Immortal Lycanthropes (25 page)

“What does this arrow do?” he shouted. “Does it unmake creation?”

Dantaghata had struggled to his feet again. He was sweating profusely (the witness reports), and looked horrified. But he was canny enough, his faculties had already returned.

“That’s the suicide arrow,” he said.

But the arrow, at nock, was changing and shifting. Its bronze tip became the head of a snake, which opened its mouth to display long, cruel fangs, and hissed.

This, witnesses agreed, was “trippy.”

“It looks like some kind of snake arrow,” Myron observed.

Dantaghata licked his lips. “The Nagastra. Its poison bite is certain death.”

Myron nodded. That sounded about right.

Dantaghata said, “Put it down before you injure yourself, little boy.”

Myron drew back the bow.

“You can’t even hurt me,” Dantaghata said. “I’m like a wheel made meticulously over a month by a craftsman who can make five chariots in a day.”

Myron took careful aim.

“Like a drop of vinegar in a jug of milk, alone I can spoil whole armies.”

“You done?” Myron asked.

“Very well,” Dantaghata said. “As you killed my brother, so shall you kill me. Very well.” And he began to cry.

“Stop it,” Myron said.

Still sobbing. “The burning ground has seen the back of every man. No man has seen its back.”

“Cut it out.”

It is here that I wish I could have spoken to Myron. I would like to know what he was thinking, now that he had his enemy in his sights. Was he thinking about those years when he had had reason to believe that no one wanted to kill him? Was he reviewing the deaths he had seen recently, the violence and the fear that followed him like a hungry dog?

What was the thought process, I want to ask him, that led him to do something as stupid as what he did? “Ah, screw it,” he said, and threw the arrow and bow over the side of the bridge to the river below. The snake head screamed all the way down. “Just leave me alone,” he also said, and turned and walked away. He had gotten maybe thirty feet, when he heard that familiar grating voice behind him calling out.

“I had a second bow in my backpack, tardo.”

Myron turned, and there, indeed, behind him, was Dantaghata, a bow, a slightly different bow, in his hands. The arrow he had drawn back glowed blue. Doubtless, Myron felt so tired.

“Goodbye, universe,” Myron said.

“Shut up, megadouche,” Dantaghata said.

And then he released the arrow.

What happened next there is perfect unanimity on. Dantaghata released the arrow, but the arrow did not move. The arrow stayed in one place, and the bow Dantaghata was holding moved backwards instead. It moved backwards as it straightened out, but then it continued to move backwards, and Dantaghata was moving forward at the same time. In fact, they were both shrinking, or contracting. The bow and Dantaghata’s body moved closer and closer as the arm separating them shortened, and soon the arm was so short that the body and the bow overlapped, and then they crossed, and then they were no more. The arrow stopped glowing, and it clattered to the ground.

The glue sniffers on the bridge were so terrified by this vision that to a man they swore repentance—but were they sober when they swore?

But Myron, Myron just turned away and walked across the bridge.

Myron walked through northwest Portland until he came to an address he had scribbled on a piece of paper, copied from a library’s phone book weeks earlier. The paper was damp and creased, but the number was still legible, and he double-checked: 408. It was the Twenty-Four-Hour Church of Elvis. Next to it was a wooden door, which at first appeared to bear no sign, until Myron noticed the red-tinted window set in it. The glass was in the shape of a flower, quartered—the rose and the cross.

Off to one side an animal that resembled a large red cat, her fur impossibly soft and bright with white and black highlights, was pacing back and forth, waving her striped bushy tail and occasionally making a little jump. She seemed to be trying to catch Myron’s eye. He studiously ignored her, although the back of his neck must have been tingling like crazy, and tested the door—it was unlocked.

The frisking animal darted forward as Myron entered the building, but the door shut in her face. It is therefore on no red panda’s testimony that I base the following account. My source, though reliable, must remain anonymous, for the Rosicrucians are known above all else for being secretive. And unfortunately, I did not get from him all this information until much later.

Myron found, inside the door, a dark wooden staircase, going down, at the foot of which stood a tiny, three-foot-tall door with a wooden plaque. It read, in several alphabets and languages, among which Myron recognized Spanish, Hebrew, and something that was probably Chinese—and rather prim English, fortunately—
WHOM ARE YOU HERE TO SEE?
The bottom few steps were littered with cigarette butts, limp colonic nozzles, and broken glass.

