Immortal Lycanthropes (15 page)

“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.”

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 always 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:

“You know Lynch knows you have him,” from Benson.

“It was bound to happen.”

“Don’t be stupid, just hand him over. Lynch has a lot of contacts.”

“Tell him you’ve seen that I have contacts here, too. He’s welcome to come, you know, even if I didn’t get around to sending an invitation.”

“He knows about the conference next week. He must know about the little trick you can do by now, too.”

“Truth be told, I’ve been having a little trouble with that. It’s why I had to leave. But the boy’s safe here, tell him that. Oh, and, Benson”—melodramatically, over her shoulder, as she turned away. “I could always use more muscle.”

“Yeah, well. I could always use a good driver.” They nodded to each other, and Benson left. Myron’s heart returned to its usual location.

The next day another car with visitors came, which the murmuring of the mobilized grunts indicated was very unusual.

Oliver and Myron came running again, but they missed the introductions. Once again, Mignon Emanuel was standing in the doorway, the guests on the porch. Florence paced back and forth nervously.

“They’re all Indian,” whispered Oliver, hidden down the hall behind a late Roman reproduction of a Greek statue of Dionysus.

“And they’re not wearing hats,” Myron noted. “
Very
interesting.”

“You’re a little early,” Mignon Emanuel was saying.

One of the three Indians adjusted his tie awkwardly. “We actually aren’t going to be able to come to the conference. We just thought it needful to warn you—”

“Threats aren’t warnings,” Mignon Emanuel said. She had clearly lost all interest in the conversation.

“This is not a threat; make no mistake. It’s one of our own, Dantaghata, a very junior member, we fear he may be coming this way. This has none of our sanction—”

“Don’t play innocent. If he’s of such low rank, how would he even know to come here?”

“He’s been talking to Meridiana. You know no one can control what Meridiana tells one.”

“Meridiana,” Myron whispered to Oliver, “is their brazen head.”

“Know-it-all,” said Oliver.

Mignon Emanuel was looking off into the distance. “Yes, yes. Well, I can take care of myself. Now, if you’ll excuse—”

“Kindly listen, he even managed to steal from us the astra. The astra of the gods.”

“Take better care of your things. Good day.” And she slammed the door. Through a window, Myron watched the militia jeer and catcall as the three Unknown Men drove away. It was the most excitement they’d seen since Myron had shown up.

Later that day, Myron and Oliver were walking idly down one of the labyrinthine corridors. Myron was trying to gauge how much Oliver knew about his upcoming debut—the answer appeared to be
nothing
—when Myron felt something familiar and awful. His legs buckled, and he fell over. He thought he was going to die, so when Oliver nudged him with his toe, Myron said, “I just slipped.”

“I wouldn’t lie on the carpet, man. The soldiers are kind of halfhearted housecleaners.”

Myron struggled to his feet, and, his head still swimming, looked around. The impulse came from a door, a door like any other in the house. Myron staggered over to it and tried the handle, but of course it was locked. From the large keyhole came a kind of miasma.

“Can you smell that? I mean, can you feel that?” Myron said.

“Are you on drugs?”

The keyhole was keyhole-shaped, of course, but Myron had never seen, before coming to this house, a keyhole in that shape. With infinite care, he put his eye up to it, but the far side of the door was dark.

“That door’s always locked. Come on—let’s go.”

“Well, what’s on the other side?”

“I don’t know, I tried picking the lock with a mechanical pencil last night when you were whacking off, but it didn’t work. No one knows what’s past locked doors, and no one cares.”

“I have to go see Miss Emanuel,” Myron said.

“Are you crazy? You can’t just go and see her, you wait for her to summon you.” This was said with some bitterness, as Oliver was, frankly, rarely summoned.

“No, it’ll be fine, come with me.”

“You’re literally nuts, I’m not getting in trouble for that.” And after some more of this classic back-and-forth, Oliver left, and Myron staggered back to the office, the office with the double doors and the brass plaque. He had realized he didn’t know where else to look for her.

The farther he went, the more his head cleared until, standing again in front of the double doors, he found himself knocking, and then ringing the buzzer. No one answered, and Myron turned to go.

Suddenly he felt his neck prickle. Florence was coming down the corridor. “Come with me,” she said, and, removing a key from the snowflake pocket of her romper, on tiptoes opened the office door.

There sat Mignon Emanuel at the big desk. Myron was surprised to see that the office was, in fact, occupied, and he looked around for a door she might have come through.

“The bookshelf is on hinges,” Mignon Emanuel said, guessing his confusion, “and it is through this that I entered. Now, what can I help you with?”

“I found a locked door.”

“There are many locked doors. Behind the bookshelf is a locked door. I keep it locked because my bedroom suite is on the far side, and I do value my privacy. I believe Florence often locks her bedroom door as well.”

Florence nodded.

“You said there were no rules here,” Myron protested.

“Locking a door is hardly a rule. If I were to forbid you to try to pick the lock, that would be a rule, but not granting you access through a locked door is no more a rule than not letting you fly. It’s not my rule; it’s gravity’s.”

Myron wasn’t sure that made sense, but he let it slide. “I was curious what’s behind the door. It’s the one down the corridor on the kitchen side of the grand ballroom. Past the red room?”

They knew which door he was talking about. Suddenly the tenor of the conversation changed. Florence took a half step away from Myron. Mignon Emanuel’s eyes became cagey.

“Why are you curious about that room?” she asked.

Already Myron was saying, “It reminded me of—” And his guard was down enough that he was ready to talk about the doomsday device, and the way it had made him feel in Greenwich Village. But everyone was being so extraordinarily cautious that he instinctively stopped.

Of?
Mignon Emanuel did not say. But her eyes said it.

In Myron’s head swam, whenever he was called upon to lie, his memories of heroes and their deceptions, of Huck Finn dressed as a girl, of David Balfour dressed as a Jacobite, of Sherlock Holmes or Raffles—masters of disguise, of Long John Silver, pathologically. This was how he thought, and how he lied, and he rather wished he could stop lying quite so much. But when he looked in Mignon Emanuel’s face, he found himself saying, “—of something Spenser once mentioned. About a door he’d seen, once, long ago.”

There was one of those awkward moments, then, when it became clear that Mignon Emanuel wanted Myron to leave, and Myron wanted to leave, but neither one could admit it, and so they stood. Mignon Emanuel made eye contact with Florence, and Florence, Myron noticed, raised her eyebrows inquiringly, but Mignon, after a moment’s hesitation, shook her head, a tiny, quick shake. It was probably meant to be imperceptible, but Mignon Emanuel never moved quickly, so it stood out by contrast. Finally, after a few false pleasantries, Myron all smiles stepped out of the room. And as soon as the door was shut, he ran. He ran down the long corridor to the study, practically slid through the secret passage, and in ten more steps he was at the base of the tower, at the base of the endless staircase. Up which he ran. His legs were perhaps still wobbly, but he had been recovering quickly; his winter in the woods had hardened him somewhat, and an upstairs run he never could have made six months ago he managed with only a stitch in his side and the rising bile of nausea as he half fell up the last step into his room. There squatted Oliver, frozen in midrummage. He had been rummaging through the duffle bag.

His mouth, when he saw Myron, opened and closed lamely. Finally, “I lost my protractor,” he said. “Do you think maybe I left it in here?”