Read Online Immortal Lycanthropes by Hal Johnson, Teagan White - Free Book Online

that’s a little better.”
    No one sat next to Myron. One person tried, but he threw up and had to change seats. After an hour on the bus, Myron thought to look closer at the roll of twenties. He found that only the top bill was a twenty; the other eight were singles. When he got to New York he learned that Gloria had not paid for the ticket; she had somehow persuaded the driver that some guardian of Myron’s would pay double on arrival. While the driver called the station police, Myron ran away into the cold and shadowy night.

IV. Men, Known and Unknown

 
New men and new methods might do for other people: let those who would, worship the rising star; he at least would be faithful to the sun which had set.
Thomas Hughes,
Tom Brown’s School Days

1.
    I have written under a great host of pseudonyms in my day. Plentygood van Dutchhook, “Fortitude,” A. Frederick Smith, G. A. Henty, Lawrence Christopher Niffen, Frank Richards, Vivian Bloodmark, and, briefly, Wen Piao, are just a few of my more popular noms de plume; but I hit my greatest circulation ghostwriting for the Stratameyer syndicate. There I, or rather we, for I was one of a stable of anonymous ghostwriters, churned out a great many stories of young men and women solving mysteries, sometimes inventing things, and always, always triumphing over mild to severe adversity. For Stratameyer alone I must have written a dozen scenes of urchins forced to spend the night on the forbidding pavements of New York. But frankly, I was whitewashing the experience.
    Myron, who may have read a dozen such scenes, had no way of knowing that. He had of late spent many nights sleeping outside, and had thought he had become inured to its hardships. But that night in New York, huddled amid the steam oozing through a grating, was the longest, the coldest, and the most terrible night of his life. Gripping tightly the garbage bag he’d stashed the doomsday device in, he waited for doomsday. “I cannot die, I cannot die,” he muttered to himself, as he rocked back and forth. And then people came out of the dark and tried to prove him wrong.
    But the streetlight turned around and shone itself dead on Myron’s face. And so the people, their attempts were desultory.
    There is an old Islamic folktale about a man who, having burned in hell for what feels like a thousand years, is given a chance to speak to the living. “How many thousand years have I been dead?” he asks them; and they answer, “A day, and part of a day.” That was Myron’s night, it was a day and part of a day.
    The first thing he did when he woke up was eat three hot dogs, courtesy of Gloria’s money and a nearby street vendor, and the second thing was ask a dozen people for increasingly circuitous directions to the public library. There he looked up and read through several books of riddles. He wanted to take them out, but he didn’t think his tattered Pennsylvania library card would work. He wanted to stop and maybe read an adventure novel, but he knew he didn’t have time. He had work to do. He tried looking up, on the computer catalog, the Nine Unknown Men. Nothing came up, but Myron wasn’t sure he was doing it right—was
nine
spelled out or should it be a numeral? Finally he gave up and headed over to the dusty, disrepaired card catalog, kept in ancient wooden drawers in a strange corner of the third floor. He opened up the
N
drawer and flipped through. Sure enough,
Nine Unknown Men
had its own card, and when he touched it, he heard a tinkling sound. A tiny bell had been threaded through a hole punched in the card, and it sounded when the card moved.
    Suddenly an old man in a plaid suit and a porkpie hat appeared behind Myron. “You probably don’t want to mess around with those reprobates,” he said.
    Myron stared at him. His hackles were still. The man was not one of them, not a lycanthrope.
    “Here’s a card,” the man said, flipping one out from inside his plaid sleeve. The card read A.