Immortal Lycanthropes twelfth-anniversary rerelease

Sample its (gradual) glory with a lengthy excerpt (TM)

My first (published) novel, Immortal Lycanthropes, turns twelve this year, which would be a bigger deal if we were not base-ten loyalists. Twelve years ago, the publisher, Houghton Mifflin, sent review copies exclusively to humorless scolds, who were immediately offended by every aspect of the book, and also thought it was hard to read. The first adventure novel to feature a were-red-panda sank into oblivion.

Until now! To celebrate the big one-two, IL is being released in a snazzy new edition, with an all-new afterword reminiscing, like Robin Hood, on this and that. I’ll eventually post the afterword in some public forum (like this one?) at some point, so people don’t have to buy a whole book just to get twelve (!) pages of new content. There are also new drawings (by a much less talented illustrator than the original featured). A few typos fixed, etc.

I love this book and am proud of it and excited to give it a second chance at life, or rather the liminal unlife of fiction. For anyone who was not strong-armed, in those halcyon days of 2012, into buying a copy, I am posting below a lengthy excerpt (TM). Perhaps you will read it and be so overburdened with the weight of suspense that you will immediately purchase a copy to learn what happens next. All questions are answered in the end. I try to play fair.

If you do wish to find out what happens, you know, next, paperback and kindle versions of the text entire are available here. Annnnnnnd…if you yourself are a humorless scold, or merely wish to share the book with a precocious seven-year old child or literal Puritan, bowdlerized editions, with IL’s already-sparse references to drugs, sex, or the naughtier regions of human or animal anatomy, excised, and also available. Adults still smoke and perhaps drink a little, and there’s still plenty of violence. But not one penis joke!

(As always, if for some reason you are unable to acquire a copy because of impecuniousness or ancient curse, drop me a line.)

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Immortal Lycanthropes

I. The Derailing.

“Perchance,” said he, as the five lads lay in the rustling stillness through which sounded the monotonous cooing of the pigeons—“perchance there may be dwarfs and giants and dragons and enchanters and evil knights and whatnot even nowadays. And who knows but that if we Knights of the Rose hold together we may go forth into the world, and do battle with them, and save beautiful ladies, and have tales and gestes written about us as they are writ about the Seven Champions and Arthur his Round-table.”
•Howard Pyle, Men of Iron. 

1.
A shameful fact about humanity is that some people can be so ugly that no one will be friends with them. It is shameful that humans can be so cruel, and it is shameful that humans can be so ugly.

It would be easy to paint a sob story here, but I am trying to remain objective. So: Myron Horowitz, short, scrawny, and hideous, had no friends. The year before, in eighth grade, he had three people he used to eat lunch with. They had perhaps been his friends, but one had moved away over the summer, one had transferred to a private school, and one had gone through puberty and come out popular. Myron Horowitz had not only not gone through puberty, he had not grown an inch in the last five years, not since his accident. People viewing him from behind assumed he was eight years old; from the front, a different set of assumptions came into play. His face had been partially reconstructed, and it was probably very well done, considering what was left to work with. But it was still a twisted, noseless, face, and Myron ate alone now. Worse than eating alone, though, was the walk home. At Henry Clay High School, students who took a bus home passed from their locker through the gymnasium to convene in the parking lot; students who walked home took a different route, through the cafeteria and out through a side door, along a wooded path to the sidewalk. Very few students walked home, but Myron did, and so did Garrett Bercelli. 

Garrett was not overly large for a freshman, but compared to Myron he was a heavyweight champion. His hands especially were large, and, as they say, sinewy. He probably had reasons for his antisocial behavior, but, frankly, they don’t concern me. He can die and go to hell for all I care, once he has served his purpose in our narrative. 

There are disadvantages, I am aware, to beginning our story this fast. Perhaps I should have given Myron a few scenes at home, curled up with his adventure books or bumping elbows with his parents at their cozy breakfast nook. But really, who wants to see that horrible face eat? And anyway, we have places to go. Myron, two years ago, had had a fourth friend, but he had died; that part is pretty funny, when you think about it, and if you are heartless, but I barely have time to mention Danny Fitzsimmons. We have places to go. People will turn into animals, and here come ancient secrets and rivers of blood.

It was on a crisp October day in suburban western Pennsylvania, beneath the golden panoply of leaves some people find so charming, that Garrett Bercelli introduced himself to Myron by picking him up and playfully throwing him into a pricker bush. Two days later he cut right to the chase and punched Myron in the stomach. That was a Friday. On Monday, Garrett really went wild; he forbore (so he explained during the course of the beating) to touch Myron’s horrible face, but he pummeled the rest of his body quite mercilessly. At last Myron spat up some blood, and Garrett ran away. 

Obviously I cannot literally enter Garrett Bercelli’s head, to observe the shadow-parade of his thought processes, but I have investigated the matter enough that I believe I can produce a fairly accurate reconstruction. Garrett ran home, convinced, I believe, that he had killed or maimed poor Myron. This fact in itself did not concern him, but the risk that he would be caught, and punished, was enough to send him hiding in his bed, the way he did as a child. He hadn’t meant to kill Myron, after all, and this should be taken into account. It had all been juvenile high spirits, and things had just gone too far. Garrett could hardly remember the beating, he could just remember the feeling it had given him, the rushing sound in his ears and the reckless abandon. Whether it gave him an erection I do not pretend to know, but let’s assume the answer is yes. The idea that anything as wonderful as the emotions he had undergone in the course of that afternoon could land him in the reformatory was intolerable. He went to school the next day filled with righteous indignation and a healthy dollop of fear (he had, in fact, tried to feign sickness, but his mother would have none of it). Imagine his relief when he saw, in home room, Myron at his desk, alive and apparently hale. The relief would have quickly turned to excitement. You may recall the feeling you have had on first discovering that the author of a favorite book had written a dozen more, perhaps under various pseudonyms, the feeling of a world of possibilities opening up. Garrett did not know what that felt like, because, as best I have been able to determine, he had never finished a book not assigned to school, and few of those. As I said, he probably had reasons for being so violent, reasons that do not concern us. But what Garrett felt at that moment was analogous to a reader’s joy. Here was something he could do, something he was good at and could get away with.

“Tuesday, fish sticks; Wednesday, spaghetti; Thursday meat loaf…” the loudspeaker was intoning for the week, when Garret leaned down a half inch from Myron’s ear.

“If you miss one day,” he hissed, referring either to school or to their meetings after and behind it, “I will kill you.”

Myron was less pleased with the arrangement. His entire body still ached from yesterday’s pummeling, obviously, and there had been blood in his urine. He considered telling his parents, his adoptive parents who had taken him in after the accident. Dr. and Mrs. Horowitz were good people—you don’t adopt a deformed eight-year old unless you are reasonably unselfish—but it’s no use pretending they understood him. They made a game effort, but a child who never grew an inch from the moment he had been found crawling dazed and torn up along the Maine coast five years ago never really made much sense to them. When Myron looked upset (for example), they cheerfully tended to remind him that at his next birthday he’d be allowed a cell phone, unaware that his true worry was that he’d have no one to call. They were always unaware. I don’t want to have a pity party for Myron Horowitz. He ends up okay, and I have frankly had worse days than his that week. But I have not had many days worse than his worst. Myron was scared, and he was too scared to admit to anyone that he was scared. He had thought about carrying a knife, and had even packed one to bring to school that day, a steak knife from his mother’s kitchen, but it fell out of his knapsack somewhere between home and school, which may have been for the best. Tuesday was a long, slow day; every day at school is a long, slow day, but this one was something special.

That Tuesday afternoon, after school, Myron decided to try leaving by a different route. From his locker he slipped downstairs and into the lobby, the one with the trophy cases, and the door to the administrative offices. If he could go out the school’s wide front door, he would be on a busy street, where Garrett would, presumably, be unable to make his assault. Myron may have been a little afraid that Garrett would make good his threat, his threat to kill him, but he was absolutely terrified of another beating like yesterday’s. He knew it would be shameful to cry, but he was afraid enough that he could feel the tears welling. He was often called “Baby” by his peers, just because of his height, and he was desperate not to have the nickname lengthened to “Crybaby.” “Chip” was the nickname he had selected for himself and that no one used. Garrett’s nickname for him, which was catching on around the school, was “Faggot.”

As Myron approached the front doors, he heard a voice behind him, saying, “Young man”—the vice-principal’s voice, he realized, as he turned around. 

Myron said nothing in response.

“Where do you think you’re going?” asked the vice-principal, a Mr. Zaborsky, famous at the country club, perhaps, for his slice, but known at Henry Clay primarily for having hair in his ears and a butt crack that peeked over his belt like a mischievous gremlin when he was standing up, only to leap forth with a yawning maw if God forbid he should bend over. This is all terribly unfair to the man, but Myron was so terrifyingly ugly that it is sometimes necessary to remind those of his acquaintance that ugliness is all around, and not limited to that hideous face. Right now, in fact, there is something ugly happening under a rock nearby; if you are near a rock, turn it over and you will see a worm going to the bathroom. Ugly things are happening in your intestines as you read this. A million million ugly microbes are crawling on your skin. Have you even been in a dim room and seen, in the one ray of light that lanced some distance away through the window, a sparkling miasma of dust motes? And have you then thought to yourself, thank the good Lord I am not on that side of the room, in that sunbeam,—for if I were, every breath would require the inhalation of that furry, filthy air? It’s just as dusty where you’re standing, of course, but you are able to pretend that it is not. That’s the kind of deception you’re apt to put over on yourself when you see Myron. Perhaps that was what Mr. Zaborsky was thinking as he wiggled his hips and tugged at his pants. 

“Home?” Myron asked.

“Home? Home? Don’t you know,” Mr. Zaborsky intoned, rather enjoying the moment, “that all those not talking a bus are to exit through the cafeteria?”

“I didn’t think it would matter,” Myron said, in a very quiet voice. “This way is closer for me is all.”

“Closer for you?” Mr. Zaborsky rather began to strut. He hooked his thumbs in imaginary suspenders. It is likely that in his mind he was a great orator, and he only on occasion had the opportunity to employ the art that was his secret calling. “The exit to which you are headed is reserved for faculty, staff, and visitors. Students are privileged with their own twin exits, one through the gymnasium and one through the cafeteria. Now what would happen if we all decided to ignore the rules, and just go our own merry way? Anarchy, that’s what! Do you know what anarchy is?”

With infinite patience, and, doubtless, not without kindness and wisdom, Mr. Zaborsky perorated about the benefits of a law and the pandemonium of lawlessness. When he finally watched Myron turn and trudge back to the cafeteria, he beamed with the saintly face of someone who has “made a difference.” But don’t be too hard on him. It is no easy thing, never to have made a difference; and, to be fair, when he heard the news the next morning, he momentarily wondered if he could have done anything to prevent it. Quickly he concluded that he had done all that was humanly possible, but he did have that moment, and that moment is something.

Nervously, to himself, Myron hummed as he entered the cafeteria.

You have perhaps already anticipated that Garrett Bercelli, tiring of the wait, unaware that his date had been held captive by Zaborsky’s endless lecture, had been himself drawn into the cafeteria, where he was standing, awkwardly, when Myron entered.

The cafeteria was a foolish place to try anything, because, although the room was empty now, the internal wall facing the hallway was nothing but a row of large windows. Across the hall were the windows of the nurse’s office, and the nurse always stayed late; she could easily see anything untoward happening in the cafeteria, if she just looked over. But Garrett was too excited to waste time dragging his prey outside.

“You know you’re going to have to pay for making me wait,” he said. He was smiling as he said it, and it was a genuine smile. He was so happy his hands were shaking.

“Leave me alone,” said Myron unconvincingly. He was a very tiny boy, I hope I have stressed, as well as an ugly one.

