The woman was barely out of girlhood, pallid, mouse-faced, with greasy hair pinned up under a mobcap. Thin hands raw from too much cold water. I wanted her name. Sally? Sara? I’d spoken to her once, when—

It was as if he’d been holding in check the force of what we were to maximise its impact when he let it go. Not that he fully let it go. Instead he kept just enough back so I could feel my own helplessness in the torrent of our will. Do you see? Yes, I did. A rush of appetite skewered my salivary glands and like a single stroke of expert lewdness raised my lupine cock into hitherto unknown hardness—but within seconds I was soft again. No, not that. Only if she were to become. You think—but it’s not. It doesn’t—

I could feel my brother’s irritation, as if I fit him like a too-tight collar. My ignorance was a maddening labour to be got through with gritted teeth. If you tried that it wouldn’t work—This is not what we—

My cock stiffened again as she blew her fringe off her moist face—but a second time softened. A moment of complete inner silence, then sudden loud Hunger, the other Hunger, booming like a kettledrum. Understanding went in: Lust was a mistaken reflex, an adjustment phase, soon burned through. The new desire made the old seem a whim. Only if she were to become. Only if she. To fuck to kill to eat. Fuck kill eat. There was a Trinity mystery, but only if … but only if—

He upped the drum’s rhythm. Thinking slid and fell like snow thawing from a roof. Her thin arms were bare from the elbows down. Collar open. Neck tendons rose when she scrubbed. White negligible girlish legs floating either side of rutting Bragg like the antennae of a confused insect. Forlorn pale toes. A shallow whorl of a navel. A quiet girl. Humans wear their histories like microclimates. She’d never shone among her eight siblings, had been vaguely loved only when noticed, had remained unformed until Bragg then seen her chance for a single leap into identity. And still her centre didn’t hold. Even giving birth hadn’t established her; it had gone through her like a fire through a field, a random agony that had left her hurt and curled around herself. She spent hours unanchored, drifted through by what felt like other people’s daydreams, though she washed and cleaned and looked after the child and opened her legs for the man.

You don’t just get the body. You get the life. Take a life . Into yourself. The deepest nourishment. Something like love. You’ll see. The space between you swells with untenable potential. Her little breasts the size of apples and her thin-skinned throat with its pounding jugular were already in my hands, between my teeth, taut and turgid, ripe for rupture. I stood outside. I saw how it would be. Nothing but my brother’s grip on the rein kept me back.

Not her .

He let the thought stand alone, unembellished.

Not her.

13

HE RAN. I ran. We ran. All persons, the plural and two singulars justified. They grappled, sheared off, bled into each other, enjoyed moments of unity. Out of the woods moonlight painted me nose to rump, a palpable lick of infinitely permissive love that asked of me only that I be completely myself . What more generous request can a lover make? It’s what I’d asked of Arabella. It’s what she’d asked of me. Until now.

He ran. I ran. We ran. At moments the triumvirate dissolved and was neither him nor I nor us but an unthinking aspect of the night, inseparable from the wind in the grass or the odours in the air, a state—like getting lost in music—recognisable only by coming out of it.

Herne House.

Home.

A hundred yards away I smelled the stabled horses sweating, heard them shifting their feet in the stalls, a lovely sound, the clop-rasp of iron on stone. I leaped the gravelled drive and walked up the rollered front lawn. From butler to tea boy the house held seventeen human hearts. Moonlight silvered the casements. The master bedroom was on the second floor. These warm nights we slept with the window open. And there it was, open. The eighteenth heart.

There’s a view that the only thing to do with atrocity is chronicle it. Facts, not feelings. Give us the dates and numbers but stay out of Hitler’s head. That’s all well and good when the chronicler is outside the atrocity. It won’t wash when the chronicler is the atrocity.

She was asleep, lying on her front, face turned towards me, one bare arm and shoulder in moonlight so bright I couldn’t believe it hadn’t woken her. The scene’s painterly sumptuousness registered, peripherally: her long dark curls against the ivory pillow, the shut lilac buds of her eyes, that white Aphrodite arm on the damask counterpane. Peripherally, because what I could see mattered so much less than what I could smell: her vinous breath and orange blossom perfume, a fraught day’s sweet-salt sweat (she’d bathed cursorily) and barely touched food (poached salmon; a summer fruit compote; coffee), her fearless female blood, a thrilling whiff of shit and the sleepwarm tang of her clever silken cunt. And what I could smell mattered so much less than what I knew: that for a moment I’d be closer to her than ever before, that every secret would be revealed, every treasure yielded, every shame exposed, every shred of self surrendered. I knew—it was passed from him to me, the old dull divine truth—that no ecstatic union compares with killing the thing you love.

My wife didn’t wake until I was fully inside the room. I was both raw with awareness and buried in the Hunger like a lone seed deep in the ground. You’re the thing you don’t want to be and it’s a joy. She ought to have screamed. According to fiction she ought to have screamed. But people never do what fiction says they do. Instead of a scream she opened her mouth and made a small noise of giant shock and revulsion, almost a hiccup. As if she had all the time in the world she lifted herself on one elbow. Her face had always had this distended version of itself—terror—but I was only seeing it now. I put a claw in the bedclothes and dragged them off. My cock rose again at the sight of her naked. My own drool fell on it. The spectacle forced a weird hiatus. Then she turned to fling herself off the bed and I grabbed her ankle and pulled her towards me. At the touch of her my member shrank. Fuck kill eat. Fuck kill eat. Fuckkilleat. But not with—

She lashed out with her free foot, missed, because I had so much time to move. I was so fast it was like having the gift of foresight. Then she did open her mouth to scream—and recognised me. It was what I’d been waiting for. You don’t know what you’ve been waiting for until it arrives. We froze. She looked into my eyes. She said, “It’s you.”