The Last Werewolf

You think horror enters spectacularly. It doesn’t. It just prosaically turns up. Even in the first seconds you know you’ll find it a room. I thought (how not?) of Harley’s face at our farewell, of how delicate he’d felt in my arms. Weariness tingled through me, as if the heart had released a stimulant that wasn’t working. Simultaneously there was a dreary bodily certainty that something would be demanded of me, that I’d have to do something.

“We’re aware of your intention for tomorrow night, Jake,” Grainer said. “To take it lying down. We don’t like it.”

“No challenge for you.”

“Exactly. Do you know I’ve been dreaming about it? In this dream, you’re sitting— fully transformed in broad daylight—all alone at one of those picnic tables in a forest. When I come out of the trees you’re pleased to see me. You wave at me, for Christ’s sake. I mean I do it, I cut off your head, but you’re just sitting there, smiling, nodding. It’s depressing as hell. I don’t want that.”

“How long have you known about Harley?”

“Years. You two were pretty slack. That wasn’t much of a challenge, either.”

“Surveillance?”

“Everything. The phones, the mobiles, the Earl’s Court place, Harley’s club. Jesus, Jake, we’ve had you bugged a dozen times.”

Some relief, naturally. You can’t live in dread of something for long without beginning to crave it.

“So the French story, this idiot Cloquet, that’s bullshit?” Questions stacked up. Only one mattered: What had they done with Harley? Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—

Grainer shook his head. “That guy, God what a loon. No, the story you got from Harley was true, as far as it went. Cloquet was tailing you in Paris, and the WOCOP agent was tailing him. The only thing Harley didn’t know was that we knew all about it. We’ve known your whereabouts more or less continuously since 2003. Harley’s been your surveillance, albeit unwittingly. Anyway, when it became apparent Cloquet was planning to take you out himself he was stopped. By me, as a matter of fact. As you know, I consider you my responsibility. Exclusively.”

“And Cloquet is?”

“Jacqui Delon’s boyfriend, or one of them. Cokehead wastrel. That’s all we know. She seemed pretty pissed when she found out he’d pulled a gun on you.”

“Are you a spy?” Madeline asked me, quietly.

“No,” I said.

“He’s a werewolf, honey,” Grainer said. “Surely you’ve told her, Jake?”

“As a matter of fact I have.” I felt tired again. Maddy’s look of fraught computation. I sincerely hoped they wouldn’t kill her. Surviving this experience might be just the epiphany to get her out of prostitution.

“It’s no way to end a war, Jake,” Grainer said. “Sit there and just …”

“Let it come down?”

“Let it come down. Doesn’t ring the right bell in the universe.”

“This is the way the world ends,” I said.

“Not your world. You’re the last of a great species. You owe the narrative something better.”

“There is no narrative. You know that.”

“There’s the one we make. It’s our responsibility.”

Ellis nodded. “Just because life’s meaningless doesn’t mean we can’t experience it meaningfully,” he said.

“Wow,” I said. “You should patent that. I’ve got one too: You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps.” Anger, after all, was rising through the blood vessels. Not at Ellis’s banality (nor Grainer’s arrogance) but at being forced into something when all I wanted was nothing.

“So,” Grainer said, “Madeline’s going to come downstairs with us for a moment. You’ll stay here. We’ll send her back with the key for the cuffs, and the information you’ll need.”

“Information?”

“About Harley. Madeline, do that and you’re absolutely free to go. Fuck it up or try anything and you’re dead. Understood?” Maddy nodded, swallowed. Her little nostrils flared. Under the gun’s gentle direction she got to her stilettoed feet. The faintest tremor in her knees. Ellis stood, replaced the chair. “Sit tight, Jake,” Grainer said. “She’ll be back soon.”

I waited. The room waited. Tomorrow night’s full moon tugged and tweaked and smacked. There are these pretransformation shenanigans, ghost spasms, the muscles and bones getting ahead of themselves. The monster knows the length of its wait as a dog knows the length of its leash, but like the dog it pulls and chokes. My front tooth was already starting its grow-back with a fibrous tickle. Information about Harley. They had him somewhere, presumably. This is the deal: He stays alive as long as you do. Give up and he gets it. Ellis’s idea, I was sure. A scheme of simple symmetry handed down from his remote height. I’d imagined … What had I imagined? Kneeling like Anne Boleyn while Grainer’s blade caught the moonlight? Sitting full-lotus smiling down the muzzle of a silver-loaded gun? At any rate I’d imagined yielding. Stillness, stars, reverence for the last benignly indifferent details. A happy death.

The door opened and Madeline entered, unaccompanied, carrying a small leather holdall. Also the handcuffs’ key. She closed the door behind her and put the bag on the floor. Then she helped me to my feet and unlocked the restraints. All done I could tell in accordance with specific instructions. She radiated moist heat. In the cleavage of the black halterneck her breasts were wet. One of the clipped-up strands of hair was down. Poignant to see her this way, stripped of her professional self, a human, afraid. Dangerous, too: Artless humanity made her wrongly appetising. Now that she’d been forced into depth I’d want to kill and eat her. One way or another my time with her was over.

“I have to say something,” she said. “What they told me. They said to say to you: ‘Think of it as an incentive.’ Now you’re supposed to open the bag.”

She hadn’t opened the bag. Had been told not to. She would have carried it up in the lift denying it was there, denying her own hand holding it, her arm, her shoulder, that whole side of her body. Because of course the lower animal in her knew. The lower animal knew and the higher animal threw up the ice wall of denial. She said nothing now as I knelt and opened the zip, only leaned back against the door, bare shoulders held a fraction higher than usual. Instinct warned her this was a big moment. She might not be able to carry on being herself after it. The possibility gave her an aliveness she’d never known, as if she’d suddenly been lifted a thousand feet in the air. In spite of everything a part of me wondered what she might become. This is the slow, grinding compulsion I’m sick of, this inevitably getting interested in people. You love life because life’s all there is, Harley had insisted. There’s no God and that’s His only Commandment.

Inside the holdall was a second bag made of tough transparent plastic, tightly sealed with tape. Inside that was Harley’s head.

20

THERE WAS A note stuck over his mouth with a message written on it in black marker: IT WASN’T PAINLESS. IT WASN’T QUICK.

“Oh my God,” Madeline said. She stood with her bare white shoulders slightly hunched and her hands pressed against her midriff. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

The face had been beaten. At leisure, I imagined. Creases in the plastic held bubbles of blood, as with vacuum-sealed beef in the supermarket. They’d made sure his eyes were open.

Just stay, he’d said.

It would be heartening to say I broke down in tears. I didn’t. The moment merely updated the inventory of all the things I should feel but didn’t. I very carefully opened the seal, reached in and peeled the note from his mouth. Like it or not the image of myself sticking it across Grainer’s lips after I tracked him down and killed him came to me, which of course was the idea. Grainer’s idea after all. Ellis would have kept Harley alive. Ellis’s money was on guilt, conscience, responsibility—mine. Grainer’s was on eye-for-an-eye vengeance—mine. New and Old Testaments respectively.