably too fast for them. Georgie was dead before the other two even noticed. I’d torn his throat out (redundantly since I’d already broken his neck) and still had most of its wet tubing in my left hand as I approached Terry and Dez. There was nothing to be said. For me this was just the relief of walking out of a bad play. Dez tried to run. Terry sat down somewhat in slow motion, mouth open, then made an attempt to get up on noodle legs. I took one bite out of Dez’s midriff as his life slipped away, swallowed, got a flash of a cobbled street corner and a plain blond woman’s moist frowning face—but stopped. I’d fed to saturation already. You ingest a life, trust me, it fills you. Terry watched everything like someone who couldn’t quite assimilate the surprise party even after everyone had jumped out and shouted surprise. He did say, as I stood over him trailing the warm sausages of Dez’s intestines, Please. Please.

Harley, their victim, had dragged himself a few feet away and stalled. I squatted next to him. He was at the pitch of fear that resembles calm. I very gently eased the gag from his mouth, pressed my finger, my awful hybrid finger—shshsh—against his lips. He nodded, or shuddered in revulsion, at any rate didn’t make a sound. I found his trousers in the doorway of the tomb, brought them to him. His face was a mob of glistening swellings. The left eye was plum-fat and gummed shut. The right tried to watch me. Untying his hands took a wearying while, what with my hands. His three broken fingers made getting the trousers on a dreamy labour. I daren’t risk helping him with them. He was too close to the edge of himself. I remained on my haunches a few feet away. It occurred to me that I hadn’t thought past ridding him of his attackers. Had he run or walked or crawled away I suppose I would have let him, though it would have meant immediate flight for me (this night’s work was bad enough now that I’d killed on my own doorstep) but he didn’t. He struggled to his feet, took three or four steps, then collapsed, unconscious.

The sky said maybe half an hour till dawn. I hadn’t made much of a mess, considering. Quickly I got bodies and gore into the Cortina. The sleeve of Dez’s shirt made a fuse, worked into the tank with a twig. By the grace of the random universe a stainless steel Ronson was in Terry’s pocket. I picked Harley up, slung him over my shoulder, lit the sleeve and ran.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

5

I PHONED HARLEY from the Zetter’s lobby.

“They’re not onto me,” he said. “I just got a call from Farrell. They didn’t know you were here. They weren’t following you, they were following the other chap. Wasn’t even the London unit. It was one of the French. I could have been at home in bed, I hope you realise.”

My young man, Paul Cloquet, had been under WOCOP’s Paris surveillance for a month. “Lightweight stuff,” Harley said. “He’d been clocked in the wrong place once too often. Plus he was having it off with Jacqueline Delon, apparently.” Jacqueline Delon is heiress to the Delon Media fortune, also a compulsive occultist and borderline wacko. I saw her once in the flesh ten years ago leaving the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. She would have been in her mid-thirties then, a lean, immaculately cosmeticised redhead in a tight-fitting green dress, big sunglasses, a thin-lipped mouth suggesting outer amusement over inner boredom. I’d imagined alluring espresso breath and slight constipation, psyche a compressed mass of Freudian maggots. Her father, who’d started in shipping, was a renowned Sadean debauchee. Allegedly she’d inherited his tastes as well as his fortune. “The French agent wasn’t even supposed to be in the UK,” Harley said. “He was supposed to call and let us take over from Portsmouth. But this is the French. They think we’re all incompetent queers.”

“You mean ‘They think we’re all incompetent queers.’ ”

“Hilarious. Anyway, fuck knows how but it turns out Cloquet had been watching you in Paris and followed you here. Fancied making a name for himself with a big scalp. My guess is he’s a rejected WOCOP applicant with a pomme frite on his shoulder. The French operative followed him here and ended up, vicariously, as it were, following you.”

“That’s not possible,” I said. “If this knob had been following me in Paris I’d have known. He’s not very good.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Ice cubes clinked in a glass. Harley sipped, swallowed. Around me the Zetter’s lobby was warm and softly lit. The murmur and tinkle of the still-serving bar was a great reassurance. Two crisp-bloused young women were stationed at reception. When I’d walked in they’d smiled at me as if my arrival was a wholesome erotic surprise. The point of civilisation is so that one can check in to a quality hotel. “Well, he managed it somehow, Jacob, I assure you. I’ve just got off the phone with Farrell at HQ. The French agent identified you and—belatedly—called us. Trust me, WOCOP knows you’re here, but only as of ten minutes ago.”

I wasn’t convinced, but Harley sounded exhausted and I couldn’t bring myself to worry him further. It was true I’d been preoccupied in Paris. One of my companies was involved in a large takeover and I’d had too much contact with my human proxies for comfort. It was just possible, I told myself, that I might, with a headful of irritating practicalities, have missed a tail, even the moron with the Magnum. The bullets of which, Harley had also confirmed, were pure Mexican silver. Whoever Cloquet was, he knew the nature of his quarry.

“Obviously we oughtn’t meet face-to-face for a while,” Harley said.

“What while? In twenty-seven days I’ll be dead.”

Quiet on his end. Remorse on mine.

“Don’t you trust me anymore, Jake?”

“I’m sorry. Forget it.”

“I don’t blame you. Sad old queen with hypertension and a sore arse. We should have found you someone young by now. We should have found you someone who—”

“Forget it, Harls, please.” Again quiet. It was possible Harley was crying. He’s prone to emotional fracture since the prostate surgery. The truth is we should have found someone else, or rather no one else, since I haven’t actually needed a human familiar for a century or more. The real truth is I should never have let Harley in to begin with, but I’d been in a phase of deep loneliness the night I put him in my exploitable debt. Now, hearing him sniff, once, and take a big sip, I thought: This is me. Every present anger derives from past weakness. Enough. Let it come down. “Ignore me,” I said. “I’m just miffed about this tool following me.”

Harley cleared his throat. Sometimes the sound of him doing this, or the sight of him struggling to open a pickle jar, or patting his pockets for the specs that are resting on his forehead breaks my heart. But what’s heartbreak? A feeling. I’ve had it with feelings, even if they haven’t had it with me. “Well, there’s no point leaving the Zetter tonight,” he said. “They already know you’re there. Why don’t you call me tomorrow morning when you’ve had some sense fucked into you?”

“Why don’t I do just that?”

Another pause. There are these silences in which I can feel him restraining the word “love.”

“Who is it tonight?” he asked. “Not the one with the plastic twat?”

“That’s Katia,” I said. “This is Madeline. No plastic. All real.”

6

A VAMPIRE HAS written: “The great asymmetry between immortals and werewolves (apart from the obvious aesthetic asymmetry) is that whereas the vampire is elevated by his transformation the werewolf is diminished by his. To be a vampire is to be increased in subtlety of mind and refinement of taste; the self opens the door of its dismal bed-sit to discover the house of many mansions. Personality expands, indefinitely. The vampire gets immortality, immense physical strength, hypnotic ability, the power of flight, psychic grandeur and emotional depth. The werewolf gets dyslexia and a permanent erection. It’s hardly worth making the comparison …” For all of which you can read: Werewolves get to have sex and we don’t.

Though I’m not a misogynist I only have sex with women I dislike. Emotionally there’s no alternative, but it’s tough. Not because dislike impedes desire (on the contrary, as we modernly know, as we’re modernly cool with) but because my dislike rarely lasts, especially with prostitutes, most of whom go out of their way to be likeable. Very many contemporary metropolitan escorts are ruinously likeable. Last year I hired a twenty-nine-year-old Argentinean girl, Victoria, whose soul spoke to mine in its own occult tongue within the first minute of our encounter. I had oral, vaginal and anal sex with her (in that order; I repeat, I’m not a misogynist) over a period of six hours (£3,600) then we went shopping at Borough Market and had breakfast overlooking the Thames. Crossing the Hungerford bridge we held hands and the wind lifted her dark hair and she turned her face up to mine for the inevitable kiss with already languorous knowledge of what was possible between us and I liked her enormously and she said, This is going to be trouble, isn’t it? So I called the agency after putting her in a cab on the Embankment and told them never to send her to me again.

Why then, if they’re so likeable, rely on prostitutes? Why not trawl the ranks of lady neo-Nazis or the register of paedophile mums? There’s a deep reason and a shallow one. The deep reason I’ll get to, by and by. The shallow one you can have now: In short, because nonprostitutes require reciprocal desire. I’m not an ugly man (or werewolf either, judging by some of the pug-faced lollopers I’ve seen in Harley’s sneaked WOCOP files) but I’m a long way from taking any woman’s attraction for granted. I can’t hang around waiting for someone who fancies me. It’s time-consuming. It’s labour intensive. Therefore professional escorts, for whom, like therapists and mercenaries (and in happy contradiction of Lennon and McCartney), all you need is cash.

Madeline, white-skinned, green-eyed, with straightened blond hair, a short upper body and alert, pop-kittenish breasts, is self-congratulatory, vain, materialistic, brimming with tabloid axioms and fluent in cliché. She’s been there done that, bought the T-shirt. She goes ballistic. She gets paralytic. She wants the organ-grinder not his monkey. She wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. Amis’s mouldering novelties are her lingua franca. Her telephone farewell is mmbaah. This more than her spiritual deficits has kept my dislike going, but it can’t last forever. A month in I can see the confused child in there, the gaping holes and wrong bulges in the long-ago fabric of love. There was a Doting and borderline Dodgy Dad, a fading and viciously Jealous Mum. This is the drag of having lived so long and seen so many: Biography shows through, all the mitigating antecedents. People teem with their own information and I start to get the headache of interest in them. Which is pointless, since when you get right down to it they’re first and foremost food.

She was waiting for me in the Zetter’s deluxe rooftop studio suite, albeit with a look of having just freshened-up from a quickie—moonlighted on my dollar since I’d booked her for the whole night. “Hiya,” she said, raising her glass, muting the TV, summoning the feline glitter. Extreme Cosmetic Surgery was on. A woman was having fat from her abdomen removed and stuffed into her buttocks.

“Feel that,” I said, extending my frozen hand. “Shall I put that on you somewhere?” Madeline’s hand, French-manicured, was warm, lotioned and in even its moist fingerprints promissory of transactional sex.

“Only if you like hospital food, babes,” she said. “D’you want champagne? Or something from the minibar?”

“Not yet. I’m going to wash the world off. You watch the rest of this. Order whatever you want.”

Brutally thawed after three minutes in the shower I stood letting the hot jets hammer wolf dregs from my shoulders. Habit had me mentally busy with disappearance strategies and WOCOP blind spots (the Middle East, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Zimbabwe, all the fun destinations), Swiss bank account numbers, timer-equipped holding cells, fake passports, weapons caches, bent hauliers—but underneath it all was something like my own voice saying: This is what you wanted. Stop. Be at peace. Let it come down.

Not that I could hold either line for long. It had been ten days since I’d fucked Madeline. Ten days takes my kind to the edge. On the Curse you’re desperate for sex with a She (if you’re straight, that is; there are, naturally, gay werewolves—one resists “queerwolves”), while off the Curse your regular libido’s amped up by the frustration of not having had sex with a She. It’s a numbers problem. Infection rates for females have always been low, WOCOP estimates one to every thousand males. As you can imagine, we don’t run into one another. I’ve never met one. In Buffy there’d be a howlers’ singles bar or dating agency. Not in the real world. The Internet’s no help: WOCOP’s set up so many entrapment sites (infamously werewolffuckfest.com, from which they wiped out almost a hundred monsters—all male; no females, if there were even any left, responded—in one month back in the mid-nineties) that no one dares take the risk. For the longest time the romantic explanation for low rates of female infection endured: Possession of a womb, it was supposed, conferred a gentleness which simply could not bear the viciousness of a lycanthropic heart. Female werewolves, masculine idiocy maintained, must be killing themselves in crazy numbers. First full moon they’d Change, devour a loved one, be unable to live with the guilt, slip away somewhere quiet and swallow a silver earring. It’s quite extraordinary, given the wealth of historical evidence to the contrary, how long this fallacy of the gentler sex lasted, but the twentieth century (years before Myra and the girls of Abu Ghraib put their two penn’orth in) pretty much did away with it. Now we know: If women don’t catch the werewolf bug, it’s certainly not because they’re sugar and spice and all things nice. Whatever the reason, there have never been enough Shes to go round. It’s one of the universe’s great sexual tragedies. It’s one of the universe’s great sexual farces too, because none of this souped-up concupiscence serves an evolutionary purpose. Werewolves don’t reproduce sexually. Howler girls are eggless, howler boys dud of spunk. If you haven’t had kids by the time you’re turned you’re not having any, get used to it. Lycanthropic reproduction is via infection: Survive the bite and the Curse is yours.

But here’s the thing, the old news, the stale headline: No one is surviving the bite anymore.

According to WOCOP not for at least a hundred years. Mauled victims die within twelve hours. It’s a mystery. I was turned in 1842 and it’s possible I was the last werewolf made. WOCOP, giddy with scientific incredulity, has captured werewolves and given them victims to bat around—without successful transmission. For the last century the species has been on a fast track to extinction, with or without WOCOP’s exterminatory zeal. By the year of the Great Exhibition we were down to fewer than three thousand. By the time Queen Victoria died just under two and a half. And by the time of the first moon landing we were a list of 793 names. Within WOCOP the Hunt’s become a joke, the guys who did their job so well they did themselves out of a job. Yearly their funding dwindles. A veil of melancholy has fallen. You’ll be Grainer’s swansong, Harley had said. His late masterpiece.

I turned the shower off, voluptuous from the heat and the perceptible pulse of Madeline’s waiting body. One hard straight fuck, allegro, to kill the fizz and settle me, then the second, third and fourth movements, adagio, ritardando, grave. This is acute desire and acute boredom in the same glass. I do what I do with the glazed despair you see in the superobese as they chomp rhythmically through their tonnage of chocolate and fried chicken. One of the things I’ve been hanging on for is the death of my libido. I’ve lost interest in everything else, so why not? But it just keeps, as it were, coming.

A pre-coitus glance in the mirror showed the drearily familiar calm dark-eyed face (every time I see it these days I think, Oh, Jacob, do yourself a favour and stop) then I joined Madeline on the bed, where at my request she turned the TV off and lay on her back and opened her white-stockinged legs and placed her arms slave-girlishly above her head and for some fifteen minutes endured the increasingly painful realisation that I wasn’t going to get an erection, while simultaneously doing everything in her power to give me one. Eventually, emphatically soft, I accepted defeat. “Hilarious though this sounds,” I said, “we’ve just made history. This has never happened to me before.”

Her professional self was miffed, and not very good at hiding it. After a clipped exhalation and a flick of the blond hair off her clavicle she said: “Do you want to try it another way?”

It’s official.

You’re the last.

I’m sorry.

It’s called delayed shock for a reason. Until getting on top of her I’d been ethereal with not having taken it in, or with having doublethinkingly taken it in and rejected it at the same time. But I’d put my hands on her waist and felt her nipples touch my chest and the softness and heat of her breath had in the way of such mysteries returned me to full and nauseous mass. It was as if I’d been ignoring a shadow on my peripheral vision only to turn and find it was a thousand-foot tidal wave, heading my way. You’re the last.

“Maybe later,” I said. “It’s not you, incidentally.” She pulled her chin in at the absurdity of that, glanced away to the invisible documentary-maker who’s always with her. Madeline’s narcissism reconfigures awkward moments as opportunities for into-camera astonishment. Er, hello?

I’d slid to rest with my head on her thigh, and now lay inhaling the smell of her warm young cunt with its wreath of Dior Addict. The last image before I’d quit flubbing her was of flak-jacketed Ellis holding up Wolfgang’s giant severed lupine head while a Hunt colleague filmed the whole thing for the WOCOP annals.

“How about I give you a massage?” I said. If this was Hollywood I’d be dismissing her fully paid and heavily gratuitied in preparation for a night’s heroic solitary brooding, a sequence of fade-shots wet-eyed Pacino would do with baleful minimalism, staring out at the city, lit cigarette, bottle and glass, the face tranquilly letting all the death and sadness gather with a kind of defeated wisdom. But this wasn’t Hollywood. The thought of being alone all night released dizzyingly wrong adrenaline and a second phase of denial. It didn’t bear thinking about. I removed Madeline’s stockings.

