by Glen Duncan
“Can he talk?” the baby-faced skinhead asked, en français.
“No,” Jacqueline said. “But he understands. So don’t say anything you might regret.”
Without the faintest twitch of warning I flung myself snarling at the bars.
To her credit, Jacqueline barely flinched. The men—to a man—leaped backwards, the two meat-goons with guns raised, the Tranquilizer with a priceless falsetto shriek.
Immediately, I subsided, stood down, shook my head dear-oh-dear fashion, a portion of dignity regained. The table I’d woken up on was, I now saw, a huge metal crate. I sauntered back to it and lay down, hands folded on my belly, ankles crossed. Jacqueline laughed, with charming subdued musicality.
“Fuck me,” the baby-faced skinhead said.
“He’s playing with you,” Jacqueline said. Then to the Tranquilizer: “For God’s sake, don’t be such a baby. Turn off the cameras.”
Apparent nonchalance notwithstanding, I was booming with Hunger. And in a cage. Mentally I flashed forward a few hours to the cold turkey scene from every heroin-addict movie. Please, man, just somethin, you gotta give me somethin. I’m not gonna make it. Oh God, it hurts …
Jacqueline stepped forward and wrapped her red-nailed fingers (blouse-matching) around the bars of the cage. “Jacob,” she said, in English, “I’m so sorry for all this. It’s not what it appears, I promise. I know you can’t answer me, so just let me talk for a moment. My name is Jacqueline Delon. I’ve wanted to speak with you for some time. I have a proposition for you. But that can wait. You must be wondering where you are.”
I didn’t move. The cage was bolted to the floor. Other than a few wooden crates, some heaps of rope, rolls of tarp and half a dozen oil drums the hold was empty.
“You’re on board the freight ship Hecate and we’re en route to Biarritz where I have a comfortable place and where I hope we can have a mutually rewarding conversation. Aside from this current indignity, for which I apologise again, I intend you absolutely no harm or discomfort, and as soon as you’re no longer a risk to myself or my crew, which should be”—she looked at her watch—“in approximately eight hours, your liberty will be restored to you, and I will personally do everything in my power to compensate you for this inconvenience. In the meantime, as a peace offering, please accept my gift to you. You’ll find it in the container you’re lying on.”
She stepped away from the cage and said quietly, “Let’s go.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“The cameras?”
“Leave them off. I’ve got what I wanted.”
The men went ahead of her. At the hold door she turned and looked back at me. “I’m so excited to meet you at last,” she said. “You’re everything I hoped you would be. I know this can be the start of something exceptional.”
After she’d gone I forced myself to lie still, listening to the Hunger turning the volume up in my blood, heartbeat the buzz-thud of a car with the stereo’s bass set to max.
Lie still.
An idiotic injunction.
Lie still.
Because you and I know.
Lie still.
What’s underneath us in the box.
22
IT’S NO ACCIDENT that the great moral philosophers invariably wrote on aesthetics, too. Figuring out what made something Right (or Wrong) was akin to figuring out what made something Beautiful (or Ugly). These days scientists are in on the act: At the unprovable cosmological fringes beauty swings it. Now mathematical models are like supermodels: They have grace, symmetry, elegance. It’s hardly surprising. Modernity having done away with Absolute Moral Values and Objective Reality, there’s only beauty left. What theory won’t we espouse if it’s beautiful? What atrocity won’t we excuse?
Or what instinct (to stick, as Madeline would have it, to the story) won’t we overcome?
For a while, standing with my warm lethal hairy hands wrapped around the cold bars of my cage, I resisted opening the container. Truth was I felt slightly seasick. The tip of my snout was dry. Beyond my confines the full moon made its inexhaustible suggestion, sent down its unbankruptable love, weirdly mingled just then with the memory of Jacqueline Delon’s thin face and tightly red-wrapped breasts. In the meantime, as a peace offering, please accept my gift to you. Clearly she’d moved beyond customary limits. Courtesy of wealth. You’re everything I hoped you would be. The remark was an affront, subject and object in each other’s seats. I live up to her expectations? Who the fuck did she think she was?
