The Last Werewolf (15 page)

I turned off the main road at Trefor and the WOCOP vehicle followed, stopped a token fifty feet behind me when I pulled over at the seaward edge of the village. I was sweating. The Curse played preview blasts of free jazz in my blood, my goosefleshed skin. The hand I lifted to wipe my face was the impatient ghost of the other hand, the hybrid thing, heavy, elegant, claw-tipped. Transformation was less than twenty-four hours away. My body heat filled the car. I got out.

Better. Cold wind and rain. Hands, throat, face, scalp, all cooled. The beach was near. A pale footpath led down to it. I took it, overcoat flapping. A WOCOP van door opened, closed.
This
would very soon become intolerable, this low-tech, this
panto
surveillance, ordered surely by Grainer, an extra satirical irritant, but I couldn’t think about it now. There was only the one thing to think about, the one thing to decide.

It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick.

Knolly turf gave way to shallow sand dunes. A sudden rough fresh odour of the sea. The old Somme survivor stirred: Margate’s salt air had come in through the open window and mingled with the lovely between-the-legs taste of his girl. (Their memories clog me like arterial fur. I’m
full
, I said to Harley. I have achieved fucking
plenum.
)

A marker buoy clanged, muted by wind and rain. The lights of a tanker twinkled, conjured a vision of a snug galley, cable-knit sweaters, tin mugs, roll-up-fag smoke. I could hear a helicopter somewhere inland, a sound like an endlessly discharging machine gun.

What’s my moti
vation
? lousy actors want to know. Grainer had given me a legitimate one.
I killed your friend, now you want to kill me
.

It almost worked. The fuse leading to the appropriate emotional bomb lit, crackled, glowed, dazzled for a few heartbeats, then faltered, sputtered,
died. I couldn’t make it mean enough. I couldn’t make it mean anything. Vengeance for the murdered supposed the dead enjoyed sufficient afterlife to appreciate your efforts. The dead enjoyed nothing of the kind. The dead didn’t go anywhere, except, if you were the monster who’d taken their lives and devoured them, into you. That’s the gift I should have given Harley, or rather made him give me. At least that way we would have been together at the end.

I turned inland, light of heart and heavy as the Dead Sea, thinking, So thank you, dear Grainer, but no—when two things happened.

The first was that I put my hands in my coat pockets and felt in one of them the woollen hat Harley had insisted I take that night in the snow. Your fucking
head
will freeze, moron, he’d said. Because he’d loved me and I hadn’t loved him we’d cast the relationship as irascible doting father and moody son. It had begun self-consciously, facetiously, but like so much that begins that way acquired some of the emotional substance it lampooned. And this memory, in the perverse way of these things, did pierce me, set an ache in the empty place where the energy to go after Grainer should be.

The second was that the agent, who’d followed me and was now down on one knee not twenty feet away, fired his weapon directly at me.

I felt a single icy stab in my thigh, an eternal three seconds of something like mild outrage—then all the lights went out.

W
HATEVER THEY USED
they didn’t get the dosage right the first time. I floated up to consciousness just long enough to deduce—from the tremor, the noise, the shape of the ceiling—that I was in the helicopter. Restraints pinned my arms, legs, chest, head. A man’s voice (definitely
not
a vampire’s) said in French, Fuck me, he’s awake—then I felt the scratch of a needle, and darkness closed over me again.

•

Transformation woke me to the smell of rust and fuel and seaweed. I was lying on my spasming back on a metal table and the restraints were gone. So were my clothes. Shoulders, shins, head, hands and haunches shunted blood and hurried bone to meet the Curse’s metamorphic demand. My circus of consumed lives stirred. The world felt strangely undulant. I thought, Well, I hope you’re ready for this, kidnapping fuckers, whoever you are. Then, throbbing with Hunger for living meat, I howled and rolled over onto my side.

Bright halogen lighting showed I was in a cage.

In what looked like the hold of a ship.

Being filmed.