“Is that nice?” I asked, a little while later. I’d turned the lights out but left the blinds open. It was still snowing. The yellowish grey sky and white roofscape yielded a moony light, enough for the glimmer of her earrings and the oil’s sheen on her skin. I had her left foot in my hands and was working it gently.

“Nnnn,” she said. “Lush.”

I massaged in what would have been silence if not for her occasional groans, certain that if I stopped I’d be unable to tolerate my own haywire energies. I recalled how tired Harley had sounded on the phone, reread it now as the first sign of his willingness to let me go. Certainly my death would bring him up against his history, leave nothing between him and the horrors he’d helped conceal, but it would release him, too. He could retire from WOCOP. Go his ways. Chug down every day a little of what he’d become and hope to live long enough to ingest the whole ugly mass. At the very least find a place somewhere warm where he could sit straw-hatted with his bare feet in the dust and listen to what the emptiness had to say. If I needed an altruistic rationale for dying, there it was.

“Tell me some more werewolf stuff,” Madeline slurred. I’d been at it for almost an hour without fear of her conscience kicking in: There’s no boon or pleasure she doesn’t peremptorily gobble up or absorb as part of her birthright. As far as she was concerned I could have gone on pampering her all night, all year, for the rest of her life. The truth is she’s not a very good prostitute.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“Tell me about the first time you killed someone.”

The Werewolf Stuff. For Maddy it’s another client quirk, but one she’s hooked on. In the posteverything world it turns out humans can’t kick the story habit. Homer gets the last laugh. “A lovely young girl lies on a bed in the dark listening to a fairy tale,” I said. “But she’s naked and the storyteller’s hands are all over her.”

She didn’t speak for a moment, then said: “What?”

“Nothing. I seek objective correlatives for the times. Never mind. I killed my first victim on the fourteenth of August, 1842. I was thirty-four years old.”

“1842 … So that’s …”

“I’ll be two hundred and one in March.”

“Not in bad nick then.”

“Human form sticks at the time of turning. It’s the werewolf gets arthritis and cataracts.”

“You should go on telly with this stuff.”

Tell me about the first time you killed someone. For the monster as for the man life’s one long diminishing surprise at how much of your wretched self you find room for. But there are the exceptions, the unique unpleasantnesses, the inoperable tumours …

“A month before taking my first victim,” I said, “I was on a walking holiday with a friend—my best friend at the time, Charles Brooke—in Snowdonia. The year, as I said, was 1842. We were wealthy, educated gentlemen of neighbouring Oxfordshire estates, therefore we went about the trip as we went about everything else: with an air of good-humoured entitlement. Charles was engaged to be married in September. The summer before I’d shocked my little world by marrying a penniless thirty-year-old American woman I’d met and fallen in love with in Switzerland.”

“What were you doing in Switzerland?”

“Charles and I were on a European tour. Not as in the Rolling Stones.”

“What?”

“One went to Europe and saw the sights, it was the done thing. Arabella was travelling there with her aunt, a bad-tempered old turkey but her only means of support. We met at the Metropole Hotel in Lausanne. It was love at first sight.” I ran my thumb very gently over the moist crinkle of Madeline’s anus. A pornographer in Los Angeles said to me not long ago: The asshole’s finished. Everything gets finished. You keep coming up with crazy shit you can’t believe you’ll find the girls for, that’ll finally finish the girls. But the girls just keep turning up and finishing it. It’s depressing.

“Something there you like?” Madeline asked, arching her back.

I removed my thumb and recommenced massaging. “No, it just seemed momentarily apposite. The word ‘love.’ ”

She lowered her backside and reached down into the ice bucket, hefted the bottle of now-flat Bollinger for a swig. “Oh,” she said, only very vaguely wondering what “apposite” might mean. “Be like that then.”

“Charles and I made our camp in a forest clearing some few miles from the base of Snowdon. Pine and silver birch, a stream glimmering like tinsel in the moonlight. A full moon, naturally.”

“That’s really the thing then, is it? The full moon?”

On our wedding night Arabella and I had dragged the bedclothes to where the window’s slab of moonlight lay. I want to see it on your skin.

“Yes, the full moon’s really the thing,” I said. “We all stupidly thought it would stop after astronauts had been up there and walked on it in ’69. There was palpable species depression when it was obvious Armstrong’s one small step changed nothing for werewolves, however giant a leap it was for mankind.”

“Don’t go off,” Madeline said. “You always do that, go off on something and I get lost. It drives me mad.”

“Of course it does,” I said. “I’m sorry. You’re a child of your time. You want the story. Only the story. Very well. To resume: Charles and I lit a fire and pitched the tent. Despite the clear skies it was warm. We ate a supper of salted beef and plum jam, bread, cheese, hot coffee, then between us drank the better part of a flask of brandy. I remember the feeling of freedom, the moon and stars above, the old spirits of wood and water, the companionship of a good friend—and like a radiation from home miles away the love and desire of a beautiful, tender, fascinating woman. I said an air of entitlement earlier, didn’t I? That was true, generally, but there were moments when I was humbled by a sense of my own good fortune.”

“How d’you do it, by the way?”

“Do what?”

“Talk like this, like telly?”

It had stopped snowing. The room was a nest of appalling contemporary comfort. In the new, still, science-fictionish light we could have been on another planet. The journals are in a safe-deposit box in Manhattan. All but the current one. This one. The last one. The untellable story. Harley has the code, the spare key, the authorisation. “Practice,” I said. “Too much time on my hands. Shall I continue?”

“Sorry, yeah, go on. You had the brandy and you were feeling whatever. Free.”

“Charles had a poor head for spirits, and he was exhausted from the miles we’d covered that day. Not long after midnight he retired to the tent, and within a matter of minutes was snoring, softly.” I lifted Madeline’s hair out of the way and worked her trapezoids from scapula to occipital bone. Anatomical Latin’s an unjudgemental friend if you have to rip people apart and eat them. “While Charles slept I lay by the fire, thinking of Arabella. I considered myself the luckiest man alive. Neither she nor I was a virgin when we met, but the little boudoir experience I’d had was no preparation for what followed with her. She had rich, steady, amoral passion. What the world would have called perversion was between us a return to angelic innocence. Nothing of the body was shameful. Everything of the body was sacred.”

“Sounds like lust at first sight to me,” Madeline said, not without a trace of irritation. She doesn’t appreciate not being the main woman in the room, even if the competition’s been dead for a century and a half.

“Certainly there was lust,” I said. “The holiest of lusts. But make no mistake, we were as deeply in love as it’s possible to be. It’s important you understand that. It’s important for what comes later.”

“Umm.”

“You understand we were in love?”

“Got it. Oh God, yeah, do my hands. You forget about your hands.”

“If this was Poe or Stevenson or Verne or Wells I’d have been drawn away from our camp by a strange sound or glimpsed figure.”

“What?”

“Never mind. It’s not important. I got up from the fire and walked away towards the stream. Thinking about Arabella, you see, had put me in a state of unbearable arousal. I needed to, in the vernacular, toss myself off.”

Madeline said nothing but a microcurrent of professional alertness went through her skin under my palms. Oh. Right. Back on. Here we go.

“I walked perhaps twenty paces to the trees by the edge of the stream, unfastened my trousers and with my throat turned up to the moon began pleasuring myself. I knew I’d tell Arabella I’d done this when I returned home. To her it would be one more sweet sacrament …” I’d started the tale with mechanical wryness but had been sucked in despite myself. I felt, suddenly, not how long a time two hundred years was, but how short. There was the werewolf beginning, like a thorn that had just this second scratched me. Yet somehow between then and now near enough two thousand victims. I thought of them in a concentration camp heap. My guts are a mass grave. It could so easily not have happened. It could so easily have happened to someone else.

“Go on,” Madeline prompted. The massage had paused with the narrative. Patience isn’t one of her strengths.

“It was the last moment of my life as a human being,” I continued, working my hands down her thighs, “and it was a good one: the scent of conifers, the rustle of the stream, the warm air and salving moonlight. I came, deliciously, with the image in my head of her looking at me over her shoulder as I fucked her from behind.”

“Getting the picture, babes.”

“Then the werewolf attacked.”

“Oh.”

“I say ‘attacked’ but the truth is I just happened to be in the way. He was on the run. I still had my prick in my hand when I heard a sudden commotion in the undergrowth, and in less time than it takes to tell he was on me—giant, strong-scented, frantic with fear—then gone. For one second of clarity I felt it all, the speed and bulk of him, the scourging claws, the meat stink of his breath, the ice of the bite and a single glimpse of the beautiful eyes—then he sprang away into the darkness and I lay winded, one arm in the rushing stream, my shirt gathering the weight of my own blood. Cold water, warm blood, something pleasant about the contrast. I seemed to lie there for a long time, but in reality it can only have been seconds before I saw the Hunt. They weren’t called that in those days. Back then they were SOL, the Servants of Light. On the opposite bank three cloaked men on horseback, armed with pistols and silver-tipped spears, one with a longbow and quiver of glinting arrows.”

“Seriously, you should write this down.”

“They didn’t see me, and the noise of the gallop would have drowned me out even if I’d had strength to call to them. In a moment, they too had disappeared. For a while I lay, strangely unconcerned, between consciousness and oblivion. I don’t know how long a time passed. Seconds might have been days. The moonlight on me was like an angel and the constellations came down to me in tenderness: Pegasus, Ursa Major, Cygnus, Orion, the Pleiades.

“The wound had stopped bleeding by the time I crawled back to camp. Charles had slept through the whole thing and some quickening nausea told me not to wake him, told me, in fact, to say nothing of what had passed. What would I have said? That a nine-foot creature, part man, part wolf, had burst out of nowhere and bitten me, then disappeared, pursued by three hunters on horseback? There was a little brandy left in the flask so I poured it over the wound and dressed it as best I could with a couple of handkerchiefs. I built up the fire and settled down to watch through what remained of the night. We had no weapons, but I could at least raise the alarm if the creature returned.” I lay alongside Madeline now, right hand doing deft shiatsu around her lumbar vertebrae. Most of her was busy absorbing the pleasure of the massage. A little of her kept the professional motor idling. Only a negligible bit of her was being irritated by whether this werewolf stuff might turn out to be some sort of mental problem.

“Naturally I fell asleep,” I said. “When I woke, the wound had all but vanished, so that for the remaining four days of the excursion I lived in fear that at best I’d suffered some sort of massive phantasm, at worst that I was completely losing my mind. Every time I thought of telling someone—Charles in the first instance, Arabella when I got home—the feeling of guilty sickness rose and I kept my mouth shut.” Madeline, fine-tuned for certain frequency shifts, touched my cock very lightly with her fingernails. “This, of course, keeping the secret from Arabella, was a Calvary all on its own. My wife’s eyes sought mine for the old recognition, but found there a difference that would have been less nightmarish had it been less slight.”

“Hey,” Madeline whispered. “Look what I’ve found.”

“I had trouble sleeping, swung between moods of euphoria and despair, two or three times ran an inexplicable fever and increasingly, as the month since the attack passed, fought against a new violent force of desire.” Madeline turned, expertly insinuated with her bottom, guided what she’d found into its cleft. “By day I was plagued by fantasies, by night I was at the mercy of dreams. Arabella … What could she do but pour out love? Love was what she had. It beat on me like sunlight on burned skin.”

From movements in Madeline’s shoulders I inferred nimble searching in the handbag on the floor. A pause. The tinkle of foil. All this via the thin muscles of her hand, arm, shoulder, to me. My heart beat against her back. She was waiting for precisely the right moment. I could feel the small difficulty she still had suppressing the part of herself that didn’t want to be a prostitute. My own tumescence reminded me of how the young man’s hand must have throbbed.

“Arabella had never seemed so desirable to me,” I said, “yet every time I went near her something stopped me. Not impotence. I could have broken stone with the erections I had. It was, rather, a compulsion to wait, to wait …”

Madeline opened the condom and reached back slowly for my cock. Between us we fitted the rubber with minimal ugliness. Another dip into the omniscient handbag yielded lubricant, which she applied with measured prodigality to the first and second fingers of her left hand. I got up from the bed with great care, as if anything—a twang from the mattress—could set the moment haemorrhaging. She backed towards me on all fours, stopped at the bed’s edge, knees together, arse raised in elemental submission. Whatever interest she’d had in the story, her only interest in it now was professional, as aphrodisiacal instrument. This called for wisdom, she knew; it was the sort of thing that could backfire on her. She reached around a second time to work the lubricant into her anus. “What happened next?” she whispered.

Arabella forced back over the bed, naked, a version of her face I’d never seen. Myself reflected in the gilt cheval glass Charles had given us as a wedding gift, the fantastic absurd prosaic reality of my Changed shape.

I pushed my cock into Madeline’s arsehole as the image shifted to one of her, Madeline, pertly shopping on the King’s Road. She made a small noise in her throat, fake welcome. What will survive of us is nothing. “I don’t tell that part of the story,” I said.

This is the deep reason I only have sex with women I dislike.

7

IT WAS A long night after Madeline fell asleep around three, leaving me alone in the inaptly named small hours, when so many big things happen in the heart. I lay for a while on the bathroom floor in the dark. I smoked. I went out onto the suite’s roof terrace, where the undisturbed fall was deep (and crisp, and even) and looked across the roofs of Clerkenwell. Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void. I thought of waking Maddy to share the scene’s queer quiet beauty—and felt the impulse immediately sucked into the furnace of absurdity, where all such impulses of mine must go, accompanied by a feeling of dead hilarity. After a while the only thing you can do with loneliness is laugh at it. I drank the minibar’s spirits, one by one, with reverence for their different personalities. I watched television.

I don’t tell that part of the story.

Haven’t told. Yet.

Gritters worked with jovial British inadequacy through the darkness, but by the time the Zetter’s kitchen started up snow was falling heavily again. Londoners would wake, look out, be grateful: not business as usual. Thank God. Anything, anything but business as usual. Daybreak was the slow development of a daguerreotype. Madeline woke—she does this with startling high-energy abruptness—and made it obvious by twitching her ankles that she was waiting for the sexual all-clear. “Why don’t you jump in the shower,” I said, “and I’ll order us some breakfast.” Which was what I assumed had arrived when, fifteen minutes later (the mere preamble or tune-up to Maddy’s ablutions barely begun) there was a knock on the door.

“Hey,” Ellis said with a smile when I opened it. “Not room service.”

He knew there was only a moment before I’d slam the door or jump at him, so immediately put his hands up and said: “Unarmed. Just here to talk.” Soft voice, Californian accent. Three years ago on a freezing night in the Dolomites he and Grainer had hunted and almost killed me. He looked the same: waist-length white hair centre-parted over a candlewax face with a big concave drop from cheekbones to jaw. For a second you thought albino—but the eyes stopped you: lapis lazuli, full of weird self-certainty. At an average height he would’ve been a grotesquely striking man. At six-four he entered the margins of science fiction. You couldn’t shake the feeling he’d started life as a willowy San Franciscan hippy girl then had his genes diabolically fiddled with. He was wearing black leather trousers and a faded Levis jacket.

“May I come in?”

“No, you may not.”

He rolled his eyes and began, “Oh come on, Jake, it’s—” then kicked me with high-speed gymnastic accuracy between the legs.

I’ve been good at fighting, in the past. I’ve been dangerous. I know karate, kung-fu, jujitsu, how to kill someone with a Yale key. But you’ve got to keep your hand in, and I haven’t humanly hit anyone for decades. I did what a man does, inhaled, suddenly, through the white light detonation and dropped, first to my knees, then, parts cupped, onto my side, knowing I’d never exhale again. Ellis stepped over me in a draught of damp biker boots and mushroomy foot odour and closed the door. In the power shower, Madeline sneezed. He ignored it, sat on the edge of the bed.

“Jake,” he said. “We want you to know something. Do you know what I’m going to say?”

I didn’t, but responding was out of the question. Everything other than staying curled up holding my balls and inhaling more and more air was out of the question.

“What I’m going to say is: You’re the last. All the resources are dedicated. There’s no one else left. It’s all for you.”

