Immortal Lycanthropes (3 page)

“What are you?” the man said.

Myron stood paralyzed. He had hardly led a life that had prepared him for acts of violence beyond schoolyard bullying, pummeling and pantslessness, and a little bit of blood. Driving through two people, killing two people—

(One or two people got away. Minors, their names were kept out of the papers if they were ever learned at all.)

—this was another order of cruelty, to which the Garretts of this world, and their friends, could only aspire in time.

The station wagon, behind him, had parked, and Myron could hear the door opening. He risked a quick glance behind and quickly took in a tall, pale woman striding across the lawn toward him. In front of him, “You’re the kid who fought the lion and mane?” the man said, and took a step forward. The afternoon sun was behind the stranger, and he was close enough now that his shadow touched Myron’s shoe.

Just then a pickup truck jumped the curb, skidded across the lawn, and churned to a halt in between Myron and his interlocutor. The passenger side window was down, and from within a smartly dressed young woman, her long black hair in a ponytail, said, “Hop in the back, this is a rescue.”

That was Alice saying that. But I was behind the wheel.

There is a cacophony inside my mouth. I have read a lot of books in my life, and have written more than a few, and, if not all of them, then at least many of them are still there in my mouth in one way or another.

I mean, there are, of course, many ways of telling a story. Horace recommends starting in the middle; the King of Hearts recommends starting at the beginning. Obviously Myron’s story started a while ago, with the accident and all, but I didn’t start back there. Why should you know more than Myron did?

I lived with the Ainu of northern Japan, once, some time ago, and there I encountered an epic poem collected and published under the name “Repunnotunkur” that ran for some five hundred lines of adventures for the narrator, before that narrator was asked to give an account, to a curious man, of everything that had happened thus far—and the poem just repeats it, word for word, five hundred lines, up to the present moment.

Readers would probably not have the patience to let a narrative start over. Imagine if, three chapters from now, Myron Horowitz were asked how he got here, and he replied, “A shameful fact about humanity . . .” I’d certainly close the book.

Oh, we asked him how he got here, and he didn’t answer. He just looked dumbly at us. He was kneeling in the flatbed of the truck as we raced through the sidestreets. It might have been a little scary for a kid.

A small window separated the flatbed from the cab of the truck. Alice slid the window open. “What’s your name?” she asked.

He told us.

“Jeez Louise, you got screwed, kid,” I said. “Look, what’s going on? Why is Benson after you? And where’d you come from, for that matter?”

“What are you talking about? How would I know what’s going on? I don’t know who Benson is. I don’t know how you fight a lion and its mane. I don’t know who you are or where you’re taking me.”

“Hey, don’t cry, Myron,” Alice said. He was crying. “My name is Alice, and this is my friend Arthur.”

“That’s me!” I said.

“Benson was the big guy who was chasing you. His driver was Mignon Emanuel. They work for Mr. Bigshot. Does that help?”

“I have no idea what you’re even talking about. Are you police?”

“Oh, lawsy, no,” Alice said. “We’re, you know, like you.”

“Like me?”

“We’re lycanthropes.”

“We’re what?”

“Technically,” I pointed out helpfully, for I abhor imprecision, “we are therianthropes.”

“You’re werewolves?” Myron asked.

“No, no, I was just saying, and this is why I abhor imprecision,” I said, “lycanthropes are werewolves, and we certainly do not turn into wolves.”

“I was using
lycanthrope
colloquially,” Alice insisted. “I didn’t mean wolves, I meant were-animals.”

“You’re crazy,” Myron said. He had stopped crying at least, but he looked like he was going to go all hysterical at any moment.

“We saved your life,” Alice said, “crazy or not. And we can turn into animals.”

