The Last Werewolf (5 page)

I turned the shower off, voluptuous from the heat and the perceptible pulse of Madeline’s waiting body. One hard straight fuck,
allegro
, to kill the fizz and settle me, then the second, third and fourth movements,
adagio, ritardando, grave
. This is acute desire and acute boredom in the same glass. I do what I do with the glazed despair you see in the superobese as they chomp rhythmically through their tonnage of chocolate and fried chicken. One of the things I’ve been hanging on for is the death of my libido. I’ve lost interest in everything else, so why not? But it just keeps, as it were, coming.

A pre-coitus glance in the mirror showed the drearily familiar calm dark-eyed face (every time I see it these days I think, Oh, Jacob, do yourself a favour and
stop
) then I joined Madeline on the bed, where at my request she turned the TV off and lay on her back and opened her white-stockinged legs and placed her arms slave-girlishly above her head and
for some fifteen minutes endured the increasingly painful realisation that I wasn’t going to get an erection, while simultaneously doing everything in her power to give me one. Eventually, emphatically soft, I accepted defeat. “Hilarious though this sounds,” I said, “we’ve just made history. This has never happened to me before.”

Her professional self was miffed, and not very good at hiding it. After a clipped exhalation and a flick of the blond hair off her clavicle she said: “Do you want to try it another way?”

It’s official.

You’re the last.

I’m sorry.

It’s called delayed shock for a reason. Until getting on top of her I’d been ethereal with not having taken it in, or with having doublethinkingly taken it in and rejected it at the same time. But I’d put my hands on her waist and felt her nipples touch my chest and the softness and heat of her breath had in the way of such mysteries returned me to full and nauseous mass. It was as if I’d been ignoring a shadow on my peripheral vision only to turn and find it was a thousand-foot tidal wave, heading my way. You’re the last.

“Maybe later,” I said. “It’s not you, incidentally.” She pulled her chin in at the absurdity of that, glanced away to the invisible documentary-maker who’s always with her. Madeline’s narcissism reconfigures awkward moments as opportunities for into-camera astonishment. Er, he
llo
?

I’d slid to rest with my head on her thigh, and now lay inhaling the smell of her warm young cunt with its wreath of Dior Addict. The last image before I’d quit flubbing her was of flak-jacketed Ellis holding up Wolfgang’s giant severed lupine head while a Hunt colleague filmed the whole thing for the WOCOP annals.

“How about I give
you
a massage?” I said. If this was Hollywood I’d be dismissing her fully paid and heavily gratuitied in preparation for a night’s heroic solitary brooding, a sequence of fade-shots wet-eyed Pacino would do with baleful minimalism, staring out at the city, lit cigarette, bottle and glass, the face tranquilly letting all the death and sadness gather with a kind of defeated wisdom. But this wasn’t Hollywood. The thought of being alone all night released dizzyingly wrong adrenaline
and a second phase of denial. It didn’t bear thinking about. I removed Madeline’s stockings.

“Is that nice?” I asked, a little while later. I’d turned the lights out but left the blinds open. It was still snowing. The yellowish grey sky and white roofscape yielded a moony light, enough for the glimmer of her earrings and the oil’s sheen on her skin. I had her left foot in my hands and was working it gently.

“Nnnn,” she said. “Lush.”

I massaged in what would have been silence if not for her occasional groans, certain that if I stopped I’d be unable to tolerate my own haywire energies. I recalled how tired Harley had sounded on the phone, reread it now as the first sign of his willingness to let me go. Certainly my death would bring him up against his history, leave nothing between him and the horrors he’d helped conceal, but it would release him, too. He could retire from WOCOP. Go his ways. Chug down every day a little of what he’d become and hope to live long enough to ingest the whole ugly mass. At the very least find a place somewhere warm where he could sit straw-hatted with his bare feet in the dust and listen to what the emptiness had to say. If I needed an altruistic rationale for dying, there it was.

“Tell me some more werewolf stuff,” Madeline slurred. I’d been at it for almost an hour without fear of her conscience kicking in: There’s no boon or pleasure she doesn’t peremptorily gobble up or absorb as part of her birthright. As far as she was concerned I could have gone on pampering her all night, all year, for the rest of her life. The truth is she’s not a very good prostitute.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“Tell me about the first time you killed someone.”

