Immortal Lycanthropes Read online

  Myron noticed that the bottom of Spenser’s can was as shiny as a mirror. He pointed at it, his mouth still full of soda.

  “The sun’s finally out this morning, so I can show you. You can use this mirror to start a fire.”

  (Swallowing.) “Why do I need a fire? I was really warm last night.”

  “You’ll need a fire to cook food, and I might not always be here. Lookit.” Spenser held the can’s polished bottom up to the sun, and moved a dry leaf back and forth in front of it. The parabolic mirror of the curved bottom of the can focused the sun’s rays on a point, and when he found that point he held the leaf there until it burst into flames.

  Myron screamed. But it was mostly, you know, joy and wonder.

  Spenser went over the process again, the polishing, the focal point, and the importance of building up a base of tinder to burn, to which you could add first small twigs and then larger branches. Myron was well versed in the literature of Jack London, so he knew most of this, the part that came after the soda can. “So that’s what the toilet paper’s for,” he said.

  “No, the toilet paper is for you. You’ll thank me for that one.”

  Spenser had brought with him to New York a backpack full of supplies, but he had left it all behind when he suddenly moosed in downtown Manhattan. The clothes he had been wearing had, of course, been torn to shreds.

  “I don’t know what’s in that tube,” he said—not the toothpaste tube, the duct-taped cylinder—“but it smells terrible. I could smell it from a mile away, and I mean that literally. I was crosstown in Alphabet City.”

  “It’s a doomsday device,” Myron said.

  “Well, keep it in the tinfoil if you have to keep it at all. If I can smell it, someone else can smell it, and you dinna want to attract attention out here.”

  Spenser, it turned out, more than anything didn’t want to attract attention. He spent most of his time alone in the woods, as moose or man, and only occasionally ventured into the “human lands.” What he called supplies were obtainable at any number of small towns, but only in New York did he have a connection to obtain his cheese.

  “Young” cheese, cheese that has not been aged, is filled with bacteria. It is a health hazard. It is therefore illegal to sell it in the United States, unless it has been made with pasteurized milk. But to young-cheese aficionados, the pasteurization process ruins the flavor. Spenser was, he would assure Myron, a man or moose of simple tastes, but he did love his cheese, and he loved it unaged, bacterial, stench-ridden, and untainted by pasteurization.

  It was for the sake of cheese that Spenser made an annual pilgrimage to New York, where a certain cheese shop, unnamed here, permitted the cognoscenti into a backroom stocked with forbidden cheese smuggled from Europe.

  “I was lucky you picked that day to go in,” Myron said.

  “See what you think is lucky when the snow starts to fall. And as soon as you opened the tinfoil, everyone in New York knew what was going on. There was no question someone was going to show up, the only question was who was going to get there first.”

  “Well, I’m lucky it wasn’t a squirrel or something,” Myron said. But Spenser wouldn’t listen to anything of the sort. He packed up the toothpaste and the toilet paper and the cans and the T-shirt into a plastic bag. There were no pretzels left.

  “You should throw it in the river,” Spenser said, and then turned into a moose, so there could be no discussion or rebuttal. Myron rode on his back, and the bag hung on an antler. The tube Myron carried in one chilly hand.

  Day after day they moved north. Myron got better, or at least more efficient, at building the lean-to. He learned how to find two trees with low branches close enough that he could stretch a stick between them. He’d lean other sticks against this crosspiece, then weave twigs and leaves among them, and it was here that he got much faster, as he figured out just how loosely he could construct the thing without letting too much wind, or the rain, through. When the sun came out from behind the ever-present clouds, he built fires. And Spenser showed him the rudiments of building snares, of tracking game, of digging up edible roots, and, as the weather grew colder, how to find the dens of hibernating rodents or bats, and scoop them out before they had a chance to wake. Bats in winter, Myron found, were as cold as death, their hearts beating too feebly to feel.

  “These are good eating,” Spenser said, roasting one over the fire. But they weren’t really good eating.

