“Nnnn,” she said. “Lush.”

I massaged in what would have been silence if not for her occasional groans, certain that if I stopped I’d be unable to tolerate my own haywire energies. I recalled how tired Harley had sounded on the phone, reread it now as the first sign of his willingness to let me go. Certainly my death would bring him up against his history, leave nothing between him and the horrors he’d helped conceal, but it would release him, too. He could retire from WOCOP. Go his ways. Chug down every day a little of what he’d become and hope to live long enough to ingest the whole ugly mass. At the very least find a place somewhere warm where he could sit straw-hatted with his bare feet in the dust and listen to what the emptiness had to say. If I needed an altruistic rationale for dying, there it was.

“Tell me some more werewolf stuff,” Madeline slurred. I’d been at it for almost an hour without fear of her conscience kicking in: There’s no boon or pleasure she doesn’t peremptorily gobble up or absorb as part of her birthright. As far as she was concerned I could have gone on pampering her all night, all year, for the rest of her life. The truth is she’s not a very good prostitute.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“Tell me about the first time you killed someone.”

The Werewolf Stuff. For Maddy it’s another client quirk, but one she’s hooked on. In the posteverything world it turns out humans can’t kick the story habit. Homer gets the last laugh. “A lovely young girl lies on a bed in the dark listening to a fairy tale,” I said. “But she’s naked and the storyteller’s hands are all over her.”

She didn’t speak for a moment, then said: “What?”

“Nothing. I seek objective correlatives for the times. Never mind. I killed my first victim on the fourteenth of August, 1842. I was thirty-four years old.”

“1842 … So that’s …”

“I’ll be two hundred and one in March.”

“Not in bad nick then.”

“Human form sticks at the time of turning. It’s the werewolf gets arthritis and cataracts.”

“You should go on telly with this stuff.”

Tell me about the first time you killed someone . For the monster as for the man life’s one long diminishing surprise at how much of your wretched self you find room for. But there are the exceptions, the unique unpleasantnesses, the inoperable tumours …

“A month before taking my first victim,” I said, “I was on a walking holiday with a friend—my best friend at the time, Charles Brooke—in Snowdonia. The year, as I said, was 1842. We were wealthy, educated gentlemen of neighbouring Oxfordshire estates, therefore we went about the trip as we went about everything else: with an air of good-humoured entitlement. Charles was engaged to be married in September. The summer before I’d shocked my little world by marrying a penniless thirty-year-old American woman I’d met and fallen in love with in Switzerland.”

“What were you doing in Switzerland?”

“Charles and I were on a European tour. Not as in the Rolling Stones.”

“What?”

“One went to Europe and saw the sights, it was the done thing. Arabella was travelling there with her aunt, a bad-tempered old turkey but her only means of support. We met at the Metropole Hotel in Lausanne. It was love at first sight.” I ran my thumb very gently over the moist crinkle of Madeline’s anus. A pornographer in Los Angeles said to me not long ago: The asshole’s finished. Everything gets finished. You keep coming up with crazy shit you can’t believe you’ll find the girls for, that’ll finally finish the girls. But the girls just keep turning up and finishing it. It’s depressing.

“Something there you like?” Madeline asked, arching her back.

I removed my thumb and recommenced massaging. “No, it just seemed momentarily apposite. The word ‘love.’ ”

She lowered her backside and reached down into the ice bucket, hefted the bottle of now-flat Bollinger for a swig. “Oh,” she said, only very vaguely wondering what “apposite” might mean. “Be like that then.”

“Charles and I made our camp in a forest clearing some few miles from the base of Snowdon. Pine and silver birch, a stream glimmering like tinsel in the moonlight. A full moon, naturally.”

“That’s really the thing then, is it? The full moon?”

On our wedding night Arabella and I had dragged the bedclothes to where the window’s slab of moonlight lay. I want to see it on your skin.

“Yes, the full moon’s really the thing,” I said. “We all stupidly thought it would stop after astronauts had been up there and walked on it in ’69. There was palpable species depression when it was obvious Armstrong’s one small step changed nothing for werewolves, however giant a leap it was for mankind.”

“Don’t go off,” Madeline said. “You always do that, go off on something and I get lost. It drives me mad.”

“Of course it does,” I said. “I’m sorry. You’re a child of your time. You want the story. Only the story. Very well. To resume: Charles and I lit a fire and pitched the tent. Despite the clear skies it was warm. We ate a supper of salted beef and plum jam, bread, cheese, hot coffee, then between us drank the better part of a flask of brandy. I remember the feeling of freedom, the moon and stars above, the old spirits of wood and water, the companionship of a good friend—and like a radiation from home miles away the love and desire of a beautiful, tender, fascinating woman. I said an air of entitlement earlier, didn’t I? That was true, generally, but there were moments when I was humbled by a sense of my own good fortune.”

“How d’you do it, by the way?”

“Do what?”

“Talk like this, like telly?”

It had stopped snowing. The room was a nest of appalling contemporary comfort. In the new, still, science-fictionish light we could have been on another planet. The journals are in a safe-deposit box in Manhattan. All but the current one. This one. The last one. The untellable story. Harley has the code, the spare key, the authorisation. “Practice,” I said. “Too much time on my hands. Shall I continue?”

“Sorry, yeah, go on. You had the brandy and you were feeling whatever. Free.”

“Charles had a poor head for spirits, and he was exhausted from the miles we’d covered that day. Not long after midnight he retired to the tent, and within a matter of minutes was snoring, softly.” I lifted Madeline’s hair out of the way and worked her trapezoids from scapula to occipital bone. Anatomical Latin’s an unjudgemental friend if you have to rip people apart and eat them. “While Charles slept I lay by the fire, thinking of Arabella. I considered myself the luckiest man alive. Neither she nor I was a virgin when we met, but the little boudoir experience I’d had was no preparation for what followed with her. She had rich, steady, amoral passion. What the world would have called perversion was between us a return to angelic innocence. Nothing of the body was shameful. Everything of the body was sacred.”