Immortal Lycanthropes

chapter 2.


A short, stocky redheaded boy, perhaps a little older than Myron but still in freckles, brought some food in later—roast beef on rye and a bowl of applesauce.

He watched Myron eat. “Have you seen the shape?” he asked.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Myron said between bites.

“Well, I’ll give you some advice, if you want to survive in this place. Stay away from Florence.”

“Is she dangerous?”

“No, but she’s mine. Or she will be, and I don’t need any competition.”

“I’m not—”

“I know you’re not, and I’m not supposed to mention your face, but I know you’re not competition. I’m just saying, is all.”

“Say, my neck isn’t prickling,” Myron said. “You’re not one of us?”

“Wrong again, you’re not one of us. Even those guys out there, the infantry, they’re not one of us, and you’re not even one of them.” He left. He hadn’t understood, Myron noted, and then he realized: the boy didn’t know.

Some time later, when he came back, the boy, whose name, he said with a brisk handshake, was Oliver, gathered the dishes and asked Myron if he was able to stand. After testing out his wobbly legs, Myron said sure, and regretted it when he learned that he was at the top of an endless spiral staircase. The steep stone steps went on and on, and Oliver, supporting Myron on his shoulder, explained briefly that Myron had been stationed at the top of “the east tower,” the highest point of the house. “Or the fortress,” he corrected himself. Fortress or house, the building was clearly huge, and Myron even on level ground found his weak legs wearying of the walk down galleries peppered with old portraiture, tiny envased tables, and the occasional suit of armor. The Oriental carpets were lush, the walls wood-paneled a dark brown. Through the windows came the morning sun, and the windows were all stained glass, so the walls and even Oliver as he walked appeared lit in a kaleidoscope of colors. Nebulae of dust motes swirled in the colored beams. Nevertheless, the spaces between the windows were dim, and while some of the many recesses were populated by statues, others were populated only by deep shadows. From outside came muffled shouts; it sounded like a lot of people out there, whatever they were doing. Myron hummed nervously to himself.

Finally the two reached a set of enormous double doors bearing a plaque that read M.E. Ignoring the buzzer, Oliver knocked, two brisk raps, and, although the muffled response was impossible to make out, he pushed one door open. Myron, unsure of what to do, put his shoulder to the other door, and was amazed to find how heavy it was, as heavy as the big metal doors to the gym at his old school.

As the doors swung slowly, Myron could see beyond a large room, lit blindingly through a skylight. Mignon Emanuel sat at an enormous desk, while Florence Agalega paced behind it, back and forth, back and forth.

“M-Miss Emanuel? Do—do you need anything else?” stammered Oliver.

“No, thank you, that will be quite sufficient.”

“Maybe? M-maybe later I could . . .”

“Perhaps later, Oliver, thank you.”

“Hello, Florence,” Oliver squeezed in, and then he was gone, the doors shut tight behind him.

“Please have a seat,” Mignon Emanuel said, rising briefly and gesturing at a small padded chair carved with many wooden swirls that stood before the desk, half resting on a tiger-skin rug. “Now,” she smoothed her skirt into place as she sat back down, “we thought we could begin with your own account. If you would be so kind as to tell us what you know.”

“What I know?” Myron hoped for further clarification, but Mignon Emanuel just nodded her head, so he continued. “I know that Oliver is not an immortal lycanthrope, but you guys are.” He had not yet sat down. To reach the chair he would have to step on the tiger-skin rug, and he felt weird doing so. The head and jaws were still attached.

Mignon Emanuel asked, “Both of us?”

“Um. I don’t know. I can feel that one’s nearby, but I guess I don’t know how many. You said you both were, though, before.”

“Yes, your first assessment was correct, Myron. I merely wished to point out the danger of making assumptions. Modes of thought are one of the primary things we address here. What can you tell us about the state you refer to as immortal lycanthropy?”

