Immortal Lycanthropes (2 page)

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 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 taking 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.

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 not to 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 was 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, then 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 quickly, 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 the car had struck; knowing him, as I do now, he probably did not think 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 blond 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 ever 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.