“Um,” Myron said. “The grandmaster of the Rosicrucians?”

The door clicked, then swung half-open, away from him.

Myron pushed it and ducked through—into the most sumptuously gaudy room he had ever seen. Every surface, walls, floor and ceiling, was covered with a glittering mosaic of mirrors. In the corners, fountains and waterfalls trickled water musically through a labyrinth of chimes. And at the far end, atop a dais, blossomed a multicolored throne, its armrests wide and curled, its back branching out like lily petals. And upon the throne sat a man clad head to foot in batik robes. He glowered in uncomfortable silence.

Myron stood there quietly, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot until he could take it no longer. “Excuse me,” he said. “Are you the grandmaster of the Rosicrucians?”

“Fool!” roared the man on the throne. “I am but the slave of his slave!” And leaping to his feet, he gestured with a sweep of his arm toward the wall. Myron’s eyes, adjusting to the chaos and the glistening, could just make out a small door, only three feet high, concealed amid the mosaic. Without another word, he went to it and ducked through.

The room on the far side was even more amazing than the one he had left. Every inch of the walls was gold—huge rectangular panels of gold, framed by golden borders traced with ornate helices of lapis lazuli. The floor was gold, and too precious to step on, so inch-high pedestals of red marble wound like stepping stones around the room. Dozens of golden candelabras of varying heights festooned the room, and the combined strength of their candles, reflected off the golden walls and lit some parts of the room like midday, while leaving in corners and crevices deep shadows. Against one golden wall, atop twelve golden steps, rose a golden throne, with precious stones, jacinth and fire opal and purple amethyst, spelling out strange letters along its back. There, in golden robes, sat a scowling woman, her dark hair braided around a golden crown. She held a golden scepter topped with an enormous orb of black opal.

“I don’t suppose,” Myron said hesitantly, “that you’re the grandmaster of the Rosicrucians?”

“Fool!” she shrieked. “I am but his slave!” She, too, leapt to her feet, her robes billowing around her, and several candles spontaneously extinguished. With the scepter she gestured toward a shadowy corner. Myron stepped uncertainly from marble stepstone to marble stepstone, reached the corner, and felt in the shadows another tiny doorway behind some drapery. It took him some time to rustle the drapery aside and duck through.

And there before him was a small garden. Light, blinding at first, streamed through a glass roof, playing off the flowering plants, rosebushes of various colors hovering over patches of daffodils and black-eyed Susans. Ferns peeped up in between the flowers. In a clearing a man wearing khaki shorts and a plain black T-shirt sat cross-legged on the mossy ground. Arrayed on the ground in front of him were a pair of wavy daggers fashioned together to make pruning shears, a set of jeweler’s scales, and a paperback copy of
Sweet and Dismal: The Economics of Boxing.

“Why are all the doorways so small?” Myron asked.

The man was staring off into space. “To teach humility to the supplicants who come, who must crawl through each door on their bellies, as we, incidentally, must to reach these same rooms ourselves. You alone have succeeded in thwarting our system. Congratulations! But this is hardly the question you came all this way to ask.”

“Are you the grandmaster of the Rosicrucians?”

“I am, but this is not the question you want to ask, either.”

“Oh, you’re right,” Myron said. “I guess what I want to ask is, what should I do? Who am I? How can I avoid being killed?”

“If you could boil that down to one question,” the grandmaster said, still staring at something behind Myron, “what would it be?”

“Who am I?” Myron said. He was in the uncomfortable position of making a statement that was a question, but being so uncertain that he asked the statement like a question.

The grandmaster said, “You have asked the question that all people ask, sooner or later. However, I’m going to give you an answer slightly different from the answer I’d give another. As all three of your questions are really the same question, the answer to all three will be revealed on June twenty-seventh of this year, at approximately eight a.m., on San Clemente Island. Do you know where that is?”

“No.”

“It’s sixty-five miles west of San Diego. On the east side of this island, about south of the midway point of its length, you’ll find a crude shack painted red. Not inside, but outside that shack, everything will be made clear.”

“Everything will be made clear outside this shack?”

“On June twenty-seventh, at approximately eight in the morning.”