As we pulled onto the highway our truck hit a bump that threw Myron against the window. I’d been watching him in the rearview mirror, and when his face came up to the window, I gave a start. He was really ugly. The features weren’t even in the right place was the problem. One eye was lower than the other, and the bridge of his nose was shaped like a seven, and it ended in nothing. Myron drew his face away from the window, pulled off his backpack, and sat on it. The flatbed must have been wet, come to think. “What animals?” he asked.

“I’m a red panda, and Arthur’s a binturong.”

“What’s a binturong?” Myron asked.

I was getting annoyed. “It’s a bearcat. What, like you’re something cooler?”

“You turn into a bearcat?”

“No, Myron, he is a bearcat. He’s a bearcat who turns into a human.”

I growled, “Can we just say
binturong?
I’m a binturong. A binturong is driving your car. You’re going to have to learn the word eventually.”

Alice was still calm, damn her eyes. “What are you, Myron?”

“I’m . . . I’m Jewish?”

“No, I mean, what animal. What do you turn into a human from?”

“I don’t turn from anything into anything. This is crazy, you don’t turn into anything, either.”

“Show him,” Alice said.

“I can’t, I’m driving.”

She grabbed the wheel and swung a foot over onto the gas pedal. “You can, I can’t—I’m wearing the wrong kind of clothes.” And she was right, her clothes were for street wear, it would’ve taken her forever to put them back on. Whereas I was dressed stylishly but sensibly, so I turned into a binturong. Shaggy black fur, tufts on the tops of my ears, and a long, sinuous tail. I popped back into human form right away, and now I was naked, of course, my clothes strewn about the font seat where they had fallen.

“You can change form, too,” Alice said, relinquishing the wheel and dropping a shirt in my lap, for modesty’s sake. “Do you not know what you are?”

“Because we sure don’t know,” I said, “so don’t look to us for the answer. Also, it’s cold in here, close the window.”

Alice did not close the window between us and Myron, of course, which I suppose made sense. The kid took this all pretty well, considering, and said, “Maybe, maybe I just haven’t turned into anything yet. Maybe at puberty I’ll start turning into something, at the full moon.”

“Jeez Louise, kid, not that old full-moon bromide. And I’ve got bad news for you: you’re never going to hit puberty.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

I was so frustrated that I leaned forward and bit the steering wheel. He was so slow to catch on!

“We saved your life,” Alice said, “we’d hardly kill you now. You’re safe, we’re just trying to figure things out.”

“How do you know I can turn into something?”

“We can feel it, when we’re around one of our own kind. Can you get the feeling from us?”

“Yeah, like your neck’s all prickly. I got the same feeling from the big guy.”

“Benson. He’s one of us, too. He’s a bison.”

“That’s how he got his name,” I added helpfully.

“And Mignon Emanuel, the woman driving the car, and Mr. Bigshot—they’re like us, too.”

Myron said, “Benson looked like an Indian, an American Indian.”

“Of course he did, where do you think bison are from?” Alice said. “I’m from Burma, or it’s Myanmar now. Arthur’s from Indochina, probably around Cambodia. It’s hard to tell where you’re from.”

“With a map like that,” I muttered. By
map
I meant
pan
—I meant his face.

“Why won’t I hit puberty?” Myron said. You couldn’t distract him from the important stuff.

I said, “You haven’t hit puberty yet, have you? And everyone else you knew did, I bet.”

“The doctor said I was slow to develop.”

Alice said, “I don’t know how you can’t know this stuff. Surely you’ve noticed that you don’t age. You’re stuck at that age, just like I’ll be twenty-three and Arthur will be seventeen forever.”

“I’m more like twenty, twenty-one really,” I said.

“Forever?” Myron said.

“Of course, you fool! Haven’t you noticed?” I was squirming all over my seat, I couldn’t stand it. Also, I was cold. “You’re immortal.”

“I can’t be immortal, I’m only thirteen years old!”

“You can’t be thirteen years old, you’re immortal.” I felt something like an itch inside my nose, but I chalked it up to nerves. “The only thing that can kill you is one of us. In animal form. With the claws and the teeth.”

