Immortal Lycanthropes

by Hal Johnson

  “If you would like to go, you might find it simpler to take the back way,” the grandmaster said. He indicated a small door behind a rosebush.

  “It’s not that,” Myron said. “It’s just that it took me a long time to get here.”

  The grandmaster nodded.

  “Well, I guess I’d expected something else. There was a lot of buildup.”

  The grandmaster was still gazing off at a point somewhere behind Myron. “Everything hidden will be revealed,” he repeated. And what more could Myron ask for? The back door was behind the rosebush, and Myron went over to take it. As he was about to go out, he looked behind him and saw what the grandmaster was looking at. Mounted on the wall behind the door Myron had entered through was a flat-screen TV, and a Woody Woodpecker cartoon.

  3.

  The red panda waited for Myron out front, but he took the back way out, so we lost him again.

  And he spent another few weeks off on his own. Spenser had taught him how to survive in the woods and Gloria had taught him how to survive in the city, while I had taught him, I would like to think, how to survive, period. It was no wonder no one could locate him.

  But word trickled through the underground stream, as it always does. Arcane whispers of San Diego, and San Clemente Island. And so, late one June night unseasonably cold and cut through with a bitter wind, the red panda, prowling a marina north of San Diego, saw Myron casting the rope off a tiny launch no bigger than a rowboat. She sped down the dock and made a great leap, forepaws stretched out, bushy tail trailing behind her, and landed flat in the launch as Myron pushed it adrift with an oar.

  Myron ignored the creature, so she turned into his old friend Alice.

  “Jinkies, it’s cold!” she cried.

  Myron ignored her and awkwardly used the oar as a paddle to navigate his way out of the marina.

  “How can it be so cold here, it’s June?”

  Myron, she noticed, had a strange look about him. Not his usual strange look—his eyes were glassy and preoccupied. He was sweating. He was wearing a yellow raincoat, and a heavy sweater underneath, which must have been warm.

  “Myron, do you remember me? I’m Alice, we met last year in a pickup truck. I know Arthur.”

  Outside the shelter of the harbor, the wind really picked up. In the distance, flashes of lightning strobed in the sky.

  “Myron, you should turn back—there’s a storm coming. Actually, do you know what you’re doing?” Ahead of them was nothing but the open sea.

  “Kind of,” Myron said.

  “It is really cold out here,” Alice said. “Do you have any spare clothes, a jacket or anything?”

  “Nothing that would fit you,” Myron said. So Alice turned back into a red panda, which is at least naturally furry.

  As the California coast drifted farther away, Myron checked a pocket compass and then moved to the back of the launch. There was a small motor there, and he fiddled with it for a long while before it started up. By this point the wind was blowing strong, and waves kept coming over the sides of the boat. The red panda tried to shake herself dry, like a dog. It got colder. But now that Myron, with the help of his compass, had oriented the boat properly, the wind was directly at their back and sped the little launch along.

  Alice assumed the shape of a human and tried to warm herself in a life jacket. “Are we going to San Clemente Island?” she asked.

  “If we’re lucky,” Myron said.

  “You do know that’s pretty far from shore?”

  “Sixty-five miles. Or farther, I guess, because we’ll have to round it to land.”

  “Are you sure this is a good idea, Myron?”

  But Myron didn’t answer that question, instead he said, “There’s something I just barely can’t remember, something like a dream from long ago, and it’s on the tip of my tongue.”

  San Clemente lies diagonally and noodle-shaped in the Pacific, maybe twenty-five miles long but only a few miles wide. It contains a naval base and a unique subspecies of night lizard and very little else. Myron was aiming to round San Clemente on the south; if they went astray to the north, they’d probably hit the island, or one of the other Channel Islands. But if they went too far south, and passed the island without spotting it, the next possible landfall was Hawaii, and past that Australia. They wouldn’t die, of course, but the weeks and months in an open boat with no drinking water would be in some ways worse than death.

