The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan

Author:Glen Duncan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Horror
ISBN: 9780307595089
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

31

I DIDN’T HAVE much fun getting myself out of the villa. There was the removal of two more bits of glass for a start, one in my left calf, one—excruciating when I took my first steps—in my right knee. For a few minutes I just lay on one of the elephantine couches bleeding and feeling sorry for myself. It was pleasant, curled up with manageable pain, listening to the rain fall. These are the first minutes of peace, I thought, with a miffed snuffle, I’ve had in bloody ages.

But that, obviously, wouldn’t do. I hobbled to what was left of the bar, took a fortifying swig of Kauffman’s, retrieved the Luger from the debris and gingerly crunched my way out onto the terrace.

Except for the rain—thanks to which a lovely fresh odour of wet earth cut through the smoke—the Delon estate was silent. The two ground-floor guards lay sprawled nearby, bloodied, dead, one of them still clutching Cloquet’s binoculars. No sound from the roof. Grainer would have shot the lookout up there through the cross-hairs from fifty yards away. The called-for reinforcements weren’t visible, had looked at each other, I felt sure, and with earnest cowardice wordlessly agreed: Fuck reinforcement.

Which meant avoiding them if they were now, tightly wound with safeties off, poking around.

Transportation was the pressing issue. I certainly wasn’t walking, not with my bleeding bits and stove-in rib. (Ribs, plural, I now thought; too much pain for just one.) It was possible Cloquet had driven here, but no less likely he’d arrived by parachute or camel or space-hopper. In any case, who knew how far it was to “the south gate”? No. I needed motorised transport, which, since one of the many things I haven’t got around to in my two hundred years is learning how to fly a helicopter (Jacqueline’s ship-to-shore sat ready on its asphalt pad), meant finding my way to the garages and hot-wiring whatever was in there.

It took me a wearying and peculiarly indeterminate time to locate them, limping and creeping and swearing through my teeth and going around, I now suspect, in circles. I think I might have sat down and passed out for a few minutes in one of the corridors. Elsewhere I vomited dismally against a wall, presided over by a vast sub-Bosch painting of a Black Mass. The rain came down harder, as if to evoke with its hiss time boiling away to nothing. I passed a large dark room where a wall-mounted flat-screen with sound muted showed an overweight rapper performing rap hand gestures, which are supposed to project masculine cool but in fact look like a pointlessly violent version of deaf sign language. The baby-faced skinhead from the Hecate lay on the floor in a pool of blood, untidily dead, with eyes open and one leg bent under him. I went down more stairs than there ought to have been.

Eventually, wounds hot, scalp whispering, ribs vociferously against all this moving around nonsense, I found the utility room and a moment’s comfort in the benign smell of clean laundry.

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