Immortal Lycanthropes

chapter 3.


He scarcely saw Oliver for the next few days. This was particularly terrifying, as Myron well knew that he was now in Oliver’s power—Oliver knew his plan, or a fictitious but still damning version of it, after all, and furthermore might be completely insane.

By this point in his stay at the house, Myron hardly needed a guide, but Dr. Aluys nevertheless slipped easily and abruptly into the role Oliver had filled. He was often waiting for Myron in the morning when he came down the stairs, and they lunched together in the kitchen. Presumably, Mignon Emanuel wanted someone to keep an eye on him, and Oliver was not reliable enough anymore.

But Myron liked Dr. Aluys. He was a terrific liar, but Myron had become something of one lately, too, so he did not begrudge him this foible. Dr. Aluys, by his own account, had been born near Paris in 1704. His stepfather had taught him the rudiments of alchemy, and it was to this science that he ascribed both his preternaturally long life and his current occupation here.

“The fabrication of the gold, vraiment, is not very profitable, believe it or not, by reason of the length of time required in transmutation; of the impossibility of working with amounts more than minute in one time; and indeed by reason of expense of materials required. Nevertheless, it offers something, and something is more than nothing, non? In exchange for a certain quantity produced, and a promise I will work to repair Madame Emanuel, I am given my own laboratory, for my own personal research in curing the ‘English disease.’ Here is where I eat my dinner the most of days.”

Myron could not help calling him on this fib. “I’ve been in your laboratory, and it was covered in cobwebs,” he said.

“Ridicule!” exclaimed the alchemist. And then, slapping the back of his hand to his forehead, which gesture shot a cloud of powder from his hair, he cried, “L’alligatâne!” This, Myron learned later, meant “Alligator-donkey.” Dr. Aluys scurried off, returning an hour later covered in what proved to be chickens’ blood.

“Fortunately, the alligator can survive of months without alimentation, and his mouth is an alligator’s mouth!” Dr. Aluys said, smiling. Turned out he had more than one laboratory. Myron assumed the good doctor had been contracted to treat Mignon Emanuel’s platypus venom.

Oh, Dr. Aluys knew all about the conference, but he seemed unconcerned about what it meant. His sole interest, he said, was science, although clearly snuff should have been included on the list. He brought Myron to one of his underground labs and showed him the half-powdered fragments of the philosopher’s stone. He also had terrariums with several species of onycophore—what is commonly called the velvet worm. These were small creatures that looked like worms with innumerable nubby legs on which they stalked their prey before snaring it in slime shot out of the face. Dr. Aluys’s delight, as he witnessed, with Myron, the rare Peripatopsis leonine catching with slime a grasshopper in midleap, was so intense that Myron felt a little embarrassed for him. But he told the good doctor the story of the snake, the frog, and the parasitic worm, and Dr. Aluys in response danced a little jig on his ancient sticklike legs.

Oh, he could discourse wittily on any topic, but favored, in addition to natural philosophy: dueling, baroque architecture, and décolletage.

“I have a hypothesis subject to you,” he told Myron. “Look at your carriage. You march so lightly now, you must be something large when you finally transform. I think you are a mammoth, trapped for of eons in the ice and only now thawed out.”

For a moment, Myron was about to say that made pretty good sense. But then he remembered that he was the chosen one. Or, at the very least, if he wasn’t, he had to pretend he was the chosen one a little bit longer.

“I’m the chosen one.”

“’Tis just a hypothesis.”

The doctor, Myron noted, clearly believed Mignon Emanuel was the raccoon she claimed she was, and he wondered if he should disabuse him of this notion. But who knew if he could trust a three-hundred-year-old alchemist?

For that matter, if Mignon Emanuel was not immortal, perhaps only alchemy could explain her youth across the decades.

Dr. Aluys was there when Mrs. Wangenstein brought back from town a black suit for Myron, fitted precisely to his measurements. He was there when Mignon Emanuel coached Myron on the inspirational speech she’d written for him. He had a knack, learned in the courts of kings, doubtless, of loitering almost forgotten in a corner and then suddenly materializing when needed. It made him a congenial companion, and the days before the conference passed quickly. Myron realized at some point that he had been either under observation or in his tower room almost the whole time he’d been in the big house; but he liked having Dr. Aluys around anyway.