  Lightning illuminated the horizon again, and Alice pandaed and huddled beneath the seat. But then it got too wet down there, and she came back up, setting her paws on the edge of the boat and looking nervously at the sky. Myron kept his hand on the throttle, and his eye on the compass. They came upon a squall. The wind had just grown stronger and stronger, but it was almost always behind them, so they didn’t notice so much until they saw that the rain ahead was falling almost horizontally. And then they were inside the rain, and Myron had to stop and bail, which slowed them down. By the time they motored clear, Myron’s pants, which stuck out of the raincoat, were sopping, and Alice’s fur was a soaking bedraggled mess. She had to go human again, and when she did she instantly regretted it.

  And in her human times, did she ask Myron for the missing details of his adventures? Did she ask him what he was thinking during his exploits among the Rosicrucians, or how he slipped away from the Campanile reservoir? Or even where he got the boat or learned the proper approach to the island? No, she did not. What she said was, “Myron, I’ve got to warn you. Whatever Arthur told you, you mustn’t listen to him. Don’t listen to anything Arthur told you.” I could have predicted that this is what she would have told him even if she had not later told me it was what she said.

  “I feel strange,” Myron said.

  Thunder boomed, uncomfortably close.

  Alice took her turn at the throttle while Myron bailed a little more. She considered turning the craft around, but she would never be able to make it all the way back in human form without coma-freezing, and, as a red panda Myron could easily wrest control from her thumbless paws and perhaps even dump her overboard.

  “I feel strange,” Myron said again. He was probably still sweating, despite the cold, although all the sea spray made it difficult to tell for certain. The smell of the sea was overpowering. Whatever it was he was having trouble remembering, he had not yet remembered. He hummed to himself.

  It took several hours, but dawn had not yet broken when lights became visible high in the distance. These were the great cliffs of San Clemente, rising a quarter mile from the sea in some places.

  “Wow,” said Myron. “And the fisherman had said this was a suicide mission.”

  “A suicide mission?” Alice asked, assuming human form for that one anxious question.

  “Going to sea in a boat this small. But it was okay after all. Now we just have to watch for the patrols.”

  The navy kept secrets on San Clemente Island, and it guarded these secrets jealously. Fishermen and divers were permitted to troll these waters, but no one may set foot on San Clemente, and watches and patrols enforced the stricture with a fanatical rigor. But today the lightning played about the top of San Clemente, and the wind, which had been blowing steadily for hours, was constantly threatening to whip the sea into a fury. So the sailors huddled safe in their secret underground bunkers. There was no one around.

  The cliffs, when the launch reached them, were far too steep to scale, but Myron motored southeast to round the tip of the island. This brought them athwart the wind, and the launch was tossed and spun around almost helplessly. A freak wave rose up and dropped, to everyone’s surprise, a broken and ragged net on top of them both. The red panda gnawed her way through the net until enough strands parted to shake it off the boat, which was almost swamped. A fishing net, Alice assumed as she began to bail in earnest, probably left behind by some trawler. But it was not a fishing net.

  Under the early morning sun Myron barely managed to struggle around the southern tip to the lee of t
he island. The sea behind him was a turbid madhouse, but here he found things placid. Finally Myron pulled up to a dock, and the red panda leapt out, glad to be on dry land again. As she prowled around the dock, sniffing, Myron clambered awkwardly out of the boat, his legs stiff and almost deadened. He lay on the boards, unwilling, it seems, now that he had come all this way, to leave the shore and trek across the island to find the red shack. The boat, unmoored, drifted away across the glassy water. By the time Alice noticed, it had gone too far to wade after, and Myron seemed unconcerned. Perhaps he had read my Boy’s Life of Cortes, which tells how the conquistador, after the disastrous retreat of his first invasion, burned the ships of his second expeditionary force on the Mexican coast, to drive home the point that this time there would be no retreat available. Or perhaps he was just in a hurry. He was running a little late.