I closed my eyes. It didn’t help. I opened them again. All I wanted was to breathe out but my lungs were annealed. Ellis sat knees apart, elbows on thighs. Behind him the windows were filled with pale cloud against which the snow looked like a fall of ash. History’s given snow new evocation options: ticker-tape parades; Nazi crematoria; World Cup Finals; 9/11 fallout.

“Did you know?” he asked.

I very gently shook my head, no. He gave a dismissive shrug—obviously if I’d known I’d hardly admit it and prove WOCOP had a leak—then bowed his head and rolled his neck as if to ease mastoidal tension. He breathed deeply a couple of times, loosened his shoulders, then straightened, staring at me. “I’m supposed to be the leering villain,” he said. “I can feel it, a sort of narrative coercion in the ether. It’s here in this room, you know, that I should get up and take a piss on you or something.” His fingers were long and knuckly, possessed of the ugly dexterity you see in virtuoso lead guitarists. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to. I just felt I wanted to see you before we … you know, come to it. The last hurrah.” He looked out at the snow and said, “Jesus, this weather.” For a few moments we both watched the down-swirling flakes in silence. Then he turned back to me. “To be honest,” he said, “I’m ambivalent about the whole thing. It’s all ambivalence, now, right? Grey areas. Morality reduced to approximations. I know you know this, Jake, that everyone’s more or less okay, all things considered. Look at this guy whatsizname, Fritzl, raping his daughter in the cellar for years. We don’t mind him, really. We know there’ll be psychology, we know there’ll be causes. It’s shock-fatigue. Beyond good and evil.”

In the shower Madeline adjusted the jet option to “massage” and let out a gasp. It occurred to me that Ellis was on drugs. His face was damp.

“We fluked it, you know,” he said. “Finding you. An agent from France came over following a suspect, turns out the suspect was following you. We thought you were still in Paris.”

At the absolute top of my held breath I said very quickly: “Why didn’t the agent kill me?”

“Come on, Jake. You’re Strictly Grainer. You know that. All the Hunt knows it, all WOCOP. It’s like one of the Five Pillars.”

The pain was diversifying: stabbings in the abdomen; a dark red headache; something devious and knifey in the colon; the need to vomit. I got up on one elbow and released a burp, which felt like a little miracle.

“I won’t lie to you,” Ellis said. “I’ll be sorry to see you go. I don’t like endings, not on this scale, not of an era.” One of Madeline’s stockings lay next to his hand. He fingered it, idly, with his awful white asparagus digits, seemed for the first time to be reconstructing my night. It was irrelevant to him. I remembered Harley’s description of him: magnificently abstracted, carries with him an inscrutable scheme of things next to which your own feels paltry. You have to remind yourself it’s just because he’s half insane. “There’s a literary anticlimax available,” Ellis continued, discarding the stocking. “You and Grainer come face-to-face and he realises that killing you will take away his purpose, his identity, so he lets you live. I’ve discussed it with him. He didn’t dismiss it straight away.”

I’d been exploring positional alternatives while he spoke and had ended up (again I say God being dead, irony still rollickingly alive) in exactly the attitude Madeline had adopted last night for receipt of buggery. Humour lightens. “But he did dismiss it,” I helium-squeaked.

“He did dismiss it. He considered it, he weighed it, he dismissed it. Filial honour trumps all.”

Filial honour. Forty years ago I killed and ate Grainer’s father. Grainer was ten at the time. There’s always someone’s father, someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems.

“That’s a shame,” I wheezed. Ellis didn’t laugh. (He doesn’t laugh, Harley had told me. It’s not that he doesn’t get it. It’s that amusement no longer makes him laugh. He’s transcended too much.)

“I agree,” Ellis said. “It’s a goddamned crying shame. But unfortunately it’s not my decision.”

With monumental belatedness I wondered what he was doing here, manifestly not putting a silver bullet in my brain or lopping off my head. The question troubled me, my other self, the one that wasn’t filling with joy at having just managed to breathe out slightly.

Someone knocked. “That’ll be your breakfast,” Ellis said. “I’ll leave you to it.” He got up and, stepping over me again, opened the door. I heard him say: “Take it in, would you?” Then he was gone.

A young hair-gelled man in Zetter livery entered with Madeline’s Full English on an enormous tray.

“Cramp,” I gasped. “I’m fine. Just put it on the bed.”

8

HARLEY’S PHONE WAS off when I called him, which meant he was either at the WOCOP offices or dead. I couldn’t shuck the conviction they were onto him. An hour after Madeline’s departure (I spent the bulk of breakfast nursing my keening plums on the bed while she ate—with meticulous greed, since she allows herself only one fry-up a month) I’d arrived at the conclusion that Ellis’s visit was simply to reinforce the story of how they’d found me. The man’s mental style—oblique, tangential, possibly stoned—made him hard to read but there was surely something hokey about the way he’d volunteered that We fluked it, you know, finding you. The only motive that made sense was WOCOP’s desire to preserve the illusion that Harley’s cover was intact. Which meant it wasn’t.

I passed the afternoon supine with a cold flannel pressed to my forehead, tracking my gonads’ slow return to quiescence, CNN on the plasma screen for the lulling white noise of the news. I’m immune to news, the news, breaking news, rolling news, news flashes. Live long enough and nothing is news. “The News” is “the new things.” That’s fine, until a hundred years go by and you realise there are no new things, only deep structures and cycles that repeat themselves through different period details. I’m with Yeats and his gyres. Even The News knows there’s no real news, and goes to ever greater lengths to impart urgent novelty to its content. Have Your Say, that’s the latest inanity, newscasters reading out viewer emails: “And Steve in Birkenhead writes: ‘Our immigration laws are the laughing stock of the world. This is the Feed the World mentality gone mad …’ ” I can think back to a time when something like this would have annoyed or at least amused me, that the democracy Westerners truly got excited about was the one that made every blogging berk a critic and every frothing fascist a political pundit. But now I feel nothing, just quiet separation. In fact the news already feels postapocalyptically redundant to me, as if (silent dunes outside, insects the size of cars) I’m sitting in one of the billions of empty homes watching video footage of all the stuff that used to matter, wondering how anyone ever thought it did.

“I had a visitor,” I told Harley from the Zetter’s bar, when, after eight in the evening, I got through to him at last. “Ellis was here this morning.”

“I heard,” he said. “I’m not surprised. Hunt consensus is you need your nose rubbed in it.”

“That’s not what worries me. It played as an effort to deliver the official ‘how we found you’ story. Which means that’s not how they found me.”

“Jake, no. You’re being paranoid. I spoke to the French chap myself.”

“What?”

“The twit with the Magnum. Cloquet. They brought him in for questioning. I was there during the interrogation. He was following you. Had been following you for a week in Paris.”

I sipped my Scotch. The bar was low-lit, dark tones and soft furnishings, a carefully designed atmosphere of deserved indulgence. The long white calves of a moody brunette sitting with one leg crossed over the other on a high stool opposite me offered a momentary distraction. She was doodling in her cocktail with a straw. In the film version I’d go over and open with a gambit of jaded brilliance. Only in films is a woman alone at a bar actually a woman alone at a bar. The thought added itself to the mental racket I was sick of. Every Hollywood movie now is part of the index of Western exhaustion. I had a vision of my death like a lone menhir in an empty landscape. You just walked towards it. Simple as that. The peace of wrapping your arms around cold stone. Peace at last.

“What for?” I asked.

I heard the shick of Harley’s malachite Zippo and his first intemperate drag. “That’s what we’re not clear on,” he said. “He claims he’s a free agent with a grudge against werewolves, but he’s been fornicating with Jacqueline Delon for the last year so it can’t be that simple. Trouble is he’s somewhat gaga. High as a kite when we picked him up. Farrell told me he’d enough coke on him to get a horse airborne. My guess is even cleaned up he’s borderline psychotic. In any case Madame Delon’s the last person to be ordering a hit on a werewolf. She loves you lot.” He caught himself. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Bad choice of words.”

“Forget it,” I said. I sniffed my Scotch. It was supposed to be Oban but it didn’t taste right. “What about the WOCOP agent tracking him? Did you talk to him?”

“Broussard,” Harley said. “He’s back in France. I didn’t speak to him, but Farrell did. Story confirmed: He was keeping an eye on Cloquet, went out of his jurisdiction, realised Cloquet was tailing you, and rather sheepishly called us in. Jake, seriously, stop worrying. I’m fine. We’re fine. No one knows.”

I’d left my room to call Harley in case Ellis had planted a bug I’d been unable to find, though I’d spent two hours looking. Perhaps I was being paranoid. Either way I felt tired, suddenly, weighed down again by the saddlebags of ifs and thens, the swag of dead currency. There’s an inner stink comes up at times of all the meat and blood that’s passed down my gullet, the offal I’ve buried my snout in, the guts I’ve rummaged and gorged on. Harley’s crispness reminded me we weren’t seeing this the same way.

“Okay, listen,” he said, as if with clairvoyance. “We’ve got to get you sorted. It’s going to take me a week, maybe ten days to get a solid out in place. That’s lousy, I know, but in this climate everything’s got to be quadruple-checked. I’m thinking—”

“Harley, stop.”

“Jake, I’m not going to keep having this argument.”

“Funny, isn’t it, how now that it’s come to this we both always knew it would come to this?”

“Please don’t.”

One develops an instinct for letting silence do the heavy lifting. In the three, four, five seconds that passed without either of us speaking, the many ways the conversation could go came and went like time-lapse film of flowers blooming and dying. When it was over all the relevant information was in. Paradoxically, it renewed our licence to pretend.

“Fuck you, Jake,” Harley said. “This is how it’s going to work. I’m getting you an out anyway. If you’re still bent on this absurd suicidal melodrama when the time comes then you needn’t avail yourself of it. But it’ll be there. It’ll be there.”

Pity and irritation curdled, gave me an inkling of the energy I’d need to fight him. Well, let be. He needed this for himself. I was secondary. This is what I’ve reduced him to: a human whose raison d’être is keeping a werewolf alive.

“Okay,” I said.

“I should bloody well think so.”

“Okay I said.”

“Well, for God’s sake. Why do you keep sniffing, by the way?”

“I ordered Oban. I think they’ve given me Laphroaig.”

“The crosses you bear, Jake. You ought to get an award.”

We discussed immediate logistics. Naturally the Zetter was being watched. WOCOP had tried to get an agent in but an international pharmaceutical sales conference had started today and the hotel was full, would be for the next forty-eight hours. The manager knew me and could be trusted to run light interference but staff would be susceptible to bribes. We had to assume my movements were marked.

“Which suits us,” Harley said.

“Because?”

“Because you’re getting out of the city tomorrow and surveillance is going with you. I can’t set up an out with the whole organisation watching London. I’m good, but I’m not God. I need their attention elsewhere.”

This is how it is: You come alert, wait, feel a piece fall into place, know the joy of aesthetic inevitability. I said: “Fine.”

“What, no tantrum?”

“There’s something I need to do. I’ll want peace and quiet. Do you care where I go?”

“What do you need to do?”

I don’t tell that part of the story. She’d looked into my eyes and said, It’s you. It’s you.

“Set the record straight,” I said. “Does Cornwall give you enough room to manoeuvre?”

“Cornwall’s what I was thinking.”

“We should change phones again.”

“No time. Have to trust to luck.”

“I don’t even know if the trains are running.”

“Every hour from Paddington or Waterloo. There’s a four-by-four booked for you at the Alamo office in St. Ives. Use the Tom Carlyle ID. There’s something else you should know.”

“What?”

“Someone hit one of Mubarak’s places in Cairo three months back. Guards neutralised with rapid-acting tranx. No forced entry, an inside job.”

Housani Mubarak, Eyptian dealer in stolen antiquities. At one time or another half the Middle Eastern market’s passed through his hands.

“Point is,” Harley continued, “they left everything in place. Took one small box of worthless crap formerly of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Mubarak’s in a state. Can’t get past the fact there was nothing valuable in the box.”

“So what was in the box?”

“Quinn’s book.”

For a moment I didn’t speak. Suffered a second dreary surge of pity and irritation. Painful to see how far Harley was willing to reach. “Harls,” I said, gently. “Please don’t be ludicrous.”

Quinn’s book, if it ever existed, was the journal of Alexander Quinn, a nineteenth-century archaeologist who had, in Mesopotamia in 1863, allegedly stumbled on the story of the authentic origin of werewolves and written it down in his diary. “Allegedly” being the key word. Neither Quinn nor his book made it out of the desert. A hundred years ago tracking this document down had been an idiotic obsession of mine. Now we might as well have been talking about Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy.

“I’m just telling you,” Harley said. “It’s a possibility. You’ve never been the only one looking for it.”

“I’m not looking for it. I haven’t been looking for it for years. I don’t care about any of that stuff anymore.”

“Right. You don’t want to know how it all started. You don’t want to know what it all means.”

“I already know what it all means.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Silence again. The bulging insistence of the real and Harley’s palpable effort to ignore it. This was how it would be between now and the end, him covering his eyes and stopping his ears and holding in the words until it was absolutely beyond denial that we were at the end. And then what? What could he say to me except Good-bye? Or I to him except Sorry? Sadness went through me like a muscle relaxant. So many moments bring me to the conclusion I don’t want any more moments.

“Call me when you get to Cornwall,” he said, then hung up.

9

A MILE FROM the village of Zennor, south of the promontory known as Gunard’s Head, the Cornish coast concertinas in a series of narrow coves and jagged inlets. The beaches—it’s a stretch to call them beaches—are shingle and stone and even a full day of sun leaves them literally and figuratively cold. The onyxy water would be mildly amused by you drowning in it. Local teenagers stymied into near autism or restless violence come here and drink and smoke and make fires and work with numb yearning through the calculus of fornication. The rocks go up steeply on either side.

“The Pines” is a tall house overlooking one of these coves, backed by a hill of coniferous woodland that gives it its name. It sits at the seaward end of a deep valley, accessed by a dirt track (no through route) down from the B road that links the coastal villages for ten miles in each direction. A former cattle farm, now equestrian centre, lies a mile inland, and the nearest domestic household is out of eye- and earshot on the other side of the woods where the track leaves the road.

This place ought, given what I’ve come here for, to have special significance, but it doesn’t. I wasn’t born here. I didn’t become a werewolf here. I’ve never killed anyone here, though a victim might scream his brains out unheard by all but spiders and mice. There have, over the years, been valuables (liquidated this last half century) but none stashed here, no Holbein in the attic, no Rodin under the stairs. I acquired the property because I had nothing in the southwest and because these devilish wriggling inlets are ideal for Harley’s outs by sea. For all that, I’ve used it maybe three or four times in twenty years.

Yet here I am. Mailer famously labelled writing the spooky art. He was right. There’s a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I’ve never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other place will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer’s, invokes occult necessities. The damp rooms are high-ceilinged and largely bare. Furniture, such as it is, is miscellaneous and secondhand: a cream seventies vinyl couch; a Formica dining table; a sagging bed into the mattress of which something’s burrowed with what looks like sexual fury. Everything’s been gnawed, nibbled, bored, colonised, webbed. Last night three foxes came up from the cellar and sat nearby on the floor, concussed by my authority. (Dog family. Anything canine succumbs. There are beautiful women in Manhattan who would have married me on the spot for the charm I had over their mutts. Wow, he normally hates guys. I’ve never seen him like this. Do you live around here?) The central heating works, though after my first night I drove into Zennor and bought wood for the fires. HQ is the lounge. I’m stocked up with Camels, Scotch, mini-market basics. No TV, no Internet, no radio, no books. Nothing to aid procrastination. Procrastination, it turns out, does well enough without aid: This is the third night I’ve managed not to write what I’ve come here to write. Hours have gone fire-gazing or staring out to sea or merely lying in a whiskied doze warmed by the foxes’ mute kinship.

Surveillance has followed as planned. I did some token fancy footwork en route to Paddington but made at least three WOCOP agents still with me on the Penzance train. If they didn’t have cars waiting they might have lost me in St. Ives, but by midnight the dark said they’d found me again. Not a comfy gig for them. You’re staking out the world’s last living werewolf but most of the time you’re thinking about your thermos, your chilblains, your frozen butt, the heaven of getting out of the snow and back into the van. I considered inviting them in. Rejected it: more procrastination. The dial went up a notch on Day Two; I think Ellis arrived. Grainer, my gut tells me, is keeping his distance, doesn’t want the tension spoiled. We’re like Connie and Mellors at the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, apart, chaste, happily purifying ourselves in honour of the coming consummation.

