by Hal Johnson
“I really don’t want to do this,” Myron said.
Florence was sitting on top of the tall wooden crosspiece from which the ropes depended. She was looking down, but it was not clear that she was listening.
Oliver picked a pair of boxing gloves off the ground, where they’d been dropped, and tossed them over to Myron. “Come on, put these on.”
Myron refused. Oliver had in the meantime slid gloves on his own fists. He couldn’t lace them up, of course, and they were far too large for him. They flopped back and forth loosely on his wrists.
“Put up your dukes, Myron!” Oliver cried. He began to dance around Myron, bobbing and weaving.
“This is not a legal match,” Myron said. “We’re not even in the ring.”
“Ding,” said Oliver, and he went in. He started tentatively, with a little light bodywork, his jabs barely touching Myron, who was endeavoring to squirm out of the way; but as he went on, and noticed that Florence was hardly even looking at him, he began to punch more in earnest.
“Quit it,” Myron said, his bare hands up shielding his face.
“The champ is on the ropes,” Oliver said. “How long can he stand up to this punishment?” The blows that landed were hardly solid, the gloves too limp and floppy to allow much force, but they stung nevertheless.
“Looks like the new kid from Vancouver is ready to claim the belt.”
“Stop it, I mean it.”
“The crowd is going wild!”
Myron felt tears welling up in his eyes. He’d been hurt much worse than this before, of course, but there was something galling about the way this would not stop. It just kept going and would not stop. Stepping backwards, he tripped on the gloves he’d refused to put on and fell over. In a moment, Oliver was on top of him, his legs pinning Myron’s arms. He was pounding ineffectually, with the underside of the glove, like a masseur, but he was pounding directly on Myron’s face. Myron began to scream.
“Florence!” A loud voice carried clearly from up above, and Oliver stopped. He turned his head. From a second-story window Mignon Emanuel was leaning. “Florence, could you bring Myron to my office?”
Suddenly noticing what was going on, Florence scampered down the rope. She pulled Myron to his feet. Oliver was standing nearby, his face downcast.
Mignon Emanuel called down, “And Oliver. That’s three days without, and five hours KP. Do you understand?”
Oliver stomped his foot and let out a long glottal-fricative sigh.
From the window: “I said, do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Oliver at a volume perfectly pitched just barely to reach the second floor.
Florence took Myron to a washroom, cleaned his face up a bit, gently, and then brought him to the office.
“What were you thinking?” was the first thing Mignon Emanuel said as they entered.
“I’m not very good at boxing,” Myron said.
Mignon Emanuel ignored him. “What if he had panicked and changed, in front of the guards and everyone?”
“I wasn’t paying attention,” Florence said.
“We’re three days away from the conference, and your not paying attention could ruin everything.”
Florence glared right back. “I’ve already said I’m sorry,” she said, which Myron noted wasn’t strictly true. “It won’t happen again. What more do you want from me?”
Mignon Emanuel did not look happy, but she turned her attention to Myron. “You’ve had a scare,” she said. “Would you like to go lie down, or would you be able to help me with something?”
“I could help,” said Myron.
And so Florence took Myron to Mrs. Wangenstein’s room, and Mrs. Wangenstein measured him with a tape measure. She wrote all the numbers down on a little pad with a golf pencil she liked to lick.
“Was that all?” Myron asked as Mrs. Wangenstein scurried off with the pad.
“That was all.”
“What’s going to happen to Oliver?” Myron asked. He didn’t really like Oliver, but he couldn’t get over the thought of the experiment he had gone through. Also, where the heck were his parents?
“He’ll be peeling potatoes for a while.” And Myron was left alone. Everyone was busy, and he had nothing to do. He sat on his bed and groused, because all of this was supposed to be for him.
In the evening, Myron was called, as he often was, from his room to dinner by a complicated code of bells. Mignon Emanuel and Florence were already there when he arrived, and he was about to ask them about the conference, about what his role, his leadership role, would be in the new world they were working toward. But before he could, a very old man in a doorman’s coat with lace coming out the sleeves entered.
