The Last Werewolf

by Glen Duncan

  We didn’t. Talulla’s dark lovely long-fingered hand came from behind and covered the bottom half of his face.

  44

  YOU’LL WANT ORDER, sequence, categories. I sympathise. But the trinity mystery of fuckkilleat collapses distinctions, swipes aside the apparatus separating this from that and introduces with the transcendental equivalent of a Gallic shrug a completely new form of experience.

  There was, for example, deep turf, frost-hardened, fracturing with a soft crunch underfoot. Turf? Where? We were in his living room. We moved languidly, two creatures gone into by the drift of dark water alongside us, neither river nor sea and with no opposite shore. Stars came all the way down to the horizon, nestled in the water. Which isn’t to say I don’t remember Talulla’s black-clawed thumb tearing his neck, a mastoid opening, a fan of blood and his sealed-up roars. The landscape was nowhere and it rolled out from the room. Bits of it fizzed or crumbled away to reveal the deity it belonged to, not God but one of his aspects, the great clean spirit of Predation, to whom we belonged, of which we contained a fragment or flame like a portion of pure joy.

  We looked at each other and everything became still. Which isn’t to say the white leather couch wasn’t smeared red where his hand went hurriedly back and forth, as if waving or trying to erase something.

  Between us was the shared certainty of escalation, a speeded-up version of the ticking of roller-coaster cars climbing the hill to the Big Drop. You’re feeling this, right? Yes. Meanwhile Drew’s life in vivid chunks like the “Previously, on—” opening of a soap: his mother’s large blond-haired head, blue-eyeshadowed and coffee-breathed, blotting out the light over his pram and coming down to him like a benign planet. His fingers’ ache stretching for the piano keys and the keys themselves clues from the time before birth. A dark-haired twelve-year-old girl biting her lip and the feeling like Christmas and birthday of his young hand creeping under the elastic of her pants her pants her actual pants, and Rheingold saying, You’ve got talent but no star quality, and he was right. A million-page flick-book of TV images, cowboys lightsabres Coke car-chases Friends the Twin Towers. That dream he’d had of swimming to what he thought was the shore except it was the flat edge of the pre-Columbus earth and suddenly he was being sucked to where the ocean poured its wrecks and sharks over the rim into black empty space not even stars just nothing and then waking covered in sweat and the escort wasn’t next to him as instructed but sitting in the window seat sending a text message on her BlackBerry and the thing with women now was purely transactional probably always had been they pretended to want sex but it was always some other fucking thing and it was amazing how you could at forty-one accept that the thing with women from now on forever was just going to be transactional he would still like to have a son and teach him music.

  In spite of the moon the television’s light perceptibly twitched and shivered, a blond green-eyed contestant on America’s Next Top Model wept glitterily, half her face obscured under the screen’s pancake of congealing blood.

  Talulla turned from what she was doing and looked at me. It’s close. Can you feel it?

  Sky and water shifted or swivelled their occult constituent parts and like the solution to a visual riddle the stars yielded a new constellation describing the figure of a wolf, a diagram showing that there was no reason for us, only the certainty of us, and understanding this was like taking the hand that would lead us to peace. The night in the room agreed, through the drifting water and the smell of frost.

  Which isn’t to say we weren’t wet with blood or that Talulla didn’t arch her back or that my hands didn’t cup her breasts or that her legs didn’t open with sly animal capitulation. I’d thought I loved her before, and so I had, the woman. But this was the monster and the monster was magnificent. I got an unmanning glimpse of the depth of my capacity for worship, drew back from it as from the edge of a cold-aired chasm. She saw that, too, and sent me, It’s the same for me, don’t you see?