“What happened to your face, anyway, faggot?”

“I don’t remember,” Myron said, which was true. He remembered nothing of the accident, nor of his life before it. 

“I’m going to give you something to remember.”

After that some other things happened, and then there was a loud crashing sound. The nurse, and then several teachers, came running. (Mr. Zaborsky was in the bathroom.) 

As a safety precaution, the school had some years before begun installing shatterproof glass, the kind with hexagons of chicken wire inside it. Then new safety advisories had indicated that the chicken-wire glass was in fact more dangerous than regular glass, for reasons that should become clear soon, and the school had stopped the replacements; but it had never gotten around to undoing what it had done. 

This bit of history, dug up and reported in the local papers that week, is necessary for an understanding of how it was that Garrett smashed through the regular windows between the cafeteria and the hallway, and smashed into the reinforced shatterproof windows of the nurse’s office. He became caught in the chicken wire, several feet off the ground, and hung there bleeding.

And there in the cafeteria—it was weird. All the tables and chairs, all of them, were tipped over and scattered to the periphery of the room. And alone in the center lay Myron, unconscious and totally naked.

They never found more than a few strips of his clothes, although the air was filled with wisps of cotton and loose, tumbling threads.

2.
Mystery explosion rocks Westfield high school, everybody said. The explosion wasn’t what caught on, though. It was the mystery. What kind of explosion could propel one student through a window, blow all the clothes off another, and scatter chairs and tables without even damaging, some scuff marks excepted, the floor? Henry Clay High School, Westfield, Pennsylvania, had a genuine unexplained phenomenon.

The school nurse got to Myron first. She hadn’t even seen Garrett, who was, after all, several feet off the ground and partly obscured by chicken wire and broken glass. She ran to Myron, covered him with her shawl, and ran back to her office to call the police, who had already been called by others. When she returned, Myron was surrounded by teachers. “Give him air,” she shrieked, not sure what else to do. She then ran back to her office, saw Garrett stuck in her window, and fell over. When the ambulance came, it took Myron and a hyperventilating nurse (Mrs. Botchel, the newspaper said) to the hospital. Garrett, now awake and screaming, had to be cut out of the chicken wire, and required a second trip. This is why reinforced windows are dangerous, incidentally.

Myron had no memory of what had happened. His attempts to explain are perhaps worth recording, if only in paraphrase. He had felt a pressure, and he had felt a lack of pressure, and then he was aware of looking at two opposite sides of the room at once, and then everything had gone dark. He was covered in bruises, dismissed as superficial because they faded quickly. Nothing else was wrong with him, and the police, although puzzled, could hardly pin a trashed cafeteria on one scrawny kid. So after an overnight (for observation) Myron was free to go. He had made quite a hit that night among the hospital staff, who were compassionate people desensitized from their internships in the burn ward and pitied the ugly little boy; they took turns showing him around, and his happiest moments came when touring the newborn ward. He had to wear a surgeon’s cap and mask, and no infant screamed when it saw him.

The Horowitzes, on hospital orders, told their son that he should take it easy, and, at the sheriff’s suggestion, encouraged him to try to remember what the devil had happened. He was out of school for a week. (Garrett, in case you care, which I don’t, recovered almost completely, but began wetting the bed compulsively; perhaps he’ll recover his dignity in time. He also remembered nothing, or said he remembered nothing, after a certain point. “I heard air rushing, and I was looking at the dark,” was all he could say.) Myron spent his week reading adventure novels on the couch, and eating cookies.

Most of this information was in the local news, accompanied by wildly inaccurate speculations about an explosion. Everyone assumed, of course, that Myron and Garrett had just been walking amiably by, innocent bystanders to some kind of occult phenomenon. The mystery was a slim sidebar in a couple of national papers, which was where I read about it. So I packed up an overnight bag, a gun, a thermos, and an extra can of gas, and I called Alice.

At his parents’ request, Myron’s return to school was a quiet affair. “Let’s act as though nothing happened,” they may as well have painted on a bedsheet banner and hung in the front hall. Lunch tables the custodian moved to the gymnasium temporarily. In the lunchroom, workmen got paint on their coveralls.

If I may be permitted a moment of melodrama (which is after all the idiom of my chosen profession), there were two smoke-filled basements in which Myron’s return to school caught a sinister eye. One of them was in Baton Rouge. The other was in Westfield, Pennsylvania. Unlike Myron, Garrett Bercelli was not without friends. Three or four of them had gone to visit ol’ Garrett in his hospital bed; had heard his secret whisper that Horowitz had, somehow (he remembered nothing!), done this to him; had later in a metaphorically smoke-filled basement made a secret pact to find Myron Horowitz after school and 1. steal his backpack, 2. remove, and 2a. steal, his pants, and 3. “teach him a lesson” through violence. Violence was their idiom. Perhaps it was not yet, but it would be before long, and they were testing the waters on a small, ugly boy, who would soon be, they high-fived each other in celebratory anticipation, bloody and half naked. It would be pretty funny, you must admit, if you are heartless.

Donald Chang, Michael West, and one or two others, needed time to make their clever plans. And so it was three days later that they lay in wait for Myron Horowitz, who was, incidentally, no happier, and no handsomer, than he had been before this whole foofarah. It never rains but it pours, they say; they say a lot of things. Myron was walking down the street. Was he whistling to himself? Was he dreaming of a brighter future that would not be his?

Westfield is a pleasant, small, suburban community. There are almost no sidewalks. The front lawns are large, trees scant, and there is, consequently a dearth of places to hide in ambush. But this is why our conspirators (Donald, etc.) had waited for this day. This was Thursday, and Thursday was garbage day; large, green, plastic, identical garbage cans sat at the end of every driveway. They had already been emptied of their garbage. Our conspirators (West, etc.) had, that day, run ahead of Myron as he walked home from school—students were allowed to use the front exit now, until the lunchroom paint dried—run to the end of Myron’s block, and secreted themselves, one each, beneath the hinged lid of a trash can. Three or four garbage cans total. It had rained earlier, and at the bottom of each can sat a quarter inch of stagnant garbage water. The stench was formidable. But it would all be worth it for the money shot, when out of three or four garbage cans leapt three or four bringers of the mayhem.

Please note that I am not being cute here. I have been unable to ascertain the exact number of mayhem bringers.

Myron’s house, or rather his parents’ house, was scarcely visible down the block, a good hundred yards away from the site of ambush. Perhaps he saw a garbage can lid twitch, for young Myron suddenly stopped whistling, and stopped walking altogether. From scant trees’ leaves dripped the remains of the morning rainfall. The road was black and shiny still. Myron was not quite at the spot he was supposed to have reached, but what, thought everyone, the hell. First one, and then another sprang from the garbage cans in a way they had probably discussed. Such springing is, in fact, very difficult to do, and in every case the can tipped over, spilling out a wet and filthy boy who was standing up, dusting himself off, and thirsting for blood.

“Take off your pants,” one said, prematurely. There was supposed to be an order to these things. 

Myron tensed: If he had started running when the cans commenced falling over, he probably could have gotten away, but, frankly, he had not expected to be assaulted here, or in this fashion. He may have expected from a garbage can to have emerged a raccoon, and true raccoons can be pleasant company. Now it was too late to run, he was surrounded by people with longer legs; now he was ready to sprint at any opportunity, now that there was no opportunity forthcoming.

From up ahead, near Myron’s house, a station wagon pulled out from the curb. Of course, no one noticed it.

“What did you do to Garrett?” one person was inquiring, while another was suggesting that Myron might want to drop his backpack and make this easier. Perhaps these two speaking were Donald Chan and Michael West. Both were killed, one quickly and one slowly over the course of six futile surgical procedures, after the speeding station wagon struck them. This happened very suddenly, and to call it a surprise would probably be understating things, especially for Messrs. Chan and West. But this was also Myron’s opportunity, and he had already begun sprinting, sideways, across the lawn, not toward his house but simply away. God help him, he was glad that the car had struck; knowing him, as I do now, he probably did not think that his classmates were dead; or perhaps he was too scared to care. Across the generous front lawn and across the generous back lawn he ran, and as he ran, and his mind processed what had happened, he gradually became less scared of the small cadre of bullies and more scared of a station wagon and its homicide of a driver. Soon Myron was on the front lawn of another street, Pennylane Place, if I recall correctly. He saw, to his right, rounding the corner, a station wagon with blood on its hood. A thin woman with short blonde hair and sunglasses, he could dimly perceive, was behind the wheel. She could not follow him across the lawns, of course, but her car was much faster than he, and, houses being spaced out as they were, Myron had nowhere to hide. He turned around, ready to run back, and he saw a man there, huge and wild-haired and dressed, unseasonably, in a long leather duster. His nose was as long and square and thin as an ax blade. His back was hunched; patches of long black hairs tufted his chin. The man looked terrifying, for all sorts of objective reasons, but he also made the hairs on Myron’s neck stand up, in a way nothing else every had. There was a shadow of a memory he could not articulate associated with this sensation. What with all that, it took Myron a moment to realize that the man, whoever he was, had been in the station wagon, and had gotten out to chase him.

“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 brief 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.

3.
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 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 said.

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.”

“Look, 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 rear-view 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.”

Incidentally, this is a binturong. (Stolen from Nat. Geo.)

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, and 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 backward 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 onramp. 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 the 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.

Twenty short pieces

II. The Derailing, Part Two.

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.

1.
Myron Hororwitz 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.”

“Sure, you can call your parents, but after we talk. We’ve got to talk first, see.” The man reached down, groped under the couch, came up with a cigarette butt, and lit it with a transparent lighter. “My name is Mr. Rodriguez, and I run a kind of school here for international students. You may have noticed the many international young people running around.”

“It’s very impressive,” Myron said.

“They are students, of course, and I run a kind of school. I can show you my papers, papers from the government that shows I have a school.”

“It sounds like a delightful school.”

Mr. Rodriguez looked at Myron a long time in silence. “How old are you, now, eight?”

“Thirteen, actually.”

“Well, I prescribe plenty of bed rest and some fruit juice. You’re healing nice. Kids heal real fast with bed rest and fruit juice.”

“Maybe I can call my parents now?”

“We don’t got no phone. Schools are for learning, not foolery, so of course we got no phone. But I’ll send Kwame to the candy store, have him call. Write your number down here.” Mr. Rodriguez groped around, looking for a pen, finally located one behind his ear, and then groped around for a piece of paper. He settled on a torn open envelope, part of the day’s mail. Myron neatly printed out his number and passed the envelope back. Mr. Rodriguez turned away.

“My name,” Myron called after him.

“Your what?”

“My name. You should tell my parents my name.”

“Right. What is it then?”

“Myron.”

Without a word, Mr. Rodriguez nodded and left. From his fist, Myron removed the wadded-up paper he had slid from the envelope.

He was excited to have acquired a clue, like a character from one of the adventure books he liked to read. “I’ll figure out what’s going on here,” he muttered.

“Hello,” said a voice, and Myron jumped. The ball of paper fell from his hand. A young Asian boy bearing a glass stepped forward and picked it up. 

“You are Myron,” the boy said. “I am John.”

“Did you bring me fruit juice?” Myron guessed.

“I think water.” He passed over the glass and the paper.

“Do you know what kind of school this is?” Myron asked.

“We learn very good English,” John said.

“Where are you from, John?”

“I am Malay. We learn very good. Mr. Rodriguez is good man.” His eyes looked terrified. 

“Where is a Malay from?”

“Malaysia. In Indochina.”

“Have you ever seen a binturong?”

“A binturong?”

“Um. A bearcat? Black and shaggy, long tail.” He gestured with his hands.

“Ah, binturong. Very nice, very pretty.”