“Who?” said Myron.
“Bonjour,” said the old man. “I am Dr. Aluys.” He swept his arm around in a great arc and bowed. And Mrs. Wangenstein came scurrying in. The main course was pheasant, with a side of salmon, and as usual no one talked.
Myron tried to catch Mignon Emanuel’s attention with his eyes, to ask about Dr. Aluys, but she was looking resolutely at her plate, or into the distance. He caught Florence’s eye and raised an inquiring eyebrow, as he’d seen her do once, but just then Oliver came in and, perceiving everything instantly, sat down and kicked Myron repeatedly under the table until Myron drew his feet up and sat on his knees. He then kicked Myron several times in the knees, but this was more difficult for him to do, so at last he stopped. Nevertheless, Myron was getting annoyed.
Perhaps it was for this reason that when Oliver asked if he could pour himself some wine, and Mignon Emanuel assented, Myron waited until he was halfway through the task before uttering, loudly, the ancient words he had learned from Spenser: “Pax sax sarax . . .”
Oliver dropped the bottle, which shattered on the white tablecloth. Red wine shot out sideways, leaving a splatter pattern like a beheading’s. Mrs. Wangenstein, for her part, began to vomit everywhere, which was curious as she had had nothing to drink yet. Oliver half fell out of his chair before he caught himself. Whatever Myron expected to happen, this was something quite extraordinary. Mignon Emanuel’s eyes narrowed.
“Perhaps you had better not repeat that,” she said, for it had been a 1990 La Tâche Burgundy.
And from the far side of the table, the old man, Dr. Aluys, began to laugh and laugh.
Mrs. Wangenstein went back to her room. By dessert, Oliver was making light of the incident. Primeval words of power did not impress him, he insisted. “It’s a simple parlor trick; that’s all. Like when psychics bend spoons with their mind. Big deal! If I concentrated that hard, I could do it, too! It’s just not worth it.” Oliver then proceeded to demonstrate how easily he could bend spoons using brute strength and the principle of leverage. He’d done two before Mignon Emanuel reminded him that he was in enough trouble already. At that he jumped out of his chair so fast that the chair tipped over, and on the way out he bumped Myron with his shoulder.
Mignon Emanuel still bore an accusatory look, when she looked at Myron. “You said there were no rules!” Myron said.
“This is the land of do-as-you-please, and there are no rules. But even in the land of do-as-you-please there are repercussions for your actions. I do not dictate, but I suggest, that you avoid trotting out whatever ancient lore you have acquired. At the very least, it makes dinner more awkward, and robs us of the pleasure of a fine Burgundy. Furthermore, it might make people doubt you are as young as you are.”
“I learned it from Spenser, I’d never heard anything like it before that.”
“Doubtless. Florence and I have spoken such tongues at certain points in our lives—dark, twisted tongues from forgotten times, as well. But your proficiency in one, I hope you understand, could engender suspicion. Again, I am merely here to suggest ramifications. The responsibility of decision is your own.”
Myron felt embarrassed by what he’d done, and the reasonableness with which Mignon Emanuel was accepting it only made it worse. But he was tired
of living a life of constant suspicion. The terrible adventure had begun to wear him down. He wanted to trust Mignon Emanuel, he wanted to believe that he could relax his guard. But his guard was still up, and his nerves were frayed.
“What about him?” Myron said, pointing at Dr. Aluys. “He’s just a guy, isn’t he, a human? How come he’s not affected by the forgotten speech?”
“One’s humanity has nothing to do with this,” Mignon Emanuel said. “It’s merely a question of getting used to it.”
Myron looked over at the old man. How did he get used to it?
With a pleasant nod, he answered: “Mon chéri, I have seen so many things your young eyes would not believe. If your eyes, they are truly young.”
“Hmm,” said Myron.