Very well. Night has drawn in. The foxes are out hunting. There’s fire in the hearth and Glenlivet in my glass.

But a cigarette, surely, to gather my thoughts.

As if they’re not already gathered. As if they haven’t been gathered, in a raw-eyed mob, for a hundred and sixty-seven years.

10

New, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full, waning gibbous, second quarter, waning crescent, new. In the summer of 1842 I didn’t know the names of the phases of the moon. I didn’t know that a complete cycle is a lunation, or that the full moon is full for one night only (though it might appear so for two or three) or that the phrase “once in a blue moon” derives from the occurrence of two full moons in a single month, a phenomenon you can expect once every 2.7 years. I did know, courtesy of a wasted classical education, that to the Greeks the moon was Selene (later Artemis and Hecate), sister of Helius, who fell in love with handsome young swain Endymion, had fifty daughters by him, couldn’t stand the thought of him dying so cast him instead into an eternal sleep. As an Oxfordshire gentleman my country lore came via my tenants, who assured me that if the horns of the moon pointed slightly upwards the month would be fine, and that if the outline of the moon could be seen there was rain ahead. A mopey scullery maid I had reciprocal oral sex with three or four times in my late teens believed that bowing to the new moon and turning over any coins you had in your pockets would double your money within the month. The only thing I knew about the moon that turned out useful was that its Latin name, luna, gives us the word lunatic. Useful because by the middle of August 1842 I’d become one.

“This is death,” Arabella said, with what sounded like detachment. “To be with you and see you and feel you but not to be known by you. I can’t bear it.” We were in the study at Herne House, me in a low chair, her standing at the unlit hearth. The room’s closed French windows looked onto a stone terrace and flower-bedded lawn, summer colours by turns dulling and vivifying in the day’s flaring and subsiding light. “And yet here I am bearing it,” she said. I was staring at the faded Bengal rug. My grandfather had made the family fortune selling Indian opium to the Chinese. “Is this what it comes to?” she asked. “Bearing what one can’t bear? The melodramatist taught a lesson, passion’s rhetoric cut down to size? I suppose the word ‘unbearable’ is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.”

Since my return from Snowdonia she’d gone through phases of her own. Initially, innocent concern. The doctor had been called twice for my fever and cramps but on both occasions the symptoms had subsided. There were other symptoms—headaches, visual disturbances, nightmares, moments of objectless entrancement—but I’d hidden them as best I could. Concealment left me furtive and sullen, led Arabella into her next phase of less innocent concern, a question or two about “any amusing fellow ramblers” Charles and I might have met on our trip, a new investigative determination in bed, something searching and irritated that morphed into fear when time after time I tore myself from her as if in disgust or contempt. Lastly, in the face of my erratic moods and inexplicable actions (I’d grab her, lock the door against servants, work her clothes loose, feel her opening to me in relieved collusion—then again recoil, curse, beg forgiveness, leave her, ride out or walk the grounds for hours) came the current phase: an almost complete conviction that the things about her I once loved were the things I now despised.

“Can I really have been so mistaken?” she asked. I could feel her looking at me but fixed my eyes on the rug. The throb of its gold and maroon kept time with my blood. “Can I really have imagined your soul so much larger than it is?” Other women would have blamed themselves. Not her. She remained in magnificent self-certainty. From deep in my fugue I blessed her rarity. “I don’t believe I can have been so wrong,” she continued. “Yet perhaps I was. I’m an American. We’re a people diseased with progress. Jacob? Look at me.”

Irony big enough for a festival: She thought I was suffering a moral reversion. She thought this, my behaviour since coming home, was a resurgence of propriety: a woman to bed but never to marry, according to the local consensus. In our first conversation over a shared breakfast table at the Metropole her eyes had advertised frank enlightened fallenness. In Eve’s place I’d have done the same and in Adam’s so would you. God put His money on shame and lost. Now it’s up to us to make the most of what we’ve won—all while she buttered a slice of bread and we talked of Geneva and her aunt prattled to Charles and the white tablecloth filled with sunlight and the silver winked. I knew from the first moment. So did Arabella. The knowledge was a perpetual latent mirth between us. She was a brunette, milk-white and supple, a little heavy in the hips. Her father had fought the British in the War of Independence. She’d been an actress, an artist’s model, once or twice a kept woman, through all a voracious reader. Eventually, penniless, she’d nearly died of pneumonia in Boston. Her only living relative, grandly dyspeptic Aunt Eliza, had swooped from Philadelphia and taken her on with the sole purpose of finding her a wealthy husband, preferably a European one, who would take her far away and off Eliza’s conscience forever. Arabella’s submission to this plan was part curiosity, part exhaustion. She’d had infatuations, never love. Fifteen years of never saying no to life had stripped her of fear—and convention. The first time we went to bed together we did with gentle greed all we could think of to do, which between us, once I got past my own astonishment, was much of what could be done. I hadn’t known desire could dissolve selves into and out of each other. I hadn’t known love’s indifference, love’s condescension to God. She was a year older than me, ten deeper. She loved in casual imperious exercise of a birthright. I loved in terror of losing her. The staff at Herne House couldn’t have been more amazed if I’d married a Bornean orang-utan.

“What do you wish?” I’d asked her one morning in the first week of our marriage. We were in bed, her lying with her wrists crossed above her head, me up on one elbow, caressing her nakedness. (The flesh had infinity in it. I must know every inch by touch yet every inch renewed its mystery the instant my hand moved on. Delightful endless futility.)

“To be as I am at this moment,” she said. Sunlight lay on her like a benign intelligence. “A happy creature. I want conversation and grass under my feet and cold water to drink and this”—she reached for my cock—“rising for me in hunger, and an occasional glimpse of my own death to keep me mindful of the beauty and preciousness of life. There. That is the complete desire of Arabella Jackson—Arabella Marlowe. Mrs. Arabella Marlowe, in fact. What do you think?”

The house’s spirits were in appalled awe of her. “I think I’ll be forever running to catch up with you,” I said.

So for a year we’d taken and taken and calmly taken without surfeit from this inheritance which restored itself daily.

Then, in mid-July, I’d gone with Charles to Snowdonia.

The question is: How long does incredulity last? How long do you go on with such things don’t exist after one such thing has risen up out of the darkness and sunk its teeth into you? The answer is: not very long. My mother had been a lip-licking consumer of Gothic novels, but more than the Vatheks and Frankensteins and Monks and Udolphos the library’s pull in my childhood was a fiendishly illustrated Bestiary of Myth and Folklore. It was in German (my father, a committed monoglot, must have acquired it for its fantastical plates), of which I couldn’t read a word. I didn’t need to. The images were sufficient. Home from Wales a day sooner than expected (Arabella was out walking) I’d rushed from the carriage straight to the mouldering stacks. It was a hot afternoon of shivering leaf shadows. There was dust in the tapestries undisturbed since the Glorious Revolution. Of course the book was still there. All these years of its quiet sentience. Now loud sentience. The King James Bible. Locke’s Essay. A complete Shakespeare. Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Turning the Bestiary’s pages I was aware of these tomes gone tense and tight-lipped, a respectable family who knew their shameful secret was about to be exposed. The room was warm and goldenly lit, laboriously aswirl with motes. My hands buzzed. One knows a fraction before seeing.

WEREWULF

In the full-page engraving up on its hind legs, maw open, tongue martially curled.

You’d think that would’ve clinched it. It didn’t. It inaugurated instead a short period of emphatic, of relieved scepticism. Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. I closed the book not as if it had told a shattering truth but as if it had exposed a preposterous lie.

A short period, I said.

Transformation’s nothing to me now (all over in less than two minutes) but it wasn’t always thus. The process has to learn you, search you out, find its optimal fit. Like murder, like sex, like everything, in fact, it gets easier the more times you do it, the more times it does you, but there’s no standard, no consistency. It gets the hang of some in three moons, others are still going through hell decades after First Bite. But however long transformation takes to bed down, debut transformation’s something no howler ever forgets.

In my dreams a small wolf slept inside me and it wasn’t comfortable. It moved its heels and elbows and paws, struggled to make space between my lungs, stomach, bladder. Occasionally a scrabbling claw punctured something and I woke. What were you dreaming? Arabella wanted to know. I knew what it was dreaming. It was dreaming of being born. The form and scale of its occupancy shifted. Sometimes its legs were in my legs, its head in my head, its paws in my hands. Other times it was barely the size of a kitten, heartburn hot and fidgety under my sternum. I’d wake and for a moment feel my face changed, reach up to touch the muzzle that wasn’t there.

Days passed and being awake guaranteed nothing. You hold a teacup or the rein of your horse and there’s your hand, your arm, looking just the same as always—but the mass is wrong, the reach, the grip. On the outside it’s you. On the inside … not. It’s not you, Arabella kept saying. It’s still me, but it’s not you. I kept moving out from under her touch, her look. Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process. I watched the mystery of myself thickening between us into a carapace. Once you’ve stopped loving someone breaking his or her heart’s just an unpleasant chore you have to get behind you. My God, you really don’t love me anymore, do you? No matter your decency the victim’s incredulity’s potentially hilarious. You manage not to laugh. But breaking the heart of someone you still love is a rare horror, not funny to anyone, except perhaps Satan, if such a being existed, and even his pleasure would be spoiled by not having had a hand in it, by the dumb, wasteful accident of the thing. The Devil wants meaning just like the rest of us. Once, in the small hours, when I’d thought she was asleep with her back to me, Arabella had said, Put your arms around me, and I had, cupped her breasts and buried my nose in the warm down of her nape—and felt another bit of her faith die because despite my skin against hers something kept us apart. Me. Can’t you come to me? she said, holding tighter. I’m still here. I’m waiting for you.

The simplest tasks required immense concentration: descending a staircase, opening a door, pulling on a riding boot. I had memories not my own. Waist-deep mist dividing around me. Trees rushing past. Moonlight on a mountain tarn. A young girl on a forest floor with her thigh torn open, naked white doll body on a bed of dark green ferns, eyes wide, dead. Jacob, where are you? Arabella wanted to know. Are you seeing something? I certainly was. Harebells crushed under his wrinkled quivering heel. The three moonlit horsemen like a living Uccello. Mucus in his snout had rattled. I fell asleep in my chair with my arm hanging down and woke feeling the stream’s soft cold flow and my shirt warm-heavy with blood. I had to keep getting up and leaving the room, the house, her.

So the two weeks since my return from Wales had passed and every day I’d suffered the torture of torturing the woman I loved, the woman who loved me. At moments of supreme self-pity I’d hated her for it. Last night, woken mouth open, tongue out, body at tearing point over the simmering shape of the wolf, I’d left her asleep and gone out onto the lawn. The moon knew. The moon knew I didn’t know what. The moon was an inscrutable pregnancy, a withheld alleviation, a love more cunning than a mother’s. The moon had a secret to share. But not yet. Not quite yet. I’d wandered the fields, crawled in dew-damp before dawn. For Arabella, waking to find me gone had torn off a further layer of denial.

“This will almost, but not quite, kill me,” she said now, still with the ominous neutrality, as the small-faced parlour maid crossed the doorway carrying a vase of white roses. “That love’s no match for the whispers of English neighbours. Marlowe’s American whore. Do you remember laughing about that? Do you remember calling it quaint?” I did remember. I remembered how that “quaint” had liberated me into superior benevolence, how with that one word the harness constricting the world—Blake’s mind-forged manacles (the erotic revolution had resuscitated dead pictures and poems)—had dropped away. Now she believed I wanted something else. How could she not? I did want something else. More blue-veined, more soft, more sweetly white / Than Venus when she rose / From out her cradle shell. Together we’d celebrated the bliss of the Fallen flesh. Now I knew there was a Fall further, into the bliss of devouring it. (And a fall further than that. Or so the moon told. Or so the moon withheld. Not yet. Not quite yet.)

“Where are you going?” Arabella said. I’d risen from the chair and crossed to the French windows. “Jacob? Will you not look at me? For God’s sake.”

My legs gave. I went down slowly onto my knees, one moist hand slipping from the door handle. She rushed to me—or the creature did; the ether tore a moment and I couldn’t tell which. Then her arms and orange blossom perfume were around me, my face close to her white breasts take her life take her life take her life please God make it stop let me die take her—“Don’t,” she said, as I pushed myself upright. “Don’t try to get up.” But I was on my feet again as if a spirit had hoiked me by the armpits.

“I must go,” I said. I knew how insane that sounded to her. “I’ll go and see Charles.” Her detachment, I now saw, had been an experiment, a toe dipped in the emotional waters she might have to enter. In fact she was still waiting for me to return to her. And still I hadn’t. She stared at me, forced into her eyes suspicion, anger, concern, potential forgiveness; to admit outright incomprehension would be a death. A few drops of sweat showed above her top lip. I thought of the look she gave me when I came inside her: sly welcome that segued into infinite calm relished confirmation. For a man a woman has no greater gift to give. And here I was destroying it. “It’s not you,” I managed to get out. I’d opened the door. The smell and weight of the lawn was a gravity I could flow into. “It’s not you. I love you.”

“Then why—”

“Please, Arabella, as you love me believe me there’s nothing … I must be …” I stepped out onto the terrace—and vomited suddenly in one hot gush and splatter. The sound was a gash on the still afternoon.

“Jacob, for pity’s sake come in. You’re sick.” Some relief, naturally, at the recurrence of a physical symptom: Better my guts than my soul, than me.

“I’m all right,” I said, straightening, searching for my handkerchief. “That helped. Disgusting. Forgive me. Please, just let me be awhile. Let me walk over to Charles’s. I’ll stay there tonight and tomorrow everything will be different, I promise. Just give me this one night to clear my head.” I could hear the precise degree by which my voice didn’t sound right. My body laboured under invisible soft weights. With a superhuman effort I hauled the version of myself she needed to the surface, turned to her, saw hope ignite in her eyes, took her hands in mine. “Don’t think what you’ve been thinking,” I said. “You wrong both of us in thinking it. Something is troubling me, something … On my life, Arabella, I can’t stay here tonight. You must let me go. Tomorrow everything—I swear everything will be different. Please. Let me go.”

For days I’d been unable to meet her eye. Now I did and saw she was still warm and open to me. Her look was of steady entreaty, to return to collusion, to renew the silent vows, to recognise her. Summer had brought out a sprinkle of freckles under her dark lower lashes. In Lausanne we’d lain stunned on the bed after first lovemaking. She’d said, Goodness me, that was nice. “Whatever it is, Jake,” she said, “you know I’m equal to it. I’m not asking you this, I’m telling you something you already know.”

For a moment I felt completely normal. It was her. It was me. We shared an outrageous exemption. The distance between us burned away. These last days had been an absurd inversion.

“I know,” I said—but the blood rushed hardening up from the soles of my feet and I saw the girl’s thigh like a disgorged treasure of rubies and felt already though it was barely three in the afternoon the moon’s slow-ascending joy. I turned and walked away across the lawn.

11

THEY’VE KILLED THE foxes.

I heard something outside and went to look. The severed heads had been left on the back porch facing the door, two with eyes closed, one—the youngest, ears too big for his head, like a bat—with eyes open. A single set of footprints in the snow from the tree line twenty feet away. We can come all the way up to the house without you hearing. I stood in the doorway and looked out into the woods. Nothing visible, but the darkness full of consciousness. I assumed Ellis. To stave off boredom and impress the juniors. To refer to Wolfgang. To advertise the product. I’m supposed to be the leering villain, he’d said back at the Zetter. If this was his work it would’ve been done with affectless efficiency. The man’s centre of self is remote. I imagine Grainer watching his protégé in action and conceding with a sad fracture inside that the torch has passed to a strange new bearer.

