Immortal Lycanthropes (12 page)

But the tiger was not alone by any means. Everyone began to kill whomever he could, for fear that he would himself die. The chipmunk attacked the wildcat’s eyes, and the mandrill tore to pieces six kinds of baboon, the chimpanzee, and a pangolin. A general massacre came down upon the bats, strange, liminal birdlike beings hated by all, and the bats were too busy fighting among themselves to realize what was happening (though there were too many kinds of bats, far too many, to make a dent in). The aardvark used her claw-hooves on small or slow creatures until the hyrax bit off her tongue, and, unable to eat, she keeled over from weakness and the jerboa finished her off. But the hyrax had died, too. They were rotten years all around. Everyone who did not become clinically paranoid died. You were either always afraid or you were a goner.

But, after the easy marks and the innocent perished, the survivors, who were tough, or canny, or small, or elusive, eventually settled down. But some, their blood fired by the years of slaughter, turned their attention outward. Those were the days of action, although most of the actions were vain and futile, of course. The flying squirrel murdered Friedrich Nietzsche in the madhouse. The babirusa somehow contrived to set off the volcanic explosion of Krakatoa. The gorilla assassinated Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas, and her friend the Barbary ape conspired, tried, and failed to assassinate Napoleon III; was sentenced to death; would not die; and so he was sent to Devil’s Island, from which he predictably escaped, for no such island can long hold a Barbary ape. “I knew him well,” Spenser said. “He went on and fought in the Civil War, for the Union, under the name Charles DeRudio, and later survived the battle of Little Big Horn, too, always running rashly and some would say nobly into danger, to no result. He was killed by the wolverine.”

“But you know Gloria?” Myron asked.

“Who?”

“The gorilla.”

“Oh, sure, sure. She came to Scotland in the reign of good King James the Fourth, actually, which is where I met her. She only spoke French, I remember. Not long after that, the French king forced James to invade England, and he died, with the flower of Scottish gentility, near Flodden Field; and Scotland never recovered.”

Myron wasn’t sure if he believed this, that Gloria had gone to Scotland in the sixteenth century or that she had been an assassin in Spain in the nineteenth. He wasn’t sure in general what to believe. It didn’t help that whatever his subject, Spenser returned to the basic idea that no matter what monumental deeds of bravery or chivalry he witnessed, these only affected things in the short term, and the short term was precisely what should not affect him, or Myron, at all. Even the improvements—like when the Scottish kings, at long last, stopped burning witches—were cosmetic, unimportant when compared to the ways in which life, and all people, kept getting worse. The vast forests of Europe had been mowed down to make room for idiots in plaid pants and sandals, and now the vast forests of America were going, too, to make room for idiots in Bermuda shorts and Nikes. Year after year people became weaker and stupider and more inured to mediocrity. All under the direction of obscure and sinister secret societies. Sometimes their motivation was naked lust for power; sometimes it was ineffable; sometimes it seemed like a personal vendetta against Spenser, and when he got to that point, the moose started to sound like a loon.

And one afternoon, while Myron was setting snares, the moose came back from foraging. His head was bleeding, and he had no antlers. He turned back into a human and washed his bloody forehead off before dressing.

“Are you all right?” Myron asked.

“A headache, nothing more. It should’ve happened months ago, but I’m frequently off schedule.”

“But you’ll be better now,” Myron suggested.

“Sure, sure.”

“I mean, this must be a load off your mind.”

Spenser didn’t suss out the pun for a few eyeblinks, and when he did he threw a snowball at Myron. Rebounding, the snowball struck the snare Myron had just set, and a sapling springing to attention shot a flurry of snow back at Spenser, covering him head to toe. Myron laughed so hard, he almost wet himself.

“Fy, skolderit skyn, thou art bot skyre and skrumple!” Spenser roared, but he was joking, now, too. They both fell down and laughed. Myron was looking forward to warmer weather, but that was all, he realized, he was looking forward to. They were alone in the wide woods, and there was nothing to fear. For the first time in years, in all the years he could remember, he was satisfied.

