Free The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan

far away and off Eliza’s conscience forever. Arabella’s submission to this plan was part curiosity, part exhaustion. She’d had infatuations, never love. Fifteen years of never saying no to life had stripped her of fear—and convention. The first time we went to bed together we did with gentle greed all we could think of to do, which between us, once I got past my own astonishment, was much of what could be done. I hadn’t known desire could dissolve selves into and out of each other. I hadn’t known love’s indifference, love’s
condescension
to God. She was a year older than me, ten deeper. She loved in casual imperious exercise of a birthright. I loved in terror of losing her. The staff at Herne House couldn’t have been more amazed if I’d married a Bornean orang-utan.
    “What do you wish?” I’d asked her one morning in the first week of our marriage. We were in bed, her lying with her wrists crossed above her head, me up on one elbow, caressing her nakedness. (The flesh had infinity in it. I must know every inch by touch yet every inch renewed its mystery the instant my hand moved on. Delightful endless futility.)
    “To be as I am at this moment,” she said. Sunlight lay on her like a benign intelligence. “A happy creature. I want conversation and grass under my feet and cold water to drink and this”—she reached for my cock—“rising for me in hunger, and an occasional glimpse of my own death to keep me mindful of the beauty and preciousness of life. There. That is the complete desire of Arabella Jackson—Arabella Marlowe.
Mrs
. Arabella Marlowe, in fact. What do you think?”
    The house’s spirits were in appalled awe of her. “I think I’ll be forever running to catch up with you,” I said.
    So for a year we’d taken and taken and calmly taken without surfeit from this inheritance which restored itself daily.
    Then, in mid-July, I’d gone with Charles to Snowdonia.
    The question is: How long does incredulity last? How long do you go on with
such things don’t exist
after one such thing has risen up out of the darkness and sunk its teeth into you? The answer is: not very long. My mother had been a lip-licking consumer of Gothic novels, but more than the
Vatheks
and
Frankensteins
and
Monks
and
Udolphos
the library’s pull in my childhood was a fiendishly illustrated
Bestiary of Myth and Folklore
. It was in German (my father, a committed monoglot, must have acquired it for its fantastical plates), of which I couldn’t read a word. I didn’t need to. The images were sufficient. Home from Wales a day sooner than expected (Arabella was out walking) I’d rushed from the carriage straight to the mouldering stacks. It was a hot afternoon of shivering leaf shadows. There was dust in the tapestries undisturbed since the Glorious Revolution. Of course the book was still there. All these years of its quiet sentience. Now loud sentience. The King James Bible. Locke’s
Essay
. A complete Shakespeare. Newton’s
Principia Mathematica
. Turning the
Bestiary
’s pages I was aware of these tomes gone tense and tight-lipped, a respectable family who knew their shameful secret was about to be exposed. The room was warm and goldenly lit, laboriously aswirl with motes. My hands buzzed. One knows a fraction before seeing.
    W EREWULF
    In the full-page engraving up on its hind legs, maw open, tongue martially curled.
    You’d think that would’ve clinched it. It didn’t. It inaugurated instead a short period of emphatic, of
relieved
scepticism. Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. I closed the book not as if it had told a shattering truth but as if it had exposed a preposterous lie.
    A short period, I said.
    Transformation’s nothing to me now (all over in less than two minutes) but it wasn’t always thus. The process has to learn you, search you out, find its optimal fit. Like murder, like sex, like everything, in fact, it gets easier the more times you do it, the more times it does you, but there’s no