Immortal Lycanthropes Read online

  “Was there,” said Myron, “when the guy found me, was there a moose with me?”

  “A moose?”

  The air on Myron’s face was cold, and he realized that the little window was wide open. It opened outward, like a door, on a little hinge. “Not with me, I mean, but back, back where I left my stuff. That stuff over there.”

  “No. We followed your tracks back to locate the bow and some other things, which we took the liberty of consolidating in a duffle bag. But I can assure you we would have noticed a moose.” She smiled, quite a lovely smile, to show she could be ironical, and Myron let out a long billow of breath. The lack of a moose was a relief; no body could mean that Spenser had escaped whatever had attacked them.

  The woman was asking, “What’s your name?”

  “Vladimir Speed,” said Myron. “What’s yours?”

  “This is Florence Agalega, and I am called Mignon Emanuel.”

  Myron passed out. But it was only for a moment; he woke from the shock of cold water in the face. Florence was reaching out—reaching up, actually—and offering him the remaining glass of water. “Sorry about that,” she whispered. All Myron could think about at the moment was that the offer was absurd, as his arms were both beneath the bedspread.

  “Vladimir,” said Mignon Emanuel, smoothing her skirt before she sat on the bed across from Florence. She carefully avoided any wet spots. “Do you mind if I call you Myron? You really are very fortunate we found you.”

  “Fortunate?” Myron cried, coming to himself. At which point he tried to throw back the covers and leap out of bed, but he found that he was securely pinned under the heavy blankets. There had been very little give before, and now Mignon Emanuel was sitting on one side of him, Florence leaning on the bedspread on the other side. Neither one could have weighed much, but Myron had no leverage and, to be frank, was not very strong at all. But he wriggled back and forth desperately. He remembered the frog’s parasitic worm, and, like that worm, he would not give up.

  “And we are similarly fortunate to have found you. For you are instrumental to our plan.”

  “Your plan to kill me!” he shrieked.

  “Killing you would be counterproductive, not to mention impolite to a guest.”

  “You’re not fooling me, I saw you in the car. You work for Mr. Bigshot.”

  “For—for whom?” Mignon Emanuel’s puzzlement seemed so genuine that Myron stopped his writhing. Could he have the situation all wrong?

  “Mr. Bigshot,” he said. “You know, the lion.”

  “You mean Marcus?” She laughed, I am compelled to say musically. I’ve heard it, and it really is a charming laugh. “Our association has been terminated, I’m sorry to say. What did you call him again?”

  “Mr. Bigshot? Isn’t that his name? I mean, what he goes by?”

  “Heavens no! Where did you get that idea?”

  “That’s what Gloria called him. And Arthur and Alice.”

  “Oh, those characters! They were having a little fun at his expense, I suppose. Mr. Bigshot!” Mignon Emanuel reached across Myron, taking the glass of water from Florence’s hand. For a moment Myron could see, in the buckling of her blouse’s collar, a nasty purple bruise on her shoulder. She then stood up. Every move was very slow and deliberate, either through general habit or to avoid spilling the water. With her body off the blankets, Myron managed to work a hand out, and no sooner had he extracted it than Mignon Emanuel slipped the glass into it. Myron had more or less meant to use the free hand to tear the covers off, but, with water in his hand, he realized he was thirsty. He downed the glass in three swallows, and, as he brought his arm down, he found Mignon Emanuel was taking the glass from him and replacing it with a handkerchief.

  “Your face will be cold. We wanted you to get some fresh air, but there’s still a chill, isn’t there? And now you’re wet!”

  Myron began to dab his wet face with the handkerchief. It felt like what he was supposed to do.

  “You don’t work for the lion anymore?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid our current relationship is more akin to rivalry. Which is indeed why you are instrumental. And you must get out of the habit of saying the lion.”

  “Um. Marcus, then?” Myron said.

  “It’s terribly imprecise, I am sure you’ll find. He is Panthera leo.”

  “He is what?”

  “Panthera leo, the proper nomenclature for Marcus Lynch. I am Procyon lotor, and Florence is Lemur catta. Do you know what you are, Myron?”

  “I don’t know what they call it in Greek, but I think I know what I am”; and Mignon Emanuel chewed her lip and nodded conspiratorially when Myron said, “The chosen one.”

  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 ca
rved 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.”