  At night (Myron may have been inspired by a scene in Huckleberry Finn to contrive the scenario) they lay around the fire and looked up at the stars, and Spenser taught him their names, and how to use them to find directions. But that only happened on the rare nights that were not overcast. Other times Myron pillowed his head against a moose and told him of his adventures, with Mr. Rodriguez and Gloria and the Unknown Men. Only a twitching ear, every few minutes, indicated that the moose had not yet fallen asleep.

  “And it turned out that I was some kind of chosen one,” Myron said. This was his favorite part. He wondered what his parents would think, to know he was a messianic figure, and hoped they would not be disappointed that he was not the one they’d been waiting for.

  Next morning, Spenser, as he boiled up some roots in a soda-can half, said, “That stuff you mentioned about being the chosen one. That stuff is shite.” But Myron didn’t worry about it. He wasn’t sure how smart Spenser was. The man believed all sorts of strange things. He believed mice were spontaneously generated from riverbanks, and maggots from cheese. He had to admit he had not seen cheese give birth to maggots for many years, but Myron facetiously suggested it might have something to do with pasteurization.

  “It might at that,” Spenser said.

  “This sounds like a good argument for pasteurized cheese,” Myron began, but Spenser would have none of that. And when Myron tried to persuade him that cheese did not create maggots ex nihilo, but rather harbored eggs laid there by flies, Spenser told him not to doubt the evidence of his senses for a whole bunch of modern superstitions. And Myron’s senses told him rather incontrovertibly that he was chosen.

  Later, around Albany, Spenser dug up one of his caches: soap, spare clothing (too large for Myron) including pants at last, gloves, crunchy granola, and some cookware, all wrapped tightly in a tarp. Around Schenectady the snow began in earnest.

  “Do we wait out the winter here?” Myron asked. He had caked his lean-to with snow, and built snow walls and a grand snow entrance, complete with snow pillars and a snow guardsman, who was deforming in the heat of the campfire. But Spenser was a moose again, and made no answer until the next day, crouched over the embers.

  “We can wait, or we can move on, and it doesn’t much matter which.” He was still brooding over his cheese, Myron thought.

  “But where are we going?”

  Spenser stroked his long beard, a nervous habit Myron had started imitating with his bare, scarred chin. “Do you mean where are we going right now, or where are we going in the long term?”

  “I mean in the end,” Myron said.

  “You’ve got to understand that ‘in the end’ is the wrong way to think. That’s how humans think, because they end up in the ground. But I’ve been at this a long time, and there hasn’t been any ‘in the end’ yet.”

  “Sure, but we can’t spend forever in the woods.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to make you understand. You might want to think about living forever in the woods.”

  Myron was so shocked by the idea that he slipped and fell in the snow. He was wearing a thick wool shirt long enough on him to pass as a nightgown. The sleeves had been cut in half. “Why would I want to spend forever in the woods?” he asked, looking up from the ground at the bare branches and the massed clouds. As he spoke, his breath billowed up opaque above him.

  “You’ve got the lion trying to kill you, by your own admission, and kill you for real,” Spenser said. “And then all sorts of other people, from these secret societies, are after you. They contro
l everything except the wilderness out here, and they’re always up to no good.”

  “The Illuminati weren’t up to no good. They delayed World War One for a hundred years.”

  “Sure, they delayed it just long enough, long enough for humans to invent new weapons to make the war really bad and really long. It’s hardly something to be proud of. If they haven’t done any harm since then, it’s because they’re jokes now. All they do is name-drop a lot. You don’t want to get involved with them anyway, trust me. You’re better off out here.”

  “I was kind of under the impression, frankly, that I should be doing something.”

  “Myron, if there was something you could do, maybe I would agree with you. But you’re thinking like a human again. You think you can do something and then everything’s going to be okay for the rest of your life. Except there is no rest of your life. It’s just going to keep going and going, and even if you achieve something now, what then? Will you just want to do something else? Because whatever you want to do is going to be blocked, or perverted, or manipulated by the Unknown Men and the Rosicrucians and the Gnomes of Zurich.”

