The Last Werewolf

“Jake?” Madeline said. “Is that real? That’s not real, is it?”

I closed Harley’s eyes. You have to. Open, the eyes of the dead are a travesty, a parody, make a fool of the deceased. Open, the eyes of the dead perform that most indecent subtraction, show the person without his life. I knew now all the times I’d pictured Harley’s recuperative solitude after my death I’d never really believed in it. The worst horrors confirm a suspicion you’ve hidden even from yourself.

IT WASN’T PAINLESS. IT WASN’T QUICK.

I’m used to the body as a thing separable violently into its constituent parts. To me a torn-off arm’s no more searingly forlorn than a chicken drumstick is to you. Still, it was Harley, what was left of him, a blunt testament to the defilements he’d suffered. A farcical testament, if you let yourself see it that way. Naturally torturers giggle while they work: The body’s dumb obedience to physics (pull hard enough and this comes off, squeeze tight enough and that pops out) against which the nuances of the victim’s personality count for nothing has in it one of the roots of comedy—the spirit’s subservience to the flesh. You can cut a head off and shove it in a bag, stick it on a pole, play volleyball or footie with it. Hilarious, among other things. This too is what I’m tired of, the friability of boundaries, the nearness of opposite extremes, the depressing bleed-ability of grief into laughter, good into evil, tragedy into farce.

Meanwhile Madeline was filling with unruly energies. I knew if she stayed shock would wear off and the demand for coherence take its place. With careful handling I put the head back in the holdall, zipped up gently, found myself out of deep inane habit hoping the darkness would come as a relief to him.

“You should go,” I said to Madeline.

“Who is that?”

“Never mind.”

“We have to call the police.”

“It’s best if you just go. The police aren’t part of this.”

“But—”

“No one will harm you, I promise. Just go and let me deal.” My window was that her system had temporarily crashed. I grabbed everything of hers I could find and stuffed it willy-nilly into the Louis Vuitton. She remained stalled by the door.

“That guy said you were a—”

“It’s a code word. It’s a word agents use.”

He’s a werewolf, honey. Naturally that had gone in. Naturally she’d made the connection.

“But you’ve said … All that stuff. It’s not true. There’s no such things.” This last utterance without much conviction, almost a question.

“Of course there are no such things,” I said. “That’s just a routine of mine, a gimmick. It’s nothing. Come on. Here, take the cash.” Six thousand. She took it, but numbly. Her face was clammy, her white hands lovely with veins. I had to keep pushing her forward against her need to stop, rewind, go over, make sense. In the end I half- propelled her through the door. I knew there was every chance she’d go straight to the police.

From which followed my own hasty pack-up and check-out. I put the holdall with my bag in the boot of the Vectra and drove. South. No specifics, just the sudden claustrophobic need to get out of the town’s clutter to the clean spaces of the coast.

It was dark, raining. I kept imagining discussing all this with Harley—then realising Harley was dead. It was a mental loop, augmented by the windscreen wipers’ two-syllable mantra, wichok, wichok, wichok. I must have been feeling something like grief (or self-pity) because I took the car’s responsive steering and smell of new vinyl as anthropomorphic sympathy. I didn’t cry. Real things don’t make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I’m like most civilised humans. Instead I drove, fluently, with reverence for the small actions, still going through the same loop of imagining talking events over with Harley then realising he was dead. When the loop faltered a giant contained emptiness took its place.

The road ran down the coast. To the west, Caernarfon Bay and the Irish Sea, occasional boat lights, a tanker or two. East and south the land rose into another stack of vowel-starved hills: Bwlch Mawr; Gyrn Ddu; Yr Eifl. Of course I was being followed, had been since leaving the hotel. A black transit van, which was unusual for the Hunt, who normally use something quicker.

You were pleased to see me. It was depressing as hell. I don’t want that. Of course he didn’t. Forty years he’d been building up to avenging his father’s death. Not much of an avenging if the murderer was going to be grateful to him for it. Therefore provoke the murderer into something other than gratitude.

The question was: Had it worked? Was Harley’s death (or as I must infer, torture and death) incentive enough to bring the wolf out fighting?

Human standards would convict me of obscene weakness if the answer was no. Harley, a man who’d devoted his life to my protection, who’d loved me, whose love I’d exploited when it suited and stonewalled when it didn’t, had been mutilated and killed for my sake. I knew his killer or killers, I had the resources and experience to avenge the crime, and if I didn’t do it no one else would.

But my standards aren’t human. How could they be? The thought of resisting Grainer tomorrow night weakened my hands on the Vectra’s wheel. Revenge entails a belief in justice, which I don’t have. (You can’t count my monster philanthropy, my werewolf good deeds. That’s vestige, habit, a moribund personal accounting system. It doesn’t derive from a principle, it just provides the moral equivalent of hand relief.) I knew what I ought to feel. I knew Grainer (and Ellis, since he would have joined in) ought to be made to pay. But ought and I parted company when I murdered my with-child wife and ate her and carried on living.

I turned off the main road at Trefor and the WOCOP vehicle followed, stopped a token fifty feet behind me when I pulled over at the seaward edge of the village. I was sweating. The Curse played preview blasts of free jazz in my blood, my goosefleshed skin. The hand I lifted to wipe my face was the impatient ghost of the other hand, the hybrid thing, heavy, elegant, claw-tipped. Transformation was less than twenty-four hours away. My body heat filled the car. I got out.

Better. Cold wind and rain. Hands, throat, face, scalp, all cooled. The beach was near. A pale footpath led down to it. I took it, overcoat flapping. A WOCOP van door opened, closed. This would very soon become intolerable, this low-tech, this panto surveillance, ordered surely by Grainer, an extra satirical irritant, but I couldn’t think about it now. There was only the one thing to think about, the one thing to decide.

It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick.

Knolly turf gave way to shallow sand dunes. A sudden rough fresh odour of the sea. The old Somme survivor stirred: Margate’s salt air had come in through the open window and mingled with the lovely between-the-legs taste of his girl. (Their memories clog me like arterial fur. I’m full, I said to Harley. I have achieved fucking plenum.)

A marker buoy clanged, muted by wind and rain. The lights of a tanker twinkled, conjured a vision of a snug galley, cable-knit sweaters, tin mugs, roll-up-fag smoke. I could hear a helicopter somewhere inland, a sound like an endlessly discharging machine gun.

What’s my motivation? lousy actors want to know. Grainer had given me a legitimate one. I killed your friend, now you want to kill me.

It almost worked. The fuse leading to the appropriate emotional bomb lit, crackled, glowed, dazzled for a few heartbeats, then faltered, sputtered, died. I couldn’t make it mean enough. I couldn’t make it mean anything. Vengeance for the murdered supposed the dead enjoyed sufficient afterlife to appreciate your efforts. The dead enjoyed nothing of the kind. The dead didn’t go anywhere, except, if you were the monster who’d taken their lives and devoured them, into you. That’s the gift I should have given Harley, or rather made him give me. At least that way we would have been together at the end.

I turned inland, light of heart and heavy as the Dead Sea, thinking, So thank you, dear Grainer, but no—when two things happened.

The first was that I put my hands in my coat pockets and felt in one of them the woollen hat Harley had insisted I take that night in the snow. Your fucking head will freeze, moron, he’d said. Because he’d loved me and I hadn’t loved him we’d cast the relationship as irascible doting father and moody son.