  Her question turned out to be the tipping point. A second of absolute balance—then down from the fulcrum moment I went into her as her eyes rolled back and her tongue curled in martial or erotic triumph (detonating however absurdly Dante, And now a she-wolf came, that in her leanness / seemed racked with every kind of greediness)—while the sudden plunge tore us out of our bodies and for an unmeasurable moment returned us to the thing that wasn’t God but the aspect of him that was ours, and in which infinitely generous archetype there was neither her nor me but only the rapture that calls you home to unity with the sweetest song and painlessly burns away the straps and buckles of the suffering self.

  Bliss.

  Bliss defies description, obviously, since it annihilates you, since you’re not there to experience it. You get the lead-up and the comedown, never the zenith. We went to the place. We came back—spoiled, made ruined addicts at a stroke. From now on nothing less would do. I thought: Two hundred years of ignorance; now this. And only two hundred years to repeat it in.

  I love you, the moment instructed us (as Drew’s life, like the last lights off the black West, went), was for the human sphere. Here, humbled and filled with tenderness for the newly restored finiteness of arms and teeth and lips and bellies, we brought our noses close, lapped, nuzzled, paused, looked, saw into each other and knew for better or worse we’d been consecrated, not just our unholy marriage but our aloneness together in the world. A condition both of us calmly conceded might lead to complete mutual hatred. It was a great comfort to know this, to understand it, to allow all the possibilities. We felt like modest little gods ourselves, beating with fresh love for life and humble in the face of the possibilities. Would have laughed if we could.

  Time had misbehaved, disguised hours as moments. I’d lost track. Unforgivably let myself unravel. Fuckkilleat came at the price of caution and control. America’s Next Top Model had been replaced by the Good Morning News. (The standard U.S. double act of paternal toupéed golfer fluffered by twentysomething L’Oréal dummy. The wigged father fucking the waxed daughter is okay as long as both maintain calculated incredulity and restrained outrage at what’s going on out there in the world.) Now, as if it had been caught asleep on duty, the moon woke and began sending its warning, a dragging (menstrual, for all I know) sensation in the lower body’s blood. We might have been two heavy fish on a weak line being reeled in by an invalid—but a magical invalid, since the thin force was irresistible.

  As one we left what remained of our victim (not much) and bounded like dog-food-ad dogs out of the open door and over the balcony’s rail into the collusive forest and the vapours of the waning night. My restarted inner clock said less than sixty minutes to moonset.

  45

  WE RAN, PASSING his spirit back and forth like teens swapping gum. Mist clung. The woods went by in a resinous blur. Half a mile from where we’d set out I caught the scent of my own piss, cut hard left, plunged with Talulla close behind through a band of fog and came in a matter of minutes to the marked tree. I went up it in a single leap and there was the pack, clipped, dew-beaded, but with contents dry and filled with the odours of civilisation. A bit of trouble with the clip cables (there’s not a product on the market built with werewolf fingers in mind) but I resisted slashing straight through them, and after a few moments’ patient application had them unfastened and stowed. I dropped to the ground.

  Our pelt back had left us twenty minutes to spare. We lay near each other but not touching, silent recipients of Pan’s globally ignored dawn suite, a soft exhalation through turf and leaf, the whirr of small wings, the introspective clambering of beetles, the shiver of water. The world, Lula was thinking, is oozing, teeming, crawling with miracles. And we live in the opaque plastic bubble of television and booze. You should start keeping a journal, I sent her, but too late: The metamorphic current had caught her. Her animal receptors were frying. I reached for her but remembered Don’t touch me and drew back. She crawled on all fours in a loose semicircle, collapsed, curled up in a ball.
Out of sight the moon set, a tiny pain, like the tearing of the last fibre holding a comically loose tooth. Talulla, foetal, jaws clamped, convulsed rhythmically, as if keeping time with something. Mucus rattled in her snout.

  Again she was ahead of me. Had the opportunity to observe—which she did, sitting and catching her breath—the body-popping extravaganza of Jake Marlowe Changing Back.

  “Thanks for not laughing,” I said, once I was confident language had returned.

