Immortal Lycanthropes

by Hal Johnson

  “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 boxcar 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.

  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 and 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 backwards. 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 a 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 a 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 things 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 still 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?”