The Last Werewolf

“I don’t even know if the trains are running.”

“Every hour from Paddington or Waterloo. There’s a four-by-four booked for you at the Alamo office in St. Ives. Use the Tom Carlyle ID. There’s something else you should know.”

“What?”

“Someone hit one of Mubarak’s places in Cairo three months back. Guards neutralised with rapid-acting tranx. No forced entry, an inside job.”

Housani Mubarak, Eyptian dealer in stolen antiquities. At one time or another half the Middle Eastern market’s passed through his hands.

“Point is,” Harley continued, “they left everything in place. Took one small box of worthless crap formerly of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Mubarak’s in a state. Can’t get past the fact there was nothing valuable in the box.”

“So what was in the box?”

“Quinn’s book.”

For a moment I didn’t speak. Suffered a second dreary surge of pity and irritation. Painful to see how far Harley was willing to reach. “Harls,” I said, gently. “Please don’t be ludicrous.”

Quinn’s book, if it ever existed, was the journal of Alexander Quinn, a nineteenth-century archaeologist who had, in Mesopotamia in 1863, allegedly stumbled on the story of the authentic origin of werewolves and written it down in his diary. “Allegedly” being the key word. Neither Quinn nor his book made it out of the desert. A hundred years ago tracking this document down had been an idiotic obsession of mine. Now we might as well have been talking about Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy.

“I’m just telling you,” Harley said. “It’s a possibility. You’ve never been the only one looking for it.”

“I’m not looking for it. I haven’t been looking for it for years. I don’t care about any of that stuff anymore.”

“Right. You don’t want to know how it all started. You don’t want to know what it all means.”

“I already know what it all means.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Silence again. The bulging insistence of the real and Harley’s palpable effort to ignore it. This was how it would be between now and the end, him covering his eyes and stopping his ears and holding in the words until it was absolutely beyond denial that we were at the end. And then what? What could he say to me except Good-bye? Or I to him except Sorry? Sadness went through me like a muscle relaxant. So many moments bring me to the conclusion I don’t want any more moments.

“Call me when you get to Cornwall,” he said, then hung up.

9

A MILE FROM the village of Zennor, south of the promontory known as Gunard’s Head, the Cornish coast concertinas in a series of narrow coves and jagged inlets. The beaches—it’s a stretch to call them beaches—are shingle and stone and even a full day of sun leaves them literally and figuratively cold. The onyxy water would be mildly amused by you drowning in it. Local teenagers stymied into near autism or restless violence come here and drink and smoke and make fires and work with numb yearning through the calculus of fornication. The rocks go up steeply on either side.

“The Pines” is a tall house overlooking one of these coves, backed by a hill of coniferous woodland that gives it its name. It sits at the seaward end of a deep valley, accessed by a dirt track (no through route) down from the B road that links the coastal villages for ten miles in each direction. A former cattle farm, now equestrian centre, lies a mile inland, and the nearest domestic household is out of eye- and earshot on the other side of the woods where the track leaves the road.

This place ought, given what I’ve come here for, to have special significance, but it doesn’t. I wasn’t born here. I didn’t become a werewolf here. I’ve never killed anyone here, though a victim might scream his brains out unheard by all but spiders and mice. There have, over the years, been valuables (liquidated this last half century) but none stashed here, no Holbein in the attic, no Rodin under the stairs. I acquired the property because I had nothing in the southwest and because these devilish wriggling inlets are ideal for Harley’s outs by sea. For all that, I’ve used it maybe three or four times in twenty years.

Yet here I am. Mailer famously labelled writing the spooky art. He was right. There’s a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I’ve never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other place will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer’s, invokes occult necessities. The damp rooms are high-ceilinged and largely bare. Furniture, such as it is, is miscellaneous and secondhand: a cream seventies vinyl couch; a Formica dining table; a sagging bed into the mattress of which something’s burrowed with what looks like sexual fury. Everything’s been gnawed, nibbled, bored, colonised, webbed. Last night three foxes came up from the cellar and sat nearby on the floor, concussed by my authority. (Dog family. Anything canine succumbs. There are beautiful women in Manhattan who would have married me on the spot for the charm I had over their mutts. Wow, he normally hates guys. I’ve never seen him like this. Do you live around here?) The central heating works, though after my first night I drove into Zennor and bought wood for the fires. HQ is the lounge. I’m stocked up with Camels, Scotch, mini-market basics. No TV, no Internet, no radio, no books. Nothing to aid procrastination. Procrastination, it turns out, does well enough without aid: This is the third night I’ve managed not to write what I’ve come here to write. Hours have gone fire-gazing or staring out to sea or merely lying in a whiskied doze warmed by the foxes’ mute kinship.

Surveillance has followed as planned. I did some token fancy footwork en route to Paddington but made at least three WOCOP agents still with me on the Penzance train. If they didn’t have cars waiting they might have lost me in St. Ives, but by midnight the dark said they’d found me again. Not a comfy gig for them. You’re staking out the world’s last living werewolf but most of the time you’re thinking about your thermos, your chilblains, your frozen butt, the heaven of getting out of the snow and back into the van. I considered inviting them in. Rejected it: more procrastination. The dial went up a notch on Day Two; I think Ellis arrived. Grainer, my gut tells me, is keeping his distance, doesn’t want the tension spoiled. We’re like Connie and Mellors at the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, apart, chaste, happily purifying ourselves in honour of the coming consummation.

Very well. Night has drawn in. The foxes are out hunting. There’s fire in the hearth and Glenlivet in my glass.

But a cigarette, surely, to gather my thoughts.

As if they’re not already gathered. As if they haven’t been gathered, in a raw-eyed mob, for a hundred and sixty-seven years.

10

New, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full, waning gibbous, second quarter, waning crescent, new. In the summer of 1842 I didn’t know the names of the phases of the moon. I didn’t know that a complete cycle is a lunation, or that the full moon is full for one night only (though it might appear so for two or three) or that the phrase “once in a blue moon” derives from the occurrence of two full moons in a single month, a phenomenon you can expect once every 2.7 years. I did know, courtesy of a wasted classical education, that to the Greeks the moon was Selene (later Artemis and Hecate), sister of Helius, who fell in love with handsome young swain Endymion, had fifty daughters by him, couldn’t stand the thought of him dying so cast him instead into an eternal sleep. As an Oxfordshire gentleman my country lore came via my tenants, who assured me that if the horns of the moon pointed slightly upwards the month would be fine, and that if the outline of the moon could be seen there was rain ahead. A mopey scullery maid I had reciprocal oral sex with three or four times in my late teens believed that bowing to the new moon and turning over any coins you had in your pockets would double your money within the month. The only thing I knew about the moon that turned out useful was that its