“Are you…worried?” I asked. She’d been a lot more sarcastic and irritated