Myron looked around the room. His eyes had adjusted to the bright sunlight, and he could see that the walls were covered with bookshelves, and the bookshelves were covered with books. In between some of the shelves were ornamented panels with locks, which opened forward and downward, like an ironing board in the wall.

“The Unknown Men,” he said, “said that we were originally some kind of animal gods, for people to worship back in the days when people used to do that.”

“That is certainly a very anthropocentric view of things,” said Mignon Emanuel.

“A what now?” He had finally sat down.

“An anthropocentric view, a human-centered view. It assumes that we exist for the use of human beings. One might as well assume that human beings existed for our use.”

“Did they? I mean, do they?”

Mignon Emanuel pushed her chair back and slid open a small drawer in the center of the desk. From it she took a small key, which she used to unlock one of the larger drawers. “There are many people here training their bodies, Myron, but it’s important for you to train your mind. Humans tend to assume they’re the most important creatures in the universe, and we can’t let you fall into the same trap.” She had meantime extracted from the drawer a large key ring filled with old-fashioned wrought-iron keys, the kind that looked like skeleton keys. Standing, she walked to the wall, unlocked a panel, and let it fall forward against her. From the nook she drew something rolled up and laminated. “What do you know about the revolution of the planets?”

The question surprised Myron. “The planets go around the sun, of course.”

“Of course. But was this always the consensus of humanity?”

“No, people used to think the sun went around the earth.”

“And they were wrong?”

“Sure, they were wrong.”

“And how do you know this?” Mignon Emanuel was sitting down again, the laminated roll, its curl held by a rubber band, before her.

Myron fretted that Mignon Emanuel might be about to suggest something crazy. “Um. Science? I mean, if you sent a space probe up and looked down at the sun, it would see the earth rotating around it. Wouldn’t it?”

“If the probe were to look down at the sun, yes; but what if it were to look down at the earth?”

“The probe stays where it is, and the earth would pass beneath it and travel on.”

Emanuel nodded. “But how do you know the probe is standing still? You’ve assumed that it stands still if it stays above the sun, and you now assume that if it stands still the earth will move away from it. But you can’t prove a conclusion if that conclusion has already been assumed in your premise. It’s called begging the question. What if you assumed the earth stood still and the probe stood still looking down upon it?”

“Okay,” Myron said, “forget the probe. The sun still doesn’t move.”

“Am I moving now?”

“No, you’re sitting there. Oh, but you’re going to say that you’re moving because you’re on the earth.”

“And the earth is rotating on its axis, and revolving around the sun. But motion is relative. If you interpreted the question to mean Am I moving in relation to the desk, or the room, or the ground, then the answer is clearly no. I am not moving in relation to the earth. But if you interpreted it to mean Am I moving in relation to the sun, then the answer is yes. Do you understand? Then let me ask you, does the sun move?”

“What, in relation to other stars? Probably, but I don’t know much about that.”

“Well, the answer is yes, the sun moves in relation to other stars. Or you could say that other stars move in relation to the sun. On Earth we tend to agree, when we ask a question about motion, that we are referring to motion relative to the earth. But what do we mean when we refer to motion in space?”

“I don’t know. Motion relative to the sun?”

“We could, of course, refer to motion relative to galactic clusters, but there’s hardly a consensus on this point. Bringing other galaxies, or even other stars, into a model of the solar system makes as much sense as bringing the sun into a model of people moving around a room. We are free to choose a point and treat it as fixed, although this choice is arbitrary, as no point is truly fixed.”

“Are you saying,” Myron asked slowly, trying to wrap his head around the situation, “that the ancient astronomers were right?”

“No, of course not. Your hypothetical probe would prove Ptolemy wrong in an instant. I’m just saying that there is a workable model that places the earth at the center of the solar system.” Here she slid the rubber band off the roll. It shot off the end, but Myron did not watch where it went; he was looking at what was on the laminated oak tag. It was a map of the solar system, of course. The map was peppered with numbers and annotations of apogees and perihelions that Myron could scarcely follow, but he could see the earth, labeled clearly in the center, with the moon orbiting it in a tight circle, the sun orbiting at some distance, with Mercury and Venus in concentric circles around the sun, Mars making a larger circle around everything, and then Jupiter, Saturn, and the rest, concentric around the orbit of Mars.

