by Glen Duncan
Of course I’d read. Folk tales, compendia of myth and superstition, academic studies. Lycanthropy, even a cursory investigation will reveal, has a place in many cultures. I’d travelled to North America and learned what I could of Wendigo and the skinwalkers, to Germany, where rustics still kept silver handy and cherished wolfsbane (which, by the way, though toxic to humans and pretty much every other animal, has absolutely no effect on us), to Serbia to hear of the vulkodlaks and to Haiti to learn what I could of the je-rouges. None of it conclusively convinced. I was a werewolf but the werewolf stories still sounded like fairy tales to me. I began to wonder if my scepticism was congenital, if the howler was naturally equipped with a nose for his own true provenance, or at least his own false biographers. The stories left me with the same depressing doubt the growing youngster begins to feel about Santa Claus and the Stork, those uniquely deflating intimations of the world’s somehow just not being like that. (These were still the days before I’d actually met any other werewolves, by the way. Not that the half dozen I’ve met since have been any use. One was four hundred and three years old and refused to speak at all. One was the founder of a [failed, naturally] werewolf society in Norway, a sect based around the worship of Fenrir, the illegitimate wolf offspring of Loki and Angrboda, which ruled him out of serious conversation. To the other four—one in Istanbul, one in Los Angeles, one in the Pyrenees and one, incredibly, on a Nile cruise in 1909—each monomaniacally desperate for a She, I was simply unwanted sexual competition and lucky to escape with my life.) Whereas, against all likelihood, John Fletcher’s story of Quinn’s encounter rang … if not true then at least not wholly false. Its very inaptness—werewolves in Mesopotamia?—lent it a whiff of mad authenticity.
One meeting with Fletcher was enough to convince me his story was true (what he was telling us was what Quinn had told him) for the simple reason that the man was incapable of making something like that up. So, granted the veracity of Fletcher’s testimony, what did Quinn write in his journal? What was the five-thousand-year-old story of the Men Who Became Wolves?
What I expected, what I realised I’d been expecting ever since the words “I have Quinn’s book” left my hostess’s mouth, was a deep, a bodily certainty that I no longer cared. What makes you think I give a fuck these days? I don’t give a fuck, actually, now that I think of it. Brave words. In fact I felt sick. Sickened, by the combination of knowing it was all too late and knowing that even now it wasn’t too late. “Quinn’s book” was simultaneously an outgrown childhood fetish and a miraculously resurrected dead love. I knew what a liberation it would be to get up and walk away, with a sad smile, as of a final renunciation that brings peace.
The beauty of chronic ambivalence is that even tiny shifts of detail have the power to tip the scales. Jacqueline turned the shower off and exhaled, heavily, and the sound rushed me up out of my stupor. Suddenly the uncertainty of my status here—was I a prisoner or not?—was intolerable. I have Quinn’s book. She wasn’t lying (and even now the thought of it within reach after all these years was like a violent drop in blood pressure) but I couldn’t stand the thought of simply waiting to see how things played out. With the abrupt cessation of the water’s flow and that one female sigh the weeks of passivity caught up with me and yanked me to my feet (without intending to, I’d gone back to the bed and sat down) in a contained paroxysm of self-disgust. I crossed the soft carpet, picked up my overcoat from where I’d dropped it by the door, then quietly let myself out of the room.
27
JUST WALK OUT OF HERE was all I had. Not much, but enough. Take her at her word and see how far I got before someone stopped me. Before someone tried stopping me. That was what I wanted, something concrete to launch myself at, physically, partly for the relief of not having to think, partly to get out from under the weight of shame that had accumulated. She makes a fool of you and you lick her hand. Holds up the baby toy of Quinn’s book and you dribble and coo. Meanwhile it wasn’t painless and it wasn’t quick.
