Immortal Lycanthropes (16 page)

“Get out,” Myron said.

“I’m not fibbing,” Oliver said, but he left. Myron kicked the door shut, dived under the bed, and came up with—the cardboard tube was there, the doomsday device was safe. Wrapping it in a bathrobe for camouflage, he ran back down the endless staircase, his eyes cast back and forth for a sign of Oliver, or any others, and zigged down one hall, zagged up another, carefully to deposit the tube inside the vast maw of what was probably not but may have been an actual Ming vase.

Then, worrying he might have left something else behind, he turned and ran back, back to the staircase that loomed again in its infinite spiral. He was gasping like a drowning man by the time he reached the top of the tower, and as he stepped up to the threshold his neck prickled, and he saw something scurrying in the bull’s-eye window. It looked like a monkey, with a cat’s face marked distinctively in black and white like a radiation symbol. Its long monkey tail was zebra striped, and it was holding a large piece of red silk. There was something around its neck. Myron was breathing too hard to say anything, but he had the presence of mind to drop the bathrobe he was still carrying, stealthily on the step behind him, just out of sight from the room. His first thought, truth be told, was that it was a raccoon horribly deformed by platypus venom. His second thought was that
P. leo,
king of beasts, had strange beasts at his command. But his third thought was correct. And the creature leapt down, behind the bed, and came up in a swirl of red. It was Florence, belting a loose kimono around her.

“Emanuel was worried about you, you left in such a hurry,” she said.

“It took you that long to get up here, and you’re a monkey?”

“A lemur. And I got up here fast enough, but—well, you might as well know, the kid was in here, going through your things.”

“And you couldn’t come in, because he doesn’t know.”

“He doesn’t know unless you told him. I thought you would, Emanuel thought you wouldn’t.” She shrugged. “So I went looking for you. Frankly, I thought you would have gotten here faster, I took so long trying to find you before I returned.”

Myron realized that she didn’t know, somehow she didn’t know he’d been there and back. Maybe she’d gone all the way back to consult with Mignon Emanuel about what Oliver was doing. Or maybe, Myron thought for a moment, maybe she was telling the truth, and nothing but simple concern had brought her up here.

But then, “Do you think Oliver might have taken anything? Maybe we should take stock of all your things,” Florence suggested, and Myron knew that something strange was going on.

“By all means,” said Myron, trying not to sound canny. “Just let me catch my breath.” And together they went through the duffle bag, Myron’s clothes, his toothbrush, his polished soda can, the borrowed Verne and Haggard volumes, the compound bow . . .

“Are you missing anything? Is this all?”

“I had a cardboard tube with some waterlogged comic books and pinups and things in it, but it had gotten all wet in the snow, so I threw it out days ago.” Myron had resolved to play it close to the vest.

Florence took a quick peep under the bed.

“So what are you again? A lemur?” Myron said. He vaguely remembered learning about lemurs in school.

“Ring-tailed lemur. From Madagascar.”

“From Madagascar?” Myron awkwardly tried to remember if pygmies lived in Madagascar. He wished suddenly he’d been paying more attention in social studies class.

But Florence explained briefly that she was not of the same people as the current inhabitants of Madagascar. Her people, the Vazimba, had flourished in Madagascar for thousands of years before the outriggers came from the east. They brought death to her people, who were very short, and not very good at fighting the long war clubs. Florence stole an outrigger canoe and set off to the east with a handful of Vazimba to find the homeland of the invaders, but only made it to the Agalega Islands where, over the agonizing years, one by one, everyone died but her. After some centuries she returned, on a piece of driftwood to Madagascar, and found that all the Vazimba were gone with scarcely a trace, except in legend.

The story was too sad for Myron to know how to respond. He was used to the despair of Spenser’s stories, of course, but that was all philosophical despair. It was hardly personal, it was just the way of the world. Florence told the story in a flat and unaffected tone, but it was so clearly personal nonetheless.

“Did you ever go back to the Agalega Islands?” Myron asked.

“Oh yeah. I was a pirate queen there a hundred and fifty years ago. That was a good time to be a pirate.”

“Maybe,” Myron suggested tentatively, “maybe you have a story about pirates, too?”

And she did! They had a grand old time there, talking pirate talk, which Myron had picked up from Robert Louis Stevenson and R. M. Ballantyne and Jack London. After a while, when they were both feeling a little giddy, Myron asked if he could see the shape. Florence removed it from around her neck and handed it to him. It was heavier than he had thought.

“I don’t get this,” Myron said.

“You’re not supposed to get it.”

“Why do you have to be the one who has to carry it?”

“It makes sense. I can get away easily if Oliver decided to really go after it.”

“That’s what I don’t get. Why would he want to?”

“He doesn’t have a choice. He’s another experiment from another daycare center; an experiment to get children addicted to various objects, and in that way make them utterly loyal to whoever could provide them. I don’t know all the details, or if they put electrodes in his brain or what, but he ended up addicted to a certain shape: that one. It’s a hard shape to copy, although sometimes you’ll see him try to cut it out of cardboard.”

He handed it back. “There are others like him, then?”

“No, I think all the others went insane.”

“Insane?”

“Or died, or something, I don’t really know. He’s the only one it worked on.” And since Florence was, for the reason stated above, usually the one to carry the shape around, this explained, she said, Oliver’s unnatural (unnatural because lemurs and humans should not mix) attraction to her.

“This all sounds horrible.”

“I’m sure it’s not as bad as I’m making it sound. Most of this happened when I was still operating in Guatemala. I didn’t hook up with Emanuel till later.”

“Is it just coincidence, then, that you and Miss Emanuel are both ringtails?”

“Ringtail? What tail are you talking about there?”

“Her raccoon tail, of course. Raccoons have ringed tails, don’t they?”

