The Last Werewolf (17 page)

“I don’t know what I believed. I wanted answers. I wanted the story. Who doesn’t want the story? If someone had told me there was a blind and deaf one-legged washerwoman in Siberia who knew the origin of werewolves I’d have hired myself a yak and set off. There’s a period of being bothered with big questions. It doesn’t last forever.”

“I’m still bothered,” she said.

“You’re French. If you lot stopped bothering the coffee and tobacco industries would collapse.”

She chuckled. Brought me my drink, administered a light fingernails caress to my thigh, then paced silkily away to the Japanese table. She knelt and began undaintily helping herself. Veins showed in her white hands
and ankles; my cock stirred in dumb irritable reflex. She wasn’t falling-in-love material but the thought of eating her was already, as from a great distance, starting to appeal.

“Werewolves are not a subject for
academe
,” she said, “but you know what the professors would be saying if they were. ‘Monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs them. Species death like this is nothing more than a shift in the aggregate psychic agenda. In ages past the beast in man was hidden in the dark, disavowed. The transparency of modern history makes that impossible: We’ve seen ourselves in the concentration camps, the gulags, the jungles, the killing fields, we’ve read ourselves in the annals of True Crime. Technology turned up the lights and now there’s no getting away from the fact: The beast is redundant. It’s been us all along.’ ”

“Yes,” I said. “I keep telling myself I’m just an outmoded idea. But you know, you find yourself ripping a child open and swallowing its heart, it’s tough not to be overwhelmed by … the concrete reality of yourself.”

Another smile. She was enjoying this. Worse, I was slightly enjoying it myself. Still, the mention of Quinn’s journal and reminder of my hot years when Meaning meant something had disturbed long-settled dust.

“And in any case,” she said, “there remain vampires. If the human psyche’s so at ease with itself why are
they
doing so well?”

“I don’t concern myself with vampires,” I said.

“They regard you as primitives,” she said. Then, looking away: “It’s the absence of language, naturally.”

The second drink had gone down with shameful ease. Your fucking
head
will freeze, moron, Harley had said. Poor Harls. Once, heartbroken by a brilliant and toxic young Bosey he’d drunk himself into a semicoma that lasted two days. When he came round and realised
I
’d been there the whole time, looking after him, he’d said, confusedly: My goodness, aren’t you kind? Then he’d fallen asleep again.

“Sorry,” I said, having lost Jacqueline’s thread. “Say again?”

“Werewolves can’t talk.
Les vampyres
think this is hilarious.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course they do.” One of the great subcurses of the
Curse, this loss of speech. It’s a failure to achieve full monstrosity. Certainly it’s deeply pleasurable to open your victim’s belly with an index claw, but not as pleasurable as it would be to be able to talk to him while you did it. It’s you, Arabella had said—and animal dumbness had denied me the apotheosis of saying, Yes, it is. Purest cruelty requires that the victim knows she suffers by your free choice. It’s you. Yes, my darling, it’s me. Now, observe.

“They’re inclined to snobbery to start with,” Jacqueline said. “This business of werewolf inarticulacy is the great justification. They do have such a large body of literature.”

This has been one of the great vampiric contentions, that they constitute a civilisation: They have art, culture, division of labour, political and legal systems. There’s no lycanthropic parallel. The yeehaw explanation is we’re too busy chasing meat’n’pussy, but the truth is the language of the
wer
is anathema to the
wulf
. After a few transformations your human self starts to lose interest in books.
Reading
begins to give you a blood-brown headache. People describe you as laconic. Getting the sentences out feels like a giant impure labour. I’ve heard tell of howlers going decades barely uttering a word.

“Yeah,” I said to Jacqueline, as I lit another Camel, “we’re not great ones for belles-lettres.”

“Yourself excepted.”

Well, yes. Obviously
I
, anomalously, still can’t fucking shut up. I blew a smoke ring. “Since you’ve read the journal there’s no point my denying it,” I said.

“How do you explain it?”

“I must like a whore unpack my heart with words.”

“Of course, but why?”

“Congenital logorrhoea.”

“Jake,
please
. It’s so obvious.”

“And yet I don’t see it.”

She shook her head, smiling. Popped a strawberry into her mouth, chewed, swallowed. Wiped her hands on a fat napkin. “Yes, you do. You’re just embarrassed by it. You’ve held on to language because without language there’s no morality.”

