The Last Werewolf

Latin name, luna, gives us the word lunatic. Useful because by the middle of August 1842 I’d become one.

“This is death,” Arabella said, with what sounded like detachment. “To be with you and see you and feel you but not to be known by you. I can’t bear it.” We were in the study at Herne House, me in a low chair, her standing at the unlit hearth. The room’s closed French windows looked onto a stone terrace and flower-bedded lawn, summer colours by turns dulling and vivifying in the day’s flaring and subsiding light. “And yet here I am bearing it,” she said. I was staring at the faded Bengal rug. My grandfather had made the family fortune selling Indian opium to the Chinese. “Is this what it comes to?” she asked. “Bearing what one can’t bear? The melodramatist taught a lesson, passion’s rhetoric cut down to size? I suppose the word ‘unbearable’ is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.”

Since my return from Snowdonia she’d gone through phases of her own. Initially, innocent concern. The doctor had been called twice for my fever and cramps but on both occasions the symptoms had subsided. There were other symptoms—headaches, visual disturbances, nightmares, moments of objectless entrancement—but I’d hidden them as best I could. Concealment left me furtive and sullen, led Arabella into her next phase of less innocent concern, a question or two about “any amusing fellow ramblers” Charles and I might have met on our trip, a new investigative determination in bed, something searching and irritated that morphed into fear when time after time I tore myself from her as if in disgust or contempt. Lastly, in the face of my erratic moods and inexplicable actions (I’d grab her, lock the door against servants, work her clothes loose, feel her opening to me in relieved collusion—then again recoil, curse, beg forgiveness, leave her, ride out or walk the grounds for hours) came the current phase: an almost complete conviction that the things about her I once loved were the things I now despised.

“Can I really have been so mistaken?” she asked. I could feel her looking at me but fixed my eyes on the rug. The throb of its gold and maroon kept time with my blood. “Can I really have imagined your soul so much larger than it is?” Other women would have blamed themselves. Not her. She remained in magnificent self-certainty. From deep in my fugue I blessed her rarity. “I don’t believe I can have been so wrong,” she continued. “Yet perhaps I was. I’m an American. We’re a people diseased with progress. Jacob? Look at me.”

Irony big enough for a festival: She thought I was suffering a moral reversion. She thought this, my behaviour since coming home, was a resurgence of propriety: a woman to bed but never to marry, according to the local consensus. In our first conversation over a shared breakfast table at the Metropole her eyes had advertised frank enlightened fallenness. In Eve’s place I’d have done the same and in Adam’s so would you. God put His money on shame and lost. Now it’s up to us to make the most of what we’ve won—all while she buttered a slice of bread and we talked of Geneva and her aunt prattled to Charles and the white tablecloth filled with sunlight and the silver winked. I knew from the first moment. So did Arabella. The knowledge was a perpetual latent mirth between us. She was a brunette, milk-white and supple, a little heavy in the hips. Her father had fought the British in the War of Independence. She’d been an actress, an artist’s model, once or twice a kept woman, through all a voracious reader. Eventually, penniless, she’d nearly died of pneumonia in Boston. Her only living relative, grandly dyspeptic Aunt Eliza, had swooped from Philadelphia and taken her on with the sole purpose of finding her a wealthy husband, preferably a European one, who would take her far away and off Eliza’s conscience forever. Arabella’s submission to this plan was part curiosity, part exhaustion. She’d had infatuations, never love. Fifteen years of never saying no to life had stripped her of fear—and convention. The first time we went to bed together we did with gentle greed all we could think of to do, which between us, once I got past my own astonishment, was much of what could be done. I hadn’t known desire could dissolve selves into and out of each other. I hadn’t known love’s indifference, love’s condescension to God. She was a year older than me, ten deeper. She loved in casual imperious exercise of a birthright. I loved in terror of losing her. The staff at Herne House couldn’t have been more amazed if I’d married a Bornean orang-utan.