“Where again?”

“South of halfway up the east coast of San Clemente Island, sixty-five miles west of San Diego.”

Myron made a mental note of the details. Then he asked, “How do you know this?”

“I have an atlas.”

“No, sorry, I mean,” Myron said, “how do you know all will be revealed?”

“We have the Mason word and second sight. Things for to come we can foretell aright,” the grandmaster said.

“And this is not a trap?” Myron said.

“It is not. But you should go alone.”

Myron shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

“If you would like to go, you might find it simpler to take the back way,” the grandmaster said. He indicated a small door behind a rosebush.

“It’s not that,” Myron said. “It’s just that it took me a long time to get here.”

The grandmaster nodded.

“Well, I guess I’d expected something else. There was a lot of buildup.”

The grandmaster was still gazing off at a point somewhere behind Myron. “Everything hidden will be revealed,” he repeated. And what more could Myron ask for? The back door was behind the rosebush, and Myron went over to take it. As he was about to go out, he looked behind him and saw what the grandmaster was looking at. Mounted on the wall behind the door Myron had entered through was a flat-screen TV, and a Woody Woodpecker cartoon.

The red panda waited for Myron out front, but he took the back way out, so we lost him again.

And he spent another few weeks off on his own. Spenser had taught him how to survive in the woods and Gloria had taught him how to survive in the city, while I had taught him, I would like to think, how to survive, period. It was no wonder no one could locate him.

But word trickled through the underground stream, as it always does. Arcane whispers of San Diego, and San Clemente Island. And so, late one June night unseasonably cold and cut through with a bitter wind, the red panda, prowling a marina north of San Diego, saw Myron casting the rope off a tiny launch no bigger than a rowboat. She sped down the dock and made a great leap, forepaws stretched out, bushy tail trailing behind her, and landed flat in the launch as Myron pushed it adrift with an oar.

Myron ignored the creature, so she turned into his old friend Alice.

“Jinkies, it’s cold!” she cried.

Myron ignored her and awkwardly used the oar as a paddle to navigate his way out of the marina.

“How can it be so cold here, it’s June?”

Myron, she noticed, had a strange look about him. Not his usual strange look—his eyes were glassy and preoccupied. He was sweating. He was wearing a yellow raincoat, and a heavy sweater underneath, which must have been warm.

“Myron, do you remember me? I’m Alice, we met last year in a pickup truck. I know Arthur.”

Outside the shelter of the harbor, the wind really picked up. In the distance, flashes of lightning strobed in the sky.

“Myron, you should turn back—there’s a storm coming. Actually, do you know what you’re doing?” Ahead of them was nothing but the open sea.

“Kind of,” Myron said.

“It is really cold out here,” Alice said. “Do you have any spare clothes, a jacket or anything?”

“Nothing that would fit you,” Myron said. So Alice turned back into a red panda, which is at least naturally furry.

As the California coast drifted farther away, Myron checked a pocket compass and then moved to the back of the launch. There was a small motor there, and he fiddled with it for a long while before it started up. By this point the wind was blowing strong, and waves kept coming over the sides of the boat. The red panda tried to shake herself dry, like a dog. It got colder. But now that Myron, with the help of his compass, had oriented the boat properly, the wind was directly at their back and sped the little launch along.

Alice assumed the shape of a human and tried to warm herself in a life jacket. “Are we going to San Clemente Island?” she asked.

“If we’re lucky,” Myron said.

“You do know that’s pretty far from shore?”

“Sixty-five miles. Or farther, I guess, because we’ll have to round it to land.”

“Are you sure this is a good idea, Myron?”

But Myron didn’t answer that question, instead he said, “There’s something I just barely can’t remember, something like a dream from long ago, and it’s on the tip of my tongue.”

San Clemente lies diagonally and noodle-shaped in the Pacific, maybe twenty-five miles long but only a few miles wide. It contains a naval base and a unique subspecies of night lizard and very little else. Myron was aiming to round San Clemente on the south; if they went astray to the north, they’d probably hit the island, or one of the other Channel Islands. But if they went too far south, and passed the island without spotting it, the next possible landfall was Hawaii, and past that Australia. They wouldn’t die, of course, but the weeks and months in an open boat with no drinking water would be in some ways worse than death.