Beyond the bars three men and a woman stood between a pair of tripod-mounted motion-sensitive cameras. One of the men was the agent who’d tranquilized me, early thirties, with a sullen, guinea-piggish face, wearing a nose stud and a black woollen cap. The other two were large skinheads in unmatching fatigues and Timberlands. One, arms covered in golden fuzz, was worryingly glazed. The other was baby-faced, with surprised eyes and a dimpled chin. Both were equipped with automatic rifles and side arms.

The woman, in tight white trousers and a clinging bloodred top, was Jacqueline Delon.

She hadn’t changed much in ten years. Slender, petite-breasted with a tiny abdomen and a lean face. Short red hair in the boyish style only French women seem able to carry off. The last time I’d seen her, outside the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, big sunglasses had hidden her eyes, and my inference—of constipation and usefully disturbed sexuality—had been drawn (wishfully, lazily) from the thin-lipped mouth and the patent narcissism of her deportment. Here, however,
were
the eyes, narrow and dirty green, full of insomniac intelligence, a bright front of compulsive playfulness over God only knew what, fear of death, self-avoidance, money-guilt, loneliness, hunger for love—possibly just immense boredom.

“Can he talk?” the baby-faced skinhead asked,
en français
.

“No,” Jacqueline said. “But he understands. So don’t say anything you might regret.”

Without the faintest twitch of warning I flung myself snarling at the bars.

To her credit, Jacqueline barely flinched. The men—to a man—leaped backwards, the two meat-goons with guns raised, the Tranquilizer with a priceless falsetto shriek.

Immediately, I subsided, stood down, shook my head
dear-oh-dear
fashion, a portion of dignity regained. The table I’d woken up on was, I now saw, a huge metal crate. I sauntered back to it and lay down, hands folded on my belly, ankles crossed. Jacqueline laughed, with charming subdued musicality.

“Fuck
me
,” the baby-faced skinhead said.

“He’s playing with you,” Jacqueline said. Then to the Tranquilizer: “For God’s sake, don’t be such a baby. Turn off the cameras.”

Apparent nonchalance notwithstanding, I was booming with Hunger. And in a cage. Mentally I flashed forward a few hours to the cold turkey scene from every heroin-addict movie. Please, man, just somethin, you gotta give me
some
thin. I’m not gonna
make
it. Oh God, it hurts …

Jacqueline stepped forward and wrapped her red-nailed fingers (blouse-matching) around the bars of the cage. “Jacob,” she said, in English, “I’m so sorry for all this. It’s not what it appears, I promise. I know you can’t answer me, so just let me talk for a moment. My name is Jacqueline Delon. I’ve wanted to speak with you for some time. I have a proposition for you. But that can wait. You must be wondering where you are.”

I didn’t move. The cage was bolted to the floor. Other than a few wooden crates, some heaps of rope, rolls of tarp and half a dozen oil drums the hold was empty.

“You’re on board the freight ship
Hecate
and we’re en route to Biarritz where I have a comfortable place and where I hope we can have a mutually rewarding conversation. Aside from this current indignity, for which I apologise again, I intend you absolutely no harm or discomfort, and as soon as you’re no longer a risk to myself or my crew, which should be”—she looked at her watch—“in approximately eight hours, your liberty will be restored to you, and I will personally do everything in my power to compensate you for this inconvenience. In the meantime, as a peace offering, please accept my gift to you. You’ll find it in the container you’re lying on.”

She stepped away from the cage and said quietly, “Let’s go.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“The cameras?”

“Leave them off. I’ve got what I wanted.”

The men went ahead of her. At the hold door she turned and looked back at me. “I’m so excited to meet you at last,” she said. “You’re everything I hoped you would be. I know this can be the start of something exceptional.”

After she’d gone I forced myself to lie still, listening to the Hunger turning the volume up in my blood, heartbeat the buzz-thud of a car with the stereo’s bass set to max.

Lie still
.

An idiotic injunction.

Lie still
.

Because you and I know.

Lie still
.

What’s underneath us in the box.

I
T’S NO ACCIDENT
that the great moral philosophers invariably wrote on aesthetics, too. Figuring out what made something Right (or Wrong) was akin to figuring out what made something Beautiful (or Ugly). These days scientists are in on the act: At the unprovable cosmological fringes beauty swings it. Now mathematical models are like supermodels: They have grace, symmetry, elegance. It’s hardly surprising. Modernity having done away with Absolute Moral Values and Objective Reality, there’s only beauty
left
. What theory won’t we espouse if it’s beautiful? What atrocity won’t we excuse?

