The Last Werewolf

by Glen Duncan

  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 a
round 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.