Immortal Lycanthropes - By Hal Johnson Page 0,61
find Gloria. At a bowling alley, passed out in a booth near the back. She was wearing a powder blue tracksuit, with a unicorn on the top. Her shoes were not regulation. Half a cigarette had smoldered out in her hand. As Myron slid in across from her, Gloria’s head snapped up.
“Hello,” he said.
Gloria said nothing.
“I want to go to the West Coast to meet the Rosicrucians,” Myron said. “But I have no idea where they are, and I have no way of getting there. Can you help me?”
“Follow me,” said Gloria, lighting another cigarette.
They went out a back door into an alley. “Tie your shoe,” Gloria said. She held the doomsday device and the compound bow while Myron bent over. When he straightened up again, Gloria was atop a fire escape, her clothes a little disheveled. She was looking at the cardboard tube with doomsday inside it.
“Actually, I don’t want this,” she said, and dropped it down to Myron, who caught it after some bobbling.
“Hey, come back with my bow,” Myron then said.
“No one knows where the Rosicrucians are,” Gloria said. “You should probably just ask the Nine Unknown Men.”
“They want to kill me,” Myron said.
“They do, huh? You’re better at this than I thought.”
“Give me back my bow.”
“I’ faith, Myron, I’m doing this to teach you a valuable lesson about the world. No one else is going to take the time to teach you these things—”
Myron shouted up, interrupting, “Mignon Emanuel gave me lessons all the time.”
“She did? Like what?”
“Like about confirmation bias.”
“What the devil is that?”
“That’s when you notice things that agree with what you already believe more often than things that contradict your beliefs.”
“I’ve never noticed anything of the sort. Anyway, she was just using you, I heard all about the conference. No one else—”
“Spenser taught me all about woodcraft. He taught me how to make a fire with a soda can, and how to build a shelter.”
“The moose taught you how to build a fire?”
“And he taught me all about the lycanthropes, and how there’s one of each species and everything.”
“No, I taught you that. I taught you that in Shoreditch.”
“Well, he taught me more, about the Time of Troubles, and who killed who.”
“That was all implicit in what I told you,” Gloria shouted down. “You could have pieced it together yourself.”
“And he told me about meeting you in Scotland.”
“I had no way of knowing you’d even be interested in that.”
“And he taught me how things always get worse.”
“I could have told you that! Did you think I couldn’t have told you that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Marry! I’ll show you what I know.” Gloria turned, up on the fire escape, from an old woman into a gorilla. Her clothes stretched out but stayed on the gorilla; they just fit poorly. A cigarette still dangled from her lips. She jumped down to the alleyway and then became a woman again. The tracksuit was bunched up at the knee and off kilter around the shoulders. “No Unknown Men, then,” she said. “Some of us have met the Rosicrucians, although there are only three that I know of still alive. The lion’s one, but he’s right out. There’s the ring-tailed lemur.”
“I strangled her unconscious, and then her house blew up. Also, I don’t think she likes me.”
“Her house blew up? You are better at this than I’d thought. Well, that leaves the coyote.”
“And you’ll tell me where the coyote is?”
“Oh, Myron, that’s not what I’m going to teach you. I’m going to teach you so much more. You’re going to learn life on the C.”
On the sea was not something Myron had expected to hear in Chicago, and he had a bout of excitement mixed with a minor panic attack that his knowledge of geography was totally kinked. But the C was for con.
“I would really prefer not to steal from anyone,” Myron objected.
“What about when you liberated that suit of clothes in Shoreditch?”
“I was going to freeze to death! I needed that suit of clothes, and it was an emergency!” Looking back, Myron wasn’t sure this was true. He had been awfully cavalier about the theft.
“Well, we’re not even going to steal anything at all. We’re going to persuade people to give us stuff. It’s the only way we’ll be able to find the Rosicrucians. And anyway, we’ll be like Robin Hood, or some romantic jewel thief. We’ll only steal from the rich, and they can afford it.”
Myron was skeptical, but desperate. “Only from the rich?”
“The haute bourgeoisie only.”
But