(Later that day:) Spring comes like a miracle, and the repetition of the miracle has still not cheapened it. There exist many sentimental descriptions of the first bluebird of the spring, or of a crocus, blooming up through the melting snow. Myron, for his part, had pried up and half overturned a hollow log and saw underneath a dark snake, its distended jaw half swallowing a frog. The frog’s legs were still kicking. Meanwhile, from the frog’s back end, its cloaca to be precise, a long, pale strand of spaghetti was twisting and writhing. It took Myron a moment to realize what was happening. The strand was a parasitic worm, and, as its host was being devoured, it was desperately trying to escape digestion by inching its way into the open air.

“That is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen,” Myron said.

Spenser came and looked over his shoulder. “You know what that means,” he said.

Myron was temporarily terrified that the scene was a revolting allegory he would have to determine the meaning of. But instead, Spenser said, “They’re not hibernating. It means spring has come.”

It was not at that moment, it was the next morning, or possibly the morning after that it happened. Myron had broken camp and packed everything they had—the bedding, extra clothes, the doomsday device, the archery equipment, and sundries like fishhooks and the soda-can mirror—into duffle bags, and he stood there, next to the moose, unsure of where to put them. Always before he had hung them on the antlers. The moose was pacing, impatient to leave. He swung his great head toward Myron.

Myron said, “I just don’t know where to put—”

And then there was a crashing in the forest. Something burst through a bush, sending up an enormous spray of snow, and dimly through that spray Myron could see the figure of a bear, brown and enormous, bringing a paw down on Spenser’s neck. Spenser went over with a great crash, taking a midsize tree down with him. Instantly he sprang to his feet again, and Myron could see the raw red wound where the paw had struck. He leapt forward, butting the bear with his head, but the wounds, where his antlers had been, just tore open. In the haze of another great spray of snow, the bear knocked him down again.

Rising slower now, on his knees, he spent a moment looking back at Myron. His eyes were the saddest things. He jerked his head and pointed with his nose, pointing away. He had to do it twice. As the bear struck again, Myron turned and ran. He dropped everything and bolted for where the trees were densest. The snow was still deep, and his legs moved slowly, as in a dream. He had never gotten boots, he was still in his old sneakers, with just rubber overshoes (ill-fitting, fished from a Dumpster) to protect against the snow; they worked all right when he was treading gingerly, but now scarcely three steps and snow was pouring into his sneakers over the top, and his feet became slippery and numb. Branches whipped against his face, and one caught him and cut him right above the eye. The trickle of blood was first hot and then icy cold in the wind as it ran down his cheek. Leaping over a log, Myron found that on the far side was a steep hill, which he proceeded to tumble down, head over heels. He skidded to a stop against some rocks at the bottom, and when he stood up, he found he was standing on an iced-over stream. His foot immediately broke through, and when he jerked it back, a jagged ice shard sliced through two socks and cut his ankle. The water from the frigid stream had collected in the rubber overshoe, and it was so hard to run in the sodden shoe. He tried to persuade himself that his best chance was to hide, but he knew that was not true; there was no way to hide a trail in the snow. He stood up and headed off again, again for the thick trees where something large would have trouble pushing through. The blood from the cut on his eyebrow had become diverted somehow and now spilled directly into his eye. He tried to wipe it away with one stiff and frozen hand. All the time he imagined he could hear a bear behind him, getting closer. And it was not his imagination, and the bear was there, and with one swipe it knocked him down.

“I fear me, Cuthbert, this is far from the spirit in which we a while ago agreed that men should go to the holy war.”

Cuthbert hung his head a little.

“Ay, Father Francis, men; but I am a boy,” he said, “and after all, boys are fond of adventure for adventure’s sake.”