“This isn’t a fair model,” Myron snorted. “Look, it has Mercury and Venus go around the sun, not the earth.”

“Every heliocentric model has the moon revolving around Earth, not the sun. These satellites are no different.”

“But you’re not saying that the sun goes around the earth, are you? Just that this version and the heliocentric version you mentioned are equally valid.”

Mignon Emanuel tapped a glossy fingernail on the chart. “Let us be precise. An argument can be valid but still false, if one of its premises is untrue. I am saying that both this geocentric model and the heliocentric model are equally true.”

Myron frowned over the strange symbols. “So should we use this one instead?”

“Probably not. Calculations are much more difficult to make with the model.”

“What’s this planet here at the edge? Proserpine? I’ve never heard of a planet called Proserpine.”

“You’ve seen enough,” said Mignon Emanuel, snapping the chart out from under Myron and rolling it up quickly. Florence silently handed over a rubber band, perhaps the same one that had gone flying, and then returned to pacing the room’s perimeter. Mignon Emanuel replaced the roll in the cabinet and locked it again. The big ring of keys went into the big drawer, the small key into the small drawer. “Tell me,” she went on, “what else you know about what you have referred to as immortal lycanthropy.”

Myron was worried for a moment that they would be there all day, if every question was followed by an astronomy lesson. Nevertheless, he marshaled his strength and pressed on: “They also said we were a dead branch, and there could be no new ones of us born.”

“Another assumption of the Nine so-called Unknown Men, of whom no fewer than seven are currently known. Your existence is sufficient refutation and overthrow of the dead-branch model.”

“And I know about the Time of Troubles, when everyone was murdering each other.”

“It’s possible to overstate the extent of the massacres, frankly.”

“And I heard there is one of us for each animal species.”

“Likely, if difficult to prove.”

“But there are no marsupials.”

“I can give evidence contradicting that hypothesis. I have met the swamp wallaby, Wallabia bicolor, an excellent fellow, as well as the wombat. Also most congenial, the wombat. Vombatus ursinus. There are monotremes, too.”

“Monotremes?”

“Egg-laying mammals. Monotreme is Greek for one-hole in reference to their single exit to the excretory system.”

“Oh. Like the platypus or the spiny echidna.”

Mignon Emanuel rewarded Myron with a quick smile. “Ornithorhyncus anatinus is one of the deadliest opponents you’re likely to face. He is the only venomous mammal—well, certain shrews and such may have a venomous bite, but they are too small to be of much notice. And he has a sixth sense, an ability to detect electricity, even the electric impulses in your nerves. A dastardly villain, O. anatinus; I was poisoned by him in a tragic incident, and have never quite recovered.” She tugged at the collar of her blouse for a quick display of that nasty purple bruise. “I usually cover it with makeup. In human form it is unsightly, but I was poisoned as an animal, and I fear that—”

“Wait, what’s poisonous?” Myron asked.

“O. anatinus, commonly called the duck-billed platypus.”

“Platypi are poisonous?”

“Venomous. And don’t say platypi—it is an incorrect plural in Greek, Latin, and English. Platypodes or platypoda or even platypuses, if you must.”

“I can’t believe platypuses are venomous.”

“I fear that if I turn back into Procyon lotor I will suffer a much worse fate.”

“It works that way. Wounds from one form don’t carry over?”

“No, of course not, but my human form is large enough that the venom is not fatal.”

“As opposed to—what is your animal?”

“P. lotor, the raccoon. Small enough for the venom to kill. So I am stuck in human form until such a time as I can locate an antivenom capable of coping with immortal venom.”

“And platypuses are seriously venomous?”

“They are.”

“And what was that you said about their only having one hole?”

Mignon Emanuel explained this in more detail. What Myron took away from the lecture was that platypuses had sex with their butts, which is perhaps not strictly accurate.