“Do you trust binturongs?” Myron asked, but of course John said nothing. It was a stupid question.

Myron drank the water and passed the glass back. John left. Holding his breath and listening for anyone to arrive, Myron quickly unwadded the paper. “You may already have won…” it said. Some clue! Myron tossed it to the ground angrily, where it bounced back off the ottoman and rolled under the couch.

From the top of the stairs came John’s whisper. “We are all prison.”

2.
“It’s like this, Kwame,” Myron said. “I’ve read a lot of books about people wandering into strange or frightening situations, and what kind of things they can do. If the situation was different I wouldn’t mind hanging around to find out what was going on and then, you know, freeing everyone. But a few days ago a man and a woman tried to kill me, with a car and with a gun. Another man and woman saved my life, and they told me I was an immortal lycanthrope, although I don’t turn into a wolf. Well, really they don’t know what I turn into. And I fell out of a speeding car and I didn’t die, so maybe they’re right. But I’ve got to get out of here and find out if I’m really a werewolf or what, so I’m not going to stay, I’m sorry. But before I go, I need to know what town this is. Do you know what town this is? Where we live?” He tried it several times, at slower speeds, but Kwame couldn’t understand him. Kwame spoke a language Myron had never heard before, from somewhere in Western Africa. He also spoke French.

It was in French that Kwame spoke to Jack (not his real name; Mr. Rodriguez had given it to him), an Algerian, and also Binky (not his real name; Mr. Rodriguez had given it to him), Vietnamese. Binky had become friends with Lord Thundercheese (not his real name; Mr. Rodriguez had given it to him), Nigerian, and had worked out a kind of private pidgin between the two. Bancroft (not his real name; Mr. Rodriguez had given it to him), Sudanese, could speak Arabic with Jack, as well as English with our friend John (not his real name; Mr. Rodriguez had given it to him). There were several other kids running around—at least one from Russia and one from a temporary autonomous zone that no nation but Cuba had ever recognized as sovereign—but Myron hadn’t figured out how they all fit in. 

For that matter, Kwame was not his real name. Mr. Rodriguez had given it to him. He was from Senegal. 

The English speakers at odd hours explained in whispers what Myron had already concluded: that Mr. Rodriguez did not, in fact, run a school for international students. He collected an assortment of fees, some from a guardian or government official, and some from nonprofit groups who sponsored the students. The children spent the day eating very little and on occasion laboriously copying sample letters Rodriguez had penned and that most of them couldn’t read. These letters extolled their ongoing education, and asked for spending money.

“If I could figure out where we are, I could sneak to a phone and call my parents.”

“No phone here,” John pointed out. 

Mr. Rodriguez spent a lot of time elsewhere, sometimes coming home very late, and usually soused and angry. Sometimes, while he was gone, the kids were locked in the house; sometimes they were locked out, but Myron was always locked in.

“Just go to the police while you’re out,” Myron begged, but Bancroft shook his head in fear.

“American police make AIDS.”

The international students would, as a rule, rather spend their time foraging for food. They hated but respected Mr. Rodriguez, and they trusted absolutely no one else, including Myron.

“Just ask them what town we’re in, Bancroft. I need to know how far from Westfield we are.”

Bancroft demurred. The inhabitants of this strange land were not to be trusted.

Mr. Rodriguez ignored most of his charges, but he looked at Myron suspiciously. The doors, of course, were deadbolted. There were bars on the first story windows.

During the days, and nights, that Mr. Rodriguez was gone, Myron wandered the house, at first looking for a way out, then seeking a clue to his current location, and finally just poking his nose around. In a drawer were several bundles of pamphlets for Featherstone Academy, “an elite multicultural educational setting in beautiful Pennsylvania, USA,” with crudely retouched photographs of Tudor houses and acres of rolling grasslands; but the place where the return address sticker would go was blank. He found quite a stash of pornographic magazines, too, but they were, on the one hand, too tailored to bizarre niche tastes and, on the other hand, too overt a reminder that Myron had still not hit puberty for him to enjoy.

“I sure feel older, though” he said to himself, and waited for his growth spurt. He hummed happily. He was, after all, having an adventure.

Mr. Rodriguez’s house had two floors in addition to the finished basement. Most of the rooms were given over to sleeping quarters for the innumerable students. Either Mr. Rodriguez was a man of surprising discrimination and taste, or whoever had lived here before him had left some stuff behind. The crumbling bookshelves held three nonconsecutive volumes of Macaulay’s Critical and Historical Essays, and several Kafka paperbacks. On one wall, in the stairwell, hung a dusty old picture Myron recognized, by Degas. His parents had owned a poster reproduction of the painting; it was a famous painting, Myron knew, and he wondered if Mr. Rodriguez knew how much this picture was worth, and what a fortune he had here.

“Fortune!” Myron shouted, and ran down two flights to the basement. He dug under the couch. Here he found half a dozen cigarette fragments and a crumpled piece of paper, which held forth the promise of riches to a certain:

Andre Rodriguez
17 Lightning Hill Rd.
Picthatch, PA

Myron knew where Picthatch was! Not fifteen miles from Westfield. He thought for a while about clever ways to sneak out of the house, and he even tried to go up the chimney. Finally he threw a chair through a second-story window (the latch had rusted shut). He looked down a dizzying height.

“What you doing there?” shouted up John, who was wandering by outside. In his hand he had a noose he had braided out of floss, with which he hoped to catch chipmunks for dinner.

“If I am truly immortal, I could just jump,” Myron whispered. But instead he dragged a bedroll to the window and, after a great deal of straining, managed to wedge it through. Once free, it unfurled and fell to the grass below.

“Hey!” John shouted. “Not use mine!”

One by one, five more bedrolls tumbled through, followed by some couch cushions, until they made a nice pile. Myron carefully checked the window frame for broken glass, stuck his feet through, and—he held his breath but did not close his eyes—slithered through into the air. When he landed on the soft pile, a great cloud of dust erupted, hiding him from sight. By the time it cleared, he was already running across the trash-strewn lawn.

“I’m escaping!” he shouted. “Anyone who wants to can come with me.”

The boys whistled and whooped, but they did not follow him. He passed a copse of birch trees, a collection of rusting fragmented automobiles, etc. Clouds rushed by overhead. The air felt heavy. It was the first time he’d been outside since he he’d arrived here. He was still wearing the same muddy clothes, and his underwear had grown strange and crispy. How many weeks had it been? In the distance, he could hear, and then see, the passing train. The air was cold enough to show his breath, like a smokestack.

A deep, wide ditch separated the train tracks from the field, and Myron, out of breath, walked along the outside rim of the ditch, following the tracks. When he finally came to place where the tracks crossed a road, he thought he recognized where he had fallen from our pickup. Myron followed the road a ways until he came to a small collection of stores. In front of a laundromat a bald, tired man was sitting on a milk crate. 

“Is there a phone around here?” Myron asked.

“Inside, costs a dime.”

Myron had prepared for this as he walked along the tracks. He presented to the man two beer bottles he had picked up on the way. “Can I trade you?” he asked.

With his newly acquired dime, he called his parents. “I’m in Picthatch, you won’t believe it, come get me,” he couldn’t help crowing. Things had gotten exciting, and it really felt, now, like an adventure.

The voice on the other end was muffled. “Where in Picthatch are you exactly?” It was a strange voice.

“Who is this?” Myron asked.

“This is Mrs. Wangenstein, your guidance counselor. Am I remembered by you, Myron?”

“What are you doing there?”

“I was asked by your parents to look after the house while they were gone. They and I have been very worried about you.”

“What’s my father’s first name?” Myron asked.

“Irving.”

“What’s my mother’s maiden name?” 

“I don’t know; she hasn’t been known to I for that long. Look, Myron—”

“Which phone are you on?”

“Er. The one in the kitchen.”

“Okay. What color is the refrigerator?”

“Myron, there’s no time for questions. I can come get you.”

“Look at the refrigerator, Mrs. Wangenstein. Tell me what color it is.”

“White.”

“Wrong answer.”

“Myron, I’m colorbli—” But he had already hung up.

He stood at the phone and tried to think. Mrs. Wangenstein had not been in his home, which meant that someone had rerouted his parents’ phone number to Mrs. Wangenstein’s house, or her cell. Who would have the resources to switch phone numbers around like that? Was it safe to go back to Westfield? Myron picked the phone up again and called 911. Before he could say a word, however, he felt himself being picked up by the scruff of his neck, which proved to be much more painful than he would have guessed. Mr. Rodriguez was dragging him outside toward the car.

“Help me!” Myron called. 

“He’s a truant,” Mr. Rodriguez reassured the unmoving and uninterested man on the milk crate, “from Estonia.” He opened the driver’s side door and threw Myron across the stick shift into the passenger seat. The car was already running, and Mr. Rodriguez was driving away before Myron had recovered his wits enough to try the door handle. It was, of course, locked.

“How did you find me? Were you monitoring the phones, too?”

“You ugly freak, of course I was going to find you. There’s nowhere else a body can walk to. Now you better tell me who you called.”

“No one, you got me right after I dialed.”

“Maybe that’s true,” said Mr. Rodriguez, “but I’ve got to figure out what to do with you. You know so much about the school operations. I’ve just got to figure it out.”

A few fat, lethargic raindrops struck the windshield. By the time Myron and Mr. Rodriguez had reached the house, it was pouring.

3.
The other kids were scrambling to drag their defenestrated bedrolls into the house before they got too soaked. Myron was sitting in an overstuffed chair, trying desperately to will himself into the form of a wolf. Or a tiger. Or an alligator. Mr. Rodriguez had turned bright flaming red.

“I take you in, I feed and clothe you, and this is the thanks you give me,” he roared. “You betray me, you run away, you try to betray our family secrets! I didn’t want to hurt you, I wasn’t going to do anything to you.” Outside, dimly refracted through the pounding rain, lightning momently illuminated the sky. “But you forcing my hand, boy!” Then, so loud both of them jumped, the thunder struck.

“I wasn’t going to say anything about you, I just wanted to call my parents.”

“I’m your parents now, dumb-ass! You don’t know how hard this is! I don’t know what to do with these kids in December when they have to go home, and then they tell all their friends I don’t have no school. I can’t let them go, but I can’t keep them here another year. And then you have to show up, and you can actually talk normal…”

It suddenly occurred to Myron that Mr. Rodriguez was under the impression that the school year started in January, and he began to laugh.

“You won’t think it’s so funny when you’re at the bottom of the river,” Mr. Rodriguez was shrieking. He jumped up and began to tremble all over. Myron was scared; he could feel every hair on the back of his neck, where Mr. Rodriguez had picked him up, begin to tingle. Suddenly he remembered feeling this way before. And at that moment a bison came bursting through the wall. Its great head smashed into Mr. Rodriguez and sent him flying to one side. The bison skidded into a bookshelf, and a set of hardcover Time-Life books came tumbling down onto its back. When it turned around, Myron had already darted out the hole in the wall and was running through the rain.

The wind and the driving rain made it hard to see, but Myron was fairly certain that a bison had managed to burst back out of the house and was in pursuit. He could feel it in his hackles. A bison was probably faster than a boy, he figured, so he deliberately headed for the copse of trees he’d passed a couple of hours before. He could hear the bison snorting and the thundering of its hooves close behind him, and he practically dived into the thick tangle of birch branches. Scrambling through the copse, he lit out at an oblique angle to the direction he’d entered, and was soon dodging between the rusted-orange chassis and engine blocks. It was hard to see in the rain, and a black tire, camouflaged against the ground, caught Myron’s foot. He went head over heels and was fortunate to land on nothing harder than the deep mud. He was breathing hard, and, in the precious seconds he spent prying himself out of the ground, he could sense his lead evaporating. Indeed, no sooner had he begun to run than he could hear the metallic clanging of a bison ricocheting off the upside-down body of half a minibus. Myron’s mud-sodden shoes were making their own noise, a grotesque sucking sound with every step. 

