Glen Duncan - The Last Werewolf

A LSO BY G LEN D UNCAN

Hope

Love Remains

I, Lucifer

Weathercock

Death of an Ordinary Man

The Bloodstone Papers

A Day and a Night and a Day

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Copyright 2011 by Glen Duncan

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division
of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in Great Britain by Canongate Books, Ltd., Edinburgh.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, for
permission to reprint an excerpt from The Discovery of the Pacific from
Selected Poems by Thom Gunn, copyright 2007 by The Estate of Thom Gunn.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Duncan, Glen, [date]
The last werewolf / by Glen Duncan.1st American ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59663-5
1. WerewolvesFiction. I. Title.
PR6104.U535L37 2011
823.92dc22 2011011667

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

v3.1

For Pete and Eva

I TS OFFICIAL, H ARLEY said. They killed the Berliner two nights ago. Youre the last. Then after a pause: Im sorry.

Yesterday evening this was. We were in the upstairs library of his Earls Court house, him standing at a tense tilt between stone hearth and oxblood couch, me in the window seat with a tumbler of forty-five-year-old Macallan and a Camel Filter, staring out at dark Londons fast-falling snow. The room smelled of tangerines and leather and the fires pine logs. Forty-eight hours on I was still sluggish from the Curse. Wolf drains from the wrists and shoulders last. In spite of what Id just heard I thought: Madeline can give me a massage later, warm jasmine oil and the long-nailed magnolia hands I dont love and never will.

What are you going to do? Harley said.

I sipped, swallowed, glimpsed the peat bog plashing white legs of the kilted clan Macallan as the whisky kindled in my chest. Its official. Youre the last. Im sorry. Id known what he was going to tell me. Now that he had, what? Vague ontological vertigo. Kubriks astronaut with the severed umbilicus spinning away all alone into infinity At a certain point ones imagination refused. The phrase was: It doesnt bear thinking about. Manifestly it didnt.

Marlowe?

This rooms dead to you, I said. But there are bibliophiles the world over it would reduce to tears of joy. No exaggeration. Harleys collections worth a million-six, books he doesnt go to anymore because hes entered the phase of having given up reading. If he lives another ten years hell enter the next phaseof having gone back to it. Giving up reading seems the height of maturity at first. Like all such heights a false summit. Its a human thing. Ive seen it countless times. Two hundred years, you see everything countless times.

I cant imagine what this is like for you, he said.

Neither can I.

We need to plan.

I didnt reply. Instead let the silence fill with the alternative to planning. Harley lit a Gauloise and topped us up with an unsteady hand, lilac-veined and liver-spotted these days. At seventy he maintains longish thinning grey hair and a plump nicotined moustache that looks waxed but isnt. There was a time when his young men called him Buffalo Bill. Now his young men know Buffalo Bill only as the serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs. During periods of psychic weakness he leans on a bone-handled cane, though hes been told by his doctor its ruining his spine.

The Berliner, I said. Grainer killed him?

Not Grainer. His Californian protg, Ellis.

Grainers saving himself for the main event. Hell come after me alone.

Harley sat down on the couch and stared at the floor. I know what scares him: If I die first therell be no salving surreality between him and his conscience. Jake Marlowe is a monster, fact. Kills and devours people, fact. Which makes him, Harley, an accessory after the fact, fact. With me alive, walking and talking and doing the lunar shuffle once a month he can live in it as in a decadent dream. Did I mention my best friends a werewolf, by the way? Dead, Ill force a brutal awakening. I helped Marlowe get away with murder. Hell probably kill himself or go once and for all mad. One of his upper left incisors is full gold, a dental anachronism that suggests semicraziness anyway.

Next full moon, he said. The rest of the Hunts been ordered to stand down. Its Grainers party. You know what hes like.

Indeed. Eric Grainer is the Hunts Big Dick. All upper-echelon members of WOCOP (World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena) are loaded or bankrolled by the loaded for their expertise. Grainers expertise is tracking and killing my kind. My kind. Of which, thanks to WOCOPs assassins and a century of no new howling kids on the block, it turns out Im the last. I thought of the Berliner, whose name (God being dead, irony still rollickingly alive) was Wolfgang, pictured his last moments: the frost reeling under him, his moonlit muzzle and sweating pelt, the split-second in which his eyes merged disbelief and fear and horror and sadness and reliefthen the white and final light of silver.

What are you going to do? Harley repeated.

All wolf and no gang. Humour darkens. I looked out of the window. The snow was coming down with the implacability of an Old Testament plague. In Earls Court Road pedestrians tottered and slid and in the cold swirling angelic freshness felt their childhoods still there and the shock like a snapped stem of not being children anymore. Two nights ago Id eaten a forty-three-year-old hedge fund specialist. Ive been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants. My last phase, apparently.

Nothing, I said.

Youll have to get out of London.

What for?

Were not going to have this conversation.

Its time.

Its not time.

Harley

Youve got a duty to live, same as the rest of us.

Hardly the same as the rest of you.

Nevertheless. You go on living. And dont give me any poetic bollocks about being tired. Its bogus. Its bad script.

Its not bad script, I said. I am tired.

Been around too long, worn out by history, too full of content, emptily repleteyouve told me. I dont believe you. And in any case you dont give up. You love life because lifes all there is. Theres no God and thats His only Commandment. Give me your word.

I was thinking, as the honest part of me had been from the moment Harley had given me the news, Youll have to tell it now. The untellable tale. You wondered how long a postponement youd get. Turns out you got a hundred and sixty-seven years. Quite a while to keep a girl waiting