“But we have spoken a long time, Myron, and you have much to think about. Permit me briefly to explicate the rules of this compound. In a word, there are no rules. You are in a land of do-as-you-please.”

Myron remembered how nervous and respectful Oliver had been. “Oliver sure acted like he thought there were rules.”

That earned another smile from Mignon Emanuel. She bestowed her smiles like gifts, or alms, and they were worth the wait. “For you there are no rules, to be more precise. Naturally not everyone has the same privileges as the chosen one.”

Florence, who had been circling the room in her own unique orbit, added, “The boy’s also an idiot. Factor that in.”

“Now, do you have any questions for me?” Mignon Emanuel asked.

Myron was taken aback. But after a moment, without even a yes, he said, “I need to find out what happened to a friend of mine, this guy, Spenser.”

“That was not a question.”

“Can you help me?”

“Excellent. For I already am. I have met Spenser on several occasions, a splendid fellow, and when we found you we recognized his spoor. I have six woodsmen on his trail. The difficulty is that it appears he fled to Canada, and international red tape is retarding the proceedings.”

“Can I go there? I don’t mean Canada, I mean back to the place you found me.”

“That will be difficult, for the location is three hundred miles away. I’m afraid you made quite a journey, much of it by boat, in your frozen state after we chanced across you. And with Marcus Lynch, Panthera leo, canonically nature’s deadliest hunter, on your trail, I would hardly advise moving much past the front yard. I would not want you to worry, though, so I promise to keep you abreast of details. My only caveat is that the Spenser I knew was a consummate woodsman, and if he does not wish to be found, finding him will prove difficult.”

“What do you know,” Myron said, “about the bear?”

“There are too many species of bear to be certain of much. Also unknown is whether this was a strike, perhaps by P. leo, against you, or whether it was an unrelated event that only Spenser can shed light on.”

“Okay, then let me ask about my parents.”

“Your parents, happily, are safe. But I hope you understand that their safety is to some degree dependent on keeping a healthy distance from you.”

“What? Why?”

“Myron, they are your weak spot. Any contact you have with them could, and probably will, be detected by your enemies.”

“I don’t believe this for one second,” Myron shouted, standing up. “I’ve heard this story about my parents before!”

Mignon Emanuel pushed back her chair and stood as well. Myron hesitated, unsure whether she was standing because he had stood, to be polite, or whether she was going to start a fight. “I thought you might feel that way,” she said, “so I encouraged an old friend of yours to join us.” Clambering out from underneath the enormous desk came—

“Mrs. Wangenstein!” Myron cried. It was his old guidance counselor.

She said, nervously, “Myron, I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize for any inconvenience that might have been engendered from myself being compelled to be allied with your enemies. Full responsibility is of course taken by myself. I was blackmailed into it, it was not my fault. Photographs, a youthful indiscretion—”

“There’s no need to go into the embarrassing details, my dear,” Mignon Emanuel said. “We quite understand.”

“Please be informed,” Mrs. Wangenstein continued, “that while your family may have had their phone number reassigned to my husband and I’s house, and I may have been compelled, through no fault of my own, to serve as an instrument, or rather a trusted lieutenant of your enemies, your family itself remains perfectly safe. This status of things was made certain of personally by myself. Their safety remains a priority of both Miss Emanuel and I, and it is my pleasure to inform you that they are residing in a series of luxury hotel accommodations. Their exact location remains uncertain even to someone as knowledgeable as myself.

“If wickeder people had not threatened, if the choice had not had to be made by myself between your enemies and Evelyn—”

“Thank you, Sophie,” said Mignon Emanuel abruptly, her expression neutral. To Myron: “I hope this reassures you for the moment. If you would like to produce a letter, or a voice recording, we will make every effort, through our agents, to bring it to your parents’ attention. Let us all work toward a time when such secrecy will no longer be necessary.”

That seemed fairly final, if unsatisfying. “Okay,” Myron said. “New question. Who’s Evelyn?”

