My wife didn’t wake until I was fully inside the room. I was both raw with awareness and buried in the Hunger like a lone seed deep in the ground. You’re the thing you don’t want to be and it’s a joy. She ought to have screamed. According to fiction she ought to have screamed. But people never do what fiction says they do. Instead of a scream she opened her mouth and made a small noise of giant shock and revulsion, almost a hiccup. As if she had all the time in the world she lifted herself on one elbow. Her face had always had this distended version of itself—terror—but I was only seeing it now. I put a claw in the bedclothes and dragged them off. My cock rose again at the sight of her naked. My own drool fell on it. The spectacle forced a weird hiatus. Then she turned to fling herself off the bed and I grabbed her ankle and pulled her towards me. At the touch of her my member shrank. Fuck kill eat. Fuck kill eat. Fuckkilleat. But not with—
She lashed out with her free foot, missed, because I had so much time to move. I was so fast it was like having the gift of foresight. Then she did open her mouth to scream—and recognised me. It was what I’d been waiting for. You don’t know what you’ve been waiting for until it arrives. We froze. She looked into my eyes. She said, “It’s you.”
Then, because I knew she knew me, and because I could kill everything in her before killing her, and because that was the trick that led to the peace that passeth understanding, and because the only way was to begin with the worst thing, I let it come down.
The flesh of her thigh opened with a spray of warm blood. She looked sprinkled with garnets. She repeated, “It’s you,” and I grabbed her by the neck and drew her to me. The Hunger fits like a womb. You deliver yourself from it. You must be born. Savour this, he warned. Savour it because too soon you won’t taste the details. I wished I could speak to her. Wished with all my heart I could say, “Yes, it’s me.” That I couldn’t left the tiniest fraction missing from her horror, and though it was tiny we felt it, my brother and I, like a splinter. I cut off the air in her throat and looked into her eyes. Goodness me, that was nice. Savour this—but I didn’t have his restraint. The smell of blood was a finality. My knees loosened. When I couldn’t stand it anymore I pushed her down onto the bed and sank my teeth—that first, fine, careless rapture—into her throat.
There is the frenzy (our unatrocious chronicler would list the postmortem facts: severed trachea, carotid and femoral arteries; massive tissue loss from the torso, thighs, buttocks; bowels ruptured; kidneys, liver and heart gone; lacerations of the breasts, vagina and perineum) but the frenzy holds a centre like the eye of a storm, and here something else is happening, an entranced consumption. Here you’re taking a life. You can’t swallow it whole. You get strands, bites, glugs, chunks. The life of Arabella Marlowe, née Jackson. She was at approximate peace with herself. Delivered into it through the troubled labour of shedding constraints. Still the odd flash of self-loathing—slut, whore—like distant lightning, but powerless, really, against her bigger, her wiser, her more wholly human self. Memories: her mother’s smell of flour and lavender. A red ploughed field under a blue sky. A painted carnival horse. A dead possum in the yard. Her limbs lengthened. The arrival of her breasts filled her with maidenly pride. The shocking little pearl of pleasure down there. Dost thou love me? I know, thou wilt say—Ay; And I will take thy word. Her father had a complete Shakespeare. She learned lines and entered characters. There was some incompletely hammered-out contract between art and God. Male attention went to her. Once or twice something shy and fierce in a man that hinted at what love would be, an index of the body’s maddening insufficiencies. She took her clothes off for painters, sculptors, lovers, learned poker, the rough friendship of rye whisky. Knowing the dangers she pushed forward into experience, suffered, caught on fire, rolled in the dirt to put herself out. She pushed harder and got sick. Pneumonia. Aunt Eliza she hadn’t seen for fifteen years. She emerged from the interrogation by death knowing she’d never be quite as awake as she’d once dreamed. Then Europe, Switzerland, white mountains, me. Love at first sight.
