Immortal Lycanthropes

chapter 3.


Myron was hardly out the door when the janitor he had seen polishing the floor earlier slipped out of a doorway and fell in step behind him. “Hey, Jackson. Remember me?” he said.

“Sure,” Myron said, confused.

“No, I mean, remember me?” And he tipped his painter’s cap back, revealing the face of the man Myron had met in the library.

“Hey!” Myron said, and then turned to run. He took one step and bumped into the man with the battered fedora and seersucker suit he’d gotten bum directions from. The man was very tall, although old and a little stooped.

“Don’t get in a lather, fella, we’re on your side,” the fedora said. “Come on, let’s ankle.” Ankle meant walk. Each man grabbed one of Myron’s arms, and dragged him across a street and down a block to a set of benches. On one bench were two other old men, a chessboard between them. They were wearing straw hats and had canes.

“Are you the Illuminati?” Myron asked.

The two men dragging him were rather out of breath, but one of the chess players said, “Pipe the professor here! You really know your onions.”

“They said you always wore hats. They said it was ridiculous,” Myron said.

The fake janitor let go of Myron’s arm, and unzipped his coveralls. Underneath he was wearing the same painted tie. “It’s just like them, you’ll see, to take every opportunity to get their little digs in. They think they’re so smart for going bareheaded.” He wiggled the tie.

Myron was looking around for an avenue of escape. Surely he could run faster than any of these four. “What does it matter?” he asked.

“It’s true, if you summon the demon Asmodeus while wearing a hat, he can possess your body. But that’s screwy! How often do you summon Asmodeus? And if I were going to, I’d simply remove my topper. It’s not a big deal.”

The chess player moved a bishop. “I can’t say I care for the Unknown Men,” he said.

“I don’t like them, either,” Myron said. “They said I was a dead branch, when really I’m more like the chosen one.”

All four men threw their hands in the air in disgust. “Faugh! The dead-branch theory! What else did they say?”

“They said you failed to prevent World War One.”

“We put it off for a hundred years. If your doctor keeps you alive for a century and then you die, do you call this man a failure?”

“I guess not,” Myron said.

The janitor, A. Weishaupt, if that was indeed his real name, put his arm on Myron’s shoulder. “Old boy, you can’t trust those saps. They’re stuck in their antiquated ways, and their forbidden rituals. We just want to help you.”

“I sometimes think no one wants to help me,” Myron said.

“Well, at the very least, we’re not deliberately trying to hurt you. You’re the most interesting thing we’ve seen in years, Jackson. We might be able to help, you know, if you let us know what you want. You didn’t mention what you wanted when you were in the lobby.”

“I just want to find my parents and have no one trying to kill me,” Myron said.

The Illuminati murmured appreciatively. “If someone’s trying to kill you, it can be—mate.” The chess players looked up from their game. “It can be a real pill to prevent. The Lord knows we’ve failed a time or two. Archduke Ferdinand, of course.”

“Prince Rudolf at Mayerling,” another said.

“Yes, and Robespierre.”

“John Keats.”

“General Gordon.”

“Caroline of Brunswick.”

“Alex Raymond.”

“Nietzsche.”

“But the point is,” A. Weishaupt, if that was indeed his real name, interrupted, “that we have succeeded far more often then we have failed.”

“Jean Jaurès.”

“Hush! Experience, old boy, has taught us that the best way to avoid being killed is to go on the offensive. With our help, you will simply have to take your assailant out before he has a chance to futz you up.”

“With your help?”

“Knowledge is power, fella,” one of the chess players said. “And we have the knowledge. The history you have learned of, the history of Washington, of Edison and Churchill, is but a tiny spring welling up from the vast underground stream. Madame Blavatsky, Jack the Ripper, and William Henry Ireland didn’t get their portraits hung in your history class, but it is their knowledge that flows underground, enriching the soil above.”

“And you,” Myron said, “have this knowledge?”

“Only a small part, but we know who knows more. This is an entire new world you’re moving into, fella, and we can be your guides. What other hope do you have?”

“Well, I do have this doomsday device.”

A hush fell over the four men. Very slowly, and with deliberate nonchalance, one said, “Did you say a doomsday device?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it right here.” Myron rooted around in the bag, which he now noticed contained his old street clothes, laundered and folded, plus sneakers—and came out with the cylinder. Its duct tape was still in place. “I don’t even know how to open it, though,” he said with a fake, dismissive laugh. He began to put it back in the bag.

There was a snapping sound, and the fedora held in front of him a switchblade knife. He flipped it around, catching the blade, and handed it pearl-handle first to Myron. Myron felt awkward. He hadn’t really intended to open the package, but it felt like everyone expected him to, and he was too embarrassed to stop what he’d accidentally started.