“Oh! Oh, I was thinking of something else. Yes, of course she has a ringtail too, but that’s just a coincidence. And speaking of Emanuel, I’d better go tell her you’re doing swell.” And at that, the lemur was back, sitting in the voluminous folds of the red kimono. She wadded the silk up in one tiny hand and leapt to the window, and then scrabbled down the brown, dead ivy along the tower. She had clearly been lying about something.

Myron lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling and wondered whom to trust.

This is a great and terrible world. I never knew there were so many men alive in it.

Rudyard Kipling,
Kim

It is an open question, how much impact one has on one’s own fate. Reasonable philosophers seem to argue for
some.
Certainly Myron Horowitz may often appear as a pawn, buffeted will-I nill-I by the hand of an unseen player, or by a cat that leaps on the board. But his was a restless soul, happy only on the move, that could never be satisfied with life at the top of Rapunzel’s tower, however pleasant the palace itself. So I ask you: to what extent did he orchestrate his own expulsion from paradise, or, if not paradise, from a warm bed, fine food, and a tastefully selected library? The chain of events that climaxed in him fleeing alone into the dark forests at night—did he wind it around himself?

I was relaxing over a cup of tea in my Boston brownstone. Alice would not get off the phone, demanding to know what I had learned so far. Somewhere in the inaudible distance a lion must have been roaring ominously, plotting how to get to his prey. At the fortress, in the backyard, the snow was melting away, with odd piles lingering around the fringes, by the woods. It was still cold out, but Myron had a new winter coat and a long, soft scarf; when the militiamen were at mess, he and Oliver would play around on the obstacle course. There were guards posted, and the guards had guns, and harpoon guns, inexplicably, too, but they turned a blind eye as Myron and Oliver swung on ropes and climbed on tires and failed to scale the wall they were too short to jump up to.

One morning the obstacle course was unexpectedly empty, and the boys had it to themselves for a long time. They had brought Myron’s compound bow out and were practicing firing sticks from it, as they had no arrows. After a while, Florence came out and joined them. She was, as always, a battery of nervous energy, and climbed up and down some knotted ropes to show the world how it was done.

“That’s what we need,” said Oliver. “We need special training. Flossie, you should be making us punch bags of rice or stand under a waterfall.”

Florence waved the suggestion away, and climbed up and down some more things, but Oliver pressed. He wanted to have a contest between him and Myron, and he wanted Florence to judge. Whoever won the contest would get a prize. “We could run the obstacle course, and then we could have a race, and then we could get in the boxing ring.”

“I really don’t want to do this,” Myron said.

Florence was sitting on top of the tall wooden crosspiece from which the ropes depended. She was looking down, but it was not clear that she was listening.

Oliver picked a pair of boxing gloves off the ground, where they’d been dropped, and tossed them over to Myron. “Come on, put these on.”

Myron refused. Oliver had in the meantime slid gloves on his own fists. He couldn’t lace them up, of course, and they were far too large for him. They flopped back and forth loosely on his wrists.

“Put up your dukes, Myron!” Oliver cried. He began to dance around Myron, bobbing and weaving.

“This is not a legal match,” Myron said. “We’re not even in the ring.”

“Ding,” said Oliver, and he went in. He started tentatively, with a little light bodywork, his jabs barely touching Myron, who was endeavoring to squirm out of the way; but as he went on, and noticed that Florence was hardly even looking at him, he began to punch more in earnest.

“Quit it,” Myron said, his bare hands up shielding his face.

“The champ is on the ropes,” Oliver said. “How long can he stand up to this punishment?” The blows that landed were hardly solid, the gloves too limp and floppy to allow much force, but they stung nevertheless.

“Looks like the new kid from Vancouver is ready to claim the belt.”

“Stop it, I mean it.”

“The crowd is going wild!”

Myron felt tears welling up in his eyes. He’d been hurt much worse than this before, of course, but there was something galling about the way this would not stop. It just kept going and would not stop. Stepping backwards, he tripped on the gloves he’d refused to put on and fell over. In a moment, Oliver was on top of him, his legs pinning Myron’s arms. He was pounding ineffectually, with the underside of the glove, like a masseur, but he was pounding directly on Myron’s face. Myron began to scream.

“Florence!” A loud voice carried clearly from up above, and Oliver stopped. He turned his head. From a second-story window Mignon Emanuel was leaning. “Florence, could you bring Myron to my office?”

Suddenly noticing what was going on, Florence scampered down the rope. She pulled Myron to his feet. Oliver was standing nearby, his face downcast.

Mignon Emanuel called down, “And Oliver. That’s three days without, and five hours KP. Do you understand?”

Oliver stomped his foot and let out a long glottal-fricative sigh.

From the window: “I said, do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Oliver at a volume perfectly pitched just barely to reach the second floor.

Florence took Myron to a washroom, cleaned his face up a bit, gently, and then brought him to the office.

“What were you thinking?” was the first thing Mignon Emanuel said as they entered.

“I’m not very good at boxing,” Myron said.

Mignon Emanuel ignored him. “What if he had panicked and changed, in front of the guards and everyone?”

“I wasn’t paying attention,” Florence said.

“We’re three days away from the conference, and your not paying attention could ruin everything.”

Florence glared right back. “I’ve already said I’m sorry,” she said, which Myron noted wasn’t strictly true. “It won’t happen again. What more do you want from me?”

Mignon Emanuel did not look happy, but she turned her attention to Myron. “You’ve had a scare,” she said. “Would you like to go lie down, or would you be able to help me with something?”

“I could help,” said Myron.

And so Florence took Myron to Mrs. Wangenstein’s room, and Mrs. Wangenstein measured him with a tape measure. She wrote all the numbers down on a little pad with a golf pencil she liked to lick.