“Loxodonta africana, the African elephant. A terrible nuisance. There are more elements after you than you may know, Myron.”

“Would you like myself to be returned back under the desk?” said Mrs. Wangenstein.

“No, please just stand,” said Mignon Emanuel.

“Last question,” Myron said. “Where am I?”

Later, when Myron left the room, he found Oliver hiding outside, waiting for him. No sooner did the heavy doors boom shut than he sidled up and in a harsh whisper asked, “What did Florence say about me?”

“I don’t think she said anything at all,” Myron said before he remembered that this was not true.

“I am so in love with her. Do you realize she’s the only girl our age in a ten-mile radius?”

“I think she’s older than I am.”

“Miss Emanuel said you were thirteen. I’m almost fourteen, and Florence is probably fifteen. She may be too old for you, but I’m right in the zone.” He wrapped his arms around himself and rocked back and forth. “Oh, Flossie! Flossie! Flossie!”

“Flossie?”

“And did you notice that she’s shorter than me?”

“She’s shorter than a lot of people.”

“She’s more beautiful than a lot of people. I’ll pretend you meant that.” He shook his fist menacingly.

“Miss Emanuel is very good-looking, too,” Myron observed after some hesitation.

“She’s completely unobtainable, and everyone is in love with her, even though she tells them she’s five hundred years old. I should warn you, you should be less saucy around Miss Emanuel.”

“Saucy?”

“I could hear a few things, accidentally, through the door. Not the words, just the tone of voice. And I’ve got to say, no one talks to her the way you do, not even Florence.”

Myron hadn’t meant to be particularly saucy. He was just tired of the runaround, tired of people he loved disappearing. He also rather liked Miss Emanuel, if tentatively, and he didn’t find her intimidating. When he had been alone with her and Florence, he’d had the feeling that for the first time in a long time he was with people he could stand a chance against in a fight.

“Did you see the shape?”

“The what now?” Myron said. He had still been thinking, rather than paying attention to Oliver.

But now, “Come on,” Oliver was saying, “I’ll show you around.”

Show him around where, though? Where was Myron? Michigan was the short answer, but Mignon Emanuel was fairly candid in her longer answer. The house in which he now stood had been built in the 1880s by bad architect Ricardo Canuteson, and then rebuilt, with sounder structure but with the same rococo-gothic façade, in 1903. At more than one hundred thousand square feet, it had been, at one point, the largest private residence in Michigan. Rectangular in design, built around a central courtyard, with two flanking asymmetrical towers.

Myron didn’t know what rococo meant, and scarcely knew what gothic meant in this context. Later, he would look them up, in the pocket dictionary on the bookshelf in his room, and not understand how they went together, until he made it outside and saw the place himself.

During the Depression, the building, and surrounding land, had been bought by the Knights of Pythias, a minor fraternal order best known for having in 1954 invented rock-and-roll music. They sold their acquisition in the seventies to a conglomerate of Qarmathian heretics from Bahrain. And Panthera leo fifteen years later picked it up from them with the money he had made in customized pornography. Originally the idea behind this gold mine was that pornographic stories, sold by subscription, could have a subscriber’s name inserted as one of the characters; later, an innovation allowed combining two photos with an airbrush; the complexities of computer-aided photo or even film manipulation need hardly be belabored. Marcus Lynch did not invent customized pornography, but he ate the man who invented it, and thereby cornered the market.

But that was just money. Mignon Emanuel, who had managed to wrest control of the house, had her own profits from various mail-order scams she only alluded to obliquely, as well as the sacks of cash found in the basement. But that was just money, too. Money was just step one. What was happening outside now, the muffled shouts and grunts, was step two: militia training.