This, of course, was the embarrassing heart of the matter. I was an animal who’d been caught, caged and observed on camera. My scrotum shrank from the shame of having been seen changing—worse, of having been filmed changing. And now left to perform, to do what it was in my nature to do. I was l’objet d’une voyeuse. Even the lion knows his debasement, mounting his mate while the bored zoo crowd looks on. To kill and eat here, now, in captivity and on show (I suspected the cameras despite Madame’s instruction; I suspected other cameras, CCTV, spyholes) would be a rich and vulgar degradation, an aesthetic (dear Maddy) offence.
Thus the Hunger got its first inkling that resistance was on the table. You’re kidding, right? the Hunger said. Then a little more sternly, You are kidding, right?
I moved quickly to the container and threw open the lid.
Inside was a naked, white, epicene young man of perhaps twenty, gagged, bound, and judging by his pupils heavily drugged. Dirty blond greasy hair and tiny nipples. Junkie arms and a long thin penis. Whatever the drugs they weren’t proof against the vision I must have presented. His sore-looking eyes first focused then bugged. He roared behind his gag. An odour of fear on his nostril breath like bitters.
Oh, the Hunger said. Oh you sweet, sweet thing.
In their cellular prison my devoured dead roused. (A consequence of eating people: The ingested crave company. Every new victim adds a voice to the monthly chorus.) Ganymede’s ankles and wrists were blood-bruised where he’d fought his restraints. Blue circulatory webbing showed through the white skin of his belly. Terror’s mouth-watering secretions crept from his pores. My salivary glands duly discharged. In the face of such … such meat the thought of eight hours ahead without feeding made my teeth and nails hurt. My hair ached. Mentally, weakness worked its angle: Resistance would be futile. I’d crack, I’d kill him and devour him and Jacqueline Delon would watch while getting head or smoking a cigarette or eating a crème brûlée or filing her nails.
And yet.
There remained the profound aesthetic repugnance. Or less loftily, self-disgust. At getting so feebly captured. At finding myself the Entertainment. At the decades spent sick of Being a Werewolf. At carrying on regardless. At costing Harley his life. (His poor head must still be in the Vectra’s boot. The locals would notice a smell. It would make the news, pass to the world via the anchorman’s autocued disbelief: “In the Welsh village of Trefor today police discovered the severed head of …” Christ, the exhausting predictability of it all.)
My young man thrashed, screaming behind his gag. The ship did something, offered some large tilted response to the sea, and I genuinely thought (God being dead etc.) I might vomit over the wretched creature. I let the lid fall shut. Then worried lest he suffocate. Jacqueline opening the case to find him not mauled but asphyxiated was hardly the denouement I was after. A quick check revealed air holes in the steel flank. Very well. But the Hunger had twigged I was serious. No barbs, no bennys, no chloroform, no laughing gas. No chains, no time locks. No teasing or dallying. Just Jake Marlowe, cold turkey, saying No.
There was an inner silence while the Hunger took this in.
I went back to the bars (thinking of Tantalus, of Christ in Gethsemane, unjustifiably of Samson at the Philistine Pillars), wrapped my monster fingers around the steel, closed my eyes and waited for the agony to begin.
Second Moon
Fuckkilleat
23
READER, I ATE HIM.<
br />
About three hours after resolving I wouldn’t.
Throughout the dull solo feast the refrain from Tennyson’s “Mariana” repeated in the hot spaces of my gorging head:
She only said My life is dreary, He cometh not, she said.
She said, I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead.
I would that I were—Yet here was the flesh that took my teeth in helpless succulence and the warm sour fountain of blood, the puncture moment that never gets old but stops being enough. And afterwards the swollen headache of my unsurprised self, the old exhausted cognisance of all the times I’ve vowed it was the last time and all the times it wasn’t.
Don’t misunderstand me: There was no guilt. Only the cavity where guilt used to be. This and the weight of my own still-hereness slumped on me like a corpse. For a long while I lay in the recovery position, eyes closed. Total self-disgust is a kind of peace.
At dawn Jacqueline returned, accompanied by the baby-faced skinhead. Both wore rubber boots over surgical scrubs. From the doorway they unrolled a length of plastic to form a walkway up to the cage. A hosepipe was unwound from a corner of the hold. I understood: a murder scene in the age of CSI. Leftovers were in the crate. The kid’s half-eaten carcase in a gelid blood soup. Wolf remnants wriggled under my human skin like rats in a sack. My fingernails, as always after the withdrawal of their wolf counterparts, hurt like hell.