I’ll bury the heads in the morning. It’s too cold now, and it won’t make any difference to the foxes.•

It was six miles cross-country to Charles’s, and I stopped—doubled-up, glazed, queasy, for periods bereft of any kind of will—many times en route. When I lay down on it the land was a continuation of my skin, full of frantic whispering life. The WEREWULF engraving shivered from the grass, from the boles of trees, from the air’s buzzing atoms. In a wood on the edge of Charles’s estate I got down on all fours and cooled my hot face in a shallow stream of water-polished pebbles. The wolf’s shoulders flirted with mine, his haunches, the scroll of his tongue. For all this there were interludes of sanity. Enough religion remained so that I went into and out of the belief that this was a punishment, superficially for carnal excess but really for living in a love that rendered God negligible, optional, obsolete. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Yahweh’s First Commandment and one he wasn’t shy of fleshing out—Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: For I the LORD thy God am a jealous God … He had every right to be jealous of Arabella. It wasn’t the fucking, the licking, the sucking, but that with her these acts livened the soul instead of deadening it, elevated being instead of degrading it. Lest ye become as gods yourselves. The serpent’s reading of the Edenic proscription was correct. We were our own divine images, not graven but flesh and blood, and God shrank in the light of our divinity. Christ was born of a virgin and died one himself. What did he know? The truths of the body were ours, not his. Human love didn’t eradicate God, but it put Him into His proper distant second place.

And for this, for thy wretched arrogance, I have turned thee into a monster. At times I half-convinced myself I could hear—in the trees’ susurrations, in the chuckle of water, in the soft clamour of thin air—the Almighty’s condemnation. But the feeling was always displaced by a worse feeling: that where should have been God’s booming petulance was in fact a slab of silence the size of the universe. This intimation, of the night sky like an abandoned warehouse of stars, of the earth heaving up flora and fauna in epic meaninglessness, was a horror so unexpectedly huge I turned back to the conviction of God’s wrath with a kind of relief. Did He who made the lamb make thee?

It was dark when I reached Archer Grange, the two-hundred-year-old pile Charles shared with his mother, older sister, deaf uncle, three bull mastiffs and a staff of twenty-four. Mother and sister were summering in Bath. (A mercy: Lady Brooke disapproved of my mercantile origins and Miss Brooke disapproved of my wife.) I had a struggle with Charles. My story was that Arabella and I had had our first fight, that I’d said absurd hot things and stormed out, that what I needed was a bottle from the Brooke cellar and a bed for the night, that the walk over here had given me time enough to realise I’d been a fool, that tomorrow would see me return in conciliatory penitence. All well and good, but my friend wasn’t blind. I was wet with sweat and shaking. For God’s sake, I looked as if I’d been brawling with a bear. We must have Dr. Giles. A servant would be despatched … I argued him out of it, but the effort nearly killed me. Only the artfully sheepish admission that I’d slipped and fallen in the stream and bruised my knee and the concession that I’d take warm brandy and one of the housekeeper’s legendary herbal compresses to an early bed kept the doctor out of it. Even then Charles insisted on ministering to me himself. Soon to be married, he wanted details of the fictional domestic spat, and while he bound on Mrs. Collingwood’s malodorous poultice I in disbelief bordering hilarity concocted nonsense about my wife’s madcap tastes in interior décor and my irrational reluctance to alter any of Herne House’s furnishings. It was quite a performance. I was in the largest guest bedroom, overlooking the Grange’s ornate front gardens and fountained lawn. The moon would come up over the line of poplars at its edge. Less than an hour. Twice the urge to rip Charles’s face off with my hands nearly got the better of me. Only the brandy—of which I’d drunk half a bottle by the time he left me to my rest—saved him.

It seemed a long time I lay there waiting for the thing I didn’t believe would happen and believed would happen and knew couldn’t happen and knew must happen. The scent of honeysuckle trellised just below the open window mingled with the room’s odours of old wood and lavendered linen. For some reason I decided to fight the impulse to get up and pace around. The poultice felt like an enormous tick. I ripped it off and threw it in the chamber pot. I grabbed the bedside candlestick to see if the wax would melt in my hand. It didn’t. I dropped it on the floor. I left my body for a few moments, long enough to look down at it shivering on the bed. Pale, sweating, knees pulled up. Charles had lent me a nightshirt. Pulling it off seared and abraded me. Crazed American ideas of style, I’d said. It made me laugh out loud. She wouldn’t have cared if we’d lived in a shed. Her dark eyes were flecked with reddish gold. When I fall asleep with you, she said, it’s like I’m sleeping in you. I drifted back down into my body. He wasn’t a man and he wasn’t a wolf. Harebells crushed under an appendage neither foot nor paw, a leathery hybrid. One jewel eye a steady gleam of the lives he’d taken. His eye said, The deepest nourishment, something like love. Something like love. You’ll see. You’ll see.

The moon rose.

Blood dragged itself upwards, the whole bodysworth packed tight under the top of my skull, an impossible accommodation, a gathering breath before brutal redistribution. I saw my mouth open and my fingers working during those moments of tantalising semifreedom from my carcase. I tore out, strained, was yanked back in. This was a new frank dark sacrament, something no-nonsense, sure of itself. There were flecks of resistance—I imagined dashing my head on the stone mullion—but the other thing swept them aside. The other thing. Indeed. A brother, a tall twin from before birth with an agenda of brisk recalibration. He arrived with nonnegotiable needs—or needs negotiable only in their potential expansion: Enough now was no guarantee of enough later. My shoulders shifted, not without difficulty learned the strange game of osteomorphosis, bore the hurried tectonics, the sensation of turning to ice and the shocking thaw that left a new grammar of movement. Shoulders, wrists, ankles—first to Change, last to Change back. I rolled onto my side. Fairytaleishly too big for the bed, since everything was growing. The not toenails nor quite claws had scarred the inlaid rosewood. I dropped onto the floor dizzied by the inrushing night’s symphony of smells, from the garden’s shut roses to the fields’ wealth of dung. An acre of wheat in the south crackled and splashed. Invisible giant hands gripped my neck and twisted in opposite directions, the schoolyard bully’s Chinese burn writ large, a necessity it turned out for the head’s jerky magic into its more blatantly predatory lineaments. My lupine twin was impatient. A being was no good without a body. The slow hindquarters tested his tolerance of delay and mine of pain. My new skull shuddered and my bowels disencumbered themselves of a piping hot turd. It was still him and me but we eyed each other knowing everything depended on bridging the gap. Cooperation would come, the two strands would plait so that we would become I, but it was his birthright to take the inaugural moment by force. Do as I say. You will do as I—many of his early utterances were cut off by the inarticulate urgency of animal need. It came down like a guillotine. I knew what the need was. There was no not knowing. There was nowhere to hide the thought that I wouldn’t … that I would never—

Many of my utterances were cut off, too.

For a moment I squatted on new long hairy haunches in the open window. Matter, raped and rearranged, murmured its trauma in the quivering cells. Consciousness, it transpired, was tender, could be hurt by something rough shoving itself in next to it. He forced himself inside me. I thought of history’s violated maids—and got his sharp correction like a slap: No anachronisms, idiot. The old world’s dead.

A pause, as if a muted bell had clanged. The night’s soft tumult stopped. Complete silence and stillness. This was sufferance on his part, a moment allowed to mark the passing of the life I’d known. (For him this was the heartbreak chore to be got out of the way quickly.) I looked out at the moonlit topiary, the pale flowers, the lawn holding its breath. I waited. Nothing. Here again was the colossal silence where God’s, someone’s, anyone’s voice should have been. Learn this lesson now, my brother said, I shan’t teach it twice. There is nothing. It means nothing. Then the night exhaled and flowed again. I knew with clairvoyant weariness I’d go back countless times to the question of why, how, but knew too I carried the answer inside. It had gone in like an inhaled spec of toxic dust. Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know. A few seconds wasn’t much to swallow a universe of pointlessness, but it was all the time I had.

A breeze stirred the honeysuckle, the hairs on my ears and delirious wet snout. My scrotum twitched and my breath passed hot over my tongue. My anus was tenderly alert. I pictured my human self jumping the twenty feet, felt the shock of smashed ankles and slivered shins—then the new power like an inkling of depravity. I leaped from the window and bounded into the moonlight.

12

FIELDS ROLLED UNDER me. Summer dry grass and the fruit-sour of cowshit. Daisies and buttercups frail lights in the land’s umber. Cattle and sheep fled, shrank, huddled at the hedgerows. Not these. All right, but the air was plump and beating with bodywarm life and its stink of fear and the moon was a woman whose smile and wide-openness seared with generous demand. My long jaws and hybrid hands ached with what they could do. Orion swung up over the woods and the question how far back do we …? Greeks? Egyptians? The myth of Lycaon. And hadn’t I read somewhere that the American tribes—but the trees closed over me and soon too soon the pork-sweet and ironish odour of human flesh and blood stunned me into a swooning halt.

My brother was a capricious gravity. At moments his pull had been light. Now I fell to him as if a trapdoor had opened under my feet.

Bragg was Charles’s gamekeeper.

This was his cottage.

Bragg was out hunting poachers.

This was Bragg’s wife.

This was no. This was yes. This was him. This was me.

Nature doesn’t judge. An earthworm curled and uncurled under my foot. The air gave its odours—sage, sawdust, wet wood, compost, lavender, charcoal—as I crept towards her. Fifteen paces. Ten. Five. Close enough to see through the window. She was standing in profile at a tin sink scouring a skillet with soot. The scrubbed table showed the remnants of supper: a torn white loaf, steamed onions, a muslined cheese, yellow butter, a pewter tankard flecked with suds. A bright fire burned in the limewashed hearth, livened the room’s half dozen bits of copper and brass. A dark-haired child of two or three years sat on the floor playing with a box of empty cotton reels.

The woman was barely out of girlhood, pallid, mouse-faced, with greasy hair pinned up under a mobcap. Thin hands raw from too much cold water. I wanted her name. Sally? Sara? I’d spoken to her once, when—

It was as if he’d been holding in check the force of what we were to maximise its impact when he let it go. Not that he fully let it go. Instead he kept just enough back so I could feel my own helplessness in the torrent of our will. Do you see? Yes, I did. A rush of appetite skewered my salivary glands and like a single stroke of expert lewdness raised my lupine cock into hitherto unknown hardness—but within seconds I was soft again. No, not that. Only if she were to become. You think—but it’s not. It doesn’t—

I could feel my brother’s irritation, as if I fit him like a too-tight collar. My ignorance was a maddening labour to be got through with gritted teeth. If you tried that it wouldn’t work—This is not what we—

My cock stiffened again as she blew her fringe off her moist face—but a second time softened. A moment of complete inner silence, then sudden loud Hunger, the other Hunger, booming like a kettledrum. Understanding went in: Lust was a mistaken reflex, an adjustment phase, soon burned through. The new desire made the old seem a whim. Only if she were to become. Only if she. To fuck to kill to eat. Fuck kill eat. There was a Trinity mystery, but only if … but only if—

He upped the drum’s rhythm. Thinking slid and fell like snow thawing from a roof. Her thin arms were bare from the elbows down. Collar open. Neck tendons rose when she scrubbed. White negligible girlish legs floating either side of rutting Bragg like the antennae of a confused insect. Forlorn pale toes. A shallow whorl of a navel. A quiet girl. Humans wear their histories like microclimates. She’d never shone among her eight siblings, had been vaguely loved only when noticed, had remained unformed until Bragg then seen her chance for a single leap into identity. And still her centre didn’t hold. Even giving birth hadn’t established her; it had gone through her like a fire through a field, a random agony that had left her hurt and curled around herself. She spent hours unanchored, drifted through by what felt like other people’s daydreams, though she washed and cleaned and looked after the child and opened her legs for the man.

You don’t just get the body. You get the life. Take a life. Into yourself. The deepest nourishment. Something like love. You’ll see. The space between you swells with untenable potential. Her little breasts the size of apples and her thin-skinned throat with its pounding jugular were already in my hands, between my teeth, taut and turgid, ripe for rupture. I stood outside. I saw how it would be. Nothing but my brother’s grip on the rein kept me back.

Not her.

He let the thought stand alone, unembellished.

Not her.

13

HE RAN. I ran. We ran. All persons, the plural and two singulars justified. They grappled, sheared off, bled into each other, enjoyed moments of unity. Out of the woods moonlight painted me nose to rump, a palpable lick of infinitely permissive love that asked of me only that I be completely myself. What more generous request can a lover make? It’s what I’d asked of Arabella. It’s what she’d asked of me. Until now.

He ran. I ran. We ran. At moments the triumvirate dissolved and was neither him nor I nor us but an unthinking aspect of the night, inseparable from the wind in the grass or the odours in the air, a state—like getting lost in music—recognisable only by coming out of it.

Herne House.

Home.

A hundred yards away I smelled the stabled horses sweating, heard them shifting their feet in the stalls, a lovely sound, the clop-rasp of iron on stone. I leaped the gravelled drive and walked up the rollered front lawn. From butler to tea boy the house held seventeen human hearts. Moonlight silvered the casements. The master bedroom was on the second floor. These warm nights we slept with the window open. And there it was, open. The eighteenth heart.

There’s a view that the only thing to do with atrocity is chronicle it. Facts, not feelings. Give us the dates and numbers but stay out of Hitler’s head. That’s all well and good when the chronicler is outside the atrocity. It won’t wash when the chronicler is the atrocity.

She was asleep, lying on her front, face turned towards me, one bare arm and shoulder in moonlight so bright I couldn’t believe it hadn’t woken her. The scene’s painterly sumptuousness registered, peripherally: her long dark curls against the ivory pillow, the shut lilac buds of her eyes, that white Aphrodite arm on the damask counterpane. Peripherally, because what I could see mattered so much less than what I could smell: her vinous breath and orange blossom perfume, a fraught day’s sweet-salt sweat (she’d bathed cursorily) and barely touched food (poached salmon; a summer fruit compote; coffee), her fearless female blood, a thrilling whiff of shit and the sleepwarm tang of her clever silken cunt. And what I could smell mattered so much less than what I knew: that for a moment I’d be closer to her than ever before, that every secret would be revealed, every treasure yielded, every shame exposed, every shred of self surrendered. I knew—it was passed from him to me, the old dull divine truth—that no ecstatic union compares with killing the thing you love.

My wife didn’t wake until I was fully inside the room. I was both raw with awareness and buried in the Hunger like a lone seed deep in the ground. You’re the thing you don’t want to be and it’s a joy. She ought to have screamed. According to fiction she ought to have screamed. But people never do what fiction says they do. Instead of a scream she opened her mouth and made a small noise of giant shock and revulsion, almost a hiccup. As if she had all the time in the world she lifted herself on one elbow. Her face had always had this distended version of itself—terror—but I was only seeing it now. I put a claw in the bedclothes and dragged them off. My cock rose again at the sight of her naked. My own drool fell on it. The spectacle forced a weird hiatus. Then she turned to fling herself off the bed and I grabbed her ankle and pulled her towards me. At the touch of her my member shrank. Fuck kill eat. Fuck kill eat. Fuckkilleat. But not with—

She lashed out with her free foot, missed, because I had so much time to move. I was so fast it was like having the gift of foresight. Then she did open her mouth to scream—and recognised me. It was what I’d been waiting for. You don’t know what you’ve been waiting for until it arrives. We froze. She looked into my eyes. She said, “It’s you.”

Then, because I knew she knew me, and because I could kill everything in her before killing her, and because that was the trick that led to the peace that passeth understanding, and because the only way was to begin with the worst thing, I let it come down.

The flesh of her thigh opened with a spray of warm blood. She looked sprinkled with garnets. She repeated, “It’s you,” and I grabbed her by the neck and drew her to me. The Hunger fits like a womb. You deliver yourself from it. You must be born. Savour this, he warned. Savour it because too soon you won’t taste the details. I wished I could speak to her. Wished with all my heart I could say, “Yes, it’s me.” That I couldn’t left the tiniest fraction missing from her horror, and though it was tiny we felt it, my brother and I, like a splinter. I cut off the air in her throat and looked into her eyes. Goodness me, that was nice. Savour this—but I didn’t have his restraint. The smell of blood was a finality. My knees loosened. When I couldn’t stand it anymore I pushed her down onto the bed and sank my teeth—that first, fine, careless rapture—into her throat.