“A cheetah, a cheetah,” Myron tried, but in vain. He remained a biped, and the bison was gaining.

But there ahead were the railroad tracks, and between him and them the broad ditch. Myron pitched down into it, through the filthy morass at the bottom, and began to mount the far side. Surely a bison would not be able to follow. Maybe Benson could turn into a man and climb around in ditches that way, but, frankly, Myron figured it was better to be pursued by a man than by a solid ton with horns. All these hopes flashed through Myron’s mind in the moment he scrambled up the side, but then, with a palpable burst of air pressure, a train came whistling by, less than a foot away. It was a freight train, and boxcar after boxcar sped past, with no end in sight. Myron was cut off.

“All right, it was a nice race, but you’re trapped now.”

Myron turned at the sound of the voice. There, separated from him only by six feet of ditch, stood, naked, the man who had terrified him in Westfield. 

“What do you want?” Myron asked. The din of the rain and the hammering rails meant that he had to shout to be heard.

“The boss is curious about you. So you’re coming with me to meet him.” 

“Is he going to hurt me?” Myron asked. The train was still going, still rumbling past.

“What do I care?”

Myron was desperate to keep Benson talking. Once the train was gone, maybe he could start running again. “How did you find me? What did you do with my parents?”

“You don’t have a choice in this, you know,” Benson said. And taking a step or two back, and then forward, he launched himself across the ditch, landing close to the speeding train. In the mud he slipped for a moment, and Myron caught his breath, but Benson righted himself. He was now standing right in front of Myron. 

“Is it true,” Myron asked, “tell me first, is it true that we’re immortal lycanthropes?” 

“I don’t know, or care, what they told you, but I can kill you, you know. I can gore you.”

“But you’d have to gore me, right? You can only kill me in animal form.”

Benson put his hand out. “Make this easy. Just give me your hand, and we’ll go back to the car.” Benson’s face, and his hand, lit up for a moment as a bolt forked across the sky.

Myron at that moment launched himself sideways, directly at the train. He bounced off the side with a horrible squelch, landed back on his soggy sneakers, tottered a moment, and fell directly back against the train. This time he happened to fall between cars, and with a series of cracks and a great outpouring of blood the front of a box car slammed into him. He fell down, as loose as a rag doll, gushing blood, but he stayed where he was, stuck on the coupling, as the train dragged him away. Benson stood wet and dumbfounded. Myron’s limp body was out of sight by the time the thunder sounded.

Sudden Glory

III. John Dillinger’s Legacy.

“He’d make a good boy for our business,” said Smith, musingly. 
Martin shook his head. 
“It wouldn’t do,” he said. 
“Why not?” 
“He wants to be honest,” said Martin, contemptuously. “We couldn’t trust him.”
•Horatio Alger, Rufus and Rose.

1.
Shoreditch, Pennsylvania, was founded as a mining town, and tried, when the coal ran out, to reinvent itself as a manufacturing town. The broken windows of factories and the innumerable corrugated tin shacks, many collapsed into lean-tos or stacks of tin sheets, offered the evidence of this plan’s failure, and of a chronology of decay. A Heinrich Schliemann of the future would find the layers of this Troy, the layers of splendor and squalor, coexisting and overlapping—with squalor, as it always does, gradually taking over. And there in Shoreditch central stood the Grand Lafayette, four glorious stories of memories of better times, or at least better times for some. The doorman still dressed like an Austro-Hungarian admiral, and the remaining crystal prisms in the grand chandelier still twinkled in the high cracked ceilings of the lobby. The Grand Lafayette had in its day been a swank hotel, then a swank convention center, then a swank apartment building, and if it had seen better days, so have we all, and it was still the swankest place in Shoreditch. 

In the penthouse of the Grand Lafayette sat a rather dusty apartment crammed to the gills with curios and knickknacks. An art-deco version of an Egyptian woman, five feet tall, balanced a lamp on her head, all hand-cast in bronze. A stuffed impala’s head, one glass eye long since having fallen out, overlooked a life-size pair of ceramic dalmatians and a score of tiny angel statues, Manchurian vase-ware, glass kittens, monogrammed letter openers in gold leaf (fanned out into an “attractive display”), Hopi kachina dolls, and one wind-up singing bird. The carpets were exquisite, Persian, and threadbare. On the walls hung faded satin-cut silhouettes in tarnished frames and pre-Raphaelite maidens in gilded frames; over the windows hung thick flowered curtains. A large sepia globe that still maintained the memory of the Polish corridor had proved to be hinged, and it hung open, revealing inside a collection of whisky bottles, half full; or perhaps, in Shoreditch, half empty. Several other bottles had clearly been emptied recently, and were scattered around a leather easy chair. In the leather chair sat, passed out, a woman in late middle age, barefoot, a velvet dressing gown tied around her, with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. Two other partially smoked and still glowing cigarettes had been put out in an open nearby jewelry box, the kind that played a tune when the lid was up. It was still tinkling away when Myron Horowitz eased through the penthouse door. He sat unseen on the ottoman and waited in silence. He’d gotten good at waiting. The woman was black, her wrinkled skin very dark, and the dressing gown, like the chair, was red.

After a few minutes, the jewelry box stopped in the middle of a measure. The woman started, leaned over, ground her cigarette in the box, and then held it up to wind it. Partway through, she stopped. Slowly, she began to lift her head.

“What song is that?” Myron asked.

The woman shoved hard with her feet, and the chair tipped over backward. Springing up on the far side of the clattering chair was no woman but an enormous gorilla, its lips pulled back to display yellow fangs. The sight might have been terrifying, except the gorilla was ludicrously wearing a dressing gown, now ill-fitted to simian proportions. 

“Arthur and Alice sent me,” Myron said.

The gorilla lifted the fallen chair upright. Suddenly a woman was wearing the dressing gown again. She tugged it back into place. “You must be Myron Lipschitz.” 

“Myron Horowitz.”

“Well, that’s a little better. How did you get in here?”

“The doorman didn’t say anything. No one thinks a kid like me is up to trouble, as long as I keep my back to him. And the door to this apartment was unlocked.”

The woman darted to the door, opened it, bent down stiffly to grab some shoes, drew them into the room, and locked the door.

“What,” Myron asked, “do they shine your shoes if you leave them outside?”

“No, but they used to, forty years ago. I guess I just put them out on instinct and forgot to lock up behind me.” The woman groped around on the floor for a glass and began to fix a drink from the bottles in the globe. “Hair of the dog. You want some?”

“I’m just a kid.”

“Suit yourself.” She stirred the concoction with a letter opener.

“Um. Are you Gloria?”

“Maybe. How’d you find me?”

“I had a talk, a while ago, with Arthur and Alice, and I’ve gone over what they said a million times in my head since then. And one thing I remember them mentioning was a Gloria in Shoreditch.”

“And then what, you just wandered around town until you got that prickling sensation in your nose?”

“I get it on the back of my neck. But yeah. It took me three days.”

Gloria gave him the once-over. “You don’t look like you’ve been sleeping on the street.”

“I stole these clothes from a Laundromat this morning. And it’s too cold to sleep on the street, I’ve mainly been in garages.”

“Laundromat, huh? You’re okay. Anyone resourceful at expropriation is okay in my book. So what else did Arthur tell you about me?”

“Nothing much. All I know about you is that you’re a friend of theirs.”

“I’m a friend of Arthur’s, not Alice’s. Remember that, you can’t trust her.”

“I can trust Arthur, though, then?”

“Well, no, not really.” She began to laugh, at first a little and then increasingly hysterically, until she choked on her drink. When she was done, she said, “You do look like you’ve been hit by a truck.”

“It was a train, actually. Look, I have a lot of questions for you.”

Gloria closed her eyes and tilted her head back. “Ask ’em. I’ve got all night.”

“You can’t have all night, it’s almost noon.”

Gloria jumped up and ran over to the window. She shuffled when she walked, like an old woman, but Myron remembered the few moments when she was a gorilla, and how differently, how fluidly she had moved. She was now pulling open the curtains, and when the noonday sun struck her in the face, she closed her eyes and gasped. Her pupils, when she turned back around, were contracted into pinpoints. 

She said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

“I can’t go out the front, they know me.”

“We could just stay here,” Myron suggested.

“No, the owners might be back at any minute.”

“You…don’t live here?”

“Of course not, look at this place! It’s bourgeois tacky!”

“That’s a nice painting,” Myron said, pointing over at the corner.

Gloria was gathering up some things and throwing them into a sack. “That’s not a painting, that’s a print.”

“No, it’s not. Prints have the name of the museum on the bottom.”

“Faith, Myron! What are you? Are you a bat or something?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Okay, go through the lobby, I’ll meet you out on the street, around the corner. Do you have any money on you?”

“No.”

“Okay, I’ll meet you anyway.” She turned back to the window. “I hate doing this in daylight,” she said.

And then a gorilla was shucking off the dressing gown. With the sack over her shoulder she jumped out the window.

2.
Gloria was dressed when Myron saw her again, and she kept looking behind her. “I hate doing that,” she said.

“In daylight. I know,” said Myron.

Gloria turned back to the boy. “You’ve got a mouth on you.”

Myron was suddenly embarrassed. “I guess I do. I didn’t used to.”

“Okay, let’s get some money and then go to a diner and get some coffee.”

“Get some money how?”

And then for twenty minutes Myron stood on the curb while Gloria accosted passersby and asked, in his name, for spare change. “A deaf mute, permanently maimed by an exploding stove! Please have a heart! The shoddy Japanese manufacturers refused to pay him a cent! The explosion claimed the lives of his parents, and the poor little crippled orphan will never see them again!” Soon Myron legitimately began to cry, and that didn’t hurt the game at all. After twenty minutes, Gloria dragged Myron across town to a diner.

“Mass! Look at this haul! Your face is your fortune, Myron.” She ordered two bacon and egg sandwiches and two coffees. “All right, tell me your story. How’d you get here?”

“It is a shameful fact about humanity,” Myron did not say. This is not the “Repunnotunkur” here. Instead he began to talk about Westfield, and Henry Clay High School.

“No, no, Arthur already told me all about that,” Gloria said, unaware that I had made up most of the stuff I told her, to cover up my own ignorance, and may have even gotten Myron’s last name wrong. “What happened—what happened after you fell out of the truck?”

“I woke up in a ditch, and this guy found me. He ran a kind of fraudulent school, where international students would come, and then he’d steal all their money while they just kind of foraged for themselves.”

“Sure, the Featherstone Academy.”

“You know it?”

“Waiter! More coffee! I make it habit to know people, especially people who are stupid and have money.”

“Okay. I was all banged up, but I rested at the academy for a while. But then this guy Benson—you know Benson?”

“Of course I know Benson.”

“Well, he found me there, and chased me over to the railroad tracks. Then I jumped on a train. Or kind of in front of a train. And that hurt worse than anything, but it got me away. And I rested up again and found you.”

“First things first.” Gloria was lighting a cigarette and trying to inhale while she talked. “Benson didn’t find you. Benson couldn’t find his shaggy hump with a map and the two-hour head start. Mignon Emanuel found you, and she sent Benson to do her dirty work, a mistake you can bet she won’t make again.”

“Benson works for Mignon Emanuel?”

“No, they both work for Mr. Bigshot. But Benson would listen to Mignon Emanuel. He’s just smart enough to know what he’s not smart enough to do on his own; which is, frankly, smarter than usual.”

“Right, Mr. Bigshot. I guess I knew that.”

