WEREWULF

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 standard, no consistency. It gets the hang of some in three moons, others are still going through hell decades after First Bite. But however long transformation takes to bed down, debut transformation’s something no howler ever forgets.

In my dreams a small wolf slept inside me and it wasn’t comfortable. It moved its heels and elbows and paws, struggled to make space between my lungs, stomach, bladder. Occasionally a scrabbling claw punctured something and I woke. What were you dreaming? Arabella wanted to know. I knew what it was dreaming. It was dreaming of being born. The form and scale of its occupancy shifted. Sometimes its legs were in my legs, its head in my head, its paws in my hands. Other times it was barely the size of a kitten, heartburn hot and fidgety under my sternum. I’d wake and for a moment feel my face changed, reach up to touch the muzzle that wasn’t there.

Days passed and being awake guaranteed nothing. You hold a teacup or the rein of your horse and there’s your hand, your arm, looking just the same as always—but the mass is wrong, the reach, the grip. On the outside it’s you. On the inside … not. It’s not you , Arabella kept saying. It’s still me, but it’s not you. I kept moving out from under her touch, her look. Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process. I watched the mystery of myself thickening between us into a carapace. Once you’ve stopped loving someone breaking his or her heart’s just an unpleasant chore you have to get behind you. My God, you really don’t love me anymore, do you? No matter your decency the victim’s incredulity’s potentially hilarious. You manage not to laugh. But breaking the heart of someone you still love is a rare horror, not funny to anyone, except perhaps Satan, if such a being existed, and even his pleasure would be spoiled by not having had a hand in it, by the dumb, wasteful accident of the thing. The Devil wants meaning just like the rest of us. Once, in the small hours, when I’d thought she was asleep with her back to me, Arabella had said, Put your arms around me, and I had, cupped her breasts and buried my nose in the warm down of her nape—and felt another bit of her faith die because despite my skin against hers something kept us apart. Me. Can’t you come to me? she said, holding tighter. I’m still here. I’m waiting for you.

The simplest tasks required immense concentration: descending a staircase, opening a door, pulling on a riding boot. I had memories not my own. Waist-deep mist dividing around me. Trees rushing past. Moonlight on a mountain tarn. A young girl on a forest floor with her thigh torn open, naked white doll body on a bed of dark green ferns, eyes wide, dead. Jacob, where are you? Arabella wanted to know. Are you seeing something? I certainly was. Harebells crushed under his wrinkled quivering heel. The three moonlit horsemen like a living Uccello. Mucus in his snout had rattled. I fell asleep in my chair with my arm hanging down and woke feeling the stream’s soft cold flow and my shirt warm-heavy with blood. I had to keep getting up and leaving the room, the house, her .

So the two weeks since my return from Wales had passed and every day I’d suffered the torture of torturing the woman I loved, the woman who loved me. At moments of supreme self-pity I’d hated her for it. Last night, woken mouth open, tongue out, body at tearing point over the simmering shape of the wolf, I’d left her asleep and gone out onto the lawn. The moon knew. The moon knew I didn’t know what. The moon was an inscrutable pregnancy, a withheld alleviation, a love more cunning than a mother’s. The moon had a secret to share. But not yet. Not quite yet. I’d wandered the fields, crawled in dew-damp before dawn. For Arabella, waking to find me gone had torn off a further layer of denial.

“This will almost, but not quite, kill me,” she said now, still with the ominous neutrality, as the small-faced parlour maid crossed the doorway carrying a vase of white roses. “That love’s no match for the whispers of English neighbours. Marlowe’s American whore. Do you remember laughing about that? Do you remember calling it quaint ?” I did remember. I remembered how that “quaint” had liberated me into superior benevolence, how with that one word the harness constricting the world—Blake’s mind-forged manacles (the erotic revolution had resuscitated dead pictures and poems)—had dropped away. Now she believed I wanted something else. How could she not? I did want something else. More blue-veined, more soft, more sweetly white / Than Venus when she rose / From out her cradle shell . Together we’d celebrated the bliss of the Fallen flesh. Now I knew there was a Fall further, into the bliss of devouring it. (And a fall further than that . Or so the moon told. Or so the moon withheld. Not yet. Not quite yet.)

“Where are you going?” Arabella said. I’d risen from the chair and crossed to the French windows. “Jacob? Will you not look at me? For God’s sake.”

My legs gave. I went down slowly onto my knees, one moist hand slipping from the door handle. She rushed to me—or the creature did; the ether tore a moment and I couldn’t tell which. Then her arms and orange blossom perfume were around me, my face close to her white breasts take her life take her life take her life please God make it stop let me die take her— “Don’t,” she said, as I pushed myself upright. “Don’t try to get up.” But I was on my feet again as if a spirit had hoiked me by the armpits.

“I must go,” I said. I knew how insane that sounded to her. “I’ll go and see Charles.” Her detachment, I now saw, had been an experiment, a toe dipped in the emotional waters she might have to enter. In fact she was still waiting for me to return to her. And still I hadn’t. She stared at me, forced into her eyes suspicion, anger, concern, potential forgiveness; to admit outright incomprehension would be a death. A few drops of sweat showed above her top lip. I thought of the look she gave me when I came inside her: sly welcome that segued into infinite calm relished confirmation. For a man a woman has no greater gift to give. And here I was destroying it. “It’s not you,” I managed to get out. I’d opened the door. The smell and weight of the lawn was a gravity I could flow into. “It’s not you. I love you.”