“Ah, yes, I spend a lot of time considering morality, when I’m not slaughtering people and gobbling them all up.”

“I’m talking about testimony. I’m talking about
bearing witness to yourself
. What is this—what are the journals—if not the compulsion to tell the truth of what you are? And what is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? It’s perfectly Kantian.”

She presented a peculiarly annoying attractive figure sitting there in her ivory silk robe with her legs tucked under her. “What was your phrase? ‘God’s gone, meaning too, yet aesthetic fraudulence still has the power to shame …’
Aesthetic
fraudulence, notice. Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly—and my dear man, you can’t stop caring about beauty.
That
is your real predicament, your real curse.”

“Fascinating the way other people see things,” I said. “But I really must be going.” I swung
my
legs over the edge of the bed and reached for my trousers.

“I have Quinn’s book,” she said.

There’s a distinctive aural quality to lies. This didn’t have it. It cost me some effort to hold—after the briefest hesitation—to my purpose with the trousers. I stood and pulled them on. You pull your trousers on and everything seems fractionally less desperate. Nonetheless I felt sick. You get used to no one having anything (except their flesh and blood, except their
life
) you could possibly want. You take your sufficiency for granted. You forget it’s contingent. You forget it’s a luxury.

“Good,” she said, observing. “I see you know I’m telling the truth. That saves us some time.”

“How did you get it?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew. The memory of Harley—
someone hit one of Mubarak’s places three months ago
—like the punch line that draws a groan.

“Oh, that’s too long a story for now. Stay for dinner and I’ll tell you. Right now I absolutely must take a shower.” She got to her feet.

“This is the technique then, is it? Keep me dangling?”

“Well, if you’re not going to see reason.”

“What makes you think I give a fuck these days? I don’t give a fuck, actually, now that I think of it.”

“Then feel free to leave. If you genuinely have no interest then walk out
the way we came in. You’ll find my driver at the gate. He’s instructed to take you wherever you care to go.”

“What
do
you want from me?” I asked her.

She turned, one hand in the pocket of her robe, and looked out through the wall of glass. “I told you,” she said. “I want you to live.”

I
FINISHED DRESSING
. Sunlight filled the perfumed room. I went to the huge window and, as she had, looked out. Dark conifers swept down to the pale line of the beach and the sea’s glitter. Blue cloudless sky, London’s recent snow a world away and a century ago, though this was still Europe, still early March. The sex had carried us into late afternoon. My shoulders ached. The junkie’s gobbled life was finding room, incredibly, the last seat in a packed arena, that solid deafening crowd of living dead. Somewhere among them an unripe foetus the size of a plum, my daughter, my son.

There were two explanations for what I was doing here. One was that Jacqueline Delon was sufficiently bored and unhinged for the keeping of a werewolf as an erotic pet to seem a rejuvenating novelty. The other was that she had a motive as yet unknown which required, in addition to the palaver of kidnapping me and accessorising herself to murder, temporary dissemblance. A woman of intriguingly acute ambiguity even without the bait of Quinn’s book.

Oh Jesus, Quinn’s book.

Thirty-seven-year-old Alexander Quinn went out to Mesopotamia for the third and final time in the spring of 1863. A double first in classics and ancient history from Oxford ought to have bricked him into academia for life, but by the time he left Kings in 1848 he was ravenous for the world beyond college walls. Brief failed stints in the British Museum, the Foreign Office (Burma) and the East India Company (Bombay) finagled by his Old Etonian dad confirmed the futility of sticking him behind a desk, and by 1854 he was on his first archaeological expedition to the Middle East under the Bacchic eye of Lord William Greaves, a known occultist roué, whom Quinn (no sluggard with the ladies himself) had met and befriended as a fellow whorer at Kate Hamilton’s. Greaves, a collector of religious antiquities and student of the Black Arts, had been
thrilled to read of Botta’s discoveries at Nineveh and Khorsabad and was convinced ancient objects of talismanic power were there for the taking if one merely had the money, leisure and inclination to go and dig them up. Quinn, desperate to get his hands dusty and put his colloquial Arabic to use, pretended an interest in diabolism and offered his services as an interpreter-cum-right-hand-man. Which, over the next nine years, is exactly what he became. Along with site management and the cataloguing of finds Quinn greased the requisite bureaucrats, landowners, tribal elders and customs officers and still found time to score opium and girls for his lordship.