Mignon Emanuel went on, “I know it’s been difficult for you, Myron, but in three days we have the conference, and we’ll need to be at our best.”
“That’s what I don’t even know anything about! What’s the deal with the conference?”
“Haven’t you been paying attention, Myron? Please, it’s very important that you pay attention. You should already know all about the conference, and I’m not about to review matters you should have mastered long ago. You’ll be presented at last as the chosen one, the first to be born in millennia.”
“But what will I do? You said there’d be people coming. Why won’t there be any immortal lycanthropes?”
“It’s nigh impossible to get any of us to do anything organized. That’s why we’re starting with other people, people with contacts, who can get the word out and generate interest.”
“I’m supposed to be in charge, don’t I get to decide who to invite? The Nine Unknown Men won’t even be there!”
“The Nine Unknown Men have sent their regrets, and the Rosicrucians are too scared to stir from their West Coast sanctuary. But there will be a great many influential people in attendance. If you don’t mind saying a few words, I’ll gladly take the liberty of having some apposite remarks typed up.”
If Myron had been thinking straight, he would have been terrified by the idea, but he was angry, and distracted by the mention of the Rosicrucians. “Who are they? Why does everyone talk about them?” he demanded.
“Hardly anyone perspicacious ever talks about them anymore,” said Mignon Emanuel, ending the discussion.
After dinner he walked past the room again, the room that had made him dizzy, and there was nothing there, no feeling. The door was still locked. He went up to his tower in a great funk, and Oliver was there and hit him across the head with a two by four.
2.
Myron awoke strapped spread-eagled on a table. His head ached, and his tongue felt furry. His first thought was that he has been knocked unconscious entirely too many times recently. His second thought was pure panic. He was in a laboratory. Along a bench by the wall was strange glassware, test tubes and alembics and spiral tubing, all covered in cobwebs. He didn’t know what most of the devices were, but he didn’t like them much. Over to one side, where he could barely see, was a kind of crib or cage with something moving in it.
“Hello?” Myron tried to say, but found he had been gagged.
Darting into his angle of vision suddenly was Oliver, wearing an overlarge lab coat and holding a beaker filled with liquid. A glass straw stuck out of the beaker.
“You’re going to tell me where it is,” Oliver said.
“I can’t tell you anything with this gag in my mouth,” Myron failed to enunciate.
Oliver held the glass straw and put his thumb over its top. When he lifted the straw up, the liquid inside stayed there.
“This is acid,” Oliver said. “Or it’s probably acid—I can’t read most of this stuff. What is this, is this Spanish? What’s an ‘extrêmement dangereux’?” He held the straw over Myron’s arm and lifted his thumb up. The liquid slipped out, and when it hit his sleeve, it began to . . . to sizzle is perhaps the right word. In a moment it had worked its way through the shirt and burned his skin. Myron was so surprised by the pain that he shouted with sufficient vigor to expel the gag from his mouth. The gag, it turned out, was nothing more than an old pair of underpants that had been wadded in there.
“Go ahead and scream,” Oliver said. “No one ever comes down here. No one even knows this place exists.”
Myron writhed in frustration. “What about the thing in the cage over there?” he said, trying to keep Oliver’s attention away from the acid.
“He’s not going to talk.”
“I mean, someone comes to feed him, clearly.”
“He’s half dead of starvation.”
“Look, Oliver, you have to listen to me. This isn’t even going to work, you can’t kill me.”
“Excuse me, are you the Virgin Mary? Because you are making an assumption! You are assuming I want to kill you.”
“I don’t understand what that means, I’m Jewish!”
Silently, Oliver put the acid away and picked up a hacksaw.
Myron tried, “Oliver, you’re going to get in trouble for this.”
“You won’t know anything about that, you’ll be dead.”
“I knew it!” He shook his bindings in frustration. “Oliver, I’m immortal. Miss Emanuel is as well, and Florence. We can all turn into animals!”
