Immortal Lycanthropes

chapter 2.


Myron awoke strapped spread-eagled on a table. His head ached, and his tongue felt furry. His first thought was that he has been knocked unconscious entirely too many times recently. His second thought was pure panic. He was in a laboratory. Along a bench by the wall was strange glassware, test tubes and alembics and spiral tubing, all covered in cobwebs. He didn’t know what most of the devices were, but he didn’t like them much. Over to one side, where he could barely see, was a kind of crib or cage with something moving in it.

“Hello?” Myron tried to say, but found he had been gagged.

Darting into his angle of vision suddenly was Oliver, wearing an overlarge lab coat and holding a beaker filled with liquid. A glass straw stuck out of the beaker.

“You’re going to tell me where it is,” Oliver said.

“I can’t tell you anything with this gag in my mouth,” Myron failed to enunciate.

Oliver held the glass straw and put his thumb over its top. When he lifted the straw up, the liquid inside stayed there.

“This is acid,” Oliver said. “Or it’s probably acid—I can’t read most of this stuff. What is this, is this Spanish? What’s an ‘extrêmement dangereux’?” He held the straw over Myron’s arm and lifted his thumb up. The liquid slipped out, and when it hit his sleeve, it began to . . . to sizzle is perhaps the right word. In a moment it had worked its way through the shirt and burned his skin. Myron was so surprised by the pain that he shouted with sufficient vigor to expel the gag from his mouth. The gag, it turned out, was nothing more than an old pair of underpants that had been wadded in there.

“Go ahead and scream,” Oliver said. “No one ever comes down here. No one even knows this place exists.”

Myron writhed in frustration. “What about the thing in the cage over there?” he said, trying to keep Oliver’s attention away from the acid.

“He’s not going to talk.”

“I mean, someone comes to feed him, clearly.”

“He’s half dead of starvation.”

“Look, Oliver, you have to listen to me. This isn’t even going to work, you can’t kill me.”

“Excuse me, are you the Virgin Mary? Because you are making an assumption! You are assuming I want to kill you.”

“I don’t understand what that means, I’m Jewish!”

Silently, Oliver put the acid away and picked up a hacksaw.

Myron tried, “Oliver, you’re going to get in trouble for this.”

“You won’t know anything about that, you’ll be dead.”

“I knew it!” He shook his bindings in frustration. “Oliver, I’m immortal. Miss Emanuel is as well, and Florence. We can all turn into animals!”

“Miss Emanuel warned me that you were delusional and might try telling me something like this.” He laid the saw across Myron’s abdomen.

“Oliver, please think clearly. Are you trying to kill me, or are you trying to extract information from me?”

Oliver had gotten a little ahead of himself, and after a moment’s reflection he had to admit, “First one and then the other.”

“I know where Mignon Emanuel keeps a second shape. I’ve been working on the puzzle all this time.”

“Aha!” Oliver jumped in the air with glee. “I knew there was a second shape, I knew you’d crack.”

“It’s in the locked room, the one we saw the day you—the day you lost your protractor.”

“That’s right, I did lose my protractor. But if it’s in the locked room, we’ll never get it.”

“I know where Mignon Emanuel keeps the keys. They’re in the desk in her office. All we need to do is get into her office.”

“We’ll never do that.”

In the crib in the corner, something unseen scuttled about.

Myron said, “I have a plan. We can do this together, Oliver, but I need you to do it. You know about this conference, right? I’m going to have to make a speech, and right before I go on, I’m going to say I lost the speech, the paper with the speech on it. And you’ll be around, and you’ll say you’d found it but slipped it under the door to the office because you thought it was hers. And we’ll need the speech so she’ll have to send one of us to go get it. Do you see, Oliver? We can get the key!”

“She’ll send Florence, not us.”

“We’ll have to get rid of Florence somehow.” For a moment, Myron saw wrath blaze in Oliver’s eyes, and he quickly amended his statement. “We’ll send her on a fool’s errand, I mean. We have three days to think of a plan. But it won’t work without both of us. What do you say, Oliver?”

Oliver was shaking. But his shaking head nodded. He began to unknot the strap binding Myron’s wrist, which proved to be the tie from a bathrobe threaded through a handy staple in the table. As he struggled with it, a voice called out.

“Oliver!” It was Mignon Emanuel. She was standing on the rickety stairs leading down to the room. Florence was with her, and was already sprinting down the staircase, ducking under the banister when halfway down to jump five feet to the floor.

“We were playing!” Oliver cried.

“It’s true, we’re just playing,” Myron said, “but I’m getting a little bored. Can you untie me?”

In a moment, Florence had undone the three knots and the belt buckle, and Myron was free. He could see that Mignon Emanuel was already turning away, back up the stairs. The crib in the corner looked like it held an alligator.

“There’s blood on the floor of your room,” Florence whispered. “Emanuel got worried.”

“That’s from a nosebleed, from before. We’re just goofing around, but I think Oliver began to lose it at one point. Seriously, he needs the shape.”

“He’s off it for three days.”

“Seriously. He needs the shape.” Myron tried to make it clear with his face how important it was.

How much Oliver, who’d spent the time paralyzed with terror, heard of this is debatable. But when Florence took the shape out from the neck of her jumper, Oliver scurried over and fell to his knees. She put one arm around him as he stroked the shape and wept. Silently, Myron turned and slunk away. He crept up the stairs.

From this angle it became clear that the alligator had the rear legs, rump, and tail of a donkey.

No time to think about that! Myron hit the top of the stairs and began to run. He didn’t have much of a plan, but he thought maybe if he beat Mignon Emanuel to her office he could hide in some way that would let him slip in after her. She could go through her secret bookcase passage, and he’d be at liberty to plunder the desk for a key. He took every shortcut Oliver had taught him, but when he rounded the final corner, Mignon Emanuel was already stepping through her office door. She suddenly turned around to look over her shoulder, but Myron ducked back around the corner before he could be noticed, and ran away. And then he caught his breath. He realized that the back of his neck had not prickled at all.

This explained why he had never seen Mignon Emanuel without Florence there as well. Perhaps with more experience he would have been able to distinguish between the presence of one and two immortal lycanthropes, but he was still new at this, and had never noticed.

Mignon Emanuel, he reasoned, was a mere human.