  “Who are the Rosicrucians? I keep hearing their name.”

  Spenser stood up, and his accent was back. “Are ye listening, lad? These are the six or seven societies that rule the earth, and at least one of them’s wroth at ye!” Ane o’ tham’s wroth at ye it sounded like. “Every year they move civilization a little farther out into the woodlands and the, sure, and the glens, and every year it gets harder to find a place they are not monitoring. All we can do is wait for them, and when we are hiding in the last swatch of tall grass, and they are mowing it down, we’ll know that we will be slaves forever. All we could do was delay the inevitable.”

  “Like the Illuminati.”

  “If you like. But maybe they’ll end up killing each other. Maybe all of them will end up killing each other, and then they’ll leave us alone.”

  “Is that what you want, just to be left alone?”

  “Why do you think I spend all my time in the woods?”

  Myron waved his arms in frustration. “I thought you lived out here because you loved nature and Mother Earth and stuff.”

  “Mother Earth? Who taught you to talk that way? Earth is no more your mother than the land is your father. There is nothing but a vast, uncaring emptiness.”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to believe in stuff like that.”

  “What you’re supposed to believe in doesn’t matter much.”

  “But why, then—why did you bother picking me up?”

  “You looked like you needed help. Time will tell if I made a mistake or not.” He stood up. “Put snow on the embers, we should get moving.”

  “Where?” Myron asked, but he got on mooseback anyway, and was off.

  2.

  The days blended together into an endless panorama of ice fishing, snow forts, and winterberries. Spenser told Myron, at times, stories from the inexhaustible store of his life. He had been an elk, as he styled it, in what is now Scotland, for millennia, occasionally traveling south through Britain or swimming, for variety, to Ireland. It was there he learned, from the Tuatha dé Dannan who ruled the island at the time, that he could change into a human. As a human he watched Stonehenge built. As a human he saw exiles from a land they called Egypt beach in Ireland and found the new ruling dynasty—and this was the first he had heard of lands beyond the islands he knew. As a human he fought alongside Finn mac Cumail and his warrior band, across Great Britain, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. But mostly, to escape from what he characterized to Myron as “incessant human sacrifice,” he returned to the uninhabited wilds of Scotland.

  It was there that the Roman general Agricola found him, while marching the length of Britain, driving the natives in their war chariots before his unconquerable might. Agricola either pressed or accepted the wild man into his legion. His beard was shaved, for the first time ever, and he learned to drill with a long spear. Rome, when he reached there, was certainly impressive, but it didn’t take him long to realize that the Romans were not much of an upgrade from the barbarities of the druids. They were just more efficient. Emperor Domitian’s hands were stained red with the blood of fellow Romans, and everyone else wallowed in the blood of Rome’s neighbors.

  Later, in Dacia, on the shores of the Black Sea, Spenser’s company (a century, he called it) got singled out for cowardice, and was scheduled for a decimation—a process by which the company was divided into groups of ten, and each group drew lots; the one who drew the bad lot was supposed to get bludgeoned to death by the other nine. Spenser didn’t draw the bad lot, but he got up and left anyway. “Say it was me, say you beat me to a pudding,” he told the other nine in bad Latin. It was one thing to kill Dacians, which was just the kind of thing you did back then, but he balked at turning on his own comrades. An elk ran into the woods.

  “The Romans make desolation and call it peace,” General Agricola’s grandson wrote. For a century, the borders of Rome were an orgy of bloodshed, after which the reign of the “five good emperors” ended, and things, predictably, got much, much worse.

  Anyone’s life story takes a long time in the telling, and a story that spans several hundred lifetimes much longer. Spenser jumped around a lot, and focused on the stuff Myron would like, the stuff found in his adventure novels. Pirates and crusaders and frontiersmen; bravery and bloodshed. But in Spenser’s accounts, every act of bravery was, ultimately, futile, every heroic action a waste of time, and every story an incipient tragedy. The bloodshed, not the bravery, was the real point of his stories.

