The Last Werewolf

Glen Duncan

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781847679444
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857860705
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

One last full moon - then it will all be over.

Jacob Marlowe has lost the will to live. For two hundred years he has wandered the world, enslaved by his lunatic appetites and tormented by the memory of his first and most monstrous crime. Now, the last of his kind, he knows he cannot go on.

But as Jake counts down to suicide, a violent murder and an extraordinary meeting plunge him straight back into the desperate pursuit of life - and love.

Sexy, smart, bloody and heartbreaking, The Last Werewolf takes literature by the throat.

THIRD MOON

THE CRUELLEST MONTH

38

Talulla, light of my life, fire of my loins … Ta-loo-la: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate … Ta. Lu. La.

‘Talulla’s bad enough,’ she said. ‘Put it with “Demetriou” and you’re in the realm of the ridiculous.’

It was afternoon and we were lying in bed in the Edwardian Park Suite at the New York Plaza, having just had sex for the fifth time in approximately six hours. I never had a sister but I imagine if I had fucking her would have felt something like fucking Talulla, sometime in our very early twenties, coming to it with relished capitulation after years of dirty adolescent telepathy.

‘Talulla Mary Apollonia Demetriou,’ she said. ‘Even in New York you rattle that off and they think you’re speaking Vulcan or something.’

It had taken less than twenty-four hours to ditch the tails, albeit after a wearing epic of old-fashioned cat-and-mouse. With Christian’s help I got out of the Zetter under a pile of soiled sheets in a laundry hamper, and away in the back of the cleaning company van. That did for the vamp flunkies. Not so the agent, whom I clocked still with me barely five minutes after leaving the depot. I wasn’t much surprised. Christian is solid, but there can no longer be any doubt the Zetter’s WOCOP moled. Three hours of Underground-and-black-cab switches (and four agents) later, I was back at Heathrow, if not certain of having slipped them then driven past caring by the force of the need to see her again. Flying Business as Bill Morris (an airport-bought First Class ticket would’ve waved a flag to anyone watching) I’d had the width of the Atlantic to coddle and thrum my lust. By the time she arrived in the hotel lobby in sunglasses and a pale pink cashmere dress I’d reached maximum agitation. Given which you’d expect a debut fuck of eye-popping gymnastics. In fact it was a thing of slow, hyperconscious deliberateness. You’d similarly expect a dive straight into werewolf biography, an immediate compulsion to compare howler notes. Not so. The deep reflex was postponement. To speak of what we were would be in the long run (but not long enough) to speak of death. We had this one opportunity to come together as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. Thereafter the rose would be sick.

Wulf was with us. Wulf knew what was going on. Wulf wanted in, materially. Wulf prowled the blood, rushed up repeatedly only to effervesce into nothing at the surface of the skin. Wulf swung and tossed its head and let loll its degenerate tongue and wreathed us in its feral funk, an odour as dense as the stink of a crammed zoo. If it was getting nothing else out of us it was getting the primary admission, that we knew what we were, that we had both felt the peace that passeth understanding, that this, now, sex in human form, was the imperfect forerunner, the babbling prophet, mere Baptist to the coming Christ. Wulf knew how good it was going to be and would not, even in abeyance, suffer us not sharing in the knowledge. Therefore we knew. Had known from first glance at the airport. Had always known.

Six human victims, I counted. Few enough for each to be still a raw perfume, ghost-traces in the involved and generous scent of her cunt, on the hot flower of her breath. She’d tell me in her own time, we both knew. For now it was the draped obscenity. My own wailing dead in disbelief at the broken agreement had been churned back into the hurrying blood. Only the spirit of Arabella remained still, fixed me with—

Like this?

Yes, just like that. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.

We found ways. This is the story, the human story, the were-wolf story, the life story: one finds ways. Kissing, slowly, was one. Though dark-haired and dark-eyed she was fair-skinned, a sensuous contrast that required continual reapprehension. All of her required this (or rather all of my desire did), repeatedness, over again-ness. The beauty spot by her lip was one of a dozen or so scattered over her body. My new constellations. There was no performance, no pornography, just complete conversion to the religion of each other, that erotic equalisation that mocks distinction between the sacred and the profane, that at a stroke anarchises the body’s moral world. All her parents’ love and spoiling was there in her parted thighs’ sly confidence. She knew the measure of her riches. The wolf had first raped then made her larger, forced on her in addition to the human gifts nauseous exemption from the moral city’s ordinances and limits. You accepted the wolf and grew, or you rejected it and died. She’d had the soft toys and pink bedroom as a little girl, the ballet aspirations, the pony fixations. These had flared and mutated, books, a smart mouth, finding the balance between sophistication and sluttiness, a little material greed, the headache of being sufficiently pretty so that politicisation was a sulkily performed chore, then work, business and the daily shifting survival strategies that made the freshman small-hours ethical arguments quaint. All this was still there, dwarfed under the dark arch of the monster. The challenge was to find the devious bloody-mindedness to keep both, who she used to be and what she was now.

