Immortal Lycanthropes

chapter 2.


Myron finally found himself in front of a giant metal head, about eight feet tall. It was a woman’s head, the color of bronze. The eyes glowed, and the mouth was on a hinge, so it moved, laboriously, when she spoke. She was speaking.

“Myron Horowitz, you have already told one lie today,” thundered the brazen head.

“What’s happening?” asked Myron, who vaguely assumed, incorrectly, that he was hallucinating.

“Tell another,” the voice echoed as it spoke, “and you will face the web of silver.”

“I didn’t lie, Gloria really sent me.”

“This is not the incident to which we refer. Earlier today, in a library, you told one lie. Above all else the Nine Unknown Men demand absolute truth.”

“What’s the web of silver? Are you one of the Nine Unknown Men? Am I wearing ice skates?”

Myron felt a hand on his shoulder. Only then did he realize that Sukumarika was standing behind him. He had been looking down at his feet. He was wearing not his normal clothes but rather what appeared to be white pajamas, belted at the waist. On his feet were strange boots that looked like skates: to the sole was attached a hook of metal shaped like a sideways U. As soon as he realized how precariously he was balanced on them, he began to wobble.

Sukumarika was whispering in his ear, “Don’t be disrespectful. The web of silver is a monofilament mesh at the bottom of a deep pit. The monofilament wire is invisible, except when moistened with dew, whereupon it glistens silver in the light. Anyone who disobeys is dropped in the pit, and at the bottom, he passes through the slicing of the web . . .”

“The experience can be quite straining,” the head thundered again. Myron turned toward it, but it gave no indication, by smirk or wink, that it was joking.

“O puissant Meridiana,” Sukumarika said, addressing the head for the first time. “Lord Hanusa, whose name is Wrath, is far from us, on secret tasks. Give us your council, most revered one, for before you stands one who claims to be an ancient representative of the lycanthropes.”

“Actually, I’m not so ancient, I’m only thirteen. My thesis is that I am some kind of chosen one, the first to be born in a thousand thousand years.” Myron, unsteady on his skates, was just the right height to look directly into the head’s glowing eyes, and they seemed to him to blaze dangerously as he talked.

“Speak of what you want,” Sukumarika hissed in Myron’s ear.

“I’m looking for Arthur the binturong, and Alice the red panda,” Myron said. “Or even just what to do. Someone wants to kill me and I’m so confused.”

“First, you must give the test of the riddle!” intoned the brazen head.

“I must what now?” Myron asked.

“It means,” Sukumarika hissed again, “you must face the test.”

“If I lose, do I get the web?”

“No,” said Sukumarika. “Something worse.”

“I’m ready,” said Myron, mentally preparing himself.

A faint whirring sound issued from the brazen head. “Which is lighter,” spoke the head, its bronze lips opening and closing upon the hinge, “a pound of alabaster or a pound of raven feathers?”

Myron puffed himself up. This was easier than he’d feared. “No problem. They’re both the same weight: a pound is always a pound.”

“Incorrect. Alabaster is white; raven feathers are black. Alabaster is therefore lighter. He has failed the first test. Now he struggles for his life in the Upside-down Chamber. Take him away.”

“What? No fair!” Sukumarika was bringing out her bag. “Don’t I get to ask you one? You have to answer my riddle, smarty.”

From the head came a puff of air that might have been a sigh. “Very well,” it boomed. “Ask your question also.”

Myron cleared his throat. He began: “Thirty white horses upon a red—”

“Teeth,” said the head. “Take him away.” And the bag went on him.

Myron kept shouting riddles from inside the bag as unseen hands bore him away. “I don’t bite a man unless he bites me—”

“An onion,” Sukumarika said.

“The longer I stand, the shorter—”

“A candle.”

“Um. What have I got in my pocket?”

“Nineteen dollars and a card from the Illuminati. We went through your pants.”

“Oh. What kind of animal am I?”

“Trivia facts are not riddles.”

“But I just wanted to know,” said Myron.

When he was unbagged he was in yet another white room. From the ceiling hung dozens of metal rings. He was on a small platform in front of a wide, yawning pit.