“It’s warm water,” Jacqueline said. “Do you mind? I’ll help as best I can, with your permission.”
I sat (naked, obviously) in profile to my captors at the side of the cage with my back to the bars, knees drawn up, face smeared and sated. I was full-bellied, heavy in the human-again limbs. The wolf’s ghost dimensions played with me when I moved, the snout’s weight and the long hybrid feet, the haunches still struggling to unload their late mass. The goon had his gun levelled at my belly, but at his mistress’s gesture lowered it.
“Here,” Jacqueline said, handing me a squeezy bottle. “It’s just a sterilising detergent. Would you prefer it if he holds the hose?”
“Decorum and I don’t keep company,” I said, my throat howl-sore. “Besides, the role of prison guard suits you. Go ahead.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Really I am. I promise this is the very last discomfort you’ll suffer as my guest. Please forgive me.”
To repeat: Total self-disgust is a kind of peace—because further ignominy can add nothing to it. Standing there washing myself in front of her I made an intellectual concession to the debasement, but it was only moments before I was enjoying the soft soap and perfectly adjusted heat of the water. Put the right music behind this, I thought, and I could be advertising shower gel.
I dried off with a white towel that might have been manufactured in heaven. The flesh can’t help it. The flesh merely reports. When I’d finished I was tired and roseate and curiously pleased with the ongoing failure of myself.
“The ammunition is pure silver,” Jacqueline said. “I tell you this not as a threat but only so that you know you’ll die if you decide to attack me the minute I open the door. I wouldn’t blame you. You must be furious with me. But there’s a helicopter waiting which will have us at my home in thirty minutes. Once there, I promise you nothing but luxury, rest and conversation. If you prefer, I can make arrangements for you to be taken to any destination you choose, and I’ll never bother you again. But I so much hope you’ll agree to hear what I have to say. Is it safe for me to open the door?”
The heroic thing would have been to refuse. Take her at her word and get the chopper to drop me at the nearest airport. Fuck conversation. But I was exhausted. The appeal of putting myself in someone else’s hands bordered the sensuous.
“I assume you keep a full bar at home?”
“Three full bars.”
“Then it’s safe to open the door.”
When we stood facing each other on the plastic she offered me her hand. I was tempted to take it and bite off a finger (leftover wolf aplenty for that) but settled for a gentle squeeze. “Now we can be relaxed,” she said. “I’m so pleased to meet you.”
I followed her to the doorway. The gargoyle with the gun stayed put. In the short corridor facing us was a little fold-out table, on it, my clothes (including the woollen hat Harley had given me) washed, dried, pressed. She opened a door on her left, which revealed a small locker. I saw a shower unit, a plastic chair, a dress the colour of wheat on a hanger. “I just need to get out of these,” she said, indicating the scrubs. I was checking the overcoat’s inside pocket for the journal. It was there, along with passports and wallet. I didn’t waste time wondering if she’d read it. “And?” I asked.
“Fascinating,” she said. “But let’s discuss it over a drink.”
24
JACQUELINE DELON’S VILLA sits a few miles south of Biarritz on a wooded hill a little west of the tiny town of Arbonne. Modern, white, glass, oak and steel, surrounded by eight private acres. The trappings you’d expect: helipad, infinity pool, tennis court, gym, CCTV, a combo-staff of domestics and security personnel. The rooms are big, full of light, ornamented with artefacts reflecting her obsession with the occult. From the upper floors (there are three, plus roof terrace) you can look down over the tops of the evergreens to the pale beach, the surf line, the ocean. In the basement there’s a library to rival Harley’s. All the tech hardware is up to the minute. There are indeed three bars—lounge, pool, master bedroom suite—and it was to the first of these Mme Delon and I retired alone on our arrival.
I lit the first deeply needed cigarette since transformation (a softpack of Camels on the counter; she’d done her homework) while my hostess fixed drinks. Tanqueray and tonic for me (too much sunlight in the room for whisky), a Tom Collins for herself. Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.
