The Last Werewolf (10 page)

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.

H
E 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.

T
HE 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.