There is the frenzy (our unatrocious chronicler would list the postmortem facts: severed trachea, carotid and femoral arteries; massive tissue loss from the torso, thighs, buttocks; bowels ruptured; kidneys, liver and heart gone; lacerations of the breasts, vagina and perineum) but the frenzy holds a centre like the eye of a storm, and here something else is happening, an entranced consumption. Here you’re taking a life. You can’t swallow it whole. You get strands, bites, glugs, chunks. The life of Arabella Marlowe, née Jackson. She was at approximate peace with herself. Delivered into it through the troubled labour of shedding constraints. Still the odd flash of self-loathing—slut, whore—like distant lightning, but powerless, really, against her bigger, her wiser, her more wholly human self. Memories: her mother’s smell of flour and lavender. A red ploughed field under a blue sky. A painted carnival horse. A dead possum in the yard. Her limbs lengthened. The arrival of her breasts filled her with maidenly pride. The shocking little pearl of pleasure down there. Dost thou love me? I know, thou wilt say—Ay; And I will take thy word. Her father had a complete Shakespeare. She learned lines and entered characters. There was some incompletely hammered-out contract between art and God. Male attention went to her. Once or twice something shy and fierce in a man that hinted at what love would be, an index of the body’s maddening insufficiencies. She took her clothes off for painters, sculptors, lovers, learned poker, the rough friendship of rye whisky. Knowing the dangers she pushed forward into experience, suffered, caught on fire, rolled in the dirt to put herself out. She pushed harder and got sick. Pneumonia. Aunt Eliza she hadn’t seen for fifteen years. She emerged from the interrogation by death knowing she’d never be quite as awake as she’d once dreamed. Then Europe, Switzerland, white mountains, me. Love at first sight.

I swallowed it, stole it, the wealth you never count till it’s taken. It went into me, an obscene enrichment, a feast of filthy profit. She fought me, such as she could. She wanted life. Unequivocally she wanted life. She couldn’t scream. I’d gone through her vocal cords in the first bite. Five seconds. Ten. Twenty. Instinct tells you when they’re going. (As a kindred instinct tells you when they’re coming.) I looked at her, gave her my werewolf face dark with her blood, my fangs dressed in her shredded treasures. She was past pain now. Her eyes said she’d gone on from it, was standing at the rail looking back at the dock. Embarkation. I could never have not loved her without becoming someone else. But I had become someone else. She blinked, once, languidly. Her lips moved. One wet gobbet of her own raw meat winked red on her cheek. Dark brown eyes flecked with gold. These eyes said: I’m going. She was past the old language: murder, morality, justice, guilt, punishment, revenge, the words were valueless currency on her voyage. Her eyes said: So, this is it. In the moment before they closed she made the last shift: At the true end of life one doesn’t care how one’s come to death. I wasn’t Jacob, or her husband, or her killer, or a monster; I was just the thing that had unlocked the door. Now she saw through me and the matter of this world into final solving darkness or annihilating light. I was no longer important. Her eyes widened once, then closed.

At some point our struggle must have clipped the bedside table because the lamp had fallen, smashed, spilled, spread a little pool of flame. One bed drape had caught. The fire moved in leisurely consummation up it, across to its neighbour. I only noticed the heat because hers had gone. Once the body’s light’s out the Hunger admits a strand of disgust, a postcoital realism before the act is complete. You eat fast, in a worsening temper, with contempt for God’s creative vulgarity in yoking consciousness to meat. You eat fast because revulsion’s chasing you. When it catches you—seeks you out like the long arm of the law—you’ll have to stop, you won’t be able to go on.

The fire bloomed. In one gesture of flame the whole rug was ablaze. I caught sight of myself for the first time in the cheval glass, hunched over the gored body. It was a hideous composition, a pornographic companion piece to Fuseli’s The Nightmare—or a satire on its excesses. Her left arm hung white, slender, supple, miraculously untouched, the hand half open, fingers arrested as if in mid-evocation of something delicate and elusive. Goodness me, that was nice.

Satiety ambushed me. Too much too soon. A delayed expansion to accommodate the haul. Fed on her flesh my own silted. The stolen life went over my consciousness like hurrying cloud shadows. I found I’d lifted one leg off the floor for balance. It took effort to put it back down. Imbibed blood goes molasses-thick. You lug it for a while, awkwardly. Get out, now, before the fire stops you. Heat beat on my back. Already one curtain was aflame.

I let what remained of her fall from my arms back onto the now burning bed. Let it go. Let it all go. At the window I paused just long enough to feel my right side singed and my left salved in the moonlight, then jumped down, fell, got up and ran.

14

THE FIRE CLAIMED half the house and killed nine of the seventeen staff. Also, as subliminally intended, overwrote the true story of how Arabella died.

Poor Charles suffered, not just the loss of my wife (whom he was at least inordinately fond of and at most guiltily in love with) but of my friendship. In the days immediately following the blaze I was as he saw it understandably remote. But remoteness became estrangement, then absence. I put my estate manager in charge of reconstruction and left for Scotland within a fortnight. I had no plan, merely a reflex to get as far away from people as possible.

I took with me a single souvenir.

The little ground-floor room overlooking the western end of the garden had been Arabella’s study. There wasn’t much in it: a bookcase; a walnut bureau; one of the tattiest of the Indian carpets and an enormous armchair in which my late wife was wont to curl up with her journal and scribble away for entire afternoons. The journal was kept in the bureau in a queer little iron lockbox with a handful of talismanic trinkets from her risky life, and though the desk had gone in the conflagration the casket—and diary—had survived. It’s in the safe-deposit box in Manhattan now, along with my own chronicles, but in the weeks and months that followed the fire I came to know much of it by heart. Only a few lines are necessary here.His behaviour grows daily more disturbed. Others would condemn me for keeping my secret, but he is so erratic I fear the effect of a mistimed disclosure. So many moments this last week I’ve been on the verge of telling him. The words are gold under my heart, honey under my tongue: Jacob, I’m carrying your child.

15

LAST NIGHT, NOT long after I’d laid down my pen (quad scripsi, scripsi) it started raining. It rained all night and it’s still raining now, late in the afternoon. The very last of the daylight shows a low sky of soft dark cloud passed under occasionally by lighter white shreds (“pannus” to meteorologists, “messengers” to fishermen; two hundred years, idle moments, books). The sea looks like marbled meat. Against it the gulls’ white has detergent ad purity. The rain’s destroying the snow, obviously. There’s still plenty out here in the valley, in the woods, but in Zennor pavements are reemerging. By the time I get back to London tomorrow the magic will be almost gone. The city will be brisk and miserable, derisory of its lapse, its little dream of things being different.

“Have you done what you needed to do?” Harley asked on the phone an hour ago.

“There was a gap in the record,” I said. “I filled it. Shall I send it to the PO box or the club?”

He understood: This journal would be the last. No more record because no more me. A bad way to start the conversation. I pictured him closing his eyes and jamming his jaws together before letting himself start again.

“Everything’s set up,” he said. “But I can’t get you out of the country till the seventeenth. Cutting it close, I know, but there’s no choice. You’ve got three car-changes between the city and Heathrow. You’re booked on the afternoon Virgin flight to New York with the Tom Carlyle ID. That’s the interference. You’ll actually be flying private charter to Exeter as Matt Arnold. These are brand-new ID packages. Passports, driving licences, NI numbers, the whole fucking caboodle. From Exeter—”

“I’m going to Wales, Harley.”

“What?”

“You heard. Snowdonia.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Go out where I came in. Full circle.”

He paused again. Laboriously lit a cigarette. “From Exeter,” he went on, quietly, “you’ve got options. You can fly to Palma and on to Barcelona or Madrid, or, if you’re not absolutely convinced you’ve shaken them, I’ve set up another two car changes between there and Plymouth. Reggie’ll wait for you until midnight of the seventeenth. He’ll get you over the Channel, then you’re on your own.”

“You’ve done the work, Harls,” I said. “You’re a rock star.”

“Yeah, well, don’t give me this Wales bollocks then.”

I let it go. He knew. I knew he knew. He knew I knew he knew. Standing at the Pines lounge bay window looking down through the rain to the cove I felt the familiar fondness for him being gnawed at by impatience. The longer I hung on the worse it would get. You can’t live solely for someone else without sooner or later hating them. I started to ask about a drop for the new fake IDs, but he stopped me.

“I’ll give you the documents myself,” he said. “I don’t want any fuck-ups.”

“That’s a stupid risk for you.”

“I won’t rest until I’ve put them into your hands personally. Do this my way, Marlowe, please.”

Which was his concession. If you’re going to die then I want to see you one more time. One last handshake before the end.

“Anything more on Cloquet?” I asked him. It was the first time I’d thought of the young man with the Magnum since leaving London, but now that I had I felt uneasy again.

“We let him go,” Harley said. “He’s got nothing. We bugged and watched him for a day or two after his release. He bowled around a bit, nursing his hand, which by the way we treated for him, then eventually he made a penitent call to Jacqueline Delon herself. She was furious with him for going after you. He was told to stay put in his hotel until one of her lot came and escorted him back to Paris. Twenty-four hours later two guys—Delon’s—showed up and did just that. Case closed.”

“You know why they invented the phrase ‘case closed’?”

“What?”

“So that the audience would know it wasn’t.”

“Have it your way, Jacob. You’re chasing shadows. You should be worrying about Ellis.”

“Not Grainer?”

“Grainer’s patient. He’ll wait for the full moon. But Ellis down there watching you with fuck-all else to do … There are a couple of trigger-happy juveniles with him, too.”

“They beheaded my foxes.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying.”

The cloak-and-dagger arrangements, superfluous though we both know they are, are in place. Graham Greene had a semiparodic relationship with the genres his novels exploited, a wry tolerance of their exigencies and tropes. Unavoidably I have the same relationship to my life. False IDs, code words, assignations, surveillance, night flights. Espionage flimflam. And that’s before we even begin on the Horror Story trappings. If it were a novel I’d reject it along with all other genre output that by definition short-changes reality. Unfortunately for me it is reality.

There is the elephant in the room: I killed and ate my wife and unborn child. I killed and ate love. Which left two alternatives: expand or die. Kill yourself or live with it. Give it up or suck it up, in the modern idiom. Well, here I am.

It was a mistake. I don’t mean morally, I mean strategically. I should have turned her. That was my chance. That was my chance. She would have made a better werewolf than I. She was bigger, braver, more blasphemous. Her potential would have been released. She would have led me. My brother in his haste missed the cure for loneliness. It was in his arms and he couldn’t see it. I’ve been happily married to my wife for eleven years. We have two lovely children. I have a good job and a beautiful home. She’s my soul mate in every respect—except one. In bed, I like to … Cathedral-sized marriages crumble because she won’t pee on him or he won’t tie her up. Nothing holds love together like shared vice or collusive perversion. In the years since I murdered and devoured her I’ve had plenty of time to think of what might have been with Arabella, under, as it were, the moon of love. I picture her in pale stockings in a sunlit Edwardian window seat, a cigarette in a long holder, reading aloud: “ ‘… The history of human civilisation shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct …’ Hang on, that’s not the bit—ah, here it is: ‘According to some authorities this aggressive element of the sexual instinct is in reality a relic of cannibalistic desires—that is, it is a contribution derived from the apparatus for obtaining mastery, which is concerned with the satisfaction of the other and, ontogenetically, the older of the great instinctual needs …’ There, you see? I told you. What time are we supposed to be at this shindig anyway?”

We would have killed together and we would have shone.

All appearances to the contrary, I haven’t left good and evil entirely behind. Absurdly or otherwise I still subscribe to atonement. I killed love. Some short while after ripping Arabella and our little foetal secret to pieces my psyche passed sentence on my heart: Henceforth you will endure, without love. You will kill, without love. You will live, without love. You will die, without love. Doesn’t sound like much of a proscription, does it? Try it for a couple of centuries.

As I say, there has been and still is vestigial ethical craziness. Over the years I’ve sought out and helped the human oppressed, from fugitive Jews in the forests of Poland to terrorised peons in the hills of El Salvador. I funded labour movements in Chile and ran guns for the anti-Fascists in Spain. Big deal, I know. Even the SS didn’t use silver bullets. You’d think the occult nuts among the Reichsführer’s people would’ve insisted, but no. Still, I saved a lot of lives, and, when I got my alignments just right, killed a lot of scumbags. My fortune (reduced by 31 percent in this latest meltdown) has dished out kidney machines and scanners, put food into the bellies of the starving and inoculants into the blood of the at-risks. The philanthropy’s self-sustaining now, the foundations, the trusts. All built (God being dead, irony still etc.) on the Indian poppy. My father, a London director of the East India Company until just before the first Opium War, had followed my grandfather’s lead in the trade and left me a formidably wealthy young man on his death in 1831. There was land, there was property, there were shares in John Company itself. Opium became cotton became coal became steel became … it’s a long story. I diversified. The 1930s hit me hard, but I recovered. Renounce love and you can achieve demonic focus. Once I’d made the decision to stay alive other decisions made themselves. I’d need mobility, anonymity, security. Or in other words sustained wealth. But earlier journals cover this. The point is I make no apology and ask no forgiveness. I’m a man. I’m a monster. A cocktail of contraries. I didn’t ask to become a werewolf but once it had happened I got used to it pretty quickly. You surprise yourself. You surprise yourself, then realise even the surprise was a bit of a sham.

For a hundred and sixty-seven years I’ve put off writing of Arabella and the death of love. Now that I’ve done it, what? Do I feel unburdened? Purged? Ashamed? Absolved?

Something’s happening to this business of talking about feelings. It’s becoming moribund. The analysand on the Manhattan couch opens his mouth to begin “I feel …” and knows that if he had any decency he’d close it again straight away. Humans are moving into a new phase, one based on the knowledge that talking about their feelings has never got them anywhere. The Demonstrative Age … I shan’t be around to see it. That, since I asked the question myself, is how I feel, surer than ever that my clock’s been right all along, that I’ve had enough, that it’s time to go, that I really can’t stand it anymore, the living and the killing and the wandering the world without love.

16

I’M JOURNEYMAN SCRIBBLER enough to know a natural stopping point when I see one, so I doubt I’d have written any more yesterday, even if the vampire hadn’t turned up.

In my lupine form his stink would have been blatant. As it was I didn’t catch it until, alerted by an anomalous creak from the upper floor, I was halfway up the stairs.

The faintest draft of snow-flavoured air said he’d got in through one of the bedroom windows. I backtracked on cartoonish tiptoe, mentally racing through the house’s furnishings for anything that might do service as a wooden stake. (It’s really the wooden stake thing then, is it? Madeline would doubtless ask. Yes, it’s really the wooden stake thing. Or sunlight, or beheading. By all means arm yourself with crucifixes and holy water and garlic and Latin—then prepare for fatal disappointment.) My ghost wulf hackles rose. In fact let me deal with this as straightforwardly as possible: Werewolves and vampires don’t get on. Mutual repulsion is visceral and without exception—and that’s before we get into the bloodsuckers’ survival strategy, their realpolitik, which, in the spirit of disinterested analysis, I’m forced to admire: Almost three hundred years ago the fifty most powerful vampire families formed an alliance and made a deal with the Catholic Church. (WOCOP—or SOL as it was then—was originally an ecclesiastical offshoot, though by the mid-nineteenth century it had become a secular corporation with a private army.) As well as paying a percentage of all vampire profits to God’s representatives on earth (nocturnals are peerless businessmen) they agreed to keep their world population under five thousand, give or take. Which means, since there are always a few rebels and rule-breakers who can’t resist creating brand-new vampiros, annually doing away with a number of their kin. Picture adult seals clubbing their own pups. In return, the Hunt allows the Fifty Families to operate uninterfered with. There have been flare-ups, of course, there have been spats (and naturally some cheating on the numbers) but by and large the deal’s held. The vamp Dons retain control of their households and the WOCOP cash registers sing. Half the “reconstruction” contracts for postwar Iraq went on no-bids to vampire-owned companies (whose funding favours, dear President Obama, the Republicans will be calling in about now). One of them, Netzer-Böll, has a weapons manufacturing subsidiary that specialises off the record in SDS—Silver Delivery Systems. A handful of particularly cynical boochies actually work for WOCOP. The Hunt uses them as trackers. Of werewolves. Grainer, Old School, will have none of it.

So what the fuck was this one doing here?

