The Last Werewolf (30 page)

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
thunk
ed 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.

S
IX 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 be 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.

We returned to the house, a silent walk through the silent village under the constellations. For the first time since the kill I felt lust flickering again between us—then realised: She’d felt it before me, knew the next phase of the cycle had begun, was faced again with its inevitable end point. Hence thigh-deep alone in the wine dark sea.

The villa smelled of our freshly washed linen and the veranda’s potted lemon and thyme. We undressed with a strange placid precision and slipped naked between the cool sheets.

“Don’t you find it strange that I’ve taken your word for it about the drugs?” she said. Somewhere on the road trip we’d covered narcotic suppressants, my old days of the cage, the cast-iron safe, the key. I’d told her the truth: It’s possible to get through, medicined to near death, for a couple of lunations, maybe three (doing four I’d nearly killed myself—literally, I’d torn my own flesh off; if it hadn’t been for the howler’s accelerated healing I’d have bled to death), but there are two reasons for not doing it. First, it’s the worst suffering a werewolf can go through. Second, it’s pointless, because whether it’s this month or the next or the one after that, unless you commit suicide
you will certainly kill again
—and again and again and again until you die of old age or silver finds you. I’d told her all this.

“I don’t find it strange,” I said. “You see the logic. Morally a month’s abstinence here or there’s meaningless.”

“That’s not why I haven’t tried it,” she said. “I haven’t tried it because I remember what those first three times were like and the thought of going through that again terrifies me. It’s not seeing the logic. It’s cowardice.”

“I’m no different. It terrifies me, too. Plus the last time I tried it I failed.”

“But you’ve done good in the world. You’ve counterbalanced.”

“Money gestures. Which is nothing if you’ve got the stuff to burn. Besides, it doesn’t work. Money’s not legal tender in the moral world.”

My cock had stirred next to her hand. I knew she knew. Was readying herself for the exquisite capitulation. Through sorrow and shame into warmth, and the peace of having no one but each other.

“It doesn’t change,” she said. “I keep thinking there’s some way around it, but in the end it’s still either kill yourself or get on with being what you are.”

“Don’t kill yourself,” I said.

“Will you stay with me?”

“Yes.”

Just stay
.

“I might kill myself,” she said. “It’s hard to say.”

“Will you promise not to kill yourself without telling me first?”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I promise not to kill myself without telling you first.”

That night I had a tumble of vivid dreams. I think we made love again, in the half-asleep way that comes close to magic. Then more dreams. One of being repeatedly stung in the neck by an elusive insect. I thought, I must tell Talulla about this when I wake up. I must—But the thought fell off suddenly into darkness.

And when I woke, late, the room was filled with sunlight and a sea-smelling breeze, and before I lifted my head from the pillow I could feel the emptiness in the bed where her body should have been and Ellis’s voice said: “Jeez, Jake, it’s about time.”

H
E WAS SITTING
in the room’s one rattan chair at the foot of the bed with his back to the French windows that opened onto the veranda, hands clasped over his belly, one leg crossed at a wide angle over the other. Trademark black leather trousers, steel-toe-capped boots, pale denim jacket. The waist-length white-blond hair was down today. A movement of air brought me his marshy foot odour. A tuning-fork hum in my teeth brought me silver rounds in the shoulder-holstered firearm. I sat up to face him.

“We’ve got her,” he said. “Do you want Q&A or shall I just roll it out?”

“Tell me,” I said.

Ellis nodded, briefly, as if to confirm his private guess at my reaction had been correct, then he got to his feet, made a
just a sec
gesture, went out onto the veranda and came back a moment later with two cups of freshly brewed coffee. He handed me one then returned to his seat.

“First, let me reassure you,” he said. “Talulla’s alive, well, completely unharmed. She’s far from here, in a location I can’t disclose yet, but you need have absolutely no anxieties about her comfort. This I promise you, Jake.”

I set the coffee down on the bedside table. My hands were trembling. Walking back from the beach last night under the stars she’d taken my hand. Neither of us had said a word but the gesture had made both of us think, gently, of death. Now I had an image of her sitting with her knees drawn up on a spartan bunk in a windowless cell.
Alive, well, completely unharmed
. I had to believe him because not believing him left me nothing.

“I can’t do this naked,” I said.

“I understand. Go ahead.”

I got to my feet, felt the perfect vacuum where any concession to or interest in my nakedness would with anyone else have been, and dressed, quickly, in yesterday’s clothes. Then sat on the edge of the bed and lit
a Camel. My in-love self like a straitjacketed lunatic sobbed and rocked back and forth repeating
They’ve got her. They’ve got her. They’ve got her
. There was a sore spot on my neck I couldn’t resist rubbing.