The Werewolf Stuff. For Maddy it’s another client quirk, but one she’s hooked on. In the posteverything world it turns out humans can’t kick the story habit. Homer gets the last laugh. “A lovely young girl lies on a bed in the dark listening to a fairy tale,” I said. “But she’s naked and the storyteller’s hands are all over her.”

She didn’t speak for a moment, then said: “What?”

“Nothing. I seek objective correlatives for the times. Never mind. I
killed my first victim on the fourteenth of August, 1842. I was thirty-four years old.”

“1842 … So that’s …”

“I’ll be two hundred and one in March.”

“Not in bad nick then.”

“Human form sticks at the time of turning. It’s the werewolf gets arthritis and cataracts.”

“You should go on telly with this stuff.”

Tell me about the first time you killed someone
. For the monster as for the man life’s one long diminishing surprise at how much of your wretched self you find room for. But there are the exceptions, the unique unpleasantnesses, the inoperable tumours …

“A month before taking my first victim,” I said, “I was on a walking holiday with a friend—my best friend at the time, Charles Brooke—in Snowdonia. The year, as I said, was 1842. We were wealthy, educated gentlemen of neighbouring Oxfordshire estates, therefore we went about the trip as we went about everything else: with an air of good-humoured entitlement. Charles was engaged to be married in September. The summer before I’d shocked my little world by marrying a penniless thirty-year-old American woman I’d met and fallen in love with in Switzerland.”

“What were you doing in Switzerland?”

“Charles and I were on a European tour. Not as in the Rolling Stones.”

“What?”

“One went to Europe and saw the sights, it was the done thing. Arabella was travelling there with her aunt, a bad-tempered old turkey but her only means of support. We met at the Metropole Hotel in Lausanne. It was love at first sight.” I ran my thumb very gently over the moist crinkle of Madeline’s anus. A pornographer in Los Angeles said to me not long ago: The asshole’s finished. Everything gets finished. You keep coming up with crazy shit you can’t believe you’ll find the girls for, that’ll finally finish the girls. But the girls just keep turning up and finishing it. It’s depressing.

“Something there you like?” Madeline asked, arching her back.

I removed my thumb and recommenced massaging. “No, it just seemed momentarily apposite. The word ‘love.’ ”

She lowered her backside and reached down into the ice bucket, hefted the bottle of now-flat Bollinger for a swig. “Oh,” she said, only very vaguely wondering what “apposite” might mean. “Be like that then.”

“Charles and I made our camp in a forest clearing some few miles from the base of Snowdon. Pine and silver birch, a stream glimmering like tinsel in the moonlight. A full moon, naturally.”

“That’s really the thing then, is it? The full moon?”

On our wedding night Arabella and I had dragged the bedclothes to where the window’s slab of moonlight lay. I want to see it on your skin.

“Yes, the full moon’s really the thing,” I said. “We all stupidly thought it would stop after astronauts had been up there and walked on it in ’69. There was palpable species depression when it was obvious Armstrong’s one small step changed nothing for werewolves, however giant a leap it was for mankind.”

“Don’t go off,” Madeline said. “You always do that, go off on something and I get lost. It drives me mad.”

“Of course it does,” I said. “I’m sorry. You’re a child of your time. You want the story. Only the story. Very well. To resume: Charles and I lit a fire and pitched the tent. Despite the clear skies it was warm. We ate a supper of salted beef and plum jam, bread, cheese, hot coffee, then between us drank the better part of a flask of brandy. I remember the feeling of freedom, the moon and stars above, the old spirits of wood and water, the companionship of a good friend—and like a radiation from home miles away the love and desire of a beautiful, tender, fascinating woman. I said an air of entitlement earlier, didn’t I? That was true, generally, but there were moments when I was humbled by a sense of my own good fortune.”

“How d’you do it, by the way?”

“Do what?”

“Talk like this, like telly?”

It had stopped snowing. The room was a nest of appalling contemporary comfort. In the new, still, science-fictionish light we could have been on another planet. The journals are in a safe-deposit box in Manhattan. All but the current one. This one. The last one. The untellable story. Harley has the code, the spare key, the authorisation. “Practice,” I said. “Too much time on my hands. Shall I continue?”