The house was solid silence. If there were staff they were hidden, though there was no mistaking the weird protoconsciousness of CCTV following me from room to empty room. Behind the butch front I was still talking myself out of looking for Quinn’s journal. It wouldn’t be visible, and if it was it wouldn’t be accessible. And in any case what was the point? Suppose I found it and it said werewolves came on a silver ship out of the sky five thousand years ago, or were magicked up out of a burning hole in the ground by a Sumerian wizard, or were bred by impregnating women with lupine seed—so what? Whatever the origin of my species it would no more make cosmic sense than the origin of any other. The days of making sense, cosmic or otherwise, are long over. For the monster as for the earthworm as for the man the world hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, and we are here as on a darkling plain … I found the lounge, opened one of the glass doors and stepped outside.
The house was built, I now saw, on the flat summit of a series of landscaped terraces. At the front a little red-earthed cactus garden led via white stone steps (one flight on the eastern side, one on the western) down to a tier of olive and cypress interspersed with lavender and thyme, with more steps down to a paved mezzanine over the garages, beyond which the white gravel driveway through the dark evergreens began.
I stood at the top of the first flight and scanned the grounds. No one visible. The indoor silence continued out here, gravid, surveillance rich. I pictured goons manning a closed-circuit console. He’s just exited the lounge, Madame. Do we intercept? Not yet. Is everyone in position? Good. Wait for my command.
In less than half a minute, unmolested, I stood on the driveway. The sun had dropped below the top floor of the house and the little sweat of self-contempt I’d worked up was cooling on my skin. Ahead the conifers made a dark green resinous tunnel, an odour like a nightmarish overdose of Christmas. I began walking.
Off the drive a floor of dead needles and the firs embracing like mourners overhead. A memory of being in my mother’s wardrobe as a child, the thrill of secret enclosure. Presumably a Freudian enactment of a return to the womb. The realisation that I hadn’t thought of my mother for years. In a universe sans afterlife the dead soon become negligible. Unless they’re the dead you’ve killed and eaten. Then you are the afterlife, the overcrowded spirit prison, the packed ghost hotel.
I walked slowly with my full-of-thinking head down—yet when the attack came I was prepared for it. In spite of myself recent events had rebooted the defence systems, dusted down the schema of combat. Jake in reverie at a stately pace, yes, but with aura madly vigilant, trip-switched, motion-sensored, hair-triggered, so that when the figure launched itself from the trees’ murk I was ludicrously ready.
It happened very fast, the reversal. One moment he was barely arm’s length from me, silver-tipped javelin on a collision course with my chest, the next (the silver forced a rush of sickness, as if I’d looked down to see my feet an inch from the cliff edge) he was on his belly groaning into the gravel. There had been a vertiginous second when I grabbed the weapon but I burned through it, snatched the thing from him, spun it Little John–style and struck low to take his shins out from under him. Since he’d flipped facedown with his legs invitingly parted I kicked him hard in the balls—terrible squish of testes on bone—then with some irritation at how inadequate a release this had been put my foot on the back of his neck and jabbed the point an inch or so into his left buttock. He wriggled, soundlessly, since he couldn’t breathe. I removed the spear and gave him a second jab next to the first. More silent contortion. I removed it a second time, got my foot under his hip, hoofed him over onto his back. Recognised the big-lipped young man formerly armed with a Magnum, Paul Cloquet. Wearing the same trench coat, the same ridiculous mascara. His right hand was now grubbily bandaged.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “You?”
Speaking was temporarily beyond him, what with the testicular trauma and ass-sta
bbing. He brought his knees up and rolled over onto his side, facing the tips of my shoes. I checked him for further weaponry, found none. Instead a gold cocaine tin and spoon, a crumpled pack of Marlboro reds, a copper Zippo, loose matches, an iPhone, a pair of binoculars, a hip flask, a credit card–filled wallet and five hundred euros in cash. Also, touchingly, a pack of cashew nuts. Since he was going nowhere I took a minute to establish there weren’t accomplices lurking. The forest’s lush consciousness said no, just this nut job. We were in quiet partnership against the purely human, me and the forest. Nature livens to the latent animal, concedes you contain a divine fragment of the pantheistic whole, that you are, at least in part, part of it. A mere domestic dog lolloping through the woods knows this, feels it, is happy.
