by Glen Duncan
“Jacob, for pity’s sake come in. You’re sick.” Some relief, naturally, at the recurrence of a physical symptom: Better my guts than my soul, than me.
“I’m all right,” I said, straightening, searching for my handkerchief. “That helped. Disgusting. Forgive me. Please, just let me be awhile. Let me walk over to Charles’s. I’ll stay there tonight and tomorrow everything will be different, I promise. Just give me this one night to clear my head.” I could hear the precise degree by which my voice didn’t sound right. My body laboured under invisible soft weights. With a superhuman effort I hauled the version of myself she needed to the surface, turned to her, saw hope ignite in her eyes, took her hands in mine. “Don’t think what you’ve been thinking,” I said. “You wrong both of us in thinking it. Something is troubling me, something … On my life, Arabella, I can’t stay here tonight. You must let me go. Tomorrow everything—I swear everything will be different. Please. Let me go.”
For days I’d been unable to meet her eye. Now I did and saw she was still warm and open to me. Her look was of steady entreaty, to return to collusion, to renew the silent vows, to recognise her. Summer had brought out a sprinkle of freckles under her dark lower lashes. In Lausanne we’d lain stunned on the bed after first lovemaking. She’d said, Goodness me, that was nice. “Whatever it is, Jake,” she said, “you know I’m equal to it. I’m not asking you this, I’m telling you something you already know.”
For a moment I felt completely normal. It was her. It was me. We shared an outrageous exemption. The distance between us burned away. These last days had been an absurd inversion.
“I know,” I said—but the blood rushed hardening up from the soles of my feet and I saw the girl’s thigh like a disgorged treasure of rubies and felt already though it was barely three in the afternoon the moon’s slow-ascending joy. I turned and walked away across the lawn.
11
THEY’VE KILLED THE foxes.
I heard something outside and went to look. The severed heads had been left on the back porch facing the door, two with eyes closed, one—the youngest, ears too big for his head, like a bat—with eyes open. A single set of footprints in the snow from the tree line twenty feet away. We can come all the way up to the house without you hearing. I stood in the doorway and looked out into the woods. Nothing visible, but the darkness full of consciousness. I assumed Ellis. To stave off boredom and impress the juniors. To refer to Wolfgang. To advertise the product. I’m supposed to be the leering villain, he’d said back at the Zetter. If this was his work it would’ve been done with affectless efficiency. The man’s centre of self is remote. I imagine Grainer watching his protégé in action and conceding with a sad fracture inside that the torch has passed to a strange new bearer.
I’ll bury the heads in the morning. It’s too cold now, and it won’t make any difference to the foxes.
•
It was six miles cross-country to Charles’s, and I stopped—doubled-up, glazed, queasy, for periods bereft of any kind of will—many times en route. When I lay down on it the land was a continuation of my skin, full of frantic whispering life. The WEREWULF engraving shivered from the grass, from the boles of trees, from the air’s buzzing atoms. In a wood on the edge of Charles’s estate I got down on all fours and cooled my hot face in a shallow stream of water-polished pebbles. The wolf’s shoulders flirted with mine, his haunches, the scroll of his tongue. For all this there were interludes of sanity. Enough religion remained so that I went into and out of the belief that this was a punishment, superficially for carnal excess but really for living in a love that rendered God negligible, optional, obsolete. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Yahweh’s First Commandment and one he wasn’t shy of fleshing out—Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: For I the LORD thy God am a jealous God … He had every right to be jealous of Arabella. It wasn’t the fucking, the licking, the sucking, but that with her these acts livened the soul instead of deadening it, elevated being instead of degrading it. Lest ye become as gods yourselves. The serpent’s reading of the Edenic proscription was correct. We were our own divine images, not graven but flesh and blood, and God shrank in the light of our divinity. Christ was born of a virgin and died one himself. What did he know? The truths of the body were ours, not his. Human 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 décor 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.
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 see through the window. She was standing in profile at a tin sink scouring a skillet with soot. The scrubbed table showed the remnants of supper: a torn white loaf, steamed onions, a muslined cheese, yellow butter, a pewter tankard flecked with suds. A bright fire burned in the limewashed hearth, livened the room’s half dozen bits of copper and brass. A dark-haired child of two or three years sat on the floor playing with a box of empty cotton reels.