“Sorry, yeah, go on. You had the brandy and you were feeling whatever. Free.”

“Charles had a poor head for spirits, and he was exhausted from the miles we’d covered that day. Not long after midnight he retired to the tent, and within a matter of minutes was snoring, softly.” I lifted Madeline’s hair out of the way and worked her trapezoids from scapula to occipital bone. Anatomical Latin’s an unjudgemental friend if you have to rip people apart and eat them. “While Charles slept I lay by the fire, thinking of Arabella. I considered myself the luckiest man alive. Neither she nor I was a virgin when we met, but the little boudoir experience I’d had was no preparation for what followed with her. She had rich, steady, amoral passion. What the world would have called perversion was between us a return to angelic innocence. Nothing of the body was shameful. Everything of the body was sacred.”

“Sounds like
lust
at first sight to me,” Madeline said, not without a trace of irritation. She doesn’t appreciate not being the main woman in the room, even if the competition’s been dead for a century and a half.

“Certainly there was lust,” I said. “The holiest of lusts. But make no mistake, we were as deeply in love as it’s possible to be. It’s important you understand that. It’s important for what comes later.”

“Umm.”

“You understand we were in love?”

“Got it. Oh God, yeah, do my hands. You forget about your hands.”

“If this was Poe or Stevenson or Verne or Wells I’d have been drawn away from our camp by a strange sound or glimpsed figure.”

“What?”

“Never mind. It’s not important. I got up from the fire and walked away towards the stream. Thinking about Arabella, you see, had put me in a state of unbearable arousal. I needed to, in the vernacular, toss myself off.”

Madeline said nothing but a microcurrent of professional alertness went through her skin under my palms. Oh. Right. Back on. Here we go.

“I walked perhaps twenty paces to the trees by the edge of the stream, unfastened my trousers and with my throat turned up to the moon began pleasuring myself. I knew I’d tell Arabella I’d done this when I returned
home. To her it would be one more sweet sacrament …” I’d started the tale with mechanical wryness but had been sucked in despite myself. I felt, suddenly, not how long a time two hundred years was, but how short. There was the werewolf beginning, like a thorn that had just this second scratched me. Yet somehow between then and now near enough two thousand victims. I thought of them in a concentration camp heap. My guts are a mass grave. It could so easily not have happened. It could so easily have happened to someone else.

“Go on,” Madeline prompted. The massage had paused with the narrative. Patience isn’t one of her strengths.

“It was the last moment of my life as a human being,” I continued, working my hands down her thighs, “and it was a good one: the scent of conifers, the rustle of the stream, the warm air and salving moonlight. I came, deliciously, with the image in my head of her looking at me over her shoulder as I fucked her from behind.”

“Getting the picture, babes.”

“Then the werewolf attacked.”

“Oh.”

“I say ‘attacked’ but the truth is I just happened to be in the way. He was on the run. I still had my prick in my hand when I heard a sudden commotion in the undergrowth, and in less time than it takes to tell he was on me—giant, strong-scented, frantic with fear—then gone. For one second of clarity I felt it all, the speed and bulk of him, the scourging claws, the meat stink of his breath, the ice of the bite and a single glimpse of the beautiful eyes—then he sprang away into the darkness and I lay winded, one arm in the rushing stream, my shirt gathering the weight of my own blood. Cold water, warm blood, something pleasant about the contrast. I seemed to lie there for a long time, but in reality it can only have been seconds before I saw the Hunt. They weren’t called that in those days. Back then they were SOL, the Servants of Light. On the opposite bank three cloaked men on horseback, armed with pistols and silver-tipped spears, one with a longbow and quiver of glinting arrows.”

“Seriously, you should write this down.”

“They didn’t see me, and the noise of the gallop would have drowned me out even if I’d had strength to call to them. In a moment, they too
had disappeared. For a while I lay, strangely unconcerned, between consciousness and oblivion. I don’t know how long a time passed. Seconds might have been days. The moonlight on me was like an angel and the constellations came down to me in tenderness:
Pegasus, Ursa Major, Cygnus, Orion, the Pleiades
.