“Second thing’s second. You left out how you recovered the second time, after the train. I presume you did not go back to Andre Rodriguez?”

Myron paused a moment. He sampled the coffee, which was till too hot. Some things, he was learning, are hard to talk about. Finally he said, “I read this book once, about these three hunters in the American frontier, and one of them got mauled by a bear. It was a terrible mauling, and he was in real bad shape, and then his wounds get infected, and he gets the fever. His friends can’t get him to move, and there’s nothing they can do for him anyway, so they camp out and wait for him either to get better or die. But the thing is, is it’s Indian country, and every day they wait puts them all into more and more incredible danger. Finally, it looks like the guy—his name was Hugh Glass—”

“(This is a true story, now?)”

“(Yeah, this was a nonfiction book.) It looks like Hugh Glass is going to die any moment, and he’s in a coma and everything. So his two friends can’t wait any longer—they decide to just leave him, assuming he’ll be dead in the morning. And they take all his gear, and his gun and everything, and they book. But the next morning, Glass’s fever breaks. And he realizes that his friends have gone, that they’ve left him alone with no gun and no food, and he vows revenge!” Myron was getting into the story. “Glass crawls around till he finds a spring, and he lies in the underbrush, eating all the berries he can reach, and gulping at the spring, until he’s strong enough to sit up; and then he can reach more berries! And bit by bit his strength returns. He’s still ripped to shreds, and his face is mostly off, but his strength returns until he can stagger around, and he happens to come across where some wolves had killed a deer or something, and he comes running out screaming at them, and one look at this guy, and the wolves turn tail and run, so he gets some meat. And he looks so terrifying, like a zombie, that the Indians don’t want to kill him, and he goes walking through the frontier, looking to find the two guys who abandoned him.”

“Did he find them?”

“Yeah, but it took forever, and he forgave them in the end. You know how that goes.”

“Myron, why are you telling me this story?”

“Because after a few miles I fell off the train. And after a while I could think and see again, and I dragged myself to a muddy ditch. And then I dragged myself away from the tracks, in case Benson was looking for me, along the tracks. And I found a barberry bush, and I ate the berries until I could sit up.”

“Too bad they sent Benson, and not a bloodhound, huh?”

“Does a bloodhound work for Mr. Bigshot?”

“No, I was just talking. There is no bloodhound.”

“Oh. Well, it was raining anyway, for a long time. I was just afraid Benson would come by and sense me. How come there’s no bloodhound?”

“Faith, I don’t know, a bloodhound’s just a kind of dog. There’s just one of us per species.”

“Why is that?”

“That’s just the way it is. You might as well ask why people walk on their feet, and not their hands.”

“If people walked on their hands, wouldn’t they just call hands feet?”

“I mean,” Gloria said, lighting a cigarette off the last one, “that this all happened so long ago that no one knows, and if they ever did know, they don’t remember.”

“How old are you?”

“Same age as you, probably. Ten thousand years or so.”

“You don’t know how old you are?”

“Myron, darling, it’s easy to lose count with numbers that big. Also, when I was born I doubt if there were any languages on earth that could count as high as ten thousand. And who knows for how long I just lived as a gorilla, living among gorillas, not even knowing humans were anything except another thing to run away from, or rip apart?”

“Am I that old, too?”

“Either that or you’re the first one of us to be born since anyone knew to keep track. Which actually isn’t that long ago, so it might not be ridiculous.”

“It isn’t that long?”

“Until two or three thousand years ago, I never left the jungle. Eventually I went exploring, but I was still in Africa, in the lakes region and then the Kalahari. If anything was happening anywhere else in the world, I sure didn’t know about it. The idea that there were a finite number of us, that there were one per species, nobody figured that out until the eighteenth or nineteenth century, probably.”

“Well, why are we? I mean, why are we this way?”

“Why are anyone the way they are, Myron? When I first met humans, I was worshipped as a god. I don’t even remember this part so well. They taught me to speak, but I hated my human form, it was so weak and clumsy. I was already old. My human skin was always old.”

“Why do you live among humans now, then?”

Gloria shrugged. “I like indoor plumbing. I like coffee and cigarettes. I like movies. There are perks.”

“I guess we can’t die?”

“Oh, you can die all right. But you can only get killed by another one of us, and only if he’s in animal form. I could turn right now and tear you to bits, and that would be the end of you. Plenty of us have died—we’ll probably never know how many. Any number of immortal rodents or shrews might have been killed by immortal cats before either even knew they could change. And in the last few hundred years, when we started being able really to travel—there’ve been a lot of deaths in the last few hundred years. Most of the seals got killed by the polar bear, and the polar bear got killed by a rhinoceros, the kind with one horn. And Mr. Bigshot killed her.” 

“But that stuff, the claws and the bite, is that the only way to die?”

“I wouldn’t go jumping in any volcanoes to test this, but you do tend to heal fast from any other kind of wound. Have you ever been hurt badly, I mean before the train thing?”

“I once almost choked to death on a piece of ice.”

“And what happened?”

“Well, it was ice. It melted in my throat, and I was fine.”

“That’s a bad example, then.”

“And I’ve been beaten up a lot…”

“The point is,” said Gloria, “you’re not in much danger from conventional methods of dying.”

“What about what happened to me before all that? I mean, my accident.”

“Well, that was Mr. Bigshot. That was a lion.”

“Benson said I fought a lion and its mane, but I couldn’t figure out what he meant.”

“No, no, Myron, you fought a lion in Maine.”

“Oh. That’s where they found me, in Maine.”

“Yeah, five years ago Mr. Bigshot, apparently, sensed someone new, an animal he’d never sensed before, but in human form. That was you, whatever you were doing there. He mauled you, but you fell in a river, and, well, Mr. Bigshot hates water. So you floated away toward the sea.”

“I thought lions didn’t hate water, that’s just a myth.”

“Mr. Bigshot hates water. I don’t know anything about other lions.”

“So I floated away, but I didn’t die.”

“No, but you didn’t heal up, either, because your wounds are from lion’s claws. Look.” Gloria pointed a knobby, swollen finger at Myron’s face and traced, one by one, the parallel scars. “It was all the gossip at the time, how Mr. Bigshot found someone new, and killed him.”

“I fought a lion and lost.”

“Everybody who fights the lion loses. Seventy-five years ago he killed the tiger, which no one thought he’d be able to do. But he did it.”

“What was the tiger’s name?”

“You know that he didn’t really have a name. He was a tiger.”

“Oh, I thought because you have a name—”

“Gloria’s not my name. They just call me Gloria because it’s convenient. Do you think they called me Gloria in Bantu a thousand years ago? How long do you think Benson has been called Benson? The tiger was going by the name Bima, but he might as well have been Shere Khan. Bima wasn’t his name, and Arthur isn’t his name, and Myron isn’t yours. They’re just a tiger, or a binturong, or whatever you are.”

“Yeah, what am I?”

“I guess we could go through every animal I’ve known who isn’t you, and eliminate them. But that might not help, since I couldn’t name every mammal, and there might have been some that died before we knew about them, and there might be some we just don’t know because they’re isolated, or in hiding, or never show up for reasons of their own. And it’s not always easy to tell how many there are supposed to be. I mean, there are supposedly three species of zebra, I saw on the TV, but I’ve only known one immortal zebra. Are the other two dead, or in hiding, or did they never exist, and you only get one zebra? I don’t know.”

“So I could be anything.”

“Well, you couldn’t be a prairie dog, and you couldn’t be a jaguar, and you couldn’t be a hippopotamus, because I know all of those. It’s hard to tell your ethnicity, without a face, but your skin’s too light to be from some places, if you wanted to cross off those possibilities. So there are lots of things you couldn’t be, but there are still lots of things you could be.”

“Okay, just two more questions. Why did Mr. Bigshot want to kill me?”

“Maybe you were talking dirt about his mother. But probably he just wanted to know what you were. When we die we turn back into our true form. Curiosity, you know.”

“Because cats are curious?”

Gloria was obviously beginning to get bored, looking around the room. “Mr. Bigshot is curious. I don’t know about other cats. He’s probably still interested, plus he’s mad about you thwarting him once, or three times now. And he must’ve read about you ripping all your clothes off, at your school. Ripped clothes are a sure sign one of us is around.”

“Arthur changed, but he didn’t rip his clothes.”

“Binturongs are small. I split a seam on the robe I was wearing, and that was a loose robe too big for me. Trust me, mention ripped clothes and all of us know what’s up.”

“How does Mr. Bigshot have people work for him? Is it because he’s the king of the beasts?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I don’t have a king. I was a queen, once upon a time, but I don’t have a king. Mr. Bigshot has minions because he can beat everyone else up, now that the tiger’s gone. Or else no one wants to try their luck on him. So when he says he’s in charge, he’s in charge until someone comes around who’ll say no.” Gloria stood up. “I’m paying the check, you leave the tip.”

“I don’t have any money.”

Gloria sighed and dropped a dollar on the table. “Well, do you have any other questions?”

“I don’t know, um. Why is this place called Shoreditch? we’re nowhere near the shore,”

“It’s named after some part of London. Okay, it was great to meet you, Myron. I hope I was able to fill in some things for you. Best of luck.”

“Wait, you can’t leave yet.”

“Don’t worry, I’m just going to pay the check.” But she didn’t pay the check; she just left.

3.
The waiter accosted Myron when he tried to go, but couldn’t bring himself to actually touch the boy, so Myron walked out unhindered. He had a lot to think over, but he was also in a state of panic. His whole plan, since he dragged himself away from the train tracks, had been to go to Shoreditch and ask Gloria what to do next. And now it turned out, it wasn’t that she didn’t know what to do; she just didn’t seem to care.

Myron ran down the street, looking all around. Not long after he’d been adopted, when Myron was still so very confused, and even spoke with a strange accent that some people said sounded Canadian, the Horowitzes had taken him to an amusement park. Already dizzy from the teacups, Myron had wandered away from his new parents in the crowd, and the half hour before he, or rather a security guard, found them again was filled not so much with terror—terror is so common an emotion among children that a terrifying day is hardly remarkable—as with despair. This, despair, Myron was becoming reacquainted with as he tore through the streets of Shoreditch. Except he was hardly aware, yet, that it was despair he was becoming reacquainted with. He was too terrified.

With just such a complicated mixture of emotions blinding him, Myron knocked over two perverts and a policeman (who was too fat to follow him) and managed to avoid, narrowly, being squashed by a plumber’s van. “Gloria!” he shouted, again and again, and then he stopped, when he remembered that this was not even her name. She had no name, and neither did he. 

Finally, out of breath, and growing leery of the many glares that a deformed, careless, running boy will garner, he slowed down to a walk. He had found Gloria once before, he could find her again the same way, if he wanted to. But it was clear, he’d decided, that Gloria was unreliable, and he was probably better off contriving a new plan, without her. So of course, no sooner had he decided this than he rounded a corner and, his hackles suddenly tingling, he saw across the street Gloria, with her sack, bumping into a well-dressed man. A pair of glasses fell off her head and hit the sidewalk with a crunch.

That’s odd, Myron doubtless thought. I didn’t know she wore glasses.

“Sir! You’ve broken my spectacles!” Gloria, meanwhile, was shouting.

“Er, I’m sorry? But you bumped into me.”

“Impossible! I was standing still, and you walked right into me.” Gloria really chewed the scenery. She needed these glasses for her job as a bus driver for the orphanage. She could not afford another pair, and without the money bus driving brought in she would not be able to afford her dialysis. Also, the orphans would not be able to get to the clinic to be treated for their eczema.

“This is all very sad, but I did not bump into you. And how bad could their eczema be, anyway?”

At that moment Gloria turned around. She pointed right at Myron. “Johnny!” she called. “This man broke my glasses, and I can’t get you to the clinic!”