You speed-whittle a log—no, a chair leg—no, a broom handle—no, a pencil—no a—God dammit … In the kitchen I turned the solitary wooden stool on its side, braced it with one foot and stomped on it with the other. Nothing. I stomped a second time. A faint sound of stress from the joint. I picked the bastard thing up and dashed it against the chimney breast. (Oh for that saloon-brawl furniture of cowboy movies!) Nil effect except a terrible rubbery shock to my wrists. I put it back on the floor and prepared for a third stomp—by which time it was too late.

He stood in the kitchen doorway, a lean pug-faced young vampire in combat trousers and leather bike jacket with eyebrow piercings and bleached white hair cropped close to his skull, holding a bulky rifle. I say “young,” but for all I know he could have been alive since the days of Gilgamesh. He raised the weapon and pointed it at me.

“Wait,” I said.

“Can’t,” he said, and smiled. Before what happened next happened I had just time to think: No, he’s a young one. The eyes haven’t gone dead. Time hasn’t done its thing. An elder wouldn’t even have paused to say “Can’t.” Then what happened next happened.

From outside came a feminine shriek, cut short with a shocking abruptness.

A silence of uncomfortable richness for two seconds. Then a severed female head smashed through the kitchen window and bounced uglily across the tiles, before coming to rest at the foot of the oven. The long dark hair fell back to reveal green eyes, semi–rolled back, mouth horribly slack. Spittled fangs. Her skin was already beginning to blacken.

“Laura?” the vampire said, quietly. Then a wooden spike tore his chest open from the inside with a wet crunch. He frowned. Dropped his weapon with a clatter and sank to his knees, the capillary webbing of hands and throat and face darkening. Ellis, in winter combat fatigues and holding a top-of-the-line Hunt Staker, stood behind him. The long blond hair had been pulled back and bound into an extraordinary solid bun.

“Hi, Jake,” he said. “You all right?”

I exhaled, slowly, set down the wooden stool. “Come on in,” I said. “Join the party.”

“Well, now that you mention it,” he said, “I could murder a drink.”

“What the fuck is going on here?”

“I really don’t know.”

He stepped around the crisping corpse of the vampire and called out of the window: “Russell?”

“Yo!”

“We good?”

“We’re good.”

“Okay. You’ve broken Mr. Marlowe’s window, however.”

“Apologies, boss. Exuberance.”

Ellis didn’t answer. Instead picked up the severed head and tossed it back out. Sounds of amusement from the juniors. The skin on the darkening corpse crackled softly. “Let me get rid of this for you,” Ellis said. He grabbed the cadaver by its bike jacket collar and dragged it out the back door. Vampire decomposition isn’t the screen-friendly instantaneous transformation to ash heap Hollywood peddles, but it is quirkily rapid. In an hour or two there’d be nothing but bloodstains to show the boochies had been here. I went into the living room, tossed a fresh log on the fire, lit up a Camel and poured a couple of straight Glenlivets.

“No hard feelings?” Ellis said, when he came back in and I handed him his glass.

“Let’s not get carried away.”

“Understood. L’chaim, anyway.”

“Chin-chin.”

He sat down on the arm of the couch and propped the vampire’s rifle alongside him. I, cold and queasy from truck with the undead, remained standing by the fire. Surrounded by surveillance, the house had retained its feel of fragile sanctuary. Now, with icy air coming through the broken kitchen window and Ellis actually in here, the magic was gone. Just as well I was leaving tomorrow.

“So?” he said. “What’s your theory?”

“I was hoping you might have one.”

“Nope. Presumably you’ve got enemies in vamp-camp?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so. I don’t have anything to do with them.”

“But you used to, right? My understanding is that for a while in the fifties you were something of a thorn in their side.”

True. See under Werewolf Philanthropy. Vampire-run businesses had paid the Nazis a fortune for ill-gotten genetics data during the war (their search for a solution to the problem of nocturnality goes on) and the Allies a fortune for what remained up for grabs after it. They’d made a fortune fencing treasures appropriated by the Reich, augmented by a highly profitable sideline smuggling war criminals out of Europe. (Decades later, naturally, there was additional money to be made selling the whereabouts of these ancient Nazis to interested Jews, but by then I’d given up interfering.) Back in the early postwar years I was the money behind and frequently leader of a disparate dozen groups convinced that direct action against certain organisations served their disparate causes. Communists, anarchists, animal rights supporters, vigilantes, conspiracy theorists—for a decade or so anti-vamp activism was rationalised by me into protecting the human, to make up for the losses I was inflicting on the poor old human myself. Crazy, I know, but true.

“I threw a few stones,” I said. “Petulance, really. Anyway, it’s ancient history.”

Ellis took a sip, looked around the room, unblinking. Nothing, apparently, disturbed the man’s air of having his mind on something more important than you. You wanted to slap him. “Yeah, but these guys are the grudge club,” he said. “Fifty years? What’s that to them? It’s yesterday. It’s five minutes ago.”

“Well, maybe you should have a word with them. Tell them there’s a queue.”

“They weren’t trying to kill you.”

“What?”

He set the glass down on the couch and picked up the rifle. Or rather what I’d thought was a rifle. The creepily nimble long fingers went to work, popped the chamber and took out the ammunition. Held it up for me to see. A dart.

“Tranquilizer,” I said.

“Tranquilizer. If it wasn’t for us you’d be fast asleep and on your way.”

“On my way where?”

“Pennsylvania.”

“What?”

Ellis smiled—alarmingly, since it brought a sudden nude babylike quality to his face. “My sister teaches second grade. One kid’s telling his buddy about Count Dracula. Says he lives in a big spooky castle in Pennsylvania. You know, instead of Transylv—”

“Got it. Hilarious. Did you know these two?”

He stowed the dart in one of his jacket’s innumerable pockets. Retrieved the Scotch. Now that the smile was gone it was as if it had never been. “The girl,” he said. “She’s maybe Mangiardi. The guy I’ve never seen.”

Mangiardi’s one of the Italian houses, one of the Fifty Families. I might have bombed a couple of their labs back in the day, but couldn’t believe this was a belated revenge attack. Vampires don’t go in for that sort of thing. Not on any kind of principle but because nine out of ten times they just can’t be bothered. All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its … motivation. Thus vampires spend a lot of time lounging around and staring out of the window and finding they can’t be arsed.

“Well, it means nothing to me,” I said. “But I suppose I ought to say thank you. Whatever they want me for I don’t imagine it’s pleasant.”

“All part of the service, Jake. But listen, if you’re really grateful, there’s something we should discuss.”

“What?”

“Mutual benefit. We’ve got som—” His headset clicked: a squad communiqué. The white waxy face and lazuli eyes very still while he listened, processed, concluded. “Roger,” he said. Then to me, covering the mic: “Christ, they can’t be left alone for five minutes.” He swallowed the last of his drink and stood up. “This’ll have to wait. But look, we’ll find a time, seriously, okay?” His tone would have been just right if we’d been minor studio executives.

“I didn’t appreciate the gesture with the foxes, by the way,” I said.

“I know. I can only apologise for that. These rookies. I’m sorry, Jake, really.”

“And now you’ve broken my window.”

“We’ll fix it up first thing tomorrow. And again, seriously, I’m sorry about the foxes. Critters can be such a comfort. I’d love a dog, but with my life? It’s not fair on the animal. We’ll talk again.”

The temptation, immediately Ellis had left, was to call Harley. I resisted: Again, the Hunter could have planted a bug. I’d been sloppy to leave him unsupervised even for a moment, but the vamps had thrown me. Besides, a report would go to WOCOP this evening; Harley would get the story without my help. Which wouldn’t do me any favours, now that I thought it through, since he was already in anxiety overdrive. This latest—vampires are after Jake—would only give him something else to waste time and energy fretting about. I sent him a text: “Audio compromised. SMS only until further notice. Small incident here. You’ll get it from Ellis. DON’T WORRY. I’M FINE.”

Vampires are after Jake. It’s ridiculous. I haven’t seen a vampire in more than twenty years. A mistake? Or some new Hunt twist? But there, beyond argument, was the tranquilizer dart. If it wasn’t for us you’d be fast asleep and on your way.

On my way where? And for what?

Here it is again, the wearisome thing, life’s compulsion to woo, the suitor who won’t take no for an answer. Vampires, Jake. What’s that about? Stick around. Find out what happens.

Yes, well, I know what happens. More happens. Variations on the same half dozen themes. There are only six plots, Hollywood says, or twelve, or nine … whatever the number it’s finite, it’s small. If this is life trying to narratively intrigue me back in, it won’t work. I’m not coming in, I’m going out.

I went around the house closing all the curtains. The darkness outside was loud, now that I listened, with the sound of Life’s indefatigable random plotting, the gossipy simmer of a new assault on my resolve. It gave me a peculiar tender sad thrill of emptiness, as when you catch your wife in bed with another man and realise you don’t care, haven’t for years, feel a little pity for them, wish them both a little luck.

Back on the couch with a fresh Camel and a topped-up Glenlivet I kicked my shoes off, stretched my legs towards the fire and yawned. It was only six in the evening but the booze and hullabaloo had made me sleepy. In a concession to Life I thought back over my years of antivamp activism, sifted memories for high-ranking bloodsuckers I might particularly have ticked off. I couldn’t come up with anything compelling. Certainly Casa Mangiardi didn’t ring any bells, and I’d never seen the lately beheaded Laura or her young companion before, I was positive.

I swallowed the last of my Scotch, put my feet up, rested my eyes. Fuck them, anyway, whatever they wanted. Under Grainer’s orders (God being dead, irony etc.) the Hunt would watch my back. I had a suicidal date with WOCOP’s werewolf-killing maestro just over a week from now, and boochies or no boochies I intended to keep it.

17

EVEN BY MY own efforts I make a pretty convincing woman, but for the rendezvous with Harley back in London I had professional help.

“Are you sure this is necessary?” I asked. “I mean, why can’t I wear trousers? Women do wear trousers, after all.”

“In trousers you’ll move like a man. The body language will give it away.” This was Todd Curtis, a friend of Harley’s, and he was waxing my legs from the knee down. I’d been instructed to shave them before leaving the Zetter. The waxing was an extra—and in my view—unnecessary precaution.

“Look, if they get that close I don’t think it’s the legs that’ll—Ow! Jesus Christ.”

“Three more and you’re good to go.”

Todd, good-looking, understatedly muscular with dark curly hair cropped very close and a thin face of calm Mafioso cruelty, was the sort of gay man very few heterosexuals would be able to tell was a gay man—though on discovering his profession they’d start to wonder. He and his team specialise in elite transvestism. For film, stage and television, yes, but also for private clients and drag competitions. Turnover last year, he told me, was just under a million euros.

“The weather’s on our side,” he said, selecting a three-quarter-length fake chinchilla from the rack his assistant had wheeled in. “The coat will do a lot of the work. How are the shoes?” We were in a massage cubicle at a health and beauty spa in Knightsbridge. Conditions were cramped and the air-con was set for nudity. The wig didn’t itch (my wigs don’t itch, Todd had said, calm as God) but the makeup caused mild claustrophobia. I’d been tailed from the Zetter but had given the two agents the slip in Covent Garden. WOCOP’s hooked into a lot of the city’s CCTV but Harley knows the blind spots. These, plus four cab changes, made it virtually certain I’d reached Halcyon Days unmarked. Virtual certainty notwithstanding, Harley’s life was at stake. Hence Todd, hence the new me.

“Wow,” I said, looking in the full-length mirror. “Maybe I’ll just take myself back to my hotel.”

“Yeah, you’re hot,” Todd said, without apparent emotion. He’d worked the transformation with a sort of impersonal concentration, and now it was done I very much had the impression he had other places to be, other men to turn into women. “Go up and down in here a few times to get used to the heels.”

The disguise followed my natural dark colouring. I looked like a plain big-boned woman who’d availed herself of maximum cosmetic assistance but about whom there remained something eerily unfuckable. No denying slight titillation. The tights in particular delivered secret arousing snugness. An erection halfheartedly threatened. You’ll be delighted to hear, dear Harley, that—

Todd’s assistant put her head round the door. “Car’s here,” she said.

The vampire attack in Cornwall had put WOCOP in a stir, though Harley’s snooping had thus far turned up nothing. Calls had gone back and forth between the London HQ and most of the Fifty Houses, but the head families, Casa Mangiardi included, were feigning ignorance, or were ignorant. Laura Mangiardi, allegedly, had forfeited familial rights by running around with pariahs, illegally made vamps who’d eluded the annual cull. The Dons’ line was they were just as irked as WOCOP. Efforts would be redoubled, controls tightened. A regrettable glitch, no harm done, long tradition of mutual respect blah blah blah. Harley, of course, remained sceptical. It doesn’t matter, I’d told him. None of it matters. In seven days—

Shut the fuck up, will you? he’d said.

The male receptionist at the Leyland made two assumptions. First, since I went straight to the lifts with barely a glance at him, that I was a prostitute. Second, since I wasn’t attractive, that I was a prostitute of dizzying kinkiness or filth.

“Your concierge thinks I’m a hooker,” I said to Harley by way of hello. He was standing, leaning heavily on the bone-handled stick. “A coprophilia specialist. And these fucking shoes, I don’t mind telling you, are killing me.”

Harley smiled, but we both knew my tone wasn’t up to the task. I’d been in the room five seconds and already the atmosphere was frail. (Don’t come onto the platform with me, we say, knowing how it’ll be: the forced levity, the nonconversation, the minutes that can’t be left empty.) The suite was large, dully corporate, decorated with too much navy blue: drapes, bedspread, corduroy couches. The window looked over puddled roofs, air vents, skylights, the rear yard of a pub with its umbrellas closed and plastic furniture wet. A few dirty scabs of snow remained, irritating now that the big white dream was over.

All the ID documents were crisp, to my eye flawless, but once Harley had tossed them to me where I sat on the bed we didn’t mention them. They’d been his last hope, talismans to bring the dead magic back to life. He’d done everything he could—and proved that nothing he could do was enough. For what felt like minutes we remained in silence, me on the edge of the bed with nyloned legs crossed, him in profile by the window, all but silhouetted by London’s milky grey afternoon light.

“What will you do?” he said.

“Go to Wales. Snowdonia. I never have been back, you know.”

He opened his mouth to say something—an objection reflex—then closed it again. Both of us had imagined there would be things to say, that we’d find things to say, but Harley stared out over the shivering roof-lakes and I knew he was getting the first true flavour of his life without me in it, an effect like the rubbery antiseptic taste of a dentist’s surgery. All those people Marlowe killed.

“The vision I have of you,” I said, “is in South America. White cotton pyjamas. Mango trees. A dusty courtyard. Hot blue sky and half a dozen static pure white clouds. You go where there’s beauty. You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.” I lit a Camel, watched myself in the mirror, a noirish unattractive woman, sitting on a bed, smoking. Somewhere in the back of our minds had been the belief that my being in drag would leaven the horror. And if I laugh at any mortal thing / “ ’Tis that I may not weep. It had failed in the way that comic music at a funeral can fail. He sat down on one of the blue corduroy couches and set the walking stick between his knees and abstractedly lit a Gauloise and slowly scratched the big dome of his forehead.

“I can’t believe this,” he said.

“Harls, come on.”

“A parent doesn’t expect to bury his child.” Cigarette smoke swirled as if struggling to form a representation of something. The room’s memories were of masturbating sales reps and adulterous couples.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Saying it gave me my first inkling of how sorry, of how exhausting this leave-taking had the capacity to become. It was as if the decision to die had taken the energy required to get me to death.

“I’m leaving too,” Harley said, then with satirical brightness: “A month’s holiday. Don’t want to be here when they cut your head off, do I?”

“Where are you going?”

“Caribbean. Barbuda. A Ballardian enclave. The bored wives of neuro-surgeons. Retired astronauts. Pharmaceuticals executives. The brochure looks like a virtual world. White concrete and ultramarine sky. A pristine end point of modernity. I imagine silence that’s really the low hum of air-conditioning and humidors.”

“Well, you’ve got the wardrobe for it. I still think you should go to Brazil. For the boys if nothing else. You’re not dead, Harls, so live.”

“Yes, well, physician heal thy fucking self.”