It was the first guests at the conference that finally drove the doctor away, back, presumably, to his underground labs. The Central Anarchist Council showed up to the conference twenty hours early, and not at the front but at the kitchen door. There were four of them, and they were very excited that they had managed to slip past the sentries, who had apparently left their posts to chase a strange man with a bow through the woods.

The Central Anarchist Council was excited. There was supposed to be some big, earth-shattering announcement at the conference, and that’s why everyone was showing up, but they had their own agenda, they told Myron and Dr. Aluys as they both ate peanut butter and honey sandwiches at the kitchen counter. “In Sèvres, France,” the CAC explained, “they have the prototype meter bar—that’s the platinum bar that shows the official length of a meter. What we’ll do while we’re here, we’ll get everyone to agree to go to Paris and destroy the meter bar. After that, no one will know how long anything is! No one will be able to measure anything ever again!”

“Non! Non! Le prototype du mètre!” cried Dr. Aluys, and he ran out of the room.

Myron didn’t see what all the fuss was about. No one ever used meters, anyway. But he was sorry it had upset Dr. Aluys, whom he never saw, incidentally, again. Finally Florence came into the kitchen to show the Central Anarchist Council to their rooms.

“Where’s Oliver?” Myron asked her.

“I think he’s in the billiard room,” Florence answered absently.

The Central Anarchist Council left behind several empty cans of spray paint, and a tube of airplane glue, which one returned to the kitchen a few minutes later to collect.

“Say, are you Myron?” he asked Myron.

Myron was.

“Man, Gloria wasn’t exaggerating about you.” He had seen Gloria, it turned out, in Chicago last month. She had refused to come along to the conference. “She used to be a legend; but now she’s never up for anything.”

Myron finished his sandwich and went to look for Oliver. He walked through the grand ballroom, where tough men dressed in camouflage were hanging up a banner, WELCOME, DELEGATES. He walked along the tables, noting the engraved nameplates. The Knights of Columbus. The Branch Davidians. The Wallenbergians. The Free Shriners. The Society of the Nights of Eternal Levity. The Carbonari. The Erisians. The National Organization of the Anvil. The Brotherhood of Moloch. The Gormogons. The AFL-CIO. There were no Rosicrucians, of course. There was also no Oliver, wherever Myron looked.

Myron went upstairs to the tower, glanced over his speech, folded it up, and, putting it in the pocket of his suit coat, tried for a long time to go to sleep.

He woke up late. Everyone was too busy to bother with Myron. When he went downstairs, he found that the house was, for once, bustling. Militiamen were running around with clipboards and extension cords. He was suited up and ready, but, of course, unless he found Oliver, nothing would go right. He looked out at the obstacle course, but before he could step outside, Mrs. Wangenstein seized his shoulder.

“The suit must not be permitted to get dirty,” she said.

Myron worried that, when he claimed the speech was lost, Mignon Emanuel would somehow know it was in his pocket, and regretted ever bringing it out of his room. He went to the giant vase, peeked inside on tiptoe. His cardboard tube doomsday device was still there. He dropped the speech in as well. It was as good a hiding place as any.

And then he went to every other secret hiding place he knew, but there was no sign of Oliver. Myron began to get the feeling that Oliver had kept some of his best secrets to himself.

By late afternoon, the grand ballroom was beginning to fill up with delegates. Myron peeked in from behind a rear curtain. He wondered if he should just forget all his furtive plans and get swept up in the conference, in the role he could still pretend to play. So many people had shown up, anxious for the promised revelation that was to be his debut. There were the Oddfellows, the Skull and Bones, the pitiful remnant of the Manson Family, the Order of the Harmonious Fist, the Assassins with their homemade bongs, the Kagaali with long beards grinding their sampo, the ATF, three of the Four Tops, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Illuminati—one of the Illuminati saw Myron and waved at him. The man did not have a hand but a metal hook. He tipped his hat up, and Myron recognized Fred “Weishaupt” Meyers. He waved back. He wished he could go talk to him, ask him what happened that day in the Village after he left, but already one of the delegates was standing up and talking. His nameplate identified him as a Wallenbergian.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the man said, a slight lilt in his accent, “let us see if, before we begin, we are able to agree on our agenda for being here.”

