Werewolves in Their Youth Read Online Free PDF

every page on microfilm. Plus I ran an extensive computer analysis on them.” He lowered his voice. “Your father is a very dangerous man. Look here.” He opened the notebook and shone the flashlight on a page where my father had written, “Myco. K. P889, L. 443, Tr. 23,” and then a date from three years earlier. The rest of the page was an illegible mishmash of numbers and abbreviations, some of them connected by sharp forceful arrows. The entry went on for several pages in the same fashion, cramped by haste and marginalia. I had seen plenty like it before, and I had no doubt that it described a process that could be used to get rid of something that grew between the tiles of your bathroom, or on the skin of your pears.
    “Did you see?” said Timothy.
    “See what?” I said.
    “Your father is Ant-Man,” he said gravely. “I’ve suspected it for a long time.” He unhooked the canteen from his belt. It was covered in green canvas and it sloshed as he waved it around. “This is the antidote.”
    He clamped the notebook under one arm and with his freed hand unscrewed the cap. I inclined my face slightly toward the mouth of the canteen, extended my fingers, and wafted the air above it toward my nostrils, delicately, as my father had shown me. I detected no odor this way, however. So he stuck it right under my nose.
    “It smells like Coke,” I said. “You put salt in it.” Timothy didn’t say anything, but I thought I saw disappointment flicker across his flashlit face. “What would happen if I drank it?” I added quickly, not wanting to let him down. There was something about the way Timothy played his game, the thoroughness with which he imagined, that never failed to entrance me.
    “That’s what I’d like to know,” said Timothy. “What if it said in this book, here, that your father has been giving you the secret formula to drink, like one drop at a time in your cereal, ever since you were a little baby? And what if that’s why you can talk to ants, too?”
    “What if,” I said. I had always felt sorry for Ant-Man, a superhero whose powers condemned him to the disappointing comradeship of bugs. “Timothy, what happened to you today? What did they say? Are you expelled?”
    “Shh,” said Timothy. The notebook went flapping to the ground as he reached for me, and drew me to him, and covered my mouth with his hand. His voice fell to a harsh whisper. “Someone’s coming.”
    I heard the sound of a car climbing the hill. A pair of headlights splashed light across the front of my house. I yanked my head free of his grasp.
    “It’s my dad!” I said. “Timothy, I need to get his stuff back—now!”
    “Quiet.” Timothy loosened his hold on me and brought the canteen up to my lips. I took a step away from him. “Quick,” he said. “Swallow this antidote. We don’t have time to test it. You’ll just have to take the risk.” He patted the dull black barrel of his rifle. “I’ve already loaded this baby with antidote darts.”
    From the distant front porch of our house I could hear our front door squeal on its hinges, and then the separate voices of my parents, saying hello. I tried to make sense of their murmurings, but we were too far away. After a while there was another long squeal of hinges, and the door slammed shut, and then our house creaked and resounded with the passage of feet along its hallway.
    “Oh, my God,” I said. “I think she let him go inside.”
    “Come on,” said Timothy. “Drink this.”
    “I’m not drinking that stuff,” I said.
    “All right, then,” he said. “ I’ll drink it.” He threw back his head and took a long swallow. Then he handed the canteen to me, and I drank down the rest of the antidote. It was sweet and sharp tasting, and bitter through and through. I felt pretty sure that it was just Coca-Cola mixed with good old sodium chloride, but then, after I got it down, I realized there must have been something else mixed into it—something that