Maybe the web of silver won’t kill me, Myron thought. Maybe I’m a starfish. He had forgotten that starfish are not mammals, and that he was not bound for the silver web. Out loud, Myron said, “I don’t want to face the silver web”; but of course he was not going to. For this was the Upside-down Chamber. And so he was hoisted up, turned topsy-turvy, and the U-shaped hooks on his feet slid into the ceiling’s metal rings. For the first time Myron saw the men who had been carrying him; huge, burly men with angry faces. Sukumarika was right underneath him, and he grabbed her head for balance. She disentangled herself from him and stepped away, but now her hair stuck out at crazy angles.

“Stop that,” she said, trying to smooth her ’do.

“Why are you doing this?” Myron said. He was willing himself vainly to turn into an orangutan, so that he could swing away across the rings.

“Every time I tried to explain, you kept interrupting with questions.” Sukumarika handed him a stout stick, about five feet long.

“I won’t interrupt now. I’m really scared.”

“Our ways are ancient, passed down from the times of the Emperor Asoka. We do not need to explain them to you.”

“So I might as well interrupt, then. Who’s Hanusa?”

“Look before you, Myron.” Sukumarika pointed across the room. Some thirty yards away, across the pit, on another small platform, a young man wearing identical skates was standing. He was probably only seventeen or eighteen, but to a high school freshman he looked like a grownup. He turned his back on Myron, reached up, grabbed two rings, and pulled himself up so he could hook his feet in the rings. When he let go with his hands, he was hanging upside down, facing forward. He reached down and picked up a staff that had been lying there. The U on the skates was shaped with the mouth forward, toward the toe, so he had to slide his skate backwards, out of the ring, and then forward, to the next ring, in order to advance. He was now out from over the platform, above the pit.

“The pit is filled with spikes,” said Sukumarika.

“I’m getting a headache, I think I should get down now,” Myron said. Just then, the young man started to run forward. Running must have been very difficult, since he was hanging upside down by hooks on his feet over a spiked pit, but he was good at it. Myron was so startled by the sudden advance, he instinctively flinched backwards. Of course, the skates slipped from the rings, and Myron fell down on the platform with a terrific clatter. His stick rolled into the pit. Everything had to stop while the men came from behind various trapdoors and arras and hoisted Myron up again. They gave him a new stick. After a brief discussion, they started to poke Myron with goads. When, tentatively, he unhooked one skate and stepped forward, it was not from the prodding; it was simply that he felt too ridiculous hanging upside down and doing nothing. So he took another step away from the platform, and he was looking down into the pit.

It was maybe twenty feet deep, and the bottom was bristling with long, cruel spikes.

“This is stupid,” Myron announced. “If I fall in, I won’t even die. It’ll just hurt a lot.”

“We have in our employ,” Sukumarika said from the platform, “an immortal vole who will come while you are pinned by spikes and eat your jugular.”

The young man began to advance again, more slowly now. Myron tried sidestepping, to circle around him, perhaps, and reach the far platform. He brandished his stick, he hoped threateningly, although waving it affected his balance, and he almost went over backwards again.

“What,” said Myron, “has a hundred eyes but cannot see?”

“A potato,” said Sukumarika.

“What,” said Myron, “is a vole?”

“A field mouse,” said Sukumarika.

Myron groaned. He’d thought he’d catch her with that one. The young man came closer, ring by ring. Myron realized he’d need to do something clever, or he was going to die. Or if he couldn’t do something clever, he should at least do something different.

“Try this one. Off to see—”

“Stop riddling, Myron,” Sukumarika shouted from behind him. “It doesn’t matter if you stump me now. It’s too late; the riddling is over.”

“I’m not talking to you, lady.” In his fear and adrenaline, he could not remember her name. “I’m talking to this guy.” He pointed his stick at the young man, who batted it away with his own. They were close enough that their staves could touch. “Hey you, you never bested me in a riddle contest. So riddle me this:


Off to see what I could find

Through heather and hollow I roam;

All that I found I left behind,

What I found not, I brought home.”


The young man was busy twirling his staff around in a complicated and frankly intimidating pattern.

“Hey, I’m talking to you,” Myron called. “‘All that I found I left behind, what I found not I brought home.’ What is it?”

The other stopped. “Wait. Say it again,” he said.

Myron repeated the rhyme, while stepping forward a ring.

“‘What I found not I brought home,’” the young man muttered to himself. “I know I know this one.”

Myron then wrapped his legs around each other, such that both feet were in the same ring, facing different ways.