A silence began to solidify between us. Unaffordable. I stood up, with a wobble on the high heels, saw him immediately thinking not yet, not so soon, not like this, wait.

“Nothing’s going to be the right thing to say,” I said. He stared at the carpet. Cigarette ash fell on his trousers. “We’re hanging around waiting for this not to seem so painful when the fact is it’s only going to get more painful the longer we hang around.”

He didn’t move. His eyes were filling. He took an aggressive drag on the Gauloise, exhaled through his nose. A tear fell, with an audible putt onto his lapel. The moment demanded action and all we had was paralysis. The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

“I’ll just ask you this once,” he said. “So I know I did ask.”

I waited. Someone pushed a cleaning cart past the door. Outside, London was set in frowning concentration, dourly focused on getting through the economic migraine. Heavy on me was the weight of the world’s ability to keep going, producing day after unique day, heaving up wars and conversations, bloodily popping out babies and silently swallowing the dead. The collective human unconscious can’t stand it, the thought of stuff going on forever, so has decided (collectively, unconsciously) to bring the planet to an end. Eco-apocalypse isn’t accident, it’s deep species strategy.

“Don’t do this,” Harley said. “Don’t leave me to myself. I haven’t got what it takes for suicide. You know that. What’s another decade to you? I’ll be dead by then. Just stay.”

“I can’t.”

“You’re a selfish cunt, do you know that?”

“Yes.”

Again he opened his mouth, saw the futility, let it go. He pulled out a wrinkled white hanky and dried his eyes. Very slowly put the glass down and stubbed out the cigarette. When he looked at me I saw his fear of everything beyond this moment. The future held a horror—himself—and he wouldn’t look until he had to, until he had no choice, until I was gone. His face shivered like the water on the flat roofs.

“So what?” he said. “We just say good-bye?”

“We just say good-bye.”

“You’ve got another week. You’ll change your mind.”

“Come here.”

He felt like an old man in my arms, skin and bones in a baggy suit, thinned hair and the smell of scalp. Something medicinal too, tiger balm or Vicks. Out of habit I searched my feelings, turned up sadness, regret, something like loss but also undeniably boredom and a kind of impotence of the heart. My inner voice repeated, enough, enough, enough.

At the door I turned and looked at him. He had nothing to say, or too much. He just stared, wet-eyed, hands heavy, filling as I watched with the sand of his future. Every act of leaving feels like a victory. The thrill of this one was tiny, faint, dud, almost nothing.

Harley remained still, unblinking. Leaving him alone with his conscience was like leaving a child alone with a paedophile.

“You’ve been a good friend to me,” I said. He didn’t respond. I turned, opened the door, stepped out into the hall and closed it behind me.

18

I HAD IMAGINED, crossing the border into Clwyd under a low sky of dark cloud, that finding the exact spot I was attacked a hundred and sixty-seven years ago wouldn’t be easy. I’d pictured hours poring over Ordnance Survey maps and picking local octogenarian brains, flailing in bogs, getting lost in the woods. But this is the twenty-first century. I simply hired a car and drove north from London, then west through Snowdonia National Park to Beddgelert (the dd pronounced as a voiced th in Welsh), a village some five miles south of Snowdon and a comfortable three-mile walk from Beddgelert Forest, where after only a single afternoon exploring I found the clearing in which Charles and I had made our camp all those years ago. From there the twenty paces to the stream, the site of the attack, the line the Hunt or Servants of Light had ridden. I sat on a rock by the bank and smoked a cigarette. That’s all there was to it.

Beddgelert hasn’t much to offer so I booked myself into the Castle Hotel in Caernarfon, a half hour’s drive northwest of the forest, overlooking the unsavoury waters of the Menai Strait.

Five days to kill before dying.

All the practical work was done long ago. The companies pass under the control of their boards. A percentage of profits stream to the charities. Real estate sale proceeds likewise. Personal wealth (I’ve off-loaded the art, the trinkets, the antiquities over the last fifty years) will be divided among certain individuals known to me (though I’m not known to them) by virtue of some outstanding quality: compassion, talent, kindness, humour, conscience. Some of it will go to ordinary folks I just happen to have met and liked. None of it will go to the families of people I’ve killed and eaten for the simple reason that finding out where the money came from (a possibility, no matter how many precautions) would drive them insane, since they wouldn’t want to part with it but would have to and would end up hating the dead person.

There are probably a dozen things you could think of to do if you only had five days left to live. I doubt they’d include visiting the Inigo Jones Tudor Slateworks, or the Caernarfon Air Museum, or Foel Animal Park, or the Sea Zoo. Nonetheless, partly in an act of self-ridicule, partly out of unexpected vacuity, I spent a day taking them in. I ate an ice cream in the drizzle. Fed coins into a delirious fruit machine. Drank a cup of tea in a café full of damp pensioners. I brought this journal up to date. All feeble distraction from the quickening Curse, which, indifferent to the winsome farewell drama, foreplayed my blood in obedience to the swelling moon. And on the subject of swelling and blood, my libido was going nuts. I had thought, given the near failure of my last date with Madeline and the days of sexual quiescence in Cornwall (nothing, not even a hand job), that desire was finally done with me. Thanatos advances, Eros retreats. Not so. By the end of my second day I was walking around in a more or less permanent gurn. To join a queue was to risk arrest.

Pocket Internet consultation revealed Caernarfon served by not one but four escort agencies, with which I made do until, around midnight of Day Three, incredulously taxied two hundred miles at my expense and toting a Louis Vuitton overnight bag, Madeline arrived. I’d promised her triple time and a generous sayonara bonus. Yes, I was Going Away.

“You are so one can short of a six-pack, babes,” she said, when I opened the door. “What are you doing here?”

“Dying. Here’s some champagne. Drink it and get into bed.”

“Crikey. Can I take my coat off first?”

“If you think it’s necessary, but please hurry.”

Maddy wasn’t the only thing up from London. I’d practically advertised my departure from the capital, so naturally WOCOP surveillance had followed. I’d clocked agents everywhere, though Grainer and Ellis declined to show themselves. I wondered what they thought I was doing, this swanning, this insouciance. To them it must look like prep for the biggest fugitive sleight of hand in history. Visibility this brazen could only be the dummy to an extraordinary escape. God alone knew what machinations they imagined I had planned.

“Ow,” Madeline said, having rolled over on something not soft in the bed. “It’s your bloody phone.” It was late afternoon on Day Four and we’d just woken up. The curtains were closed and what was left of the light was going. The night had been taxing, for Madeline because I’d fucked her six times with preposterous staying power, and for me because no amount of fucking her could suppress the psychic quartet of fear and boredom and sadness and hunger that took turns being me and sometimes didn’t take turns but nauseously swelled together like a mesmerising special effect. I had a champagne head and cocaine guts, but more pressingly the first blood-shudders and muscle-hiccups of wolf, of the coming transformation. The Last Curse.

“You’ve got voicemail, by the way,” Madeline said. “Here. I’ve got to pee. God, I feel like death.”

The phone, of course, was the phone, the Harley phone. Battery almost dead. Message icon flashing. The clipped nonperson female voice (a slightly retarded descendant of the Speaking Clock) said: Message. Received. Yesterday. At. Seven. Fourteen. a.m.

It was Harley.

“Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—”

That was all.

I played it again, pointlessly since I’d heard it perfectly the first time. The cutoff was absolute, technological. I dialled the number. Voicemail. I dialled again. Voicemail.

A little more of the light seemed to go. The room smelled of hotel carpet, flat champagne and sex. Adrenaline shimmied and bucked in my shoulders and wrists, went through my scalp, balls, knees. I stood there staring at nothing, trying to see through walls, miles, hours, other people.

I dialled again.

Voicemail.

Maddy emerged from the en suite. She’d washed her face and brushed her teeth and pinned her hair up with clips. In ten minutes she’d look as good as a new car. Her recovery time’s astonishing. “Look at that, thank you very much,” she said, turning her cheek and showing me a tiny love-bite on her pliable young neck. “That’s a mark, isn’t it?”

“Get dressed,” I said. “I’ll give you an extra thousand but only if you get dressed and go down to the restaurant right now. I just need a few minutes.”

“I can’t go down looking like this.”

I found last night’s dress and tossed it to her. “A grand on top of the rest. Go on. I’ll be down in a bit.”

Alone in the room when she’d gone, I stood (dressed, brutally awake) with all the lights on and the mobile in my hand trying not to panic.

Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—

There’s what?

It was a risk, but I called the Earl’s Court house. You’ve reached Elite Antiquarian. Please leave your name, number and a brief message, and we’ll return your call as soon as possible. Thank you. “Yes, hello. This is Mr. Carlyle. I’m told you’ve recently acquired a sixteenth-century Malleus Maleficarum, which I’d be very interested in taking a look at. Please do call me back on …” No point not leaving the hotel number. WOCOP knew I was here, and if they were monitoring Earl’s Court calls then they already knew about Harley. I hung up and called the foundation. No, Mr. Harley wasn’t there at the moment. Was there a message?

Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—

It wasn’t beyond Harley to try a ruse. Drag me back to London for another assault on my resolve. He was desperate. Desperate enough to leave that message? Possibly. You’re a selfish cunt, do you know that? Said in the way we said such things, implying affection. But underneath he’d meant it. Why not? It was true.

I lit a Camel. Parted the curtains and peered out. Dusk. Rain. Car headlamps. Pedestrians under umbrellas. Every now and then you look out at the world and know its gods have gone utterly elsewhere. Its personality shows, the kid abandoned horribly early who’s survived at too great a price.

There was a knock at the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me,” Madeline said. “Let me in a sec.”

“For fuck’s sake.”

I opened the door. Had a split second to register Ellis holding a fire extinguisher and Grainer holding Maddy—then the fire extinguisher hit me in the face.

19

I WASN’T KNOCKED out but I was knocked over, and in the aftermath of the blow’s red detonation sufficiently dazed for Ellis to get my hands cuffed behind my back. Grainer steered Madeline at silenced gunpoint over to the couch, sat her down, then stood behind her with the weapon resting against the back of her skull. The room’s furnishings achieved sudden taut sentience. To her credit, Maddy was keeping her mouth shut. I had the impression it wasn’t the first time she’d been around men with guns, which made me feel tender towards her, sorry I hadn’t kissed her more.

Grainer had lost weight since I’d last seen him and looked handsomer for it. Oily thick dark hair flecked with grey, a broad face, small hard brown eyes, pockmarked skin. Native American blood in there somewhere giving the good cheekbones, the inscrutable distance. In the Dolomites he’d been in lightweight Hunt fatigues and night-vision goggles. Now here he was like a spruce gangster in dark casuals and a quality black overcoat.

I spat out a bloody front tooth. My nose was broken. “Don’t worry, Madeline,” I said through my mashed mouth. “It’s me they want.”

Ellis found the dimmer and turned the lighting down slightly, for no reason, it appeared, beyond his own aesthetic sensibilities. He took the desk chair, placed it opposite me and sat down. In a film he’d start cleaning his nails or peeling an apple. In reality he just sat, elbows on knees, in a state of relaxed readiness. The long white hair was ponytailed today.

“So here’s the thing,” Grainer said. “We know about Harley.”

Instant structural shift. As if a wall or door had gone for good and now cold air came in.

“Is he dead?”

“Don’t try’n drive this, Jake. You’re the passenger.”

You think horror enters spectacularly. It doesn’t. It just prosaically turns up. Even in the first seconds you know you’ll find it a room. I thought (how not?) of Harley’s face at our farewell, of how delicate he’d felt in my arms. Weariness tingled through me, as if the heart had released a stimulant that wasn’t working. Simultaneously there was a dreary bodily certainty that something would be demanded of me, that I’d have to do something.

“We’re aware of your intention for tomorrow night, Jake,” Grainer said. “To take it lying down. We don’t like it.”

“No challenge for you.”

“Exactly. Do you know I’ve been dreaming about it? In this dream, you’re sitting—fully transformed in broad daylight—all alone at one of those picnic tables in a forest. When I come out of the trees you’re pleased to see me. You wave at me, for Christ’s sake. I mean I do it, I cut off your head, but you’re just sitting there, smiling, nodding. It’s depressing as hell. I don’t want that.”

“How long have you known about Harley?”

“Years. You two were pretty slack. That wasn’t much of a challenge, either.”

“Surveillance?”

“Everything. The phones, the mobiles, the Earl’s Court place, Harley’s club. Jesus, Jake, we’ve had you bugged a dozen times.”

Some relief, naturally. You can’t live in dread of something for long without beginning to crave it.

“So the French story, this idiot Cloquet, that’s bullshit?” Questions stacked up. Only one mattered: What had they done with Harley? Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—

Grainer shook his head. “That guy, God what a loon. No, the story you got from Harley was true, as far as it went. Cloquet was tailing you in Paris, and the WOCOP agent was tailing him. The only thing Harley didn’t know was that we knew all about it. We’ve known your whereabouts more or less continuously since 2003. Harley’s been your surveillance, albeit unwittingly. Anyway, when it became apparent Cloquet was planning to take you out himself he was stopped. By me, as a matter of fact. As you know, I consider you my responsibility. Exclusively.”

“And Cloquet is?”

“Jacqui Delon’s boyfriend, or one of them. Cokehead wastrel. That’s all we know. She seemed pretty pissed when she found out he’d pulled a gun on you.”

“Are you a spy?” Madeline asked me, quietly.

“No,” I said.

“He’s a werewolf, honey,” Grainer said. “Surely you’ve told her, Jake?”

“As a matter of fact I have.” I felt tired again. Maddy’s look of fraught computation. I sincerely hoped they wouldn’t kill her. Surviving this experience might be just the epiphany to get her out of prostitution.

“It’s no way to end a war, Jake,” Grainer said. “Sit there and just …”

“Let it come down?”

“Let it come down. Doesn’t ring the right bell in the universe.”

“This is the way the world ends,” I said.

“Not your world. You’re the last of a great species. You owe the narrative something better.”

“There is no narrative. You know that.”

“There’s the one we make. It’s our responsibility.”

Ellis nodded. “Just because life’s meaningless doesn’t mean we can’t experience it meaningfully,” he said.

“Wow,” I said. “You should patent that. I’ve got one too: You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps.” Anger, after all, was rising through the blood vessels. Not at Ellis’s banality (nor Grainer’s arrogance) but at being forced into something when all I wanted was nothing.

“So,” Grainer said, “Madeline’s going to come downstairs with us for a moment. You’ll stay here. We’ll send her back with the key for the cuffs, and the information you’ll need.”

“Information?”

“About Harley. Madeline, do that and you’re absolutely free to go. Fuck it up or try anything and you’re dead. Understood?” Maddy nodded, swallowed. Her little nostrils flared. Under the gun’s gentle direction she got to her stilettoed feet. The faintest tremor in her knees. Ellis stood, replaced the chair. “Sit tight, Jake,” Grainer said. “She’ll be back soon.”

I waited. The room waited. Tomorrow night’s full moon tugged and tweaked and smacked. There are these pretransformation shenanigans, ghost spasms, the muscles and bones getting ahead of themselves. The monster knows the length of its wait as a dog knows the length of its leash, but like the dog it pulls and chokes. My front tooth was already starting its grow-back with a fibrous tickle. Information about Harley. They had him somewhere, presumably. This is the deal: He stays alive as long as you do. Give up and he gets it. Ellis’s idea, I was sure. A scheme of simple symmetry handed down from his remote height. I’d imagined … What had I imagined? Kneeling like Anne Boleyn while Grainer’s blade caught the moonlight? Sitting full-lotus smiling down the muzzle of a silver-loaded gun? At any rate I’d imagined yielding. Stillness, stars, reverence for the last benignly indifferent details. A happy death.

The door opened and Madeline entered, unaccompanied, carrying a small leather holdall. Also the handcuffs’ key. She closed the door behind her and put the bag on the floor. Then she helped me to my feet and unlocked the restraints. All done I could tell in accordance with specific instructions. She radiated moist heat. In the cleavage of the black halterneck her breasts were wet. One of the clipped-up strands of hair was down. Poignant to see her this way, stripped of her professional self, a human, afraid. Dangerous, too: Artless humanity made her wrongly appetising. Now that she’d been forced into depth I’d want to kill and eat her. One way or another my time with her was over.