“Well?” I said, returning. “Let’s hear it.”
He closed his kohled eyes, spent what seemed to me an inordinately long time parting and bringing together the Jaggerish lips over the excellent large teeth. Shook his head, slowly: Can’t talk yet. The balls. Must wait for the balls. I got down on my haunches and began slowly rubbing his back. It was what I’d wished someone could’ve done for me when Ellis mashed my nuts that morning at the Zetter. As is the way of it once two men have shared the intimacy of violence, Cloquet took the gesture as if it were the most natural thing in the world. His eyes opened.
“Why are you trying to kill me?” I asked him, in French. “And why are you so superhumanly shit at it?”
Still no dice. He just kept swallowing. His breath was bad. Aware of our conspicuousness I half-carried, half-dragged him off the drive and in among the trees. I’d left my smokes in Jacqueline’s boudoir so filched one of his Marlboros and lit it. Incredibly, he with trembling hands found his coke accoutrements and took a couple of hefty toots. It first dazed then steadied him.
“Better?” I said.
He nodded. “Don’t kill me,” he said, in English. Then added, with something like tenderness: “You fucking cunt.”
I hadn’t heard anything to make me laugh for a while. This did. Plus there was the standard French insult of ignoring your French and answering in English. “Hot tip,” I said. “If you’re trying to get someone to not kill you, avoid calling him a fucking cunt.”
He smiled, reached for the coke again. I snatched it from him and put it in my pocket. “Enough of that,” I said. “Quid pro quo, understand? You don’t get this back until you tell me what I want to know.”
Something ended in him, visibly. Though still lying more or less on his side, now semipropped against the flared bole of a tree, he sagged. The bright cosmeticised eyes said no sleep for a long time. “Quid pro quo, Clarice,” he said, in a Hopkins-Lecter impersonation of surprising accuracy.
“You’ve got it. Now. Why do you want me dead?”
“Because she wants you alive.”
“Jacqueline?”
“Did you fuck her yet?”
God only knows why, but I lied. “No,” I said.
“Her cunt’s got a mind. It knows you. Everything about you. Like Lucifer. God is omniscient but he can’t separate out the useful knowledge. You know? He can’t distinguish. For that you need the Devil or her cunt.”
“Why does she want me alive?”
“For the vampires.”
“What?”
“You don’t know anything. I can’t believe you’ve lived this long. I’m not talking to you. You’re beneath me.”
I got up off my knees and crept back out to the drive where I’d left the javelin. “I can use this in a number of ways,” I said when I returned. “They won’t kill you, these ways, but they will hurt. You’re fond, I imagine, of your right eye? I mean, you’ve gone to the trouble of putting makeup on it.” I lined the tip up with the object in question.
Tears, to my surprise, welled and hurried down his cheeks. Ignoring the silver point of the weapon (it was as if he genuinely didn’t recognise it was there) he reached up and tenderly covered his eyes. “Oh God,” he said, quietly. “You don’t know what it’s like with her.”
“For the love of Mary,” I said. “I get it, she’s got a nifty twat. Tell me what I need to know and you can go up there and try’n get back into it. What is this about vampires?”
He dropped his hands, snuffled up his tears, laughed as if at an irony visible only to him. With the now-smudged mascara he looked like Alice Cooper. “I thought I was large,” he said. “Until I met her. Little sins you’re so proud of. Nothing. Crumbs on her table. Now there’s no going back.”
“I can’t believe you’re going to make me do real damage to you,” I said, raising the javelin. “But if that’s the only—”
“Helios Project,” he said. “You know about the Helios Project?”
“Well, I know what it is,” I said. Hardly a secret: The Helios Project is the ongoing attempt by vampires to get themselves immune to the destructive power of daylight. One way or another they’ve been working on it since the Ten Commandments.
