The Last Werewolf (39 page)

I took Grainer’s pistol and three ammunition clips from his belt. Not that I had a clue how to use it. I wasn’t even sure I’d identified the safety correctly. I’d found
some
thing that looked like a safety switch and moved it to the opposite setting, but there was still, I had to admit, a good chance of the damned thing going off and hitting me in the foot.

It wasn’t easy to leave Jake. Twice I moved away and came back, a last look, touch, smell. Werewolves, I was discovering, can’t weep. Uncried tears knotted my throat. The raw fact of my aloneness kept dissolving into the fantasy of him waking up.

Don’t be sentimental. Get going. You’ve got work to do
.

Jake’s spirit, or my own fictionalised version of it. At any rate it got me to my feet and forced me, step by step, away into the trees.

I’d only gone a few paces, however, when I found Cloquet. It couldn’t have been anyone else, from Jake’s description, and of course there was the silver javelin, custom-made, with his and Jacqueline Delon’s names entwined around it in angelic script, now buried in Grainer’s chest. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to find a werewolf standing over him, nor, to his credit, much afraid. He was lying propped against a beech tree with a cigarette in one hand and a half-empty bottle of vodka in the other. He’d been hit by a bullet in the left leg. The Hunter’s wild burst from the automatic that had missed Jake and peppered the trees.

“Bonsoir, mademoiselle,”
he said. Then in English. “He killed my queen. Therefore I killed him.
C’est tout
. God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Kill me if you like, but don’t make me suffer.”

You saved my life, I wanted to say, but of course I couldn’t. The impulse to help him was strangely acute, partly for Jake’s sake, somehow, since I knew they’d shared an odd camaraderie—but what could I do?

There was the armoured van, but it held Poulsom’s messy remains, and in any case I couldn’t face going back there. The motorcyclist’s rhetorical question came back to me:
What sort of moron tails someone in a white car?
This sort, evidently. Not quite believing what I was doing, I pointed to him then mimed holding a steering wheel. Repeated the gesture.
Where is your car?

Not surprisingly, it took him a few moments to get his head around what he was seeing. When he did, he laughed, one half-cracked burst of hysteria that started and stopped abruptly. I felt Jake’s spirit like the sun’s warmth on my back.

“Un kilometre,”
Cloquet said, pointing behind himself. I could tell his light had come back on. Until this moment he’d thought he’d reached the end of himself. Now here was life again. A werewolf offering help. I held
out my hand to him. He laughed again, then became slightly teary, then took it.

•

Which really completes the job I set out to do here, to finish Jake’s story. I wanted to stick strictly to the events, to leave
feelings
out of it—but I find reading back over these few pages that I haven’t quite managed that. It’s surprisingly hard (dear Maddy, as Jake would have said) to stick to the story. Of course there’s
another
story (among other things of how to get a nine-foot werewolf into a Land Rover) but it doesn’t belong here. There might be time for that later. I get the feeling I’ve caught the writing bug, in honour of Jake, yes, but also from psychological necessity. Talking to yourself might not cure loneliness, but it helps.

A month has passed since that night in Beddgelert forest, and though I’ve survived it hasn’t been easy. I couldn’t have done it without Cloquet’s help—but again, that’s a story for another time.

Tomorrow, if all goes as planned, I leave for New York.

In the meantime there’s the Curse to get through. Tonight’s the full moon, and the Hunger doesn’t care what you’ve been through or what your fears are or where you’ll be next week. There’s a comfort in it, the purity of its demand, its imperviousness to reason or remorse. The hunger, in its vicious simplicity, teaches you how to be a werewolf.

Maybe that’s the best way to end this postscript, with a statement of final acceptance. My name is Talulla Mary Apollonia Demetriou, and I am the last living werewolf on earth.

Until my baby’s born. Then there’ll be two of us.

A big howl of appreciation to: Jonny Geller, Jane Gelfman, Melissa Pimentel, Nick Marston, Jamie Byng, Francis Bickmore, Sonny Mehta, Marty Asher and all at Canongate and Knopf; to Stephen Coates for musical genius and free psychotherapy; and to Kim Teasdale, without whom none of it would be any fun at all.

For the sound track to
The Last Werewolf
by The Real Tuesday Weld, go to:
www.tuesdayweld.com/thelastwerewolf
.

Glen Duncan is the author of seven previous novels. He was chosen by both
Arena
and
The Times Literary Supplement
(London) as one of Britain’s best young novelists. He lives in London.