“Miss Emanuel warned me that you were delusional and might try telling me something like this.” He laid the saw across Myron’s abdomen.
“Oliver, please think clearly. Are you trying to kill me, or are you trying to extract information from me?”
Oliver had gotten a little ahead of himself, and after a moment’s reflection he had to admit, “First one and then the other.”
“I know where Mignon Emanuel keeps a second shape. I’ve been working on the puzzle all this time.”
“Aha!” Oliver jumped in the air with glee. “I knew there was a second shape, I knew you’d crack.”
“It’s in the locked room, the one we saw the day you—the day you lost your protractor.”
“That’s right, I did lose my protractor. But if it’s in the locked room, we’ll never get it.”
“I know where Mignon Emanuel keeps the keys. They’re in the desk in her office. All we need to do is get into her office.”
“We’ll never do that.”
In the crib in the corner, something unseen scuttled about.
Myron said, “I have a plan. We can do this together, Oliver, but I need you to do it. You know about this conference, right? I’m going to have to make a speech, and right before I go on, I’m going to say I lost the speech, the paper with the speech on it. And you’ll be around, and you’ll say you’d found it but slipped it under the door to the office because you thought it was hers. And we’ll need the speech so she’ll have to send one of us to go get it. Do you see, Oliver? We can get the key!”
“She’ll send Florence, not us.”
“We’ll have to get rid of Florence somehow.” For a moment, Myron saw wrath blaze in Oliver’s eyes, and he quickly amended his statement. “We’ll send her on a fool’s errand, I mean. We have three days to think of a plan. But it won’t work without both of us. What do you say, Oliver?”
Oliver was shaking. But his shaking head nodded. He began to unknot the strap binding Myron’s wrist, which proved to be the tie from a bathrobe threaded through a handy staple in the table. As he struggled with it, a voice called out.
“Oliver!” It was Mignon Emanuel. She was standing on the rickety stairs leading down to the room. Florence was with her, and was already sprinting down the staircase, ducking under the banister when halfway down to jump five feet to the floor.
“We were playing!” Oliver cried.
“It’s true, we’re just playing,” Myron said, “but I’m getting a little bored. Can you untie me?”
In a moment, Florence had undone the three knots and the belt buckle, and Myron was free. He could see that Mignon Emanuel was already turning away, back up the stairs. The crib in the corner looked like
it held an alligator.
“There’s blood on the floor of your room,” Florence whispered. “Emanuel got worried.”
“That’s from a nosebleed, from before. We’re just goofing around, but I think Oliver began to lose it at one point. Seriously, he needs the shape.”
“He’s off it for three days.”
“Seriously. He needs the shape.” Myron tried to make it clear with his face how important it was.
How much Oliver, who’d spent the time paralyzed with terror, heard of this is debatable. But when Florence took the shape out from the neck of her jumper, Oliver scurried over and fell to his knees. She put one arm around him as he stroked the shape and wept. Silently, Myron turned and slunk away. He crept up the stairs.
From this angle it became clear that the alligator had the rear legs, rump, and tail of a donkey.
No time to think about that! Myron hit the top of the stairs and began to run. He didn’t have much of a plan, but he thought maybe if he beat Mignon Emanuel to her office he could hide in some way that would let him slip in after her. She could go through her secret bookcase passage, and he’d be at liberty to plunder the desk for a key. He took every shortcut Oliver had taught him, but when he rounded the final corner, Mignon Emanuel was already stepping through her office door. She suddenly turned around to look over her shoulder, but Myron ducked back around the corner before he could be noticed, and ran away. And then he caught his breath. He realized that the back of his neck had not prickled at all.
This explained why he had never seen Mignon Emanuel without Florence there as well. Perhaps with more experience he would have been able to distinguish between the presence of one and two immortal lycanthropes, but he was still new at this, and had never noticed.
Mignon Emanuel, he reasoned, was a mere human.
3.
