Immortal Lycanthropes

by Hal Johnson

  “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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “No, it’s old,” Myron conceded.

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

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

  “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 show 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 that 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 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 a 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 to her cell. Who would have the resources to switch phone numbers around like that? Was it safe to go back to Westfield? Myron picked up the phone 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 t
hey 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.