Immortal Lycanthropes

IV. Men, Known and Unknown

New men and new methods might do for other people: let those who would, worship the rising star; he at least would be faithful to the sun which had set.

Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days

chapter 1.

I have written under a great host of pseudonyms in my day. Plentygood van Dutchhook, “Fortitude,” A. Frederick Smith, G. A. Henty, Lawrence Christopher Niffen, Frank Richards, Vivian Bloodmark, and, briefly, Wen Piao, are just a few of my more popular noms de plume; but I hit my greatest circulation ghostwriting for the Stratameyer syndicate. There I, or rather we, for I was one of a stable of anonymous ghostwriters, churned out a great many stories of young men and women solving mysteries, sometimes inventing things, and always, always triumphing over mild to severe adversity. For Stratameyer alone I must have written a dozen scenes of urchins forced to spend the night on the forbidding pavements of New York. But frankly, I was whitewashing the experience.

Myron, who may have read a dozen such scenes, had no way of knowing that. He had of late spent many nights sleeping outside, and had thought he had become inured to its hardships. But that night in New York, huddled amid the steam oozing through a grating, was the longest, the coldest, and the most terrible night of his life. Gripping tightly the garbage bag he’d stashed the doomsday device in, he waited for doomsday. “I cannot die, I cannot die,” he muttered to himself, as he rocked back and forth. And then people came out of the dark and tried to prove him wrong.

But the streetlight turned around and shone itself dead on Myron’s face. And so the people, their attempts were desultory.

There is an old Islamic folktale about a man who, having burned in hell for what feels like a thousand years, is given a chance to speak to the living. “How many thousand years have I been dead?” he asks them; and they answer, “A day, and part of a day.” That was Myron’s night, it was a day and part of a day.

The first thing he did when he woke up was eat three hot dogs, courtesy of Gloria’s money and a nearby street vendor, and the second thing was ask a dozen people for increasingly circuitous directions to the public library. There he looked up and read through several books of riddles. He wanted to take them out, but he didn’t think his tattered Pennsylvania library card would work. He wanted to stop and maybe read an adventure novel, but he knew he didn’t have time. He had work to do. He tried looking up, on the computer catalog, the Nine Unknown Men. Nothing came up, but Myron wasn’t sure he was doing it right—was nine spelled out or should it be a numeral? Finally he gave up and headed over to the dusty, disrepaired card catalog, kept in ancient wooden drawers in a strange corner of the third floor. He opened up the N drawer and flipped through. Sure enough, Nine Unknown Men had its own card, and when he touched it, he heard a tinkling sound. A tiny bell had been threaded through a hole punched in the card, and it sounded when the card moved.

Suddenly an old man in a plaid suit and a porkpie hat appeared behind Myron. “You probably don’t want to mess around with those reprobates,” he said.

Myron stared at him. His hackles were still. The man was not one of them, not a lycanthrope.

“Here’s a card,” the man said, flipping one out from inside his plaid sleeve. The card read A. WEISHAUPT & CO., ILLUMINATIONS. “These guys are pretty swell. Would you like a bowl of soup?”

Myron said he would not.

“So anyway, if you don’t mind my asking, why were you interested in the Nine Unknown Men?”

“I wasn’t,” Myron lied. “I was just flipping around. I’m really looking for information on John Dillinger.”

“Ah,” said the man, nodding his head. His tie was very wide, and a hula girl was painted on it. Myron looked closely to make certain, as he didn’t want to make a mistake after Gloria’s lecture, but he could see the streaks of paint. The tie had been hand painted. “Dillinger,” the man continued, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses, “is quite the berries.”

“Quite the berries?”

“I merely mean that he is a fascinating subject. Some say he killed JFK, but I think we can agree that’s an exaggeration, eh?” He chuckled, and looked expectantly at Myron. He looked him right in the face, which most people, on the first day, cannot do.

“I have to go now,” Myron said. And he went to the corner of Fifth Street and Sixth Avenue. The walk took him over an hour, and he got lost for part of it, when a man in a battered fedora and a seersucker suit talked him into walking six blocks and one mysterious flight of stairs in the wrong direction, but at last he found himself at his destination. On one of the four corners was a deli; on two others, pornography stores. The fourth corner had a plain brick building with a small bronze plaque that read 9UM. There was no bell, so Myron pulled the marbled glass door open. The small lobby contained a dying, beribboned potted plant; a slouched-over janitor, his cap pulled low, polishing the floor with a huge buzzing machine; and a high white marbled desk, behind which sat a smartly dressed man. The man had a little mustache and a headphone over one ear. There was very little room for Myron in the lobby.

Myron figured he might as well just cut right to the chase. “I’m here to see the Nine Unknown Men,” he said.

“If they are unknown, this may prove difficult,” the man behind the desk said. He had an Indian accent.

“It’s cool, Gloria sent me,” Myron said, loudly to be heard over the floor polisher.

He paused a moment, and seemed to be listening on his earpiece. “You have told one lie today, Myron Horowitz,” the man said inexplicably. “Tell another and you must face the web of silver.”

“No, no.” Myron could barely see over the lip of the white desk. “I’m one of those . . . I don’t even know what to call them.” He tried to lean forward for a conspiratorial whisper, but he was too short. “I’m an immortal lycanthrope.”

“That will get you through the door,” the man said, and he moved his hands around behind the desk, where Myron couldn’t see. Perhaps he pressed a button, because a panel in the wall, behind the dying plant, slid open, and he tilted his head toward it.

Myron had to clamber over the plant to enter. He found himself, as the door slid shut behind him, in a small pitch-black room. Suddenly his ears were popping, and he realized he was in an elevator, descending rapidly. He was blinded momentarily when the door opened again. Here was a larger, brighter lobby. People were walking quickly back and forth, carrying clipboards and pocket calculators. Most of them looked Indian. A woman, wrapped in a brightly colored dress, gestured for Myron to follow her. She was wearing a security badge, with her photo and the name Sukumarika on it. The two walked down a long white corridor that reminded Myron of the hospital.

“Listen carefully,” said the woman, Sukumarika, “because what you are about to hear is non-negotiable, and I will not repeat it. The Nine Unknown Men have been around since before your great-grandmother’s great-grandmother was born, and don’t think just because you got through the door that we’ll change for you.”

“If I’m immortal, aren’t I older than the Nine Unknown Men?” Myron asked. The woman stopped dead in her tracks.

“I suppose that’s correct,” she said after a moment, and began walking again. Her lips were pursed disapprovingly, probably because Myron had said aren’t I instead of am I not.

“Actually, I’m not that old,” Myron said. “I’m only thirteen.”

“You can’t be thirteen,” Sukumarika said. “None of your kind has been born in millennia.”

“Maybe I was just born, maybe I’m the first of a whole new set. Did you ever think of that?”

“This is impossible. The lycanthropes are a dead branch; a dead branch, like the Illuminati.”

Myron said, “I don’t know what you mean. I was thinking maybe I was more like the chosen one.”

At that moment Sukumarika threw a bag over Myron’s head. Myron was small enough, and the bag was large enough, that it went down to his waist. He tried struggling, but several pairs of hands had seized him, and, mostly from fear, he lost consciousness.