“Sounds like lust at first sight to me,” Madeline said, not without a trace of irritation. She doesn’t appreciate not being the main woman in the room, even if the competition’s been dead for a century and a half.

“Certainly there was lust,” I said. “The holiest of lusts. But make no mistake, we were as deeply in love as it’s possible to be. It’s important you understand that. It’s important for what comes later.”

“Umm.”

“You understand we were in love?”

“Got it. Oh God, yeah, do my hands. You forget about your hands.”

“If this was Poe or Stevenson or Verne or Wells I’d have been drawn away from our camp by a strange sound or glimpsed figure.”

“What?”

“Never mind. It’s not important. I got up from the fire and walked away towards the stream. Thinking about Arabella, you see, had put me in a state of unbearable arousal. I needed to, in the vernacular, toss myself off.”

Madeline said nothing but a microcurrent of professional alertness went through her skin under my palms. Oh. Right. Back on. Here we go.

“I walked perhaps twenty paces to the trees by the edge of the stream, unfastened my trousers and with my throat turned up to the moon began pleasuring myself. I knew I’d tell Arabella I’d done this when I returned home. To her it would be one more sweet sacrament …” I’d started the tale with mechanical wryness but had been sucked in despite myself. I felt, suddenly, not how long a time two hundred years was, but how short. There was the werewolf beginning, like a thorn that had just this second scratched me. Yet somehow between then and now near enough two thousand victims. I thought of them in a concentration camp heap. My guts are a mass grave. It could so easily not have happened. It could so easily have happened to someone else.

“Go on,” Madeline prompted. The massage had paused with the narrative. Patience isn’t one of her strengths.

“It was the last moment of my life as a human being,” I continued, working my hands down her thighs, “and it was a good one: the scent of conifers, the rustle of the stream, the warm air and salving moonlight. I came, deliciously, with the image in my head of her looking at me over her shoulder as I fucked her from behind.”

“Getting the picture, babes.”

“Then the werewolf attacked.”

“Oh.”

“I say ‘attacked’ but the truth is I just happened to be in the way. He was on the run. I still had my prick in my hand when I heard a sudden commotion in the undergrowth, and in less time than it takes to tell he was on me—giant, strong-scented, frantic with fear—then gone. For one second of clarity I felt it all, the speed and bulk of him, the scourging claws, the meat stink of his breath, the ice of the bite and a single glimpse of the beautiful eyes—then he sprang away into the darkness and I lay winded, one arm in the rushing stream, my shirt gathering the weight of my own blood. Cold water, warm blood, something pleasant about the contrast. I seemed to lie there for a long time, but in reality it can only have been seconds before I saw the Hunt. They weren’t called that in those days. Back then they were SOL, the Servants of Light. On the opposite bank three cloaked men on horseback, armed with pistols and silver-tipped spears, one with a longbow and quiver of glinting arrows.”

“Seriously, you should write this down.”

“They didn’t see me, and the noise of the gallop would have drowned me out even if I’d had strength to call to them. In a moment, they too had disappeared. For a while I lay, strangely unconcerned, between consciousness and oblivion. I don’t know how long a time passed. Seconds might have been days. The moonlight on me was like an angel and the constellations came down to me in tenderness: Pegasus, Ursa Major, Cygnus, Orion, the Pleiades .

“The wound had stopped bleeding by the time I crawled back to camp. Charles had slept through the whole thing and some quickening nausea told me not to wake him, told me, in fact, to say nothing of what had passed. What would I have said? That a nine-foot creature, part man, part wolf, had burst out of nowhere and bitten me, then disappeared, pursued by three hunters on horseback? There was a little brandy left in the flask so I poured it over the wound and dressed it as best I could with a couple of handkerchiefs. I built up the fire and settled down to watch through what remained of the night. We had no weapons, but I could at least raise the alarm if the creature returned.” I lay alongside Madeline now, right hand doing deft shiatsu around her lumbar vertebrae. Most of her was busy absorbing the pleasure of the massage. A little of her kept the professional motor idling. Only a negligible bit of her was being irritated by whether this werewolf stuff might turn out to be some sort of mental problem.

“Naturally I fell asleep,” I said. “When I woke, the wound had all but vanished, so that for the remaining four days of the excursion I lived in fear that at best I’d suffered some sort of massive phantasm, at worst that I was completely losing my mind. Every time I thought of telling someone—Charles in the first instance, Arabella when I got home—the feeling of guilty sickness rose and I kept my mouth shut.” Madeline, fine-tuned for certain frequency shifts, touched my cock very lightly with her fingernails. “This, of course, keeping the secret from Arabella, was a Calvary all on its own. My wife’s eyes sought mine for the old recognition, but found there a difference that would have been less nightmarish had it been less slight.”

“Hey,” Madeline whispered. “Look what I’ve found.”

“I had trouble sleeping, swung between moods of euphoria and despair, two or three times ran an inexplicable fever and increasingly, as the month since the attack passed, fought against a new violent force of desire.” Madeline turned, expertly insinuated with her bottom, guided what she’d found into its cleft. “By day I was plagued by fantasies, by night I was at the mercy of dreams. Arabella … What could she do but pour out love? Love was what she had. It beat on me like sunlight on burned skin.”

From movements in Madeline’s shoulders I inferred nimble searching in the handbag on the floor. A pause. The tinkle of foil. All this via the thin muscles of her hand, arm, shoulder, to me. My heart beat against her back. She was waiting for precisely the right moment. I could feel the small difficulty she still had suppressing the part of herself that didn’t want to be a prostitute. My own tumescence reminded me of how the young man’s hand must have throbbed.