Immortal Lycanthropes (19 page)

“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.