The Last Werewolf (11 page)

L
AST 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.

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.