“What do you wish?” I’d asked her one morning in the first week of our marriage. We were in bed, her lying with her wrists crossed above her head, me up on one elbow, caressing her nakedness. (The flesh had infinity in it. I must know every inch by touch yet every inch renewed its mystery the instant my hand moved on. Delightful endless futility.)

“To be as I am at this moment,” she said. Sunlight lay on her like a benign intelligence. “A happy creature. I want conversation and grass under my feet and cold water to drink and this”—she reached for my cock—“rising for me in hunger, and an occasional glimpse of my own death to keep me mindful of the beauty and preciousness of life. There. That is the complete desire of Arabella Jackson—Arabella Marlowe. Mrs. Arabella Marlowe, in fact. What do you think?”

The house’s spirits were in appalled awe of her. “I think I’ll be forever running to catch up with you,” I said.

So for a year we’d taken and taken and calmly taken without surfeit from this inheritance which restored itself daily.

Then, in mid-July, I’d gone with Charles to Snowdonia.

The question is: How long does incredulity last? How long do you go on with such things don’t exist after one such thing has risen up out of the darkness and sunk its teeth into you? The answer is: not very long. My mother had been a lip-licking consumer of Gothic novels, but more than the Vatheks and Frankensteins and Monks and Udolphos the library’s pull in my childhood was a fiendishly illustrated Bestiary of Myth and Folklore. It was in German (my father, a committed monoglot, must have acquired it for its fantastical plates), of which I couldn’t read a word. I didn’t need to. The images were sufficient. Home from Wales a day sooner than expected (Arabella was out walking) I’d rushed from the carriage straight to the mouldering stacks. It was a hot afternoon of shivering leaf shadows. There was dust in the tapestries undisturbed since the Glorious Revolution. Of course the book was still there. All these years of its quiet sentience. Now loud sentience. The King James Bible. Locke’s Essay. A complete Shakespeare. Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Turning the Bestiary’s pages I was aware of these tomes gone tense and tight-lipped, a respectable family who knew their shameful secret was about to be exposed. The room was warm and goldenly lit, laboriously aswirl with motes. My hands buzzed. One knows a fraction before seeing.

WEREWULF

In the full-page engraving up on its hind legs, maw open, tongue martially curled.

You’d think that would’ve clinched it. It didn’t. It inaugurated instead a short period of emphatic, of relieved scepticism. Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. I closed the book not as if it had told a shattering truth but as if it had exposed a preposterous lie.

A short period, I said.

Transformation’s nothing to me now (all over in less than two minutes) but it wasn’t always thus. The process has to learn you, search you out, find its optimal fit. Like murder, like sex, like everything, in fact, it gets easier the more times you do it, the more times it does you, but there’s no standard, no consistency. It gets the hang of some in three moons, others are still going through hell decades after First Bite. But however long transformation takes to bed down, debut transformation’s something no howler ever forgets.

In my dreams a small wolf slept inside me and it wasn’t comfortable. It moved its heels and elbows and paws, struggled to make space between my lungs, stomach, bladder. Occasionally a scrabbling claw punctured something and I woke. What were you dreaming? Arabella wanted to know. I knew what it was dreaming. It was dreaming of being born. The form and scale of its occupancy shifted. Sometimes its legs were in my legs, its head in my head, its paws in my hands. Other times it was barely the size of a kitten, heartburn hot and fidgety under my sternum. I’d wake and for a moment feel my face changed, reach up to touch the muzzle that wasn’t there.

Days passed and being awake guaranteed nothing. You hold a teacup or the rein of your horse and there’s your hand, your arm, looking just the same as always—but the mass is wrong, the reach, the grip. On the outside it’s you. On the inside … not. It’s not you, Arabella kept saying. It’s still me, but it’s not you. I kept moving out from under her touch, her look. Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process. I watched the mystery of myself thickening between us into a carapace. Once you’ve stopped loving someone breaking his or her heart’s just an unpleasant chore you have to get behind you. My God, you really