  Myron and the little red panda scrambled inland across a desert of low bushes and cacti. There were no trees to be seen, although in a few places the stumps of petrified tree trunks rose several feet from their calcite roots in the sand. The ground sloped uphill, and the rocks and sand were loose enough to make climbing difficult. Tediously, wet and weary, Myron trudged up the long slope toward the far cliffs, the red panda at his heels. A family of dwarf gray foxes came scuttling out from under a withered shrub to sniff at Alice and scampered away to yip from a distance. And, then, once they reached the long flat ridge of the island’s east cliffs, the wind proved stronger even than it had been, and far less predictable. They had hardly been there a minute, resting at the top after their miles of ascent, when a stray gust coming unchivalrously from behind knocked Myron flat over. When he picked his face up out of the rocky ground, he saw that the red panda was caught in the wind, which had lifted her up and blown her out to sea.

  For a moment she turned human, in an attempt to gain enough mass to set herself down, but it was too late, she was over the edge, and, as a human, she dropped like a rock. Myron could only watch, helpless. The wind was too strong for him safely to get close enough to the edge to look over. Who can blame him if he assumed Alice was gone? The wind just kept blowing, bringing with it that haunting whistling it makes, and the unmistakable sea smell of fish and salt.

  But Alice—Alice was luckier than she will ever admit. The cliffs were not as high here as they were farther up, but it was still a good two hundred feet down; she turned back into a red panda partway through, though, and was light enough to be bobbled up and down by the wind before she landed in the water. And here the wild sea did not immediately toss her far away, or buffet her to a jelly against the cliff face. Rather, she found herself tangled in a net, a net that had itself been tangled in the rocks, its loose end flopping about in the waves. Being caught thus was awkward in some ways, and encouraged swallowing a lot of salt water, but it did offer a way for the red panda to scurry to the cliffs. Here she tested the rough, uneven surface for pawholds. And slowly, her body hampered by several pounds of extra water weight in her tail alone, she began to climb.

  No one saw him, meanwhile, but we can assume that Myron turned south here and headed downhill along the ridge, hoping to see a red shack. He had spent the last two months largely alone, so perhaps he was used to it, but Alice can be charming company, so perhaps she was missed. Perhaps he still missed me. As he walked, he kept his body low, and his feet spread wide for balance. At least that’s what he was doing when Alice caught sight of him again. She had worked her way up the cliff—perhaps she exaggerated how difficult it was—and tracked Myron by scent. She tried to keep out of the wind, which slowed her somewhat, but she was gaining on Myron, and indeed she had a visual on him. He was walking in the distance, that peculiar squatting walk in the wind, right up to a red shack. The red shack shuddered as the wind hit it, barely keeping together. A long, charred, lightning rod extended up from its side, vibrating with every new gust. The shack looked newly built and shoddy, and tumbling out of it, like clowns from a car, came a hippopotamus, a wildebeest, an ermine, even, and a man dressed nattily in a white suit. A scar ran across his dark face, over one absent eye and the bridge of his nose. He was grinning broadly.

  Myron was gaping at the menagerie, and the man and the scar.

  Alice could sense them now, and very sensibly she backtracked and took shelter behind a rock. The wind carried tantalizing fragments of their conversation to her sharp ears, but some parts, I must admit, remain speculative. Certainly the man, noticing that Myron was staring at his scar, said, “Don’t worry, boy. You didn’t do this to me. The tiger did.”

  “You’re Mr. B—Mr. Lynch,” Myron stammered.

  The animals arranged themselves in a half circle around Myron. He found himself stepping backwards, closer to the cliff’s edge. The hippopotamus, in negotiating for the best space, hit the rickety shack with his posterior, and its walls collapsed into timbers. The inside, it could be seen now, was glittering with a wallpapering of tinfoil.

  Marcus Lynch smoothed his sparse mustache. The sun was directly behind Myron, so Marcus had to squint his good eye when he looked at him. He looked like—the cat who had eaten the canary is perhaps an unfortunate cliché, but certainly it applied. “The Rosicrucians told me to build a shack on a certain place, paint it red, and at eight in the morning you’d come to me. You’re a little late, by the way. What did they tell you?”

  “To look—to look for the red shack. I had to go around the island and back, so I wouldn’t miss it. It was farther south than I’d thought. The directions weren’t very specific.” Myron took another step toward the edge.