  She didn’t answer, was still inwardly returning herself. Her eyes were big and bright, murder-purified. Helping her clean herself up (the products don’t care, address blood and guts with the same floral cheer as they would ketchup and gravy) I felt the stunned regrouping of her human aspects, the shock and disgust that here, again, was the grossest defilement, beyond forgiveness, beyond any kind of washing away. Very soon followed (her eyes hardened) by the knowledge that shock and disgust had already proved themselves inadequate. Six times. Now seven. Which left the fact of herself she must find a way of getting along with, since it was either this or death. I know what you’re going through, I wanted to say. I didn’t say it. Aside from the psychic travails she was visibly Curse-hungover. I, old lag that I am, had forgotten how it used to be, aura peeled, consciousness red-raw. You don’t want talk, for Christ’s sake.

  I bagged up the cleaning accoutrements and kicked earth over where she’d vomited last night. Rucksack on, final idiot-check of the site. Short of the fading odour of werewolf piss there wasn’t a sign we’d been here.

  An hour later, fog-damp, meat-heavy, we were back at the car. My calves ached. Talulla was shivering. The vehicle’s interior was a tremendous comfort when the doors thunked shut. This is another of the purposes of civilisation, so that you can get in a car and close the door and be surrounded by technology-studded vinyl and drive away in conditioned air. I dropped the bin-liner (a DNA conundrum, should anyone ever find it) in a rest-stop Dumpster en route to San Francisco and replaced the number plates in an empty lay-by a little farther up the road. Two hours after that, having returned the Toyota in the city, we boarded an Amtrak bound for Chicago.

  For a while we sat side by side in silence, Talulla in the window seat looking out. Sunlight warmed our hands and faces. Her pupils were small. She blinked slowly, as if each meeting and parting of the eyelids yielded its distinct portion of peace. Her body radiated exhaustion. The train’s motion went into us like a sedative.

  My eyes were closed when she spoke.

  “I’m getting used to it,” she said. Neutral statement. Gain and loss in mutually nullifying equilibrium. Her throat was sore. I didn’t reply. She wasn’t expecting me to.

  After a while, she put her head on my shoulder, closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  Third Moon

  The Cruellest

  Month

  46

  SIX DAYS AFTER murdering Drew Hillyard we arrived, surreal from too many time zones and too much weather, in Ithaca.

  Not Ithaca, New York. Itháki, Greece.

  We had stopped for a night in New York, however, against my inclination. Nikolai had been haranguing Talulla over the phone ever since we’d left and she insisted on putting in an appearance before we skedaddled again. There was peace to be made between her father and Ambidextrous Alison, who’d threatened, for the dozenth time, to quit if Nikolai didn’t stop interfering. (There was no financial need for the restaurants now, of course, but aside from the problem of how to explain the sudden acquisition of twenty million dollars, Talulla knew the Gilaley business was for Nikolai a nexus for happy memories.) In any case, it gave us a night in a hotel bed after the torturous dimensions of the Amtrak sleeper. A bed we slept in, chastely. Sex on the Curse, it transpires, zeroes libido just in the way that no sex on the Curse whacks the dial up to max. When we touched it was with geriatric solicitousness. Of the many memories from those crammed weeks that one—of slipping between crisp cold hotel sheets with her after three nights on the train—is peculiarly vivid, the swan dive into sleep, like pitching voluntarily into death, the last friable bits of shared consciousness—is this peace? this is peace, isn’t it, to be able to let go?—dissolving into darkness like a skyrocket’s trail of sparks … There are great sleeps, sleeps of monumental innocence, and that was one. We woke with a feeling of having been popped brand-new out of a mould. It gave us a current of mild giddiness on which to make our second exit from New York.

  American Airlines to Rome, then Air Italia to Cephalonia. From there a boat to Ithaca. A modest villa up a hundred rough steps overlooking the little harbour town of Konia, an off-season short-notice snip at twelve hundred euros a week. I’d been here thirty years ago, having killed a healthy young French contemporary-dance student holidaying across the Aegean in Ephesus. The place had been insinuating itself at some subconscious level, I believed, since I first set eyes on Talulla at Heathrow, and I’d fixed this sojourn before we left Manhattan for California three weeks ago.