“Blood for the blood god!” cried the Brotherhood of Moloch in unison.

“Come now,” objected one of the Central Anarchist Council. “There is a posted agenda for this conference. Why don’t we stick to that?”

The Wallenbergian said, “I’m not competing with the posted agenda. I just want to see if we can agree on certain points before the conference starts.”

Myron felt a prickling on his neck, and suddenly Mignon Emanuel was behind him. “The Wallenbergians always try to hijack things for their own devices,” she whispered in his ear. “I never should have invited them, except they have become so powerful politically.”

Myron turned around. Mignon Emanuel was dressed in her finest gray shirt and blazer. It was exactly what she wore every day, except Mrs. Wangenstein had informed Myron earlier that it was much more expensive. For a moment, the tingle on his neck made Myron doubt all his conclusions about Mignon Emanuel—but then he noticed that riding on Mignon’s shoulder was a ring-tailed lemur, a handkerchief knotted around something on a thong around its neck.

“Who are the Wallenbergians?” Myron whispered back.

“They are a society that believes that Raoul Wallenberg is a prisoner in Siberia, and seeks his release. They have to bring it up every time, everywhere they go.”

“Who’s Raoul Wallenberg?” Myron whispered. He felt frustrated to see how little he knew about the groups at the conference, about how little he knew about this world. But there were other things he had to learn than would be taught to him here.

“The greatest human since Chinese Gordon,” Mignon Emanuel said. “But still just a human.” And then she was called away by an electrical fire.

“Actually, I have a slightly different suggestion about what we should do,” the Aum Shinrikyo delegate was saying.

Something grabbed Myron violently from behind. It was Oliver, in a panic. “There you are!” he hissed.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” Myron said.

“I couldn’t come anywhere near you while Miss Emanuel was around. If she saw us together, everything would be ruined.” Oliver was shaking, and he looked like death, but, to be fair, Myron hadn’t thought of this angle, and he couldn’t really argue with the reasoning. “Did you get rid of Florence? You said you would. I didn’t see her around.”

Myron had to bite his tongue, for he was about to say where Florence really was. It didn’t matter, though. Mignon Emanuel would never send Florence to the office while Myron was around, not if she wanted to keep the secret that she was just a human herself. “She’ll be gone for a while,” he said. “Now let me go tell Miss Emanuel I forgot my speech, and you come up and mention you slipped it under her door, okay?” Oliver did not look very stable or rational at the moment, and Myron was afraid he might have forgotten the plan already.

“Wait,” said Oliver. “Give me the speech first, and I’ll go stick it under the door.”

“You don’t have to really slip it under her door, it’s a lie. A ruse. Just say you did.”

“But what if she checks? She’ll know I lied.”

“How will she check? If she goes there later, we can just say we picked it up. It doesn’t matter.”

“It definitely matters, just give me that speech.”

Myron was holding his head. “I don’t have it on me anymore.”

“Tell me where it is. I’ll go get it.”

“Oliver, we don’t have time! Just pretend you put it under the door.”

“Don’t be an idiot, where did you hide it?”

Finally, Myron told him about the vase. As soon as Oliver left, Myron regretted that he had not gone himself. What would he do if Mignon Emanuel made him go out before Oliver came back? It wasn’t far to the vase, of course, but who knew what Oliver would do, once out of Myron’s sight? He peeked again, through the curtain, at the scene on the ballroom floor, but his sight was blocked by the Knights of Columbus delegates, who were standing and administering to each other, in a ring, their traditional oath: “I will go to any part of the world whithersoever I may be sent, to the frozen regions north, jungles of India, to the centers of civilization of Europe, or to the wild haunts of the barbarous savages of America without murmuring or repining . . .” It went on and on, and Myron couldn’t tell what was happening beyond them. He kept checking his watch nervously, but he wasn’t wearing a watch, so instead he just kept lifting his left arm halfway to his face like a crazy person. When the Knights of Columbus sat, the rest of the delegates began to stomp their feet in impatience.

And then he felt Florence, and therefore Mignon Emanuel, coming up behind him. “Are you almost ready for showtime, Myron?” Mignon Emanuel asked with an encouraging smile.