“It’s ages since I’ve made drinks,” she said. “There’s always someone else. But I thought it best for it to be just the two of us.” She’d taken a seat—the bar had six high swivel chairs of white leather—next to mine, and was poking at her cocktail’s ice cubes with her index fingernail. The wall to my left was glass, and looked out onto a patio of terra-cotta tiles and a cactus garden. Soil red as chilli powder. It was only mid-March but the sky was clear and the air still. You could feel the blinding brilliance summers would have here. Small birds whirred to and from a feeder bracketed to one white wall.
“So,” she said, “I must explain myself. What it comes to, Jacob, is …” She looked down, smiled, had a brief inner dialogue with herself, let her shoulders sag, then slid from her stool and stood in front of me. “Come with me,” she said, offering me her hand. She might have been a nine-year-old with a tree house to show off. “Come.”
I took her hand (retained the Camel, the G&T), got to my feet and followed her.
Through two large rooms (one with a central circular designer fire pit and a large standing stone but little else) down a corridor to a steel door with keypad entry. Beyond, varnished oak stairs led down to the formidable library. Air-con and the feel of soundproof walls. Other heavy doors, also keypadded, led off. Jacqueline paused at one of them, looked me in the eye for a moment, then punched the access code and opened the door.
The room it revealed was small and windowless. A filing cabinet, a desk, a computer—and the wall above it covered in press clippings. All of them related one way or another to me. BODY OF MISSING GIRL FOUND. CORAL INDUSTRIES ESTABLISHES SUB-SAHARAN AIDS CHARITY. VECTOR IN AGGRESSIVE BUY-OUT. MUTILATED BODY DISCOVERED. FAMILY MASSACRED IN MANSON-STYLE ATTACK. MYSTERY DONOR FUNDS PIONEERING CANCER RESEARCH. WHO RUNS LAERSTERNER INTERNATIONAL? “WEREWOLF” EYEWITNESS IS CLASS-A DRUG-USER. UNNAMED DONOR INJECTS NEW LIFE INTO VACCINE DISTRIBUTION. “SILVER BULLETS” FOUND AFTER NIGHT OF MYSTERY GUNSHOTS. VECTOR NOW TO TRADE AS HERNE. FULL-MOON MURDERS ARE COINCIDENCE, POLICE MAINTAIN.
“Press Enter,” Jacqueline said.
The animal remnants don’t like small
spaces. I forced myself past it and sat down at the desk. Hit the key as instructed. Instantly footage began to run. Me coming out of International Arrivals in Tokyo. Caption: JM Tokyo, 07/02/06. Me leaving the Algonquin. Me on the beach at Galveston. Me going into Harley’s Earl’s Court house. Me strolling down the Rue de Rivoli. Me in a Cairo café. All shot in the last three years. The last sequence: me dressed as a woman, getting out of a taxi and entering the Leyland Hotel.
“I take it I’m supposed to be surprised?” I said.
“Not at all,” she said. “Just convinced of my dedication.”
There was nothing to put my cigarette out in, so I downed the Tanqueray and dropped the butt in the glass. “Well, you’ve got the transformation footage now. Essential for a name-and-shame operation. The kill too, no doubt. Congratulations. Prepare yourself for the weight of public indifference.”
“Please don’t insult me. You know that’s not what this is.”
“Then what is this?”
“A chance for sanctuary.”
“What?”
“I want you to stay alive. I’m offering you protection, indefinitely. Serious protection,” she added, seeing the dismissal forming in my face. “Not that—not what you’re used to. I don’t think you have any understanding of what a subtraction from the world your death would represent. You’re something magnificent, Jake. There’s such little magnificence left.”
“Thank you very much. I think I’ll be going now.”
“Listen to me, please.”
“There’s nothing to discuss.”
“You must give me a chance to—”
“Don’t be fucking absurd.”
She fell silent. Little-girlishly dropped her head, picked at a hangnail. A performance of compressed sullenness. I remembered the small turgid breasts and inviting abdomen. Blood in my cock twitched. Of course it did. The post-Curse horn. Again: The flesh can’t help it. Laughter, desire, boredom and exhaustion did what they do as a team, cornered me into a unique paralysis. My hands in my lap like two dead crabs. Just stay, Harley had said.