  “It’s the domestic happy ending,” she said. “Odysseus back to hearth and home and faithful wife. A kid could have worked that out. I thought you were supposed to be smart?”

  Not smart. Happily stupid. Stupidly happy. The Jake Marlowe revolution was complete: Tedious self-knowledge had become blissful self-ignorance. All former certainties were up for renegotiation. The circuitry of detached self-analysis was fried. Here again was immersion in the good blind flow.

  Not so simple for Lula. Her larger self might have moved ahead into acceptance but her smaller wasn’t going without a fight. Nightmares woke her, drenched. Fugues took her, after a while gave her back. She didn’t talk about them. Sometimes the entire weight of her self-loathing was compressed into the angle at which she held a cigarette. In the white bedroom I’d wake alone, panic, search, find her lying in the empty bathtub, or standing on the veranda staring at the sea, or curled up with her arms wrapped around herself on the kitchen’s terra-cotta floor. These rites were necessary, in both senses of the word: There was no escaping them, and through them survival lay. She knew this, was sickened by the logic of her own continuance. That’s the trouble with disgust, she’d said. You get through it.

  One night in the small hours I found her—after a rise to near hysteria when she wasn’t in the house, or on the balcony, or in the garden, or in the village—out to thigh-depth naked and alone in the sea. I stripped, waded, shosh … shosh (she glanced back, once, saw it was me), stood beside her. The beach was deserted. Cool but not cold. Moonlight (waxing crescent) lay in flakes of silver leaf on the water. I knew not to take her hand, not to touch. In this state she wanted touch like a woman in labour wants a French kiss.

  “My dad used to tell me the story of Lycaon when I was small,” she said. “He always made a big deal of the eight years proviso, how no one ever heard of any of the wolves changing back into men.”

  There are two versions of the myth. In one, Lycaon, king of Arcadia, tries to feed Zeus human remains in a pie at a banquet and is punished by being turned into a wolf. In another, he offends Zeus by sacrificing a human infant on the god’s altar, after which not only the king but anyone who sacrifices there suffers lupine transformation—and can return to human shape only if he manages not to eat human flesh for eight years.

  “What’s the longest you’ve gone?” she asked.

  “Four moons.”

  “How close would you get to eight years?”

  “Eight years might as well be eight thousand. You know that. There’s no going back.”

  A little while passed before she said, “No. I know.”

  I was aflutter with urgent masculinity, a scowling hyperreadiness to do violence to anyone or anything that might have the obscene inclination to harm her. It was very difficult not to keep putting my hands on her, my arms around her, my body and soul between her and all conceivable dangers. It was such sweetness, such an undeserved relief not to have to care about myself anymore. Only her. Only her.

  “It’s always going to b
e like this,” she said. “On the run. Looking over your shoulder. Getting away with it. What a disgusting phrase that is, really. Getting away with it. I wasn’t going to drown myself, by the way. Can we drown?”

  “Yes. In both forms. And burn, eventually.”

  The sea’s motion around our legs gave us the illusion of swaying.

  “I looked at fabric swatches with my dad and Alison when we stopped in New York,” she said. “We’re redecorating the place on Twenty-eighth Street. And three days earlier I’d fucked you with my face buried in a man’s ripped-open corpse.”

  She laughed, once—not, as many would have, histrionically—but because what she’d said was both factually correct and sounded like a line from a cult comedy horror film.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s right.” I knew why she’d said it. Your unavowed atrocities kill you from the inside out. What is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? Jacqueline Delon had asked. She was wrong. It’s a survival necessity. You can’t live if you can’t accept what you are, and you can’t accept what you are if you can’t say what you do. The power of naming, as old as Adam.