The stomping grew louder. Where the deuce was Oliver? “Er,” Myron said, stalling for time. “Actually, well, this is embarrassing to say, but, actually”—he was stuck halfway through the sentence, and had nowhere to go but forward—“it turns out I can’t find the speech.”

“What?” Mignon Emanuel snapped.

“I really need it. Do you have another copy?” And for a moment of sheer terror he wondered what he would do if she did have one. He hadn’t prepared for one moment to get in front of the delegation. He had only a cursory idea of what he was even supposed to say. The incredible fear somehow managed to increase.

“Oh, I saw that in the hall,” Oliver said, arriving from nowhere. Myron noticed with alarm that he had the cardboard tube held casually behind his back. “I slid it under your office door, I thought it was yours.”

Mignon Emanuel looked from Myron to Oliver and back.

“I recognized your handwriting, so I figured it belonged to you,” Oliver continued, as Myron tried to will him into shutting up.

Mignon Emanuel now turned her full attention on Oliver.

“I mean your typewriting,” he said.

Myron managed to croak out, “Maybe one of us should go get it.”

The stomping of the restless crowd was reaching a fever pitch. Mignon turned to Oliver. He was sweating profusely, and swaying a little. “If we must,” she said, with her most chilling voice. It was not a dark and forgotten tongue, but it scared the hell out of Myron nevertheless. She pulled a key ring out of her breast pocket, carefully sliding one key off it; she went to hand it to Oliver, and then, with a sideways glance at the lemur on her shoulder, changed her mind. “Myron, I’ll take my time on the introductory remarks,” she said, handing him the key. “For God’s sake, don’t tarry, and don’t mess up your speech. There is a lot riding on this for both of us. For both of us.” And Myron was off at a run. He stopped when applause told him that Mignon Emanuel had stepped onto the ballroom floor. Turning around, he caught Oliver’s eye and gestured at the tube. Give it to me. Oliver smiled and shook his head. With his free hand he described a shape in the air. Myron nodded and, leaving Oliver behind, began to run again.

He ran down the hall, past burly men stacking hors d’oeuvres and loosening champagne corks. Around the corner with the Heppelwhite serpentine chest, and down the long green carpet, and there before him was the office door. He fumbled with and dropped the key before he managed to shoot the bolt. He practically fell into the room. It was dark, but motion detectors activated the small reading light on the desk. There on the floor in front of him were the pages of his speech. Myron realized that it shouldn’t have been so dark, since it was still dusk, and looked up at the skylight, but the skylight was covered with an opaque screen. He wasted a few precious seconds looking for a switch to retract the screen, for better lighting, and then gave up and opened the top drawer of the desk. Inside was a small key. He used it to open the large drawer, and from inside that, under some juggling clubs, a dismantled Bunsen burner, a signed baseball (signed, I have reason to believe, by the 1919 Chicago White Sox), a railroad lantern, and a jade elephant with a clock on its back, he pulled a ring of six ancient keys. He didn’t really know whether the keys would open the door; he didn’t really know what kind of doomsday device would be behind the door. But he had seen the look on Mignon Emanuel’s face when he mentioned the room, and he knew that his studies, his messiahship, his comfortable life here in the big house—it was worth throwing all of these away for one look in Pandora’s box.

There were other plans competing for a place on his agenda—perhaps he should look for the promised sliding bookshelf, perhaps he should go through the locked cabinet in the wall, perhaps he should be rummaging through the desk or even just picking up a juggling club in case he had to brain Oliver to get the tube back—but they all got tabled, and Myron was sprinting for the door. He felt his neck prickle just as he saw something cat-size jump down across the doorway, and there, standing up from a crouch on the ground, was Florence.

“You forgot the speech,” she said, stepping forward over the pages.

Myron felt, along with everything else, extremely uncomfortable because she was naked. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, perhaps wishing he had taken the club after all.

“You won’t.”

I have hitherto failed to belabor the unfortunate truth, which the perspicacious reader will already have appertained: that Myron was in fact shorter than Florence. She outweighed him, as well, and had a superior reach. She was unconstricted by a Fauntleroy three-piece suit. There was every reason to assume she was the stronger, too. Myron, in desperation, tried—if it had been a punch, it would have been a pretty sissy punch, but really it was a just a one-handed push. Florence quickly shifted her weight, and Myron went right past her. He thought for a moment he was home free, but then she kicked him in the back of the knee and he went down. She jumped on his back and pinned his shoulders with her hands. He was lying half on, half off the tiger-skin rug.