“Good Lord!” cried the man.

And, after the man had departed, Gloria sauntered over to Myron, counting the roll of bills. “Bourgeois idiot, he’s obviously not from around here,” she was muttering.

“Why did you leave?” Myron asked.

Gloria shrugged. “I figured I’d already told you everything you needed to know.”

“You stuck me with—”

“Okay, so I didn’t want to pay the check. I figured they wouldn’t make you, I figured the waiter’d be too busy looking at you to recognize me if I came back in. Once the idea got in my head, it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up.”

“What about the help you’re supposed to give me? Why did Arthur want to bring me to you if this is all you can do for me?”

She secreted the bills somewhere under her neckline. “Mass, Myron, you don’t think Arthur was really bringing you to me?”

“He said he was heading for Gloria in Shoreditch. How else would I have found you?”

“He didn’t want to bring you to me, he just wanted his doomsday device back.”

“Doomsday device?” Myron shook his head. “This just gets stupider and stupider. Did you give him the doomsday device?”

“Of course not,” Gloria said. “I haven’t seem him in seven or eight years. And when I saw him last, that’s when he gave me the device.”

“You’re just telling me lies, aren’t you? How did he tell you all about me, like you’ve been claiming he did, if he didn’t come right here after he lost me?”

“Myron, you have to start thinking things through better. You could be in real danger if you act stupid like this. He phoned me, of course. He called me from the road. What year do you think this is?”

“Oh,” Myron said.

“Anyway, he’d know better than to bring that doxy around me.”

“Are you…are you jealous of them?”

“Myron, come here.” Gloria pulled him over to a side street and began walking him along, at a fairly rapid clip considering the way she hobbled. She leaned in to whisper in his ear. “You have to understand this. There’s nothing to be jealous about. Arthur and Alice aren’t dating. Binturongs and lesser pandas don’t date. That would be bestiality—or double bestiality—or whatever it would be, animals don’t get turned on across species.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe that’s what you should do, to figure out what kind you are. Walk around the zoo until you feel something stirring.” She laughed and actually elbowed Myron in the ribs as they were walking, making him stagger several steps. “I told you to get smarter, Myron. You’re going to need it.” She suddenly stopped and, painfully bending over, began rummaging around in her sack, which she was still toting.

“Gloria, I don’t know what to do. A lion wants to kill me, and I can’t find my parents, and I’ve never been on a trip alone before.”

“Chin up, Myron. If you ever had parents they died ten thousand years ago. Now, I can’t tell you what to do, because if I knew I wouldn’t be a drunk and a gambler and a thief.” 

“You’re a thief?”

“Not really—really I’m an expropriator, and a propagandist. A propagandist by the deed.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means where did you get those clothes?” She drew from the sack a cylinder about fifteen inches long and six inches in diameter, wrapped in black duct tape. “I can’t tell you what to do, but here’s something, maybe it’ll keep you busy. You can take this doomsday device and deliver it to Arthur.”

Myron took the cylinder gingerly. “What’s in here?” 

They were walking again, Gloria pulling Myron along by the sleeve. “John Dillinger’s wang,” she said.

“What!”

“No, I mean, faith, I don’t know. I never open anything I’ve heard called a doomsday device.”

“I don’t know where Arthur is.”

“Well, he’s looking for you, too, so that should double your chances. And what you can do is ask the Nine Unknown Men, they always know this kind of thing.”

“I don’t know who they are, either.”

“You’re not supposed to, naturally; they’re unknown. They’re in New York City, at the corner of Fifth Street and Sixth Avenue. You should be writing this down.”

“I don’t have a pencil. Literally the only things I own in this world are these stolen clothes and a doomsday device.”

“You do have a mouth on you. Let’s hope you have a brain too.”

“Corner of Fifth Street and Sixth Avenue.”

“Good. Now the Nine Unknown Men will ask you a riddle, and if you get it right they’ll help you, but if you get it wrong—well, you don’t want to get it wrong. Are you good at riddles?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now listen closely, because this is the most important thing I’m going to tell you. Do you remember that print in the apartment you found me in? The one you said was a painting?”

“Sure.”

“There are certain classes of people who will buy original art but can’t bring themselves to own a reproduction. It’s ‘vulgar,’ or ‘common,’ to own a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, even though of course no one could possibly afford the original Mona Lisa. So what do you think they do, Myron?”

“A reproduction?”

“I mean a poster of the Mona Lisa, not the original.”

“Yes, I know what a reproduction is,” Myron sniffed, “I just don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”

“What they do is they buy a poster of the Mona Lisa, but one that has at the bottom a notation that says what exhibit it’s from. This way they can pretend that it’s not a poster of the Mona Lisa, which is too vulgar for words, but a promotional item, like a movie poster or a concert poster. A souvenir of their trip to the Louvre. It’s a kind of trick. The people who adopted you, Myron—”

“My parents.”

“—the people who adopted you. They’re upper middle class, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know. My father’s a doctor.”

“All the art in their house, I’m betting, was either an actual painting or a poster that said ‘Philadelphia Museum of Art,’ with the date, on the bottom.”

“Maybe.”

“You’ve got to understand, not everyone is like that. Not everyone refuses to hang posters up. Some people are petit bourgeois and not haut bourgeois. Not everyone is going to be from the same world you know. You’re not from the same world you know. Remember that. Ah. Up you go now.”

Myron found that Gloria was muscling him onto a bus. She slipped him a roll of twenties bound with a rubber band. 

“This goes to New York,” she said. “I’ll take care of your ticket. The Nine Unknown Men, don’t forget them, either.”

“Wait, why am I giving Arthur this doomsday device? What should I do about the lion?”

“You’ve got plenty of options. Maybe you can use the doomsday device to get revenge, like Hugh Jass.”

“Hugh Glass.”

Gloria nodded appreciatively. “Well, that’s a little better.”

No one sat next to Myron. One person tried, but he threw up and had to change seats. After an hour on the bus, Myron thought to look closer at the roll of twenties, and found that only the top bill was a twenty, and the other eight were singles. When he got to New York he learned that Gloria had not paid for the ticket; she had somehow persuaded the driver that some guardian of Myron’s would pay double on arrival. While the driver called the station police, Myron ran away into the cold and shadowy night.

IV. Men, Known and Unknown.

New men and new methods might do for other people: let those who would, worship the rising star; he at least would be faithful to the sun which had set.
•Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days. 

1.
I have written under a great host of pseudonyms in my day. Plentygood van Dutchhook, “Fortitude,” A. Frederick Smith, G. A. Henty, Lawrence Christopher Niffen, Frank Richards, Vivian Bloodmark, and, briefly, Wen Piao, are just a few of my more popular noms de plume; but I hit my greatest circulation ghost writing for the Stratameyer syndicate. There I, or rather we, for I was one of a stable of anonymous ghostwriters, churned out a great many stories of young men and women solving mysteries, sometimes inventing things, and always, always triumphing over mild to severe adversity. For Stratameyer alone I must have written a dozen scenes of urchins forced to spend the night on the forbidding pavements of New York. But frankly, I was whitewashing the experience.

Myron, who may have read a dozen such scenes, had no way of knowing that. He had of late spent many nights sleeping outside, and had thought he had become inured to its hardships. But that night in New York, huddled amid the tendrils of steam oozing through a grating, was the longest, the coldest, and the most terrible night of his life. Gripping tightly the garbage bag he’d stashed the doomsday device in, he waited for doomsday. “I cannot die, I cannot die,” he muttered to himself, as he rocked back and forth. And then people came out of the dark and tried to prove him wrong.

But the streetlight turned around and shone itself dead on Myron’s face. And so the people, their attempts were desultory. 

There is an old Islamic folktale about a man who, having burnt in hell for what feels like a thousand years, is given a chance to speak to the living. “How many thousand years have I been dead?” he asks them; and they answer, “A day, and part of a day.” That was Myron’s night, it was a day and part of a day.

The first thing he did when he woke up was eat three hot dogs, courtesy of Gloria’s money and a nearby street vendor, and the second thing was ask a dozen people for increasingly circuitous directions to the public library. There he looked up and read through several books of riddles. He wanted to take them out, but he didn’t think his tattered Pennsylvania library card would work. He wanted to stop and maybe read an adventure novel, but he knew he didn’t have time. He had work to do. He tried looking up, on the computer catalog, the Nine Unknown Men. Nothing came up, but Myron wasn’t sure he was doing it right—was nine spelled out or should it be a numeral? Finally he gave up and headed over to the dusty, disrepaired card catalog, kept in ancient wooden drawers in a strange corner of the third floor. He opened up the N drawer, and flipped through. Sure enough, Nine Unknown Men had its own card, and when he touched it, he heard a tinkling sound. A tiny bell had been threaded through a hole punched in the card, and it sounded when the card moved.

Suddenly an old man in a plaid suit and a porkpie hat appeared behind Myron. “You probably don’t want to mess around with those reprobates,” he said.

Myron stared at him. His hackles were still. The man was not one of them, not a lycanthrope.

“Here’s a card,” the man said, flipping one out from inside his plaid sleeve. The card read

A. Weishaupt & Co.,
Illuminations.

“These guys are pretty swell. Would you like a bowl of soup?”

Myron said he would not. 

“So anyway, if you don’t mind my asking, why were you interested in the Nine Unknown Men?”

“I wasn’t,” Myron lied. “I was just flipping around. I’m really looking for information on John Dillinger.”

“Ah,” said the man, nodding his head. His tie was very wide, and a hula girl was painted on it. Myron looked closely to be certain, as he didn’t want to make a mistake after Gloria’s lecture, but he could see the streaks of paint. The tie had been hand painted. “Dillinger,” the man continued, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses, “is quite the berries.”

“Quite the berries?”

“I merely mean that he is a fascinating subject. Some say he killed JFK, but I think we can agree that’s an exaggeration, eh?” He chuckled, and looked expectantly at Myron. He looked him right in the face, which most people, on the first day, cannot do. 

“I have to go now,” Myron said, and went. He went to the corner of Fifth Street and Sixth Avenue. The walk took him over an hour, and he got lost for part of it, when a man in a battered fedora and a seersucker suit talked him into walking six blocks and one mysterious flight of stairs in the wrong direction, but at last he found himself at his destination. On one of the four corners was a deli; on two others, pornography stores. The fourth corner was a plain brick building with a small bronze plaque that read 9UM. There was no bell, so Myron pulled the marbled glass door open. The small lobby contained a dying, beribboned potted plant; a slouched over janitor, his cap pulled low, polishing the floor with a huge buzzing machine; and a high white marbled desk, behind which sat a smartly dressed man. The man had a little mustache and a headphone over one ear. There was very little room for Myron in the lobby.

Myron figured he might as well just cut right to the chase. “I’m here to see the Nine Unknown Men,” he said.

“If they are unknown, this may prove difficult,” the man behind the desk said. He had an Indian accent.

“It’s cool, Gloria sent me,” Myron said, loudly to be heard over the floor polisher.

He paused a moment, and seemed to be listening on his earpiece. “You have told one lie today, Myron Horowitz,” the man said inexplicably. “Tell another and you must face the web of silver.”

“No, no.” Myron could barely see over the lip of the white desk. “I’m one of those…I don’t even know what to call them.” He tried to lean forward for a conspiratorial whisper, but he was too short. “I’m an immortal lycanthrope.”

“That will get you through the door,” the man said, and he moved his hands around behind the desk, where Myron couldn’t see. Perhaps he pressed a button, because a panel in the wall, behind the dying plant, slid open, and he tilted his head toward it.

