The Last Werewolf

love didn’t eradicate God, but it put Him into His proper distant second place.

And for this, for thy wretched arrogance, I have turned thee into a monster. At times I half-convinced myself I could hear—in the trees’ susurrations, in the chuckle of water, in the soft clamour of thin air—the Almighty’s condemnation. But the feeling was always displaced by a worse feeling: that where should have been God’s booming petulance was in fact a slab of silence the size of the universe. This intimation, of the night sky like an abandoned warehouse of stars, of the earth heaving up flora and fauna in epic meaninglessness, was a horror so unexpectedly huge I turned back to the conviction of God’s wrath with a kind of relief. Did He who made the lamb make thee?

It was dark when I reached Archer Grange, the two-hundred-year-old pile Charles shared with his mother, older sister, deaf uncle, three bull mastiffs and a staff of twenty-four. Mother and sister were summering in Bath. (A mercy: Lady Brooke disapproved of my mercantile origins and Miss Brooke disapproved of my wife.) I had a struggle with Charles. My story was that Arabella and I had had our first fight, that I’d said absurd hot things and stormed out, that what I needed was a bottle from the Brooke cellar and a bed for the night, that the walk over here had given me time enough to realise I’d been a fool, that tomorrow would see me return in conciliatory penitence. All well and good, but my friend wasn’t blind. I was wet with sweat and shaking. For God’s sake, I looked as if I’d been brawling with a bear. We must have Dr. Giles. A servant would be despatched … I argued him out of it, but the effort nearly killed me. Only the artfully sheepish admission that I’d slipped and fallen in the stream and bruised my knee and the concession that I’d take warm brandy and one of the housekeeper’s legendary herbal compresses to an early bed kept the doctor out of it. Even then Charles insisted on ministering to me himself. Soon to be married, he wanted details of the fictional domestic spat, and while he bound on Mrs. Collingwood’s malodorous poultice I in disbelief bordering hilarity concocted nonsense about my wife’s madcap tastes in interior decor and my irrational reluctance to alter any of Herne House’s furnishings. It was quite a performance. I was in the largest guest bedroom, overlooking the Grange’s ornate front gardens and fountained lawn. The moon would come up over the line of poplars at its edge. Less than an hour. Twice the urge to rip Charles’s face off with my hands nearly got the better of me. Only the brandy—of which I’d drunk half a bottle by the time he left me to my rest—saved him.

It seemed a long time I lay there waiting for the thing I didn’t believe would happen and believed would happen and knew couldn’t happen and knew must happen. The scent of honeysuckle trellised just below the open window mingled with the room’s odours of old wood and lavendered linen. For some reason I decided to fight the impulse to get up and pace around. The poultice felt like an enormous tick. I ripped it off and threw it in the chamber pot. I grabbed the bedside candlestick to see if the wax would melt in my hand. It didn’t. I dropped it on the floor. I left my body for a few moments, long enough to look down at it shivering on the bed. Pale, sweating, knees pulled up. Charles had lent me a nightshirt. Pulling it off seared and abraded me. Crazed American ideas of style, I’d said. It made me laugh out loud. She wouldn’t have cared if we’d lived in a shed. Her dark eyes were flecked with reddish gold. When I fall asleep with you, she said, it’s like I’m sleeping in you. I drifted back down into my body. He wasn’t a man and he wasn’t a wolf. Harebells crushed under an appendage neither foot nor paw, a leathery hybrid. One jewel eye a steady gleam of the lives he’d taken. His eye said, The deepest nourishment, something like love. Something like love. You’ll see. You’ll see.

The moon rose.