“Emanuel will be here soon,” she said. “Just relax and wait it out.”

Myron gasped something out—“Tapeworm,” it sounded like. He flailed his arms backwards, trying desperately to claw at Florence. She easily avoided the clumsy attempt, of course, but then Myron gave a particularly mighty heave, straining the arm in the socket, and his hand slipped up through the leather thong Florence had around her neck. Florence jerked backwards, but the thong was caught on his wrist, and she couldn’t pull away.

At first Myron thought Florence has seized his hand in some kind of judo wristlock, and was just torturing him. But in trying to escape the hold he wrapped the thong around his wrist again, and the biting of the thong into his flesh was a distinctive enough sensation that Myron caught on and repeated the motion. He moved his arm in a circle until the thong was wound painfully tight around his forearm. He could hear Florence gagging behind him. Suddenly the weight was off him, and there was a moment of crisis, as a lemur attempted to draw its tiny head through the loop; but Myron jerked his arm forward, bringing the small creature with it, and he was able to use his other hand to tighten the noose. The lemur scratched, but she could not bite him, and her scratches were feeble. Then she tried to turn into a human again, but that was a bad idea—her throat was too large, and the constriction must have been terrible. She managed to get on top of his prone body, and grabbed his face with her hands and went for his eyes, but before she got any further she grew limp and fell forward, onto Myron’s head.

Myron slithered out from underneath her. He carefully unwrapped the thong from his arm and her throat. The knotted handkerchief on the thong, he removed it to confirm that the shape was there. When he left Florence breathing shallowly, in one pocket he had the shape, in the other the key ring. His arm was bleeding in several places, and his hand was slowly fading from purple.

And he was running again, back toward the room. He took a detour through the defunct pinball arcade to avoid passing right by the grand ballroom. He wasn’t taking any risks.

The first key he tried, when he reached the forbidden door, didn’t fit the lock, and the second one was too small and rattled around inside the keyhole. The third one slipped in partway, got stuck, and then with a rip slid home. It fit snug, but before Myron could turn it, a wave of nausea and confusion washed over him. He shook it off and, as he took a deep breath and steeled himself, he heard a voice down the corridor: “Don’t open that door.”

To no one’s surprise it was Mignon Emanuel, striding slowly and purposefully, with Oliver scurrying along ahead of her. Oliver ran right past Myron and kept going, but Mignon Emanuel stopped a few yards away when she saw that Myron had the key poised for turning.

“Please, Myron. The conference is waiting for you. For you!”

Suddenly Myron began to cry. “You lied to me! You’re not even one of us.”

“I am one of you.”

“I can tell, I can tell who is and who isn’t. Don’t lie to me. You’re not.”

“I knew I sensed something, you followed me the other day—Myron, I am one of you, I promise you. This is my trick. I figured out a way to hide the scent, so no one could tell I was around. Benson’s the only one who knew I could do it, Benson and Florence now; but I tried it too often and it got stuck. That’s when I left Marcus—I didn’t want him to know I could do it. I’m trying to get it back where I can turn it on and off. You’ve got to believe me.” Her face was contorted in desperation and agony, and she held her hand out. “I have so many plans for us. Please, Myron, come back to the conference.”

“Okay, prove it, then. Turn into a raccoon.”

“I can’t. I told you, the platypus—”

“I don’t believe you! I don’t even believe platypuses are poisonous!”

Mignon Emanuel said, “Venomou—”

But at that moment there was an explosion, somewhere off in the house. The foundation shook. There were screams in the distance, delegates shouting and stampeding. The abrupt crackling of flames. Mignon Emanuel paused midword, and turned her head toward the noise. And Myron turned the key and pushed the door open.

The swinging of the door triggered the motion detector, and the light went on in the room. Exhaust fans were already running. The floor was ornately tiled, and the tiles spelled out a motto in Latin, which of course Myron could not read, but I have it on no less an authority than Dr. Aluys’s, who survived the incident and whom I later interviewed, that it was a quote from Emperor Vespatian, who said to his subjects on his deathbed (and I translate), “Why do you weep? Did you think I was immortal?” The walls, somewhat less tastefully, were covered with tinfoil, as was, Myron could only suppose, the back of the door, including the keyhole he had popped through. Tinfoil over the keyhole (his mind was working rapidly) could have been pinpricked by Oliver when he tried to pick the lock, and would explain why, when it was reapplied, Myron could no longer smell the room beyond. But none of this was what was surprising.