“Well, I know what it is,” he parroted, in satirical falsetto. “Do you know, loup-garou, that they now have three recorded cases of sunlight tolerance?”
“No.”
“No. Of course you don’t. So far it hasn’t lasted more than seventy-two hours, but you can imagine their excitement. Know what all three cases have in common?”
“What?”
“Werewolf attacks. The vampires who showed massively increased resistance to daylight had all been bitten by werewolves.”
I sighed. I probably hadn’t sighed in thirty years, but right then it was just the thing. See, Jake? Life said. See how things just start taking shape if you stick around long enough? Dots were becoming visible; I knew with weary certainty the next few moments would join them into some sort of bastard picture. Still, one goes through the motions.
“Doesn’t make sense,” I said. “There have been plenty of bites down the years. We’re like cats and dogs.”
“Yes, Clouseau, but what happened a couple of hundred years ago? Werewolves stopped multiplying. Victims stopped surviving the bite. A virus, WOCOP says. Who knows? But whatever it is when it’s passed to a vampire it confers, to however small a degree, resistance to sunlight.” He reached for the Marlboro. I let him light one up. In the time since leaving the house late afternoon had become dusk. The forest around us was suddenly wealthy with darkness. The white gravel of the winding drive would be the last light to go. “The vampires are kicking themselves because it took them so long to spot it,” Cloquet continued. “Now that they have spotted it”—the big lips widened to free the equine grin—“O Fortuna!—there’s only one werewolf left.” He laughed, huskily, softly blasted me with the louche breath, forgot not to put weight on his bottom, yelped, curled back onto his side. I rather wished I’d stabbed him somewhere less awkward.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t dig vampires but they’re not stupid. It can’t possibly have taken them this long to work this out.”
He was searching his pockets—for the hip flask it turned out. I helped him unscrew the top. After a glug and a wince he said: “But of course it can. For one thing the cases are so far apart. One in 1786, one in 1860, one in 1952. In the 1952 incident the vampire never told anyone he’d been bitten. He was embarrassed. A minion found it in his journal last year and reported it. Plus you’re overstating the case for werewolf-vampire contact. The reality is that when you meet each other you just turn and go in opposite directions, no? Actual conflict rarely occurs.” He shook his head. “It’s too funny. They’re livid.”
I sat back on my heels. Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—presumably—a vampire plot to get you. Werewolf failure to infect is the result of a virus which when passed via a bite to a vampire confers on him a resistance to sunlight. The impulse to laugh started then immediately died. I closed my eyes. The little combat flurry had left me with a postadrenaline heaviness, worsened now by the predictability of the picture revealed by joining the dots. “Aging Jacqueline’s selling me to the boochies,�
�� I said. “For immortality.”
“The immortal cunt. Le con immortel.”
“So you kill me and there’s nothing for her to sell. Dear God help us. Then what? You send her flowers and a vat of Botox and she takes you back?”
He wrinkled his nose, as if conceding a minor snag. Then smiled. He had a sort of likeable stubborn idiocy.
“Quinn’s book,” I said. “Does she have it?”
“Ah, the Men Who Became Wolves. The place where it all began! Not a very wholesome story from what I hear. Wild dogs and dead bodies. Fucking disgusting.”
My scalp went hot. I pressed the javelin’s tip against the tender meat of his throat.
“Okay, okay, fuck. Ow—”
“Does she have the book or not?”
“She has it. The stone too.”
“The stone? The original stone?”
“You can’t get to it. It’s in a vault underground. You have no clue. It’s like Fort Knox under there.”
“How did she get it?”
“How does she get anything? You know what you’re dealing with. She has the uncanniness. You know Crowley? Do what thou wilt? She has the … Things align for her. She bought a lot of the looted shit that came out of Iraq in the war. She’s got contacts in the military, Blackwater, the CIA, the U.S. State Department. I told you: Her cunt is a giant intelligence. What are you going to do now?”