G. A. Henty,
Winning His Spurs

Melodrama is my usual, if not necessarily my preferred, idiom, so you can imagine how difficult it was for me not to falsify the preceding events. How choice it would have been if, right before poor Spenser perished, he had finally found the cheese of his dreams! He reaches one hoof gingerly toward the wedge, which is emanating visible stink lines, and only then does he fall. His last words are poignant, and involve some kind of pun on Edam.

But absolute fidelity to facts, established through extensive interviews of the participants, especially young Myron in this instance, forbid my coloring of events with my usual palette. And so it is with no mendacious or even misleading rhetorical flourish that I draw back the curtain on a scene in which our hero awakens in a bed in a small round room, tastefully appointed. The red rays of the sunset stream through a small circular window. A low bookshelf squats beside the bed, like an incubus preparing to clamber into position. Entering the room are two women. One, moving as quickly and nervously as a chain smoker, is black and has the gangly limbs of a teenager; she stands well under five feet tall, and if she is wearing children’s clothing (striped shirt & purple overalls), perhaps this is why. The other is very pale, tall and slender, perhaps thirty, her blond hair cut short and her fashionable gray business skirt cut to the knee. I will go so far as to say that, in the magical and forgiving light of dusk, she is beautiful. Perhaps she looks familiar. It’s very cold; Myron’s neck is prickling, and this is what has awakened him.

“Well,” and it is the taller woman who speaks, as taller people always do, “how are we feeling today?” In the chill, her breath is faintly visible. She bends over above him, her movements slow and languid, and places the back of her hand on Myron’s forehead.

All the confusion of the moment is right then swept away by amazement that someone, anyone, is able to touch his face without flinching. And so Myron could only gape, dumbfounded as the woman explained that one of her employees had been some distance from here walking in the woods, collecting mistletoe, and had chanced to come across Myron, bloody and half frozen. As she spoke, silently the teenager, all four and a half feet of her, paced back and forth with a glass of water in each hand. Myron was tucked in tight, the heavy covers up to the chin, but his eyes darted back and forth between the two. He could see on the floor beyond her his bow, the cardboard tube, and a duffle bag that was not his. He could barely bring himself to ask the obvious question.

“Was there,” said Myron, “when the guy found me, was there a moose with me?”

“A moose?”

The air on Myron’s face was cold, and he realized that the little window was wide open. It opened outward, like a door, on a little hinge. “Not with me, I mean, but back, back where I left my stuff. That stuff over there.”

“No. We followed your tracks back to locate the bow and some other things, which we took the liberty of consolidating in a duffle bag. But I can assure you we would have noticed a moose.” She smiled, quite a lovely smile, to show she could be ironical, and Myron let out a long billow of breath. The lack of a moose was a relief; no body could mean that Spenser had escaped whatever had attacked them.

The woman was asking, “What’s your name?”

“Vladimir Speed,” said Myron. “What’s yours?”

“This is Florence Agalega, and I am called Mignon Emanuel.”

Myron passed out. But it was only for a moment; he woke from the shock of cold water in the face. Florence was reaching out—reaching up, actually—and offering him the remaining glass of water. “Sorry about that,” she whispered. All Myron could think about at the moment was that the offer was absurd, as his arms were both beneath the bedspread.

“Vladimir,” said Mignon Emanuel, smoothing her skirt before she sat on the bed across from Florence. She carefully avoided any wet spots. “Do you mind if I call you Myron? You really are very fortunate we found you.”

“Fortunate?” Myron cried, coming to himself. At which point he tried to throw back the covers and leap out of bed, but he found that he was securely pinned under the heavy blankets. There had been very little give before, and now Mignon Emanuel was sitting on one side of him, Florence leaning on the bedspread on the other side. Neither one could have weighed much, but Myron had no leverage and, to be frank, was not very strong at all. But he wriggled back and forth desperately. He remembered the frog’s parasitic worm, and, like that worm, he would not give up.