All along the walls of the room, like a hunting lodge’s, were the heads of animals, mounted on plaques: a bighorn sheep, a beaver, a wolverine, a caribou, and so on. Smaller plaques held the whole bodies of stuffed rodents and rabbits. In the center of the room was a nearly complete skeleton of a great cat, bound together with silver wire, its right foreleg missing. And then Myron realized that this was not a bighorn sheep or a beaver, this was the bighorn sheep and the beaver; because there, there newly mounted to one side of the door, there was the moose. He had died with no antlers, of course, so the taxidermist had provided him with false antlers, but they were a cruel mockery of the antlers Myron remembered, these were stunted, misshapen devil’s antlers falsely wired to his great head. The bile rising in his stomach, his head still swimming, Myron, who had taken all of this in during a mere moment, turned back in wrath to Mignon Emanuel. He screamed, and she—she was occluded by the shredded, floating remains of a twenty-five-hundred-dollar outfit. And then, standing in her place, roaring and eight feet tall, was a bear.

Myron thought he was going to die. But the bear turned away from him and batted with an enormous paw something fast and on fire. The fiery bolt crashed into a wall, blasting a hole in it. Past the bear, standing amid the smoke and flame, Myron could now see a young Indian man with a bow, an arrow nocked in it. The arrow appeared to be shimmering, or pulsating, strangely.

“Get away—he’s mine!” the young man shouted. He was, of course, Myron perceived, the man he had fought among the Nine Unknown Men in New York.

The bear became Mignon Emanuel again. “You’re not going to hurt him.”

“I only want to hurt him for a few minutes,” said the man, whose name, Myron had finally put together, must be Dantaghata. “Then I’ll kill him.”

“Don’t be absurd,” said Mignon Emanuel. “You know you can’t kill us.“

“Are you certain?” Dantaghata said. “I hold the Pashupatastra, unmaker of worlds, the irresistible weapon of Lord Shiva the Destroyer.”

Mignon Emanuel blanched. Myron could not see her face, so he could not see if she looked afraid, but her voice betrayed her when she asked, “Is that . . . is that arrow there the Pashupatastra?”

“Of course not—the Pashupatastra is reserved for him. But this is the Narayanastra.”

“Oh, is that all?” said Mignon Emanuel with relief, and became a bear, charging down the corridor at the archer.

Myron immediately turned the other way and ran smack into Oliver. He pushed the larger boy out of the way and then pulled him as they ran around a corner.

“That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” Oliver said.

Myron said nothing.

“Did you see that?” Oliver asked. “Miss Emanuel was naked.”

“Come along,” Myron said.

They ran a while longer—it was a big house. Oliver said, along the way, that he thought Mignon Emanuel might have followed him to the rendezvous at the locked door. Myron didn’t have the strength to remind him that there had been no rendezvous. The sounds of thunderclaps echoed along the corridors. Finally they reached a back door to the outside, and Myron turned to Oliver and said, “I’m going to go to the West Coast. I’m going to go looking for the Rosicrucians.”

“Wait, you want to leave?”

“I don’t know who else might even know about what’s going on. Look, maybe you should come, too. We can look for your parents, they’re near there, right?”

“You can’t go, you were just starting to be cool!”

“Oliver, you don’t belong here. These people are crazy, and they’re liars, and, Oliver, they kill people. We’ve got to go.”

But stretching up to his full height, Oliver scoffed, “Yeah, well, good luck getting anywhere without your poster tube.”

So Myron handed over the shape and then, when Oliver fell over and curled up fetal around it, picked up the cardboard tube he had dropped. Leaving Oliver, and everything, behind, Myron ran across the lawn, doubling around to pick up his bow from the side of the obstacle course where it had been abandoned on the wet ground. It was already dark, and it was getting darker. Then he was off, into the pitch-black woods.

One quick last glance back to confirm that the house was on fire, and in places beginning to collapse.