Myron had to clamber over the plant to enter. He found himself, as the door slid shut behind him, in a small pitch-black room. Suddenly his ears were popping, and he realized he was in an elevator, descending rapidly. He was blinded momentarily when the door opened again. Here was a larger, brighter lobby. People were walking quickly back and forth, carrying clipboards and pocket calculators. Most of them looked Indian. A woman, wrapped in a brightly colored dress, gestured for Myron to follow her. She was wearing a security badge, with her photo, and the name Sukumarika on it. The two walked down a long white corridor that reminded Myron of the hospital. 

“Listen carefully,” said the woman, Sukumarika, “because what you are about to hear is non-negotiable, and I will not repeat it. The Nine Unknown Men have been around since before your great-grandmother’s great-grandmother was born, and don’t think just because you got through the door that we’ll change for you.”

“If I’m immortal, aren’t I older than the Nine Unknown Men?” Myron asked. The woman stopped dead in her tracks.

“I suppose that’s correct,” she said after a moment, and began walking again. Her lips were pursed disapprovingly, probably because Myron had said aren’t I instead of am I not.

“Actually, I’m not that old,” Myron said. “I’m only thirteen.”

“You can’t be thirteen,” Sukumarika said. “None of your kind has been born in millennia.”

“Maybe I was just born, maybe I’m the first of a whole new set. Did you ever think of that?”

“This is impossible, the lycanthropes are a dead branch; a dead branch, like the Illuminati.”

Myron said, “I don’t know what you mean. I was thinking maybe I was more like the chosen one.”

At that moment Sukumarika threw a bag over Myron’s head. Myron was small enough, and the bag was large enough, that it went down to his waist. He tried struggling, but several pairs of hands had seized him, and, mostly from fear, he lost consciousness. 

2.
Myron finally found himself in front of a giant metal head, about eight feet tall. It was a woman’s head, the color of bronze. The eyes glowed, and the mouth was on a hinge, so it moved, laboriously, when she spoke. She was speaking.

“Myron Horowitz, you have already told one lie today,” thundered the brazen head.

“What’s happening?” asked Myron, who vaguely assumed, incorrectly, that he was hallucinating. 

“Tell another,” the voice echoed as it spoke, “and you will face the web of silver.”

“I didn’t lie, Gloria really sent me.”

“This is not the incident to which we refer. Earlier today, in a library, you told one lie. Above all else the Nine Unknown Men demand absolute truth.”

“What’s the web of silver? Are you one of the Nine Unknown Men? Am I wearing ice skates?”

Myron felt a hand on his shoulder. Only then did he realize that Sukumarika was standing behind him. He had been looking down at his feet. He was wearing not his normal clothes but rather what appeared to be white pajamas, belted at the waist. On his feet were strange boots that looked like skates: to the sole was attached a hook of metal shaped like a sideways U. As soon as he realized how precariously he was balanced on them, he began to wobble.

Sukumarika was whispering in his ear, “Don’t be disrespectful. The web of silver is a monofilament mesh at the bottom of a deep pit. The monofilament wire is invisible, except when moistened with dew, whereupon it glistens silver in the light. Anyone who disobeys is dropped in the pit, and at the bottom, he passes through the slicing of the web…”

“The experience can be quite straining,” the head thundered again. Myron turned toward it, but it gave no indication, by smirk or wink, that it was joking.

“O puissant Meridiana,” Sukumarika said, addressing the head for the first time. “Lord Hanusa, whose name is Wrath, is far from us, on secret tasks. Give us your council, most revered one, for before you stands one who claims to be an ancient representative of the lycanthropes.”

“Actually, I’m not so ancient. I’m only thirteen. My thesis is that I am some kind of chosen one, the first to be born in a thousand thousand years.” Myron, unsteady on his skates, was just the right height to look directly into the head’s glowing eyes, and they seemed to him to blaze dangerously as he talked.

“Speak of what you want,” Sukumarika hissed in Myron’s ear.

“I’m looking for Arthur the binturong, and Alice the red panda,” Myron said. “Or even just what to do. Someone wants to kill me and I’m so confused.”

“First, you must give the test of the riddle!” intoned the brazen head.

“I must what now?” Myron asked.

“It means,” Sukumarika hissed again, “you must face the test.”

“If I lose, do I get the web?”

“No,” said Sukumarika; “something worse.”

“I’m ready,” said Myron, mentally preparing himself.

A faint whirring sound issued from the brazen head. “Which is lighter,” spoke the head, its bronze lips opening and closing upon the hinge, “a pound of alabaster or a pound of raven feathers?”

Myron puffed himself up. This was easier than he’d feared. “No problem. They’re both the same weight: A pound is always a pound.”

“Incorrect. Alabaster is white; raven feathers are black. Alabaster is therefore lighter. He has failed the first test. Now he struggles for his life in the Upside-down Chamber. Take him away.”

“What? No fair!” Sukumarika was bringing out her bag. “Don’t I get to ask you one? You have to answer my riddle, smarty.”

From the head came a puff of air that might have been a sigh. “Very well,” it boomed. “Ask your question also.”

Myron cleared his throat. He began: “Thirty white horses upon a red—”

“Teeth,” said the head. “Take him away.” And the bag went on him.

Myron kept shouting riddles from inside the bag as unseen hands bore him away. “I don’t bite a man unless he bites me—”

“An onion,” Sukumarika said.

“The longer I stand, the shorter—”

“A candle.”

“Um. What have I got in my pocket?”

“Nineteen dollars and a card from the Illuminati. We went through your pants.”

“Oh. What kind of animal am I?”

“Trivia facts are not riddles.”

“But I just wanted to know,” said Myron.

When he was unbagged he was in yet another white room. From the ceiling hung dozens of metal rings. He was on a small platform in front of a wide, yawning pit.

Maybe the web of silver won’t kill me, Myron thought. Maybe I’m a starfish. He had forgotten that starfish are not mammals, and that he was not bound for the silver web. Out loud, Myron said, “I don’t want to face the silver web”; but of course he was not going to. For this was the Upside-down Chamber. And so he was hoisted up, turned topsy-turvy, and the U-shaped hooks on his feet slid into the ceiling’s metal rings. For the first time Myron saw the men who had been carrying him: huge, burly men with angry faces. Sukumarika was right underneath him, and he grabbed her head for balance. She disentangled herself from him and stepped away, but now her hair stuck out at crazy angles.

“Stop that,” she said, trying to smooth her ’do.

“Why are you doing this?” Myron said. He was willing himself vainly to turn into an orangutan, so that he could swing away across the rings.

“Every time I tried to explain, you kept interrupting with questions.” Sukumarika handed him a stout stick, about five feet long.

“I won’t interrupt now. I’m really scared.”

“Our ways are ancient, passed down from the times of the Emperor Asoka. We do not need to explain them to you.”

“So I might as well interrupt, then. Who’s Hanusa?”

“Look before you, Myron.” Sukumarika pointed across the room. Some thirty yards away, across the pit, on another small platform, a young man wearing identical skates was standing. He was probably only seventeen or eighteen, but to a high school freshman he looked like a grownup. He turned his back on Myron, reached up, grabbed two rings, and pulled himself up so he could hook his feet in the rings. When he let go with his hands he was hanging upside down, facing forward. He reached down and picked up a staff that had been lying there. The U on the skates was shaped with the mouth forward, toward the toe, so he had to slide his skate backward, out of the ring, and then forward, to the next ring, in order to advance. He was now out from over the platform, above the pit. 

“The pit is filled with spikes,” said Sukumarika.

“I’m getting a headache, I think I should get down now,” Myron said. Just then, the young man started to run forward. Running must have been very difficult, since he was hanging upside down by hooks on his feet over a spiked pit, but he was good at it. Myron was so startled by the sudden advance he instinctively flinched backward. Of course, the skates slipped from the rings, and Myron fell down on the platform with a terrific clatter. His stick rolled into the pit. Everything had to stop while the men came from behind various trap doors and arrases and hoisted Myron up again. They gave him a new stick. After a brief discussion, they started to poke Myron with goads. When, tentatively, he unhooked one skate and stepped forward, it was not from the prodding; it was simply that he felt too ridiculous hanging upside down and doing nothing. So he took another step away from the platform, and he was looking down into the pit.

It was maybe twenty feet deep, and the bottom was bristling with long, cruel spikes. 

“This is stupid,” Myron announced. “If I fall in, I won’t even die. It’ll just hurt a lot.”

“We have in our employ,” Sukumarika said from the platform, “an immortal vole who will come while you are pinned by spikes and eat your jugular.”

The young man began to advance again, more slowly now. Myron tried sidestepping, to circle around him, perhaps, and reach the far platform. He brandished his stick, he hoped threateningly, although waving it affected his balance and he almost went over backward again. 

“What,” said Myron, “has a hundred eyes but cannot see?”

“A potato,” said Sukumarika.

“What,” said Myron, “is a vole?”

“A field mouse,” said Sukumarika.

Myron groaned. He’d thought he’d catch her with that one. The young man came closer, ring by ring. Myron realized he’d need to do something clever, or he was going to die. Or if he couldn’t do something clever, he should at least do something different.

“Try this one. Off to see—”

“Stop riddling Myron,” Sukumarika shouted from behind him. “It doesn’t matter if you stump me now. It’s too late; the riddling is over.”

“I’m not talking to you, lady.” In his fear and adrenaline, he could not remember her name. “I’m talking to this guy.” He pointed his stick at the young man, who batted it away with his own. They were close enough that their staves could touch. “Hey you, you never bested me in a riddle contest. So riddle me this:

Off to see what I could find
Through heather and hollow I roam.
All that I found I left behind;
What I found not, I brought home.”

The young man was busy twirling his staff around in a complicated and frankly intimidating pattern.

“Hey, I’m talking to you,” Myron called. “‘All that I found I left behind; what I found not, I brought home.’ What is it?”

The other stopped. “Wait. Say it again,” he said.

Myron repeated the rhyme, while stepping forward a ring.

“‘What I found not I brought home,’” the young man muttered to himself. “I know I know this one.”

Myron then wrapped his legs around each other, such that both feet were in the same ring, facing different ways.

“Oh, I know! Ticks! The answer is ticks.” 

But holding his stick like a baseball bat, Myron hit the fellow in the shins. A scraping noise, and the man’s boots slid back, free of the rings, and he fell through the air. Myron looked away before he hit the spikes. There was no sound. Slowly and very carefully, Myron turned back to the platform. Those same men helped him down. His heart was beating very fast, and he was more terrified than he cared to let on.

The men began to untie Myron’s boots. Sukumarika stood in front of him, her lips pursed with displeasure. “I killed him,” Myron said. His eyes were tearing up.

Sukumarika silently pointed behind him. Myron looked over his shoulder and saw that the man he had fought was caught in a net that had sprung up, halfway down the pit and well above the spikes. He was clambering across the net like a spider.

Myron was relieved. “Will you tell me where Arthur is?” he asked.

“We don’t have to tell you anything. You’re lucky to be alive.” She was walking him back to the elevator.

“Will you tell me why I’m a dead branch?”

“Like the Illuminati?”

“Yeah, like the Illuminati.”

They walked down one flight of stairs and up another flight of stairs, over a catwalk (below, men in white coats could be seen carving with lasers enormous gems), and through a room shaped like a natural cavern, along which flowed sluggishly a stream of what appeared to be honey. 

“You’re a dead branch,” Sukumarika said at last, as they reached a dead end to the corridor, “because your original purpose no longer applies. The Illuminati were formed to stop World War One. This was long before most people could have thought World War One was coming, or even possible, this was the eighteenth century, but the Illuminati had acquired through their parent organization, the Freemasons, certain documents, and they were able to extrapolate that a great war would come and end civilization as we knew it. So, for over a hundred years, they tried meddling in world affairs, on every level. They started revolutions, and they suppressed revolutions. They signed treaties, and they broke treaties. And then, after all that labor and skullduggery, World War One happened anyway, and ended civilization as we knew it, and then what were the Illuminati to do? They still exist, and they’re major property holders in some cities, such as Munich, but there’s no reason for them to be around. They’re a dead branch, withered and sere, but still attached to the trunk. They’re jokes, frankly. Look at the hats they wear! The Nine Unknown Men, and the members of their subsidiaries and affiliates, would never wear such hats!”

