Free By Blood We Live by Glen Duncan

the last sheet and the back cover said some were missing. Exposed binding where the excision had been made. My nose expected mould, the sour of old leather. Instead got pharmacy. Medicine. Chemical.
    A document Jake would have wanted you to see.
    For a few moments I stood there on mindless pause.
    Then all my abstractedness shrank back to sudden, tight, bristling consciousness. My skin livened. I was very aware of the dimensions my body occupied, standing in the hall, the villa, the town, the hills, boot-shaped Italy, the big aching curve of the planet, space and time that used to dissolve into God but now went eventually via the Large Hadron Collider into a pointless looped nowhere and nothingness. I was very aware of stilled, wide-eyed
wulf
’s for once almost perfect fit inside me.
    Because in an intuitive leap I’d realised (plot-addicted Life hopped from foot to foot with excitement) whose diary this was.

13
    Q UINN ’ S .
    Impossible.
    I wanted to sit down. Didn’t. Just stood there, holding it in both hands as if I were about to make a presentation of it to an invisible dignitary.
    It’s a ridiculous story
, Jake had written,
but history’s full of ridiculous stories.
    The story of Alexander Quinn, an amateur archeologist who went to Mesopotamia in 1863 and discovered, by accident, the oldest account of the origin of a near worldwide myth—the men who became wolves. Told to him by a dying man, translated by Quinn’s guide, recorded by Quinn in his journal. But Quinn had been killed by bandits in the desert and his journal lost. Jake had spent forty years searching for it. In the end gave up. In the end told himself finding it wouldn’t make any difference:
Suppose I found it and it said werewolves came on a silver ship out of the sky five thousand years ago
, he wrote in his own journal,
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 make no more 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 …
    By the time I met him it had petrified into dogma: Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all, Lu, he said. There isn’t one. I’d inherited it. Repeated it verbatim to Walker when he was still new to the Curse.
    But as soon as I’d pulled the book from the Jiffy bag I’d known. Quinn’s journal. Maybe the truth of how it all began. Maybe the truth of what it all
meant.
A dizzying rush, and under the rush, boredom: This was Life, at it again, trying to flog you connectedness, pattern, structure, trying to flog you a plot. (It’s Life’s suppressed Tourette’s: months, years, decadesof clean contingent smalltalk—then a sudden foul-mouthed explosion of X-rated coincidences and symbols and narrative hooks, a frantic and ludicrous claim for
story.
) But I repeat: the boredom was
under
the rush. The rush was no less real. My hands were nerve-rich, face full of soft heat. I’d grown up Catholic, and though the Curse doth make existentialists of us all (monthly murder will do that; watching your victims’ lives end, feeling all their lights go out in the darkness, all their hopes of heaven met by … by the vast mathematical silence) my childhood self kept its stubborn flame burning. Suppose Quinn’s book reopened the questions? Suppose there was a magical architecture, transcendence, a supernatural scheme of things? Design, intent, meaning. Morality. Suppose there would be, after all,
consequences
?
    There was a folded slip of paper sticking out from between the pages like a bookmark, about a third of the way in. I opened it there. Forced myself to avoid what was on the diary pages (in spite of which I registered