Some forty years ago, Mignon Emanuel had (she explained) acquired a controlling share in a national chain of daycare centers, and during her tours of the individual franchises had carefully vetted each child for a particular combination of aggression and insecurity. Ten years later she had approached the selected children, one by one, in the afternoon as they left their high schools, invited them into a limousine and out to dinner—and implied she had known them in their youth, casually mentioned that she could offer them immortality, and left them with a photo. Ten years later another visit, another dinner. And then another. Sometimes, in the decades between, she would show up unexpectedly, with bail or a beer. Finally, in their midforties, the aging subjects were drawn by the increasingly plausible prospect of eternal youth and an offer few could resist to Michigan, where they spent their days and nights in tents outside this stately edifice, training along an obstacle course and in the arts of war. There were some desperate thirty-five-year-olds in there, too, from the second wave of daycare surveys. They came into the house only to do light housekeeping and cook meals—there was no staff proper. The only residents in the vast, empty building were Mignon Emanuel, Florence, Oliver, Mrs. Wangenstein (she nodded her head in proud acknowledgment of the mention), a certain Dr. Aluys, and, of course, young Myron Horowitz.

But the one hundred and thirty-three bruisers outside in their boxing rings and firing ranges, they were only step two. Step three was young Myron Horowitz.

Here Mrs. Wangenstein was sent from the room on some transparently false errand (counting orchids in the conservatory probably), and Mignon Emanuel leaned forward across the desk, not for the sake of secrecy, for she spoke in a normal voice, but as one leans toward a friend, a friend about to receive monumental and joyous news. “I’m engaged!” “I’m having a baby!” “I got the job!” That kind of news.

She said, “Imagine an army of us, an immortal army capable of infiltrating any camp, of flying, burrowing, or brachiating”—she actually used this word, I have it on good authority—“and incapable of being stopped.” Myron looked a little worried, and Mignon Emanuel changed her tone. “Imagine, as well: We are the only one who can kill us. Why do we keep doing it? Why can we not live peacefully with each other? Humanity has offered us the trappings of civilization, and we have chosen, repeatedly chosen, to live by the law of tooth and claw. Do you see the common problem here?”

Myron did not.

“We live in anarchy. We have no organizing principles; we acknowledge no government or sovereignty. In the reign of chaos, all there can be is violence; the violence of the cat against the mouse, of the strong against the weak. There has never been anyone to raise a voice in an attempt to persuade our brethren toward unity. Until now.”

“Me?” said Myron.

“You’re the proof that we are not a dead branch, Myron. You’re the hope that there may, indeed, be more to come.” Mignon Emanuel had stood up now, and walked around the huge desk to kneel by Myron’s chair. When Florence came to stand next to her, they were the same height. “You offer us, you offer them something to live for, Myron. They’ll never forget you for that. But there are a few—Marcus is one, Evelyn, yes, is another—who seek leadership for their own nefarious ends. You are in danger from them, true, but here, surrounded by these elite guards, you’ll be safe until your enemies can be converted to your point of view.”

Myron was excited. “So what do we do?”

“Leave that to me, Myron. I’ve already set the wheels in motion, the great wheels, you might say, on which revolve the heavens.” Her smile at this point was jaw busting and absolutely delightful. “Your grand debut is already scheduled, when your unique status will be revealed, first to the human members of the Invisible College”—here she meant the various secret societies Myron had met and would meet—“and later to the rest of us, whom you are destined to rule, with Florence and me at your side to advise, of course. It will be an exciting time, Myron, and there’s every chance, as word gets around, that our friend Spenser will hear about it and learn you’re safe. But while we prepare for the occasion, please, look around, let Oliver show you the ropes, have a good time, and relax.”

Myron would hardly believe his good fortune. “Is Oliver,” he asked, after a moment, “one of the daycare center recruits? Because he’s awful young.”

“No, Oliver is a different matter altogether. Show it to him, Florence.”

Florence drew over her head a leather thong that had been resting outside her turtleneck. Coming up along with it, from behind the front bib of her purple overalls, was a molded piece of gray plastic. It was flat, and its outline was curved.

“What’s that?” Myron asked, as Florence held the thong; the plastic piece twisted back and forth.

“That,” Florence said, “is the shape.”