I swallowed it, stole it, the wealth you never count till it’s taken. It went into me, an obscene enrichment, a feast of filthy profit. She fought me, such as she could. She wanted life. Unequivocally she wanted life. She couldn’t scream. I’d gone through her vocal cords in the first bite. Five seconds. Ten. Twenty. Instinct tells you when they’re going. (As a kindred instinct tells you when they’re coming.) I looked at her, gave her my werewolf face dark with her blood, my fangs dressed in her shredded treasures. She was past pain now. Her eyes said she’d gone on from it, was standing at the rail looking back at the dock. Embarkation. I could never have not loved her without becoming someone else. But I had become someone else. She blinked, once, languidly. Her lips moved. One wet gobbet of her own raw meat winked red on her cheek. Dark brown eyes flecked with gold. These eyes said: I’m going. She was past the old language: murder, morality, justice, guilt, punishment, revenge, the words were valueless currency on her voyage. Her eyes said: So, this is it. In the moment before they closed she made the last shift: At the true end of life one doesn’t care how one’s come to death. I wasn’t Jacob, or her husband, or her killer, or a monster; I was just the thing that had unlocked the door. Now she saw through me and the matter of this world into final solving darkness or annihilating light. I was no longer important. Her eyes widened once, then closed.
At some point our struggle must have clipped the bedside table because the lamp had fallen, smashed, spilled, spread a little pool of flame. One bed drape had caught. The fire moved in leisurely consummation up it, across to its neighbour. I only noticed the heat because hers had gone. Once the body’s light’s out the Hunger admits a strand of disgust, a postcoital realism before the act is complete. You eat fast, in a worsening temper, with contempt for God’s creative vulgarity in yoking consciousness to meat. You eat fast because revulsion’s chasing you. When it catches you—seeks you out like the long arm of the law—you’ll have to stop, you won’t be able to go on.
The fire bloomed. In one gesture of flame the whole rug was ablaze. I caught sight of myself for the first time in the cheval glass, hunched over the gored body. It was a hideous composition, a pornographic companion piece to Fuseli’s The Nightmare—or a satire on its excesses. Her left arm hung white, slender, supple, miraculously untouched, the hand half open, fingers arrested as if in mid-evocation of something delicate and elusive. Goodness me, that was nice.
Satiety ambushed me. Too much too soon. A delayed expansion to accommodate the haul. Fed on her flesh my own silted. The stolen life went over my consciousness like hurrying cloud shadows. I found I’d lifted one leg off the floor for balance. It took effort to put it back down. Imbibed blood goes molasses-thick. You lug it for a while, awkwardly. Get out, now, before the fire stops you. Heat beat on my back. Already one curtain was aflame.
I let what remained of her fall from my arms back onto the now burning bed. Let it go. Let it all go. At the window I paused just long enough to feel my right side singed and my left salved in the moonlight, then jumped down, fell, got up and ran.
14
THE FIRE CLAIMED half the house and killed nine of the seventeen staff. Also, as subliminally intended, overwrote the true story of how Arabella died.
Poor Charles suffered, not just the loss of my wife (whom he was at least inordinately fond of and at most guiltily in love with) but of my friendship. In the days immediately following the blaze I was as he saw it understandably remote. But remoteness became estrangement, then absence. I put my estate manager in charge of reconstruction and left for Scotland within a fortnight. I had no plan, merely a reflex to get as far away from people as possible.
I took with me a single souvenir.
The little ground-floor room overlooking the western end of the garden had been Arabella’s study. There wasn’t much in it: a bookcase; a walnut bureau; one of the tattiest of the Indian carpets and an enormous armchair in which my late wife was wont to curl up
with her journal and scribble away for entire afternoons. The journal was kept in the bureau in a queer little iron lockbox with a handful of talismanic trinkets from her risky life, and though the desk had gone in the conflagration the casket—and diary—had survived. It’s in the safe-deposit box in Manhattan now, along with my own chronicles, but in the weeks and months that followed the fire I came to know much of it by heart. Only a few lines are necessary here.