  The ancient Celts were bound, each individual was bound, by a complicated series of geasa, or taboos. In this way, Munremar son of Gerrchenn (with whom Spenser was, two thousand years ago, acquainted) was placed under geis not to cut his beard until he had slain the witch woman Cailleach Beara; later he learned that Cailleach Beara was under a geis such that she could not be killed except by a bare-faced man. And so Munremar, to resolve this contradiction, held his head in the fire until the beard burned away, and only then, with scarred and bubbling face, was he able to slay the witch. In one sense, this was an action of the most selfless devotion to a cause. But the way Spenser told the story, it became a tale of how one man ruined his face and his health in order to murder a helpless crazy woman.

  Myron told stories, too, but they were mainly stories from books he had read. He did the plot of Treasure Island over three nights, and he fancied that Spenser was held in rapt attention by the production. Or he went over again and again the strange events of the last few months, looking for clues. Spenser hated and feared the Nine Unknown Men, but he finally revealed, as they sat around the campfire one night, that he had once had occasion to ask them a riddle himself. He had asked, “What animal is it that hath a tail between its eyen?”

  “What are eyen?” Myron said.

  “It’s an old way of making something plural, like children or brethren. It means eyes.”

  “Oh. Why don’t you talk old-fashioned like that more often, if you’re so old?”

  “You learn to adapt to that kind of thing. If I spoke old-fashioned, you wouldn’t be able to understand a word.”

  “I could understand,” said Myron, who had read Walter Scott. “I know all those thees and thous and things.”

  Spenser looked grim. “You still don’t really understand what all this means. Have you ever met anyone who’s only a hundred and fifty or two hundred years old?”

  Myron conceded he had not.

  “There are a few around, necromancers and alchemists mainly. And they’re always stuck in a world that ended a century ago. I mean, they can’t adapt to anything modern. They hate automobiles and telephones, they flip out in the motion pictures, and in the end they retreat more and more into the trappings of their childhoods—panopticons and hornbooks or whatever. But my childhood was spent among elks. The only things around were trees and hills. Forget automobiles, I had to get used to wa
lking on two legs, and then wearing pants, eating with my hands, and then eating with a knife. Old-fashioned talk? I can barely remember the human language I first learned, but . . . it was something like . . .” And here he produced a few tongue-twisting sentences so bleak and alien that Myron dropped the stick he was holding. The bat on the end of it landed in the fire, and its wing membranes went up like tissue paper. Myron scrambled to save dinner, and only later, as he was getting ready to go to sleep, did he ask Spenser what the terrifying sentences were.

  Spenser was still stirring the fire up. “An invocation to the fourteen chthonic gods of Hatheg-Kla,” he said.

  “Fourteen? Why fourteen?” asked Myron.

  After a long pause, Spenser said, “Because the fifteenth died.”

  Myron thought this all sounded so cool. “That thing you said, can you,” he asked, “say it again?”

  Spenser could not help but smile as out of the terrifying and oppressive darkness behind the campfire he intoned, “Pax sax sarax . . .”

  3.

  One morning Myron woke up with a start. Spenser was missing. He stumbled out of the lean-to and saw two moose; one was obviously Spenser, the other had no antlers. Myron made a guess about what was up and ducked back into the lean-to. Later, when Spenser was making breakfast, Myron quizzed him about it. “Was that a lady moose?” he asked.

  “What? No, he was male.”

  “Then how come he had no antlers?”

  “Moose shed their antlers for the winter.”

  “Oh yeah?” Myron crowed. “Then how come you still have antlers?”

  “I travel around too much some years, it interferes with the rhythms. They’ll fall off sooner or later.” He looked worried, or perhaps guilty and guarded about something.

  But Myron didn’t believe him. Every once in a while, as he rode that day, he’d tweak Spenser about having a girlfriend, until Spenser bucked him off, onto and through the thin ice of a frozen pond. They spent the rest of the day drying Myron out by a fire. Spenser fretted about the delay and tried to look grim-faced, but when he saw Myron’s hair, wetted and then frozen onto crazy shapes, he couldn’t help smiling.