“Okay, but why am I a dead branch?”

“I don’t mean to be cruel. There was a time when primitive men worshipped totem animals, and then it was needful for some to be halfway between man and animal, with a foot in both worlds.”

“Most have four feet, not two,” Myron objected, but even he knew he was picking at nits.

“One by one, peoples dragged themselves up from this animism, embracing newer religions. Under the tutelage of the many forms of Hinduism, the Abrahamic religions, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, or what have you, people abandoned the old ways. With the exception of a few tribes, the animal gods have been forgotten, and these tribes will not last long as they are. And yet you live on. The world has outgrown you, as it has outgrown the Illuminati. The civilization they were formed to preserve, one of progress and innovation, noblesse oblige and grand narratives, no longer exists. And the world you existed for has been dead much longer than that.” She fiddled with her earring, and a door hissed open in the dead-end wall. She pushed Myron inside, not ungently. “I guess you could go look for an animist, or maybe even a stoned neopagan. But, really, you have no purpose. Sorry.” She handed Myron the garbage bag he’d been carrying; it was more full than before; the door slid shut and all was black.

“You cheated,” a voice said, there in the darkness. 

Myron’s ears were popping, so he had trouble hearing things. “What?” he said.

“You cheated, and I’m going to remember this. I’d watch your back if I were you.”

The door opened into the familiar lobby, and Myron could see, in the dim fluorescent light that spilled in, that there in the elevator with him was the young man he had fought. 

Myron stepped backwards out of the elevator. “I apologize,” he said as the door closed. The young man was saying something, too, but Myron missed it, his voice was so low and ominous.

And then once again the wall was blank.

“Careful of the plant,” said the man behind the desk. He still had the accent. 

Myron looked around. The floor-waxing machine stood unattended against a wall. The floor shone slickly, and it was cold against Myron’s bare feet.

“Did I tell any more lies?” Myron asked.

“I don’t think so you did.”

“But they told a lie to me. They said that I would fall on the spikes, and you know what? There was a net. So they lied about that.” Myron turned and walked out the door. As he did, he heard faintly behind him the man saying:

“Why are you sure we would spring the net for you?”

3.
Myron was hardly out the door when the janitor he had seen polishing the floor earlier slipped out of a doorway and fell in step behind him. “Hey, Jackson. Remember me?” he said.

“Sure,” Myron said, confused.

“No, I mean, remember me?” And he tipped his painter’s cap back, revealing the face of the man Myron had met in the library.

“Hey!” Myron said, and then turned to run. He took one step and bumped into the man with the battered fedora and seersucker suit he’d gotten bum directions from. The man was very tall, although old and a little stooped.

“Don’t get in a lather, fella, we’re on your side,” the fedora said. “Come on, let’s ankle.” Ankle meant walk. Each man grabbed one of Myron’s arms and dragged him across a street and down a block to a set of benches. On one bench were two other old men, a chessboard between them. They were wearing straw hats and had canes.

“Are you the Illuminati?” Myron asked.

The two men dragging him were rather out of breath, but one of the chess players said, “Pipe the professor here! You really know your onions.”

“They said you always wore hats. They said it was ridiculous,” Myron said.

The fake janitor let go of Myron’s arm, and unzipped his coveralls. Underneath he was wearing the same painted tie. “It’s just like them, you’ll see, to take every opportunity to get their little digs in. They think they’re so smart for going bareheaded.” He wiggled the tie. 

Myron was looking around for an avenue of escape. Surely he could run faster than any of these four. “What does it matter?” he asked.

“It’s true: If you summon the demon Asmodeus while wearing a hat, he can possess your body. But that’s screwy! How often do you summon Asmodeus? And If I were going to, I’d simply remove my topper. It’s not a big deal.”

The chess player moved a bishop. “I can’t say I care for the Unknown Men,” he said.

“I don’t like them either,” Myron said. “They said I was a dead branch, when really I’m more like the chosen one.”

All four men threw their hands in the air in disgust. “Faugh! The dead-branch theory! What else did they say?”

“They said you failed to prevent World War One.”

“We put it off for a hundred years. If your doctor keeps you alive for a century and then you die, do you call this man a failure?”

“I guess not,” Myron said.

The janitor, A. Weishaupt if that was indeed his real name, put his arm on Myron’s shoulder. “Old boy, you can’t trust those saps. They’re stuck in their antiquated ways, and their forbidden rituals. We just want to help you.”

“I sometimes think no one wants to help me,” Myron said.

“Well, at the very least, we’re not deliberately trying to hurt you. You’re the most interesting thing we’ve seen in years, Jackson. We might be able to help, you know, if you let us know what you want. You didn’t mention what you wanted when you were in the lobby.”

“I just want to find my parents and have no one trying to kill me,” Myron said. 

The Illuminati murmured appreciatively. “If someone’s trying to kill you, it can be—mate.” The chess players looked up from their game. “It can be a real pill to prevent. The Lord knows we’ve failed a time or two. Archduke Ferdinand, of course.”

“Prince Rudolf at Mayerling,” another said.

“Yes, and Robespierre.”

“John Keats.”

“General Gordon.”

“Caroline of Brunswick.”

“Alex Raymond.”

“Nietzsche.”

“But the point is,” A. Weishaupt, if that was indeed his real name, interrupted, “that we have succeeded far more often than we have failed.”

“Jean Jaurès.”

“Hush! Experience, old boy, has taught us that the best way to avoid being killed is to go on the offensive. With our help, you will simply have to take your assailant out before he has a chance to futz you up.”

“With your help?”

“Knowledge is power, fella,” one of the chess players said. “And we have the knowledge. The history you have learned of, the history of Washington, of Edison and Churchill, is but a tiny spring welling up from the vast underground stream. Madame Blavatsky, Charles Manson, and William Henry Ireland didn’t get their portraits hung in your history class, but it is their knowledge that flows underground, enriching the soil above.”

“And you,” Myron said, “have this knowledge?”

“Only a small part, but we know who knows more. This is an entire new world you’re moving into, fella, and we can be your guides. What other hope do you have?”

“Well, I do have this doomsday device.”

A hush fell over the four men. Very slowly, and with deliberate nonchalance, one said. “Did you say a doomsday device?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it right here.” Myron rooted around in the bag, which he now noticed contained his old street clothes, laundered and folded, plus his sneakers—and came out with the cylinder. Its duct tape was still in place. “I don’t even know how to open it, though,” he said, with a fake, dismissive laugh. He began to put it back in the bag.

There was a snapping sound, and the fedora held in front of him a switchblade knife. He flipped it around, catching the blade, and handed it pearl-handle first to Myron. Myron felt awkward. He hadn’t really intended to open the package, but it felt like everyone expected him to, and he was too embarrassed to stop what he’d accidentally started.

“I don’t know…” was the best he could get out.

Do you really think, everyone’s eyes seemed to be saying, you should be carrying around something called a doomsday device and not know exactly what it is?

The silent argument was persuasive. In absolute stillness, except for the cars passing by, some distant sirens, and the cacophony of the Manhattan crowds, Myron sawed clumsily at the tape. With a little help from his teeth, he managed to cut the top off the cylinder. It was just a cardboard tube under all that tape, the kind inside a roll of wrapping paper. Inside was something wrapped in many layers of tinfoil. He gingerly probed the tinfoil, spreading it out at the top. It extended over the edges of the cylinder like the petals of a flower.

Suddenly the back of Myron’s neck erupted in goose flesh. He’d never felt anything quite like this before. He looked over both shoulders, but there was no one suspicious around except some toothless junkies, a pair of blind and deaf drag queens arguing into each other’s hands, and a homeless man who had built a three-story castle out of refrigerator boxes. Myron began to feel dizzy “Is your name really A. Weishaupt?” he said, groggily.

“Myron, you’re killing me.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

“My name is Fred Meyers. What’s wrong with you?”

“I think I’ve been drugged. Did you drug me?”

The Illuminati rolled up their sleeves and shook their fists. “The Nine Unknown Men!” they cried. “They must’ve done this to you!”

“The cads!” one added.

Very slowly, “No, maybe I’m not drugged, maybe it’s something else,” Myron said. Just then a moose came thundering down the avenue. Cars swerved onto the sidewalk, and people were screaming in its wake. It charged right up to Myron, who dropped the tube. The moose turned into a wild-haired naked man, and he caught it before it hit the ground.

“By the deer on Mora’s brow!” the moose-man exclaimed through his long blond beard. “What the de’il is that thing?” He was stuffing, as he spoke, the tinfoil back into place.

“Excuse me,” said Fred Meyers. In his hand was a small pistol. “A silver bullet is in the chamber. I suggest you drop the doomsday device.”

“You daft son of a whore, do you ken how foul this smells? Silver bullets are naught but a nuisance, and if I cared two pins for your device I’d gore you afore your finger half crooked.” He had a strong accent. Ye daft soon o’ a hewer.

“You have stated your opinion, but the fact of the gun remains,” said Fred Meyers. And they all stood there.

“’Tis frightful cold,” said the moose-man, who was, after all, completely naked. His hair was so long it would have come down to his thighs had it not been sticking out in every direction. And to Myron, he said, “These’ll be friends of yours?”

“Maybe,” said Myron.

Then: With a whistling sound, a disk, like a Frisbee, cut through the air. It passed by fedora’s head, slicing a strip off the rim of his hat, before embedding itself, with a thock, in the bench. Immediately Fred Meyers spun around, but a second disk cut into his gun, and he dropped it. His hand was scattered and bleeding.

“Get aboard,” the moose-man said to Myron, and dropped the tube. Myron half expected it to explode when it hit the ground, but nothing of the sort happened; it just struck the pavement and rolled six inches, brought up short by a kneeling moose. The Illuminati were scrambling for cover. From across the street was running the young man Myron had fought upside down. In his hand was a long dagger, and his eyes were blazing. He was screaming, and it was hard to catch, but it sounded something like, “I’m good enough to give you a head start, and you stop and talk to the janitor?” The rest was obscenity.

One of the Illuminati tugged on his cane, and out slid a long blade. “Call the Rosicrucians!” he cried. “Call the Knights of Columbus!” 

Myron grabbed the doomsday device and jumped on the moose’s back. The moose unwound its legs and began to run. Myron looked over his shoulder and saw the young man was chasing him down the sidewalk, slowly losing ground. Then, when he was a block behind, he fell over, and disappeared from sight. There was the sound of gunfire. But the moose kept on running. Myron held on tight as it moved across the jammed traffic. It leapt onto a car hood, caving it in, and ran faster and faster over sidewalk and street. Myron was so high up, he was looking down on the pedestrians scattering before him. Soon they reached a tunnel, part of which was blocked off by orange cones; the moose ran through the cones, through the echoing of the tunnel, and out into more city streets on the other side. There were sirens, and the sound of a policeman’s voice through a bullhorn. Myron closed his eyes, but he remembered falling out of the truck, and he held on as tight as he could. After what seemed forever, the moose stopped in some woods. He shook Myron onto the ground, and then he was a naked man again.

He said to call him Spenser. He said Myron owed him a set of clothes and some cheese.

[Chapter 5, with Spenser in the woods, and then the following chapters all the way to the riveting end, are behind this classic paywall: https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Lycanthropes-Hal-Johnson-ebook/dp/B0D9376HQ2/.]