“I don’t know . . .” was the best he could get out.

Do you really think, everyone’s eyes seemed to be saying, you should be carrying around something called a doomsday device and not know exactly what it is?

The silent argument was persuasive. In absolute stillness, except for the cars passing by, some distant sirens, and the cacophony of the Manhattan crowds, Myron sawed clumsily at the tape. With a little help from his teeth, he managed to cut the top off the cylinder. It was just a cardboard tube under all that tape, the kind inside a roll of wrapping paper. Inside was something wrapped in many layers of tinfoil. He gingerly probed the tinfoil, spreading it out at the top. It extended over the edges of the cylinder like the petals of a flower.

Suddenly the back of Myron’s neck erupted in goose flesh. He’d never felt anything quite like this before. He looked over both shoulders, but there was no one suspicious around except some toothless junkies, a pair of blind and deaf drag queens arguing into each other’s hands, and a homeless man who had built a three-story castle out of refrigerator boxes. Myron began to feel dizzy. “Is your name really A. Weishaupt?” he said, groggily.

“Myron, you’re killing me.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

“My name is Fred Meyers. What’s wrong with you?”

“I think I’ve been drugged. Did you drug me?”

The Illuminati rolled up their sleeves and shook their fists. “The Nine Unknown Men!” they cried. “They must’ve done this to you!”

“The cads!” one added.

Very slowly, “No, maybe I’m not drugged, maybe it’s something else,” Myron said. Just then a moose came thundering down the avenue. Cars swerved onto the sidewalk, and people were screaming in its wake. It charged right up to Myron, who dropped the tube. The moose turned into a wild-haired naked man, and he caught it before it hit the ground.

“By the deer on Mora’s brow!” the moose-man exclaimed through his long blond beard. “What the de’il is that thing?” He was stuffing, as he spoke, the tinfoil back into place.

“Excuse me,” said Fred Meyers. In his hand was a small pistol. “A silver bullet is in the chamber. I suggest you drop the doomsday device.”

“You daft son of a whore, do you ken how foul this smells? Silver bullets are naught but a nuisance, and if I cared two pins for your device I’d gore you afore your finger half crooked.” He had a strong accent. Ye daft soon o’ a hewer.

“You have stated your opinion, but the fact of the gun remains,” said Fred Meyers. And they all stood there.

“’Tis frightful cold,” said the moose-man, who was, after all, completely naked. His hair was so long, it would have come down to his thighs had it not been sticking out in every direction. And to Myron, he said, “These’ll be friends of yours?”

“Maybe,” said Myron.

Then: With a whistling sound, a disk, like a Frisbee, cut through the air. It passed by fedora’s head, slicing a strip off the brim of his hat before embedding itself with a thock in the bench. Immediately Fred Meyers spun around, but a second disk cut into his gun, and he dropped it. His hand was scattered and bleeding.

“Get aboard,” the moose-man said to Myron, and dropped the tube. Myron half expected it to explode when it hit the ground, but nothing of the sort happened; it just struck the pavement and rolled six inches, brought up short by a kneeling moose. The Illuminati were scrambling for cover. From across the street was running the young man Myron had fought upside down. In his hand was a long dagger, and his eyes were blazing. He was screaming, and it was hard to catch, but it sounded something like, “I’m good enough to give you a head start, and you stop and talk to the janitor?” The rest was obscenity.

One of the Illuminati tugged on his cane, and out slid a long blade. “Call the Rosicrucians!” he cried. “Call the Knights of Columbus!”

Myron grabbed the doomsday device and jumped on the moose’s back. The moose unwound its legs and began to run. Myron looked over his shoulder and saw the young man was chasing him down the sidewalk, slowly losing ground. Then, when he was a block behind, he fell over and disappeared from sight. There was the sound of gunfire. But the moose kept on running. Myron held on tight as it moved across the jammed traffic. It leapt onto a car hood, caving it in, and ran faster and faster over sidewalk and street. Myron was so high up, he was looking down on the pedestrians scattering before him. Soon they reached a tunnel, part of which was blocked off by orange cones; the moose ran through the cones, through the echoing of the tunnel, and out into more city streets on the other side. There were sirens, and the sound of a policeman’s voice through a bullhorn. Myron closed his eyes, but he remembered falling out of the truck, and he held on as tight as he could. After what seemed forever, the moose stopped in some woods. He shook Myron onto the ground, and then he was a naked man again.

He said to call him Spenser. He said Myron owed him a set of clothes and some cheese.