Because nothing compares to killing the thing you love.

Of course it wasn’t Cloquet who’d sold us out to the vampires. It was me. They’d come because I’d obscurely called them. Wasn’t that the tradition, that a vampire couldn’t enter uninvited? The first steel skewer going through my throat was a consummation devoutly to be wished: better someone else killed my child than I killed it myself.

I was very close, just then, to total breakdown. It’s amazing how close you can be, without realising you’ve been going that way. It’s right there. You can see yourself as through a two-way mirror, broken down, liberated, not counting the cost because only the ego counts that and the ego’s gone. You can see yourself in a room of warm soft harmless chaos where everyone’s stopped expecting anything of you.

Everyone except your children.

I was on the floor, curled up on my side, though I didn’t remember lying down. I wasn’t crying, but I knew I couldn’t move. Something like my own voice kept talking to me about what a complete disgusting failure I was, but I had silence – a share of the vast mathematical silence I’d discovered the night I met Delilah Snow – to blot it out. If I lay there long enough I’d be able to summon a share of the impenetrable darkness as well. Then I wouldn’t be able to see or hear anything at all. Longer still and the other senses would go too.

PART TWO

THE THIRD RECURRING DAYDREAM

‘And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire – and it would come to absolutely the same thing.’

Albert Camus – L’Etranger

14

It happened in upstate New York, under a full August moon, when I was six months gone, making what I knew would be the last kill before pregnancy put me in need of Cloquet’s hands-on help. The victim was George Snow, seventy-four-year-old retired attorney at law, widower, father of four, grandfather of six, great-grandfather of three, who lived alone with two cats, walked three miles every day, fished, kept up with Current Events, read the odd literary novel, ate a low-fat diet and listened to forties jazz for himself and Joni Mitchell in loving memory of his wife. The family house was a sprucely kept six-bedroomed property in its own four acres of meadow grass and woodland between Spencertown to the south and Red Rock to the north, just under two miles from Beebe Hill State Forest, and in about five years it was going to be too much for George to manage, which he tried not to think about, though if he noticed an oblong of sun on the oak floor in the hall or the dry timber smell of the back porch or the deep-carpeted calm of the upstairs landing it hurt his heart, because to leave here would be a second brutal bereavement, after the loss of Elaine.

The murder logistics had been simple. Country Road 22 ran straight through the forest and there was luxuriant cover virtually all the way to George’s front door. Cloquet had dropped me close to the change site an hour before moonrise, and would pick me up at the arranged rendezvous on the east side of the forest three hours later, from whence we’d hit the highway. Three hours was a small window – and there’d be five hours of cooped-up wulf to deal with in transit afterwards – but increasingly my preference was for getting as far away from the crime scene as quickly as possible. (The long lunar nights had proved tricky. You had to weigh the difficulty of staying concealed till you were human again against the risk of being spotted – nine feet tall and covered in blood – getting into the back of a van. And while not sticking around for moonset let you put some miles between you and your victim’s remains, it also left you exposed to the risks of the road: engine trouble; an accident; getting pulled over for a faulty brake light. Okay sir, I’m going to need to take a look in the back of the vehicle...) In any case that was the plan, and in accordance with it, just after nine p.m., high on hunger and the relished creep through the moonlit forest, I opened the back door, ducked my giant head for the lintel and entered the house.

It’s a delight to sneak into a stranger’s home, to feel its appalled paralysis, all its helpless historied objects made naked by your unauthorised eye. Here was a big clean kitchen that murmured in its atoms of sunlit family breakfasts, American plenty, manageable dysfunction, love. But long ago now. The room knew its glory days were over. I crossed it and went silently down the hall to the study.

The door was open. Grey-haired George, in pale green flannel shirt and grey corduroys, was sitting in a leather swivel chair at a pine desk, illuminated by an angle-poise lamp, going through some envelope files. His back was to the doorway, to me, to death. Everyone’s always is.

My hands were big and heavy and electric. I thought of how all his body’s alarms would go off at once, the spectacular chemical chaos. He was just beginning to register the slight change in the light, the peripheral tremor of my shadow. The room stilled its details. He raised his head and removed his reading glasses.

I sprang across the floor and spun his chair around to face me.

You want them to see you. You want them to see you because horror fills the flesh with everything it’s going to lose. Memories mass in the cells, rush to final coherence, as if they know that for death only maximal life will do.

George wasn’t afraid of dying, but he enjoyed being alive. The seasons still spoke to him; his child self was still there when the leaves shivered or thunder broke. He loved his family, hopelessly, hopelessly, those little ones with the genes still being cashed-out, inexhaustibly. The smell of air and stone and grass on those kids when they came in from outdoors was the smell of life. He still allowed himself to get involved in HBO dramas. He still had friends in New York. Last year he’d had a six-month fling Philip Roth would’ve envied with divorced Chattham restaurateuse Amber Brouwer, a woman twenty-one years his junior. The first real sex since Elaine’s death almost four years ago. (There had been, in the deranged early months of grieving, when everything ugly had seemed not only allowed but obligatory, half a dozen desolate nights with call girls in Manhattan hotels, but it was a firework of inversion that had soon burned out.) They’d both known, he and Amber, that it wasn’t going anywhere, but known too that for a little while that wouldn’t matter and so made the most of it. Sunday mornings in her bed (his moribund Episcopalian deep structure still issuing vague guilt for not going to church, though he hadn’t been for practically his whole adult life) were slow and rich and astonishing. He’d forgotten how it could be. The mesmerising particularity of a lover’s body, the thin skin over her clavicle, the lilac scribble of varicosis in her thigh, the surprising graceful taper of her hands. The world had shuddered wider awake for him in those first weeks. But eventually their window had closed. He hadn’t realised how much he needed a woman, physically, until she’d said it had to stop. Now he felt sexually lonely all over again.