The woman was barely out of girlhood, pallid, mouse-faced, with greasy hair pinned up under a mobcap. Thin hands raw from too much cold water. I wanted her name. Sally? Sara? I’d spoken to her once, when—
It was as if he’d been holding in check the force of what we were to maximise its impact when he let it go. Not that he fully let it go. Instead he kept just enough back so I could feel my own helplessness in the torrent of our will. Do you see? Yes, I did. A rush of appetite skewered my salivary glands and like a single stroke of expert lewdness raised my lupine cock into hitherto unknown hardness—but within seconds I was soft again. No, not that. Only if she were to become. You think—but it’s not. It doesn’t—
I could feel my brother’s irritation, as if I fit him like a too-tight collar. My ignorance was a maddening labour to be got through with gritted teeth. If you tried that it wouldn’t work—This is not what we—
My cock stiffened again as she blew her fringe off her moist face—but a second time softened. A moment of complete inner silence, then sudden loud Hunger, the other Hunger, booming like a kettledrum. Understanding went in: Lust was a mistaken reflex, an adjustment phase, soon burned through. The new desire made the old seem a whim. Only if she were to become. Only if she. To fuck to kill to eat. Fuck kill eat. There was a Trinity mystery, but only if … but only if—
He upped the drum’s rhythm. Thinking slid and fell like snow thawing from a roof. Her thin arms were bare from the elbows down. Collar open. Neck tendons rose when she scrubbed. White negligible girlish legs floating either side of rutting Bragg like the antennae of a confused insect. Forlorn pale toes. A shallow whorl of a navel. A quiet girl. Humans wear their histories like microclimates. She’d never shone among her eight siblings, had been vaguely loved only when noticed, had remained unformed until Bragg then seen her chance for a single leap into identity. And still her centre didn’t hold. Even giving birth hadn’t established her; it had gone through her like a fire through a field, a random agony that had left her hurt and curled around herself. She spent hours unanchored, drifted through by what felt like other people’s daydreams, though she washed and cleaned and looked after the child and opened her legs for the man.
You don’t just get the body. You get the life. Take a life. Into yourself. The deepest nourishment. Something like love. You’ll see. The space between you swells with untenable potential. Her little breasts the size of apples and her thin-skinned throat with its pounding jugular were already in my hands, between my teeth,
taut and turgid, ripe for rupture. I stood outside. I saw how it would be. Nothing but my brother’s grip on the rein kept me back.
Not her.
He let the thought stand alone, unembellished.
Not her.
13
HE RAN. I ran. We ran. All persons, the plural and two singulars justified. They grappled, sheared off, bled into each other, enjoyed moments of unity. Out of the woods moonlight painted me nose to rump, a palpable lick of infinitely permissive love that asked of me only that I be completely myself. What more generous request can a lover make? It’s what I’d asked of Arabella. It’s what she’d asked of me. Until now.
He ran. I ran. We ran. At moments the triumvirate dissolved and was neither him nor I nor us but an unthinking aspect of the night, inseparable from the wind in the grass or the odours in the air, a state—like getting lost in music—recognisable only by coming out of it.
Herne House.
Home.
A hundred yards away I smelled the stabled horses sweating, heard them shifting their feet in the stalls, a lovely sound, the clop-rasp of iron on stone. I leaped the gravelled drive and walked up the rollered front lawn. From butler to tea boy the house held seventeen human hearts. Moonlight silvered the casements. The master bedroom was on the second floor. These warm nights we slept with the window open. And there it was, open. The eighteenth heart.
There’s a view that the only thing to do with atrocity is chronicle it. Facts, not feelings. Give us the dates and numbers but stay out of Hitler’s head. That’s all well and good when the chronicler is outside the atrocity. It won’t wash when the chronicler is the atrocity.
She was asleep, lying on her front, face turned towards me, one bare arm and shoulder in moonlight so bright I couldn’t believe it hadn’t woken her. The scene’s painterly sumptuousness registered, peripherally: her long dark curls against the ivory pillow, the shut lilac buds of her eyes, that white Aphrodite arm on the damask counterpane. Peripherally, because what I could see mattered so much less than what I could smell: her vinous breath and orange blossom perfume, a fraught day’s sweet-salt sweat (she’d bathed cursorily) and barely touched food (poached salmon; a summer fruit compote; coffee), her fearless female blood, a thrilling whiff of shit and the sleepwarm tang of her clever silken cunt. And what I could smell mattered so much less than what I knew: that for a moment I’d be closer to her than ever before, that every secret would be revealed, every treasure yielded, every shame exposed, every shred of self surrendered. I knew—it was passed from him to me, the old dull divine truth—that no ecstatic union compares with killing the thing you love.