How do I know all this?

Because I spent time finding it out.

Why did I spend time finding it out?

Because before his death in 1863 Quinn claimed to have discovered the origin of werewolves.

It’s a ridiculous story, of course, but history’s full of ridiculous stories.
You can’t make this shit up
, one finds oneself saying, whenever the seemingly prosaic old world lifts the veil on its synchronicities. Meanwhile the seemingly prosaic old world shrugs: Hey, don’t ask me. I just work here.

As so often with Great Finds, the man looking was looking for something else. Quinn had travelled to the town of Al Qusayr, whence rumour had reached the archaeologists of an underground temple fifteen miles away, literally fallen into by a retarded goatherd. Greaves, sceptical (the natives had learned quickly there was money to be made selling “information” to eccentric Europeans), had given Quinn the site as a pet project, and the protégé had set off from the camp in Al Qusayr with camels, a guide and two servants, one of whom was to be despatched with the guide back to his lordship to summon hands and equipment should the rumours turn out to be fact.

Which, to everyone’s surprise, they did. The subsequent excavations at Gharab revealed not just a temple but an entire sunken village dating from the third millennium
B.C
. Lord Greaves cleaned up his act and led the dig, partly because the wealth of artefacts shocked him into a renaissance of genuine interest and partly out of respect for the good man he’d lost.

For Alexander Quinn never made it back to camp. He and his little scouting party were ambushed by bandits on their return journey. Quinn, the guide and one of the servants were killed. The other servant, John Fletcher, though left for dead, survived a knife wound to the shoulder, wandered delirious for a day in the desert, then was picked up by a merchant caravan. On the strength of the only word they understood, “Qusayr,” the merchants returned him to Greaves there two days later, where, having made it through fever and miraculously dodged infection, he told his lordship the whole story.

The night before the attack, Fletcher reported, the party, camped by the temple site, had been startled by the arrival of an astonishingly old man in rags, who’d come crawling on hands and knees out of the darkness. Skeletal and half blind, he spoke a dialect even the guide only partly understood, but they didn’t need the translator to see the old fellow was close to death. When Quinn made to send for help the old man stopped him. No point. Time to die. But listen. Keep story. No children so tell you. You write down. Keep story. He’d laughed when he said this, at himself it seemed. Fletcher had supposed him mad. Quinn, unwilling to simply let the man die, sent the servants back to the village for help, but by the time they returned the old man had expired. In those two hours he had told, Quinn claimed, an extraordinary story, a story which, if its provenance was genuine, had been passed down from the days before Etana and which would provide the oldest account of the origin of a near worldwide myth—of humans who became wolves.

Quinn, via the guide’s translation, had written the whole thing down in his journal.

That wasn’t all. But for the rags on his back the old man’s only possession, wrapped in the remains of a gunnysack, was a piece of stone, some ten inches by eight, clearly a fragment of a larger tablet, bearing hieroglyphs Quinn couldn’t decipher, but which, according to the old man, was proof of the truth of his tale.

Which isn’t much, is it? Hardly sufficient, you’d think, to form the basis of a neurotic obsession for the better part of forty years. Because
for
forty years the thought of Quinn’s lost journal—and the story of the Men Who Became Wolves—never ceased being a drain on my energies.

There’s a limit to what one can do. I interviewed John Fletcher, Lord Greaves, all the surviving members of the 1863 expedition. I travelled with an interpreter to Al Qusayr and on to the excavated temple at Gharab. I sought out bandit chiefs and offered rewards for information. I retained half a dozen dealers in antiquities and rare books to keep an eye on the market, despite the laughably overwhelming likelihood that Quinn’s diary had simply been deemed worthless and chucked away to be long since swallowed by the desert sand. It all took time, money, mental illness. I knew it was a ludicrous fixation. (One knows one’s madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.) When the
Times
reported the story in May of 1863 I’d been a werewolf for twenty-one years. The big questions didn’t, it turned out, go away. Once a month I transformed into a monster, part man, part wolf. Fair enough. I killed and devoured humans, starting with my wife. Very well. But where did it all
fit in
? Was my species God’s handiwork or the Devil’s? Darwin’s
Origin
, published four years earlier, had said, effectively, neither, but old habits died hard. What would happen to me when
I
died? Had I still a soul? Where and when did werewolves begin?