The Last Werewolf

“At least.”

“Jesus, how’ve you managed?”

She just looked at me, jaws clamped, on behalf of womankind. My own pre-Curse blood-bubble and bone- burp routine was under way. The premature hybrid hands and feet were ghost-fucking with me (extra care behind the wheel, Marlowe), lupine previews flashing in my human shoulders and hips. I deal by keeping on the move. Sitting still makes things worse. Not so for Lula. She looked like she never wanted to move again. Her makeup was smudged. She’d started taking it off then given up. She stared at me with the baleful resignation of a seventeen- year-old suffering the sort of hangover she’ll come out of with a feeling of humble spiritual enlargement—if she comes out of it at all.

“I’ll wait awhile,” I said. “We’ve got time.”

She shook her head. “Don’t bother. This is just what happens to me. It’ll last till this evening then I’ll be full of beans. Come this evening you’ll wish I was like this again.”

It still wasn’t easy leaving her. Several false departures. “If for any reason something happens to me,” I said, turning back for the fourth time at the door—then realised I didn’t have anything useful to offer.

“Just go,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

I left her a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, three packs of Camels, a dozen Advil and a pot of lousy motel coffee. Also Cloquet’s Luger, which I’d hung on to, though I’d replaced the silver ammo with regular rounds. Useless against boochies (should I not be back before sundown) but fine for familiars and agents. “Anyone comes through that door who isn’t me,” I said, “shoot them.”

She nodded, teeth chattering, then closed her eyes and waved me away. I locked the door behind me. It was just after noon.

Novelists, notoriously, are always working, eyes and ears open for anything they might be able to use. Ditto werewolves. Not for quirky characters or snippets of dialogue but for murder locations, places that lend themselves to the secret kill. I’d had this stretch of coast—the hundred miles between Monterey and Morro Bay—in the file for years. Along with the requisite geography and the ghosts of Steinbeck, Miller and Kerouac, Big Sur’s got isolated houses and a glut of whacked-out residents with more money than sense. In the late sixties I’d rented a place here for a few weeks (flew to Alaska for the kill) and been struck by the potential richness of its pickings. Odd I’d left it this long, really. You were saving it for her, my romantic insisted—and in my new generous idiocy I didn’t wholly dismiss the idea.

It’s a strange craft or art, finding the where and the when and the who of the kill. Naturally one develops a nose for it over time, a sensitivity to variables. In the early years I used to spend weeks as it were casing the joint. Now you can drop me anywhere there’s human habitation and in less than twenty-four hours I’ll give you the optimal target.

Of course there are soft options. The Western world’s so mad these days you can put an ad in the paper and some desperate self-harmer will answer it. Wanted: Victim for werewolf. Must be plump and juicy. Non-smoker with GSOH preferred. No time-wasters. I’ve had my share of drug addicts and alkies, the blind, the deaf, the crippled, the infirm, the mentally ill. I’ve hired escorts (male and female), doped them, driven them out to the countryside, let them wake up and make me a chase of it. All of which will do (the Curse being unencumbered by aesthetics or fair play) but there’s a peculiar profound satisfaction in the straight—one wants to say traditional or clean-lined—mode of predation: You stalk a perfectly healthy human being, confront them, give them plenty of time to really take it in, then do what you do.

I spent the day driving and hiking, equipped with knapsack, bush hat, state-of-the-art Van Gorkom walking boots, binoculars and a paperback copy of Birds of the Western United States, officer. Tourist season was a month away and the trails were quiet. I had the place to myself. The odour of redwoods and damp earth made my eyeteeth and fingernails throb.

By three in the afternoon the fog had lifted and the sun had come out. I worked with free-form fluidity, and with an hour still to go before sundown I’d lined up a hit and two backups. It would mean a sixteen-mile on-foot round-trip and smart timing but we could do the whole thing without breaking cover once—and it doesn’t get better than that.

Talulla phoned as I was climbing back into the Toyota.

“You’ll be sad to hear,” she said, “I’ve entered the full-of-beans phase.”

“Good.”

“Don’t get excited. It’s basically ADD, with fever and hallucinations.”

This is another purpose of civilisation, so that we can exchange love-packed banalities over the phone.

“Everything’s set,” I told her. “I’ll be home in an hour.”

The sun was setting over the Pacific and the mountains were lit pink and gold. The car was warm with evening light and spoke in its fuel and vinyl odours of America. I drove carefully, holding focus. Wulf heckled, spooked my hands and face with claw and muzzle. My scalp loosened and shrank, hot and cold by turns. Close, now, brother, very close. But I drove to my beloved, carefully.

43

THE FOLLOWING EVENING we parked the Toyota, now with its California plates, in a twenty-four-hour gas station and diner just off Route 1 about a mile north of the Andrew Molera State Park. Talulla wore a blond wig while I sported a false moustache and a Yankees baseball cap. Sunglasses for both of us. The disguises felt excessive but the gas station had CCTV. It was cool and damp. Moonrise was three hours away. Lu’s mode had changed again. Last night’s fidgets had subsided. Now she was quiet, clear-eyed. This was her penultimate pretransformation stage. The final stage would come ten minutes before Turning. Not pretty, was how she’d described it.

It was an hour’s trek to the change site I’d selected. Redwoods mixed with coastal oaks at least a half mile from the nearest trail. From there a seven-mile romp to the target. Kill. Seven miles back. Two miles to the car. Timing was the issue. Timing’s always the issue. Moonrise was 8:06, moonset tomorrow morning at 7:14. Eleven hours and forty-six minutes on the Curse. Hunting alone I’d hold off till 4:00 a.m. Two hours for killing and feeding and an hour-fourteen to get back to base camp. Once you can manage the Hunger, whet and dandle and tease, you want the shortest possible time between werewolf crime and human flight—for the simple reason that if the remains are discovered and the alarm raised you don’t want to be nine feet tall covered in hair sporting a gory muzzle and bloody claws when the sirens start to wail. But I wasn’t hunting alone.

“It’s coming,” Talulla said.

“In here. Quick.”

I lifted a branch and she ducked under. Her face was strained and sweaty. “Get undressed,” I said. “Can you manage?”

No one near, according to my nose, and in any case we weren’t visible. Twilight on the roads and trails was coagulate darkness under the trees.

“Oh,” Talulla said, down to her underwear, holding her belly. She swallowed, repeatedly. Dry heaved, once. I got her out of the bra and panties and stuffed them with the rest of our clothes into the rucksack. Kit-checked: wet wipes, water spray, liquid soap, bin liners. I climbed fifteen or twenty feet into the oak (as rehearsed yesterday) and secured the pack with the clip cables. Back on the ground I found Lula on her knees, doubled up, arms wrapped around herself.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Very close.”

“I know. Me too.”

They were the last words we exchanged that night.

She was quick. Quicker than me. I had assumed—as a male? as an elder? (as a moron, Marlowe)—I’d be fully transformed and at her service while she was still in the throes. But no. Her damp face rendered an appalling small-eyed in extremis version of itself, she vomited bile,