“You could kill me?”

“Well, probably not, I’m a binturong. We’re pretty harmless. But for all I know, you could be a vole. I could kill a vole.”

“What’s a vole?”

“Like a field mouse, stop asking quest—”

But Alice interrupted me. “Someone’s nearby.”

And they came up the ramp, onto the highway, the station wagon with Mignon Emanuel and Benson. I floored it and they floored it, and I said, “How did they find us?”

“They must’ve known we were going to see Gloria,” Alice said. Her head was turned around, her eyes glued on the station wagon as it slowly gained on us.

“How could they possibly know that?”

“She’s in Shoreditch, that’s pretty close to here.”

“Who’s Gloria?” Myron asked. But just then there was a loud, sharp noise, and he cried, “They’re shooting at me!”

“They’re not shooting at you,” I replied, with calm assurance and nerves of steel. “They’re shooting at the tires.”

“What, so they don’t want to kill me?”

I checked the rearview. Benson had his arm out the window, carelessly blasting away with a pistol. With his other hand he was attempting to manipulate a CB radio. What an idiot. I considered telling Alice to get my own pistol from the glove compartment, but I didn’t want her to end up looking as stupid as Benson did. Instead, I said to Myron, “Anyone wants to kill you, I told you, bullets won’t do the job.”

“So they
do
want to kill me?”

“How the devil would I know? Jeez Louise, kid, I’m driving here. Now hold on, I’m going to try something tricky.”

I yanked the wheel left, crashed over the median, skidded backwards on the wet road, whipped around, bounced in a shower of sparks off a stone embankment, and drove the wrong way under a bridge and down an on-ramp. We threaded around a descending railroad gate, made a U-turn that involved at least two people’s lawns, and cut through a city park to avoid a red light. Alice screamed and laughed, and, frankly, I was screaming and laughing, too. I was impressed with the kid, that he never made a peep. Fifteen minutes later, after a half-dozen other moving violations, we pulled into a gas station, and noticed that Myron Horowitz was no longer in the flatbed.

“I told him to hold on,” I said, but Alice put her hand on my arm and shut me up. Inside his backpack, which he had left behind, was a book I had written sixty years ago.

As for me, it was only by thinking how the late Baron Trenck would have conducted himself under similar circumstances that I was able to restrain my tears.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich,
The Story of a Bad Boy

Myron Horowitz regained consciousness in a soggy ditch. Two black children were looking down at him and speaking French. He was in so much pain he passed out again. When he came back, he was on a couch, wrapped in a blanket. A very broad man was looking down at him.

“What did they tell you?” the man asked.

“They told me I was an immortal lycanthrope,” Myron said.

“You’re in shock—drink this,” the man said. Myron drank it and passed out.

It would be tedious to enumerate the number of times he came into and out of consciousness. “I’ve been hurt worse,” Myron insisted, and that was certainly true, but he couldn’t remember that hurt, and that made all the difference. Children, all younger than Myron, although not younger than he looked, would come down a flight of stairs bearing orange juice and aspirin. Sometimes they would bring just the aspirin, along with an empty glass and a guilty look. The walls of the room were wood-paneled, and the carpet was a thick dark red, and filthy. A bedpan was utilized, for the first day at least—but Myron had trouble keeping track of time. Occasionally the sound of a distant train would whistle through the windowless walls. At last the broad man returned. He was wearing a tattered robe and leafed through the mail as he walked. The mail went into a pocket in the robe as he sat on an ottoman.

“I thought you were worse off than you were. It was your face, see. That’s all old wounds, I guess, but it had so much dirt on it, I thought it just got tore off.”

“No, it’s old,” Myron conceded.

“You was bleeding some, and I thought your legs was broke, but I guess not. I guess you’re going to be okay, with a headache maybe. You was talking crazy for a while.”

“I do have a headache. Can I call my parents? I’ve had kind of a weird time of it, and they must be worried.”