Blood dragged itself upwards, the whole bodysworth packed tight under the top of my skull, an impossible accommodation, a gathering breath before brutal redistribution. I saw my mouth open and my fingers working during those moments of tantalising semifreedom from my carcase. I tore out, strained, was yanked back in. This was a new frank dark sacrament, something no-nonsense, sure of itself. There were flecks of resistance—I imagined dashing my head on the stone mullion—but the other thing swept them aside. The other thing. Indeed. A brother, a tall twin from before birth with an agenda of brisk recalibration. He arrived with nonnegotiable needs—or needs negotiable only in their potential expansion: Enough now was no guarantee of enough later. My shoulders shifted, not without difficulty learned the strange game of osteomorphosis, bore the hurried tectonics, the sensation of turning to ice and the shocking thaw that left a new grammar of movement. Shoulders, wrists, ankles—first to Change, last to Change back. I rolled onto my side. Fairytaleishly too big for the bed, since everything was growing. The not toenails nor quite claws had scarred the inlaid rosewood. I dropped onto the floor dizzied by the inrushing night’s symphony of smells, from the garden’s shut roses to the fields’ wealth of dung. An acre of wheat in the south crackled and splashed. Invisible giant hands gripped my neck and twisted in opposite directions, the schoolyard bully’s Chinese burn writ large, a necessity it turned out for the head’s jerky magic into its more blatantly predatory lineaments. My lupine twin was impatient. A being was no good without a body. The slow hindquarters tested his tolerance of delay and mine of pain. My new skull shuddered and my bowels disencumbered themselves of a piping hot turd. It was still him and me but we eyed each other knowing everything depended on bridging the gap. Cooperation would come, the two strands would plait so that we would become I, but it was his birthright to take the inaugural moment by force. Do as I say. You will do as I—many of his early utterances were cut off by the inarticulate urgency of animal need. It came down like a guillotine. I knew what the need was. There was no not knowing. There was nowhere to hide the thought that I wouldn’t … that I would never—

Many of my utterances were cut off, too.

For a moment I squatted on new long hairy haunches in the open window. Matter, raped and rearranged, murmured its trauma in the quivering cells. Consciousness, it transpired, was tender, could be hurt by something rough shoving itself in next to it. He forced himself inside me. I thought of history’s violated maids—and got his sharp correction like a slap: No anachronisms, idiot. The old world’s dead.

A pause, as if a muted bell had clanged. The night’s soft tumult stopped. Complete silence and stillness. This was sufferance on his part, a moment allowed to mark the passing of the life I’d known. (For him this was the heartbreak chore to be got out of the way quickly.) I looked out at the moonlit topiary, the pale flowers, the lawn holding its breath. I waited. Nothing. Here again was the colossal silence where God’s, someone’s, anyone’s voice should have been. Learn this lesson now, my brother said, I shan’t teach it twice. There is nothing. It means nothing. Then the night exhaled and flowed again. I knew with clairvoyant weariness I’d go back countless times to the question of why, how, but knew too I carried the answer inside. It had gone in like an inhaled spec of toxic dust. Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know. A few seconds wasn’t much to swallow a universe of pointlessness, but it was all the time I had.

A breeze stirred the honeysuckle, the hairs on my ears and delirious wet snout. My scrotum twitched and my breath passed hot over my tongue. My anus was tenderly alert. I pictured my human self jumping the twenty feet, felt the shock of smashed ankles and slivered shins—then the new power like an inkling of depravity. I leaped from the window and bounded into the moonlight.

12

FIELDS ROLLED UNDER me. Summer dry grass and the fruit-sour of cowshit. Daisies and buttercups frail lights in the land’s umber. Cattle and sheep fled, shrank, huddled at the hedgerows. Not these. All right, but the air was plump and beating with bodywarm life and its stink of fear and the moon was a woman whose smile and wide-openness seared with generous demand. My long jaws and hybrid hands ached with what they could do. Orion swung up over the woods and the question how far back do we …? Greeks? Egyptians? The myth of Lycaon. And hadn’t I read somewhere that the American tribes—but the trees closed over me and soon too soon the pork-sweet and ironish odour of human flesh and blood stunned me into a swooning halt.

My brother was a capricious gravity. At moments his pull had been light. Now I fell to him as if a trapdoor had opened under my feet.

Bragg was Charles’s gamekeeper.

This was his cottage.

Bragg was out hunting poachers.

This was Bragg’s wife.

This was no. This was yes. This was him. This was me.

Nature doesn’t judge. An earthworm curled and uncurled under my foot. The air gave its odours—sage, sawdust, wet wood, compost, lavender, charcoal—as I crept towards her. Fifteen paces. Ten. Five. Close enough to