Fucking (the word ‘lovemaking’ offered itself, with some legitimacy) let clairvoyance thrash about a bit between us: Here I was looking out from behind her eyes when she was eight, sitting on a back stoop twittered over by leaf-shadows and stinging from some giant injustice. There she was behind mine in the sunlit library – WEREWULF – at Herne House. Here was a glowering sky over a dark field with a solitary Dutch barn. Here a car showroom, light bouncing off too much glass. Here Harley lighting the evening fire and saying, Well that’s just fucking nonsense. Here her feet poking out of glittering bath foam, toenails like a little family of rubies. We lived a handful of each other’s moments, or imagined we did. Coming, I gripped the soft warm hair above her nape and stared at her. She stared back. Her eyes had the cold omniscience, her cunt the hot. Her open mouth moved very slightly, a barely perceptible shape of affirmation. This and the beauty spot did for whatever Tantric resolve I was holding onto. A first climax of total dissolution, as into God or void—then the return, the humble reassertion of fingerprints, scalp, knees, tongue, heart, brain. You forgot sex could do this, cast the divine fragment back into the divine whole for a moment, then reel it out again, razed, beatified.

So the five carnal hours had passed.

But passed they had. Now we lay on the bed like starfish. It’s one of the Platonic Forms, lying with someone on a hotel bed after transcendent sex. Outside, Manhattan was chillily sunlit under a blue March sky. Somewhere back down the hours it had rained. We’d been aware of it, as one harmless animal going about its business might be aware of another harmless animal doing the same. Now the air had a rinsed optimism. To be resisted, my realist warned, because already the future was groping, like a temporarily blinded giant, towards us.

‘It’s the Irish Talulla,’ she said. ‘Not the Chocktaw one. My mom’s family came over in the 1880s. Not that it makes a difference. It’s still a god-awful mouthful.’

‘Demetriou’ from her Greek father, Nikolai, who’d come to the US as a physics post-grad in ’67, got sidetracked by the counter-culture, barely scraped his MSc at Columbia and nearly died of a mysterious stomach infection on a trip to Mexico in 1973. He’d survived, however, and emerged traumatised, presumably into readiness for love, since less than six months out of hospital he met, fell for and married Colleen Gilaley, heiress to the not inconsiderable pile represented by her father’s four delis and three diners spread over Manhattan and Brooklyn, a familial empire into which Nikolai was grudgingly (and unproductively) absorbed. In 1975 (Ford in the White House, Jaws in movie theatres, Saigon fallen, the Khmer Rouge overrunning Cambodia, Humboldt’s Gift on the highbrow shelves, Shogun on the low) Colleen gave birth to what would be the Demetrious’ only child, a girl, Talulla Mary Apollonia, now thirty-four, divorcee, werewolf.

‘It happened to me in California,’ she said, speaking out of the qualitatively different silence that had formed after the nomenclatural explanation. (It happened to me in California. We were talking about ‘it’, now. This was how it would be, I realised, these early hours would display gentle schizophrenia, the multiple realities of what there was to talk about, of what we were.) ‘Last summer. My decree absolute had come through and I’d taken a trip out there to visit a couple of old UCLA friends in Palm Springs. Allegedly to celebrate my new singledom. In fact I felt like shit. Sad and washed-up and ugly and sexually dead.’ The divorce had been precipitated by the discovery that her ex, Richard, a high-school teacher and aspirant novelist, had been having an affair with the deputy head’s secretary. You know, Talulla had said, if it had been some nineteen-year-old twinkie with pneumatic tits I could have come out of it with a bit of dignity. I pity you, Richard, I really do. But this woman was forty-seven. You can imagine what a boost that gave me.

‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I got sick of things in Palm Springs and took a hire car out to Joshua Tree to lick my wounds. I stayed in a little cabana motel out on Route 62, hiked in the park during the day, drank tequila with the kids running the motel in the evening. It was a comfort, the desert. I think, by the way, we should order up some Cuervo, don’t you? I’m getting the feeling this is the calm before the storm, though what storm I don’t know.’

Lycanthropy had done things for her, licensed tangentiality, sanctioned intuition, loosened and altogether sexed-up the intelligence. She’d graduated with a degree in English and what turned out to be an insufficient interest in journalism. She started the career, but without much conviction, and after a couple of years drifted into helping run the Gilaley business. The education remained, humoured as a hopeless putz by the smut and savvy of her American trade self. I rang down for the Cuervo, half a dozen fresh limes, worried for the thousandth time Harley’s IDs were rotten, that my flight out of Heathrow had tripped a switch, that Grainer and Ellis were already hip to ‘Bill Morris’ over at the Plaza, bunked-up in luxury with his new howler squeeze.

‘Then, one night,’ she went on, ‘I wandered into the horror movie. I think it might have been the dumbest sequence of actions I’ve ever performed. For a start, I was driving alone at night in the desert. Off the main road too. I’d been out to Lake Havasu for the day and was determined to get back to my motel without the tedium of 62 West. It wasn’t late. Naturally the moon was up. Naturally the car broke down.’

The Cuervo and limes arrived. I found shot glasses in the suite’s bar and set us up. These, I knew, were the high-octane minutes, days, weeks, when anything she does can pluck the phallic string. Watching her toss back the shot. The pale female throat and her soft hair fallen back to reveal the flushed ears with their pearl studs. And this is nothing, Wulf said. You wait. You just fucking wait.

‘The horror movie’s always there,’ she continued. ‘Just needs certain conditions to firm up. Mainly human stupidity. You’re driving around thinking the big thing is your poor broken heart and then suddenly the car dies and everything around you says, er, no, honey, the big thing is you’re all alone out here and your phone’s not getting a signal and you haven’t seen another car in over an hour and in any case this is America so the last thing you should be hoping for is another car to come along. Hit me again.’

I poured two more shots. Again the toss back, the taut throat, the breasts’ uplift, the pearls.

‘You could have been dumb and ugly,’ I said, as she wiped her mouth with her hand.

‘So could you.’

‘If we both were that would’ve been okay. It’s inequity causes the trouble.’

‘What if I’d been smart and ugly?’

‘Initially excruciating but better in the long run. Dumb and pretty I’d have ended up killing you. Or more likely you me. Anyway go on. You’d broken down in the middle of nowhere.’

She put the glass on the bedside table and lay on her side, propped on one elbow, facing me. We were over the first miraculous wave, her eyes conceded. Now a soberer relief, and the first shadows of realism. ‘I’d passed a one-horse town two or three miles down the road,’ she said. ‘A diner, a store, a handful of houses. I was pretty sure I’d seen a garage, too. At the very least there’d be a phone. I’d call Triple A and that would be that. So I walked. I must have gone about half a mile when the helicopter appeared.’

I was studying her hand, enjoying the thought of its history, relishing in the inane way one must in these beginnings the bare fact that it was hers. Full-fleshed with long unpainted nails. She wore a big opal ring on her middle finger. When she’d touched her clit, with healthy deft modern American entitlement, the sight of this ringed finger slipping with cunning purpose through the soft dark hair of her mons had almost finished me.

‘It came up about fifty yards away, I guess out of a ravine. I thought it must be the police because of the searchlight. Obviously these were your WOCOP guys.’

‘The Hunt.’

‘Right. Well, anyway, it happened incredibly fast. I could tell they were chasing someone, something, but I couldn’t see what. It was bizarre standing there with suddenly no category to put the experience in. That’s why I just stood there, like an idiot. Then the searchlight swung and blinded me and suddenly – out of nowhere – the werewolf hit me.’

I thought back to the file I’d seen. Had the report mentioned a witness? It had not. Thank God.

‘You’d hardly call it being bitten. More a scrape of the teeth. He really just ran me over. The claws did the real damage. I remember thinking, even in the split-second it took: Jesus, were-wolves exist. You’d ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Glen Duncan
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• First Moon: Let It Come Down
• Second Moon: Fuckkilleat
• Third Moon: The Cruellest Month
• Preview of Book Two: Talulla Rising