“Oh, I know! Ticks! The answer is ticks.”

But holding his stick like a baseball bat, Myron hit the fellow in the shins. A scraping noise, and the man’s boots slid back, free of the rings, and he fell through the air. Myron looked away before he hit the spikes. There was no sound. Slowly and very carefully, Myron turned back to the platform. Those same men helped him down. His heart was beating very fast, and he was more terrified than he cared to let on.

The men began to untie Myron’s boots. Sukumarika stood in front of him, her lips pursed with displeasure. “I killed him,” Myron said. His eyes were tearing up.

Sukumarika silently pointed behind him. Myron looked over his shoulder and saw that the man he had fought was caught in a net that had sprung up, halfway down the pit and well above the spikes. He was clambering across the net like a spider.

Myron was relieved. “Will you tell me where Arthur is?” he asked.

“We don’t have to tell you anything. You’re lucky to be alive.” She was walking him back to the elevator.

“Will you tell me why I’m a dead branch?”

“Like the Illuminati?”

“Yeah, like the Illuminati.”

They walked down one flight of stairs and up another flight of stairs, over a catwalk (below, men in white coats could be seen carving with lasers enormous gems), and through a room shaped like a natural cavern, along which flowed sluggishly a stream of what appeared to be honey.

“You’re a dead branch,” Sukumarika said at last, as they reached a dead end to the corridor, “because your original purpose no longer applies. The Illuminati were formed to stop World War One. This was long before most people could have thought World War One was coming, or even possible, this was the eighteenth century, but the Illuminati had acquired through their parent organization, the Freemasons, certain documents, and they were able to extrapolate that a great war would come and end civilization as we knew it. So, for more than a hundred years, they tried meddling in world affairs, on every level. They started revolutions, and they suppressed revolutions. They signed treaties, and they broke treaties. And then, after all that labor and skullduggery, World War One happened anyway, and ended civilization as we knew it, and then what were the Illuminati to do? They still exist, and they’re major property holders in some cities, such as Munich, but there’s no reason for them to be around. They’re a dead branch, withered and sere, but still attached to the trunk. They’re jokes, frankly. Look at the hats they wear! The Nine Unknown Men, and the members of their subsidiaries and affiliates, would never wear such hats!”

“Okay, but why am I a dead branch?”

“I don’t mean to be cruel. There was a time when primitive men worshiped totem animals, and then it was needful for some to be halfway between man and animal, with a foot in both worlds.”

“Most have four feet, not two,” Myron objected, but even he knew he was picking at nits.

“One by one, peoples dragged themselves up from this animism, embracing newer religions. Under the tutelage of the many forms of Hinduism, the Abrahamic religions, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, or what have you, people abandoned the old ways. With the exception of a few tribes, the animal gods have been forgotten, and these tribes will not last long as they are. And yet you live on. The world has outgrown you, as it has outgrown the Illuminati. The civilization they were formed to preserve, one of progress and innovation, noblesse oblige and grand narratives, no longer exists. And the world you existed for has been dead much longer than that.” She fiddled with her earring, and a door hissed open in the dead-end wall. She pushed Myron inside, not ungently. “I guess you could go look for an animist, or maybe even a stoned neopagan. But, really, you have no purpose. Sorry.” She handed Myron the garbage bag he’d been carrying; it was more full than before; the door slid shut and all was black.

“You cheated,” a voice said, there in the darkness.

Myron’s ears were popping, so he had trouble hearing things. “What?” he said.

“You cheated, and I’m going to remember this. I’d watch your back if I were you.”

The door opened into the familiar lobby, and Myron could see, in the dim fluorescent light that spilled in, that there in the elevator with him was the young man he had fought.

Myron stepped backwards out of the elevator. “I apologize,” he said as the door closed. The young man was saying something, too, but Myron missed it, his voice was so low and ominous.

And then once again the wall was blank.

“Careful of the plant,” said the man behind the desk. He still had the accent.

Myron looked around. The floor-waxing machine stood unattended against a wall. The floor shone slickly, and it was cold against Myron’s bare feet.

“Did I tell any more lies?” Myron asked.

“I don’t think so you did.”

“But they told a lie to me. They said I would fall on the spikes, and you know what? There was a net. So they lied about that.” Myron turned and walked out the door. As he did, he heard faintly behind him the man saying:

“Why are you sure we would spring the net for you?”