Or what instinct (to stick, as Madeline would have it, to the story) won’t we overcome?

For a while, standing with my warm lethal hairy hands wrapped around the cold bars of my cage, I resisted opening the container. Truth was I felt slightly seasick. The tip of my snout was dry. Beyond my confines the full moon made its inexhaustible suggestion, sent down its unbankruptable love, weirdly mingled just then with the memory of Jacqueline Delon’s thin face and tightly red-wrapped breasts.
In the meantime, as a peace offering, please accept my gift to you
. Clearly she’d moved beyond customary limits. Courtesy of wealth.
You’re everything I hoped you would be
. The remark was an affront, subject and object in each other’s seats.
I
live up to
her
expectations? Who the fuck did she think she was?

This, of course, was the embarrassing heart of the matter. I was an animal who’d been caught, caged and observed on camera. My scrotum shrank from the shame of having been seen changing—worse, of having been
filmed
changing. And now left to perform, to do what it was in my nature to do. I was
l’objet d’une voyeuse
. Even the lion knows his debasement, mounting his mate while the bored zoo crowd looks on. To kill and eat here, now, in captivity and on show (I suspected the cameras despite
Madame’
s instruction; I suspected
other
cameras, CCTV, spyholes) would be a rich and vulgar degradation, an aesthetic (dear Maddy) offence.

Thus the Hunger got its first inkling that resistance was on the table. You’re kidding, right? the Hunger said. Then a little more sternly, You are kidding,
right?

I moved quickly to the container and threw open the lid.

Inside was a naked, white, epicene young man of perhaps twenty, gagged, bound, and judging by his pupils heavily drugged. Dirty blond greasy hair and tiny nipples. Junkie arms and a long thin penis. Whatever the drugs they weren’t proof against the vision
I
must have presented. His sore-looking eyes first focused then bugged. He roared behind his gag. An odour of fear on his nostril breath like bitters.

Oh, the Hunger said. Oh you sweet,
sweet
thing.

In their cellular prison my devoured dead roused. (A consequence of eating people: The ingested crave company. Every new victim adds a voice to the monthly chorus.) Ganymede’s ankles and wrists were blood-bruised where he’d fought his restraints. Blue circulatory webbing showed through the white skin of his belly. Terror’s mouth-watering secretions crept from his pores. My salivary glands duly discharged. In the face of such … such
meat
the thought of eight hours ahead without feeding made my teeth and nails hurt. My
hair
ached. Mentally, weakness worked its angle: Resistance would be futile. I’d crack, I’d kill him and devour him and Jacqueline Delon would watch while getting head or smoking a cigarette or eating a crème brûlée or filing her nails.

And yet.

There remained the profound aesthetic repugnance. Or less loftily, self-disgust. At getting so feebly captured. At finding myself the Entertainment. At the decades spent sick of Being a Werewolf. At carrying on regardless. At costing Harley his life. (His poor head must still be in the Vectra’s boot. The locals would notice a smell. It would make the news, pass to the world via the anchorman’s autocued disbelief: “In the Welsh village of Trefor today police discovered the
severed head
of …” Christ, the exhausting predictability of it all.)

My young man thrashed, screaming behind his gag. The ship did something, offered some large tilted response to the sea, and I genuinely
thought (God being dead etc.) I might vomit over the wretched creature. I let the lid fall shut. Then worried lest he suffocate. Jacqueline opening the case to find him not mauled but asphyxiated was hardly the denouement I was after. A quick check revealed air holes in the steel flank. Very well. But the Hunger had twigged I was serious. No barbs, no bennys, no chloroform, no laughing gas. No chains, no time locks. No teasing or dallying. Just Jake Marlowe, cold turkey, saying
No
.

There was an inner silence while the Hunger took this in.

I went back to the bars (thinking of Tantalus, of Christ in Gethsemane, unjustifiably of Samson at the Philistine Pillars), wrapped my monster fingers around the steel, closed my eyes and waited for the agony to begin.