Immortal Lycanthropes Page 11

  “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 My
ron? 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.”

  3.

  Oliver showed Myron all the best places to hide, the coal chute, the drop ceiling, showed him the secret passage from behind the orchids to the lounge, and the one banister you probably should not slide on. “I know every inch of this building, I know mysterious places no one else has ever been, probably,” Oliver explained. In one bathroom the tub had feet. Myron was still woozy, so they spent a great portion of the day watching the troops go through their paces on the obstacle course. They were middle-aged, so it was not so easy to whip them into fighting shape, but they were trying. At night, in the kitchen, Oliver boiled water in an electric kettle and brought down packets of instant oatmeal.

  “You may not want to watch this,” Oliver said. “I like my oatmeal really thick, and it grosses some people out. I mean really, really thick.”

  Myron peeked over at what he was stirring in the bowl. “That’s not too bad,” he said, “that’s only a little bit thicker than I would make it.” Then Oliver dumped another packet of oatmeal into the mix. So that happened.

  Then they rode back and forth on the rolling ladders in the library. Myron found a handsome set of uniform editions of the complete works of H. Rider Haggard and another of the complete works of Jules Verne, and he took a couple of volumes up to his tower, where he read, at last, until he fell asleep. Every day went more or less like that. Oliver was a
lways around, and, when he slunk off on his own business, Myron returned to his tower room. Outside were a hundred and thirty-three men, but in the long days in the big house they seemed miles away. Sometimes when Myron and Oliver went to the kitchen to swipe cold cuts, one of the men would be there, too, fixing food, and he would explain things about anatomy that Myron could not follow.

  On many evenings, Mignon Emanuel would assign Oliver some menial and arduous task and then call Myron into her office and, while Florence paced ceaselessly behind them, give him lessons in the hidden patterns that underlay, as she called it, the “phenomenal world.” They covered the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence; the dangers of confirmation bias; Zipf’s law; and some basic predicate logic. These evenings Myron would take a problem set to the tower, to finish before the next lesson. In some ways, this labor could be boring and frustrating, but it was also exciting. He was learning forbidden lore. He also didn’t want to disappoint Mignon Emanuel, for reasons he would have been hard-pressed to explain. But the lessons caused some awkwardness, too, for Oliver resented them, and Mrs. Wangenstein, for reasons of her own, expressed on several occasions her disapproval of learning outside a “sanctioned school environment.”

  A couple of times a week there would be a big dinner, prepared by the recruits, and the five housemates would sit at the huge dining-room table. An extra place was always set, but it was always empty. Mignon Emanuel would carve the duck, or the lamb, offer around a side of salmon, and propose toast after toast until Mrs. Wangenstein slid out of her chair, weeping and apologizing to everyone and her absent family. Myron tasted a little of the wine, and learned that the sip he took was worth almost two hundred dollars. Oliver drank three glasses, and began to vomit, which got the sobbing Mrs. Wangenstein vomiting, too. This happened more than once. At first Myron thought the sip of wine made him feel so strange, but eventually he realized it was the salmon. Several weeks went by.

  One day alarms sounded, the militiamen mobilized outside, and a car ground along the gravel drive. Mignon Emanuel and Florence came to the door to meet it, which was unusual, and Myron and Oliver hung around to see what would happen. Out of the car stepped—Benson! He wore a leather duster and mirror shades, and over his shoulder he balanced a shotgun. Myron began to panic, but Benson just wanted to talk to Mignon Emanuel. Their rather strained and trite conversation went something like: