Immortal Lycanthropes by Hal Johnson & Teagan White

Author:Hal Johnson & Teagan White
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Young Adult
ISBN: 9780547751962
Publisher: Clarion Books
Published: 2012-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

3.

Oliver showed Myron all the best places to hide, the coal chute, the drop ceiling, showed him the secret passage from behind the orchids to the lounge, and the one banister you probably should not slide on. “I know every inch of this building, I know mysterious places no one else has ever been, probably,” Oliver explained. In one bathroom the tub had feet. Myron was still woozy, so they spent a great portion of the day watching the troops go through their paces on the obstacle course. They were middle-aged, so it was not so easy to whip them into fighting shape, but they were trying. At night, in the kitchen, Oliver boiled water in an electric kettle and brought down packets of instant oatmeal.

“You may not want to watch this,” Oliver said. “I like my oatmeal really thick, and it grosses some people out. I mean really, really thick.”

Myron peeked over at what he was stirring in the bowl. “That’s not too bad,” he said, “that’s only a little bit thicker than I would make it.” Then Oliver dumped another packet of oatmeal into the mix. So that happened.

Then they rode back and forth on the rolling ladders in the library. Myron found a handsome set of uniform editions of the complete works of H. Rider Haggard and another of the complete works of Jules Verne, and he took a couple of volumes up to his tower, where he read, at last, until he fell asleep. Every day went more or less like that. Oliver was always around, and, when he slunk off on his own business, Myron returned to his tower room. Outside were a hundred and thirty-three men, but in the long days in the big house they seemed miles away. Sometimes when Myron and Oliver went to the kitchen to swipe cold cuts, one of the men would be there, too, fixing food, and he would explain things about anatomy that Myron could not follow.

On many evenings, Mignon Emanuel would assign Oliver some menial and arduous task and then call Myron into her office and, while Florence paced ceaselessly behind them, give him lessons in the hidden patterns that underlay, as she called it, the “phenomenal world.” They covered the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence; the dangers of confirmation bias; Zipf’s law; and some basic predicate logic. These evenings Myron would take a problem set to the tower, to finish before the next lesson. In some ways, this labor could be boring and frustrating, but it was also exciting. He was learning forbidden lore. He also didn’t want to disappoint Mignon Emanuel, for reasons he would have been hard-pressed to explain. But the lessons caused some awkwardness, too, for Oliver resented them, and Mrs. Wangenstein, for reasons of her own, expressed on several occasions her disapproval of learning outside a “sanctioned school environment.”

A couple of times a week there would be a big dinner, prepared by the recruits, and the five housemates would sit at the huge dining-room table.

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