His behaviour grows daily more disturbed. Others would condemn me for keeping my secret, but he is so erratic I fear the effect of a mistimed disclosure. So many moments this last week I’ve been on the verge of telling him. The words are gold under my heart, honey under my tongue: Jacob, I’m carrying your child.
15
LAST NIGHT, NOT long after I’d laid down my pen (quad scripsi, scripsi) it started raining. It rained all night and it’s still raining now, late in the afternoon. The very last of the daylight shows a low sky of soft dark cloud passed under occasionally by lighter white shreds (“pannus” to meteorologists, “messengers” to fishermen; two hundred years, idle moments, books). The sea looks like marbled meat. Against it the gulls’ white has detergent ad purity. The rain’s destroying the snow, obviously. There’s still plenty out here in the valley, in the woods, but in Zennor pavements are reemerging. By the time I get back to London tomorrow the magic will be almost gone. The city will be brisk and miserable, derisory of its lapse, its little dream of things being different.
“Have you done what you needed to do?” Harley asked on the phone an hour ago.
“There was a gap in the record,” I said. “I filled it. Shall I send it to the PO box or the club?”
He understood: This journal would be the last. No more record because no more me. A bad way to start the conversation. I pictured him closing his eyes and jamming his jaws together before letting himself start again.
“Everything’s set up,” he said. “But I can’t get you out of the country till the seventeenth. Cutting it close, I know, but there’s no choice. You’ve got three car-changes between the city and Heathrow. You’re booked on the afternoon Virgin flight to New York with the Tom Carlyle ID. That’s the interference. You’ll actually be flying private charter to Exeter as Matt Arnold. These are brand-new ID packages. Passports, driving licences, NI numbers, the whole fucking caboodle. From Exeter—”
“I’m going to Wales, Harley.”
“What?”
“You heard. Snowdonia.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Go out where I came in. Full circle.”
He paused again. Laboriously lit a cigarette. “From Exeter,” he went on, quietly, “you’ve got options. You can fly to Palma and on to Barcelona or Madrid, or, if you’re not absolutely convinced you’ve shaken them, I’ve set up another two car changes between there and Plymouth. Reggie’ll wait for you until midnight of the seventeenth. He’ll get you over the Channel, then you’re on your own.”
“You’ve done the work, Harls,” I said. “You’re a rock star.”
“Yeah, well, don’t give me this Wales bollocks then.”
I let it go. He knew. I knew he knew. He knew I knew he knew. Standing at the Pines lounge bay window looking down through the rain to the cove I felt the familiar fondness for him being gnawed at by impatience. The longer I hung on the worse it would get. You can’t live solely for someone else without sooner or later hating them. I started to ask about a drop for the new fake IDs, but he stopped me.
“I’ll give you the documents myself,” he said. “I don’t want any fuck-ups.”
“That’s a stupid risk for you.”
“I won’t rest until I’ve put them into your hands personally. Do this my way, Marlowe, please.”
Which was his concession. If you’re going to die then I want to see you one more time. One last handshake before the end.
“Anything more on Cloquet?” I asked him. It was the first time I’d thought of the young man with the Magnum since leaving London, but now that I had I felt uneasy again.
“We let him go,” Harley said. “He’s got nothing. We bugged and watched him for a day or two after his release. He bowled around a bit, nursing his hand, which by the way we treated for him, then eventually he made a penitent call to Jacqueline Delon herself. She was furious with him for going after you. He was told to stay put in his hotel until one of her lot came and escorted him back to Paris. Twenty-four hours later two guys—Delon’s—showed up and did just that. Case closed.”
“You know why they invented the phrase ‘case closed’?”
“What?”
“So that the audience would know it wasn’t.”
“Have it your way, Jacob. You’re chasing shadows. You should be worrying about Ellis.”
“Not Grainer?”
“Grainer’s patient. He’ll wait for the full moon. But Ellis down there watching you with fuck-all else to do … There are a couple of trigger-happy juveniles with him, too.”
“They beheaded my foxes.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying.”
The cloak-and-dagger arrangements, superfluous though we both know they are, are in place. Graham Greene had a semiparodic relationship with the genres his novels exploited, a wry tolerance of their exigencies and tropes. Unavoidably I have the same relationship to my life. False IDs, code words, assignations, surveillance, night flights. Espionage flimflam. And that’s before we even begin on the Horror Story trappings. If it were a novel I’d reject it along with all other genre output that by definition short-changes reality. Unfortunately for me it is reality.
There is the elephant in the room: I killed and ate my wife and unborn child. I killed and ate love. Which left two alternatives: expand or die. Kill yourself or live with it. Give it up or suck it up, in the modern idiom. Well, here I am.
It was a mistake. I don’t mean morally, I mean strategically. I should have turned her. That was my chance. That was my chance. She would have made a better werewolf than I. She was bigger, braver, more blasphemous. Her potential would have been released. She would have led me. My brother in his haste missed the cure for loneliness. It was in his arms and he couldn’t see it. I’ve been happily married to my wife for eleven years. We have two lovely children. I have a good job and a beautiful home. She’s my soul mate in every respect—except one. In bed, I like to … Cathedral-sized marriages crumble because she won’t pee on him or he won’t tie her up. Nothing holds love together like shared vice or collusive perversion. In the years since I murdered and devoured her I’ve had plenty of time to think of what might have been with Arabella, under, as it were, the moon of love. I picture her in pale stockings in a sunlit Edwardian window seat, a cigarette in a long holder, reading aloud: “ ‘… The history of human civilisation shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct …’ Hang on, that’s not the bit—ah, here it is: ‘According to some authorities this aggressive element of the sexual instinct is in reality a relic of cannibalistic desires—that is, it is a contribution derived from the apparatus for obtaining mastery, which is concerned with the satisfaction of the other and, ontogenetically, the older of the great instinctual needs …’ There, you see? I told you. What time are we supposed to be at this shindig anyway?”
We would have killed together and we would have shone.
All appearances to the contrary, I haven’t left good and evil entirely behind. Absurdly or otherwise I still subscribe to atonement. I killed love. Some short while after ripping Arabella and our little foetal secret to pieces my psyche passed sentence on my heart: Henceforth you will endure, without love. You will kill, without love. You will live, without love. You will die, without love. Doesn’t sound like much of a proscription, does it? Try it for a couple of centuries.
As I say, there has been and still is vestigial ethical craziness. Over the years I’ve sought out and helped the
human oppressed, from fugitive Jews in the forests of Poland to terrorised peons in the hills of El Salvador. I funded labour movements in Chile and ran guns for the anti-Fascists in Spain. Big deal, I know. Even the SS didn’t use silver bullets. You’d think the occult nuts among the Reichsführer’s people would’ve insisted, but no. Still, I saved a lot of lives, and, when I got my alignments just right, killed a lot of scumbags. My fortune (reduced by 31 percent in this latest meltdown) has dished out kidney machines and scanners, put food into the bellies of the starving and inoculants into the blood of the at-risks. The philanthropy’s self-sustaining now, the foundations, the trusts. All built (God being dead, irony still etc.) on the Indian poppy. My father, a London director of the East India Company until just before the first Opium War, had followed my grandfather’s lead in the trade and left me a formidably wealthy young man on his death in 1831. There was land, there was property, there were shares in John Company itself. Opium became cotton became coal became steel became … it’s a long story. I diversified. The 1930s hit me hard, but I recovered. Renounce love and you can achieve demonic focus. Once I’d made the decision to stay alive other decisions made themselves. I’d need mobility, anonymity, security. Or in other words sustained wealth. But earlier journals cover this. The point is I make no apology and ask no forgiveness. I’m a man. I’m a monster. A cocktail of contraries. I didn’t ask to become a werewolf but once it had happened I got used to it pretty quickly. You surprise yourself. You surprise yourself, then realise even the surprise was a bit of a sham.