  “Well, mine were very precise. You should be more careful, Myron, of whom you trust; you have been betrayed. Oh, and surely you don’t think you can thwart me this way again,” Marcus said. He was really enjoying himself. “Look over the edge, you’ll see Benson in a boat. He’s spent the last fifteen hours laying nets out, which has been very difficult because of the wind and the waves last night, and because the water is particularly deep just there. But as you can see, after wasting far too many nets, he has finally got the area below covered. If you leap off, you’ll find yourself tangled in them, and he will draw you out and kill you.”

  “Benson left you, he was working for Mignon Emanuel,” Myron said.

  “I know,” said Marcus. “That’s why he’s down there, doing the wet work, while we stayed up here high and dry.” The lion, of course, hated water.

  The animals laughed sycophantically at the thought of Benson’s discomfort. Their laughs, though, were terrible animal grunts and squeals. The hippopotamus’s laugh was especially bad. You will probably never hear a hippopotamus laugh, but, if you ever have the chance to, don’t. And then Marcus raised his hand, and the animals all took a step forward.

  Myron had risked a glance over the cliff. It was much lower here, probably under a hundred feet, but still a dizzying height. He could see Benson below in a small boat in the center of a sea of nets like a spider waiting in its web. “What do you want from me?” Myron said, turning his attention back.

  “Mignon Emanuel wanted to use you as a false messiah, to rally suckers around. The gorilla wanted to use you as an insideman. My desires are far simpler. I want to kill you and see if you really are a wooly mammoth the way some people say. Then I will skin you, sew up your skin with sawdust, and put it on display at my coronation.”

  From the windswept caves of the cliff below came the echoed cawing of sheltering seagulls. It all sounded so familiar.

  “Aren’t you afraid,” Myron tried, “that I will turn into a mammoth and kill all of you?”

  “It is unlikely you know how to turn into anything, but even if you managed, lion plus hippo plus ermine plus wildebeest can easily defeat a mammoth. The ermine will crawl up inside the trunk, we have the plan all worked out, and it is quite a brutal death. I’ve been studying your moves, Myron, and I have carefully neutralized all your tricks. You can’t leap to safety. Your eldritch words of power have no effect on anyone as old as we. There is no doomsday
device to be seen. No cavalry will come to the rescue; the navy is hidden below the ground, and your red panda behind the rocks over there will meet her death once we are done with you.”

  Alice heard that part, all right. She was probably missing the pistol, left behind in her pickup, sixty-five miles away.

  “I suppose I should thank you, really, for removing Mignon Emanuel from the board,” he continued. “She was the only one I considered a true rival. My resources are great enough now, with my ermine and all, that eliminating Evelyn should be child’s play, once I get rid of this last loose end. The embarrassment of the one that got away. These phrases describe you, Myron.”

  At a signal they all stepped forward again. Myron could only take a microstep backwards. He could feel the soft volcanic rock crumbling beneath his foot. He was out of tricks.

  The ermine twitched its black-tipped tail in anticipation of blood. Myron recognized the feeling of him from Chicago.

  “Did it ever occur to you that I might be the chosen one?” Myron asked.

  “Surely, Myron, not even you are naïve enough to believe Mignon Emanuel’s confidence games.”

  Myron sighed. “You know, the first time I stared down my own death, I was really scared. The second time I cried. But by now, it’s just something that happens to me. I guess I just don’t—wait a minute.”

  Marcus looked like he had quite been enjoying the speech. “Wait a minute? Why, what’s wrong?”

  “I just remembered something,” Myron said. “I should have thought of this days ago.” And he leapt off the cliff. There was a clap of thunder.

  “Damn him!” Marcus cried, and after a moment’s hesitation raced to the edge to peer over. He wanted to make sure, doubtless, that Benson had netted the troublesome boy and was dragging him into a position where he could somehow turn into a bison and gore him. But when he looked down all he saw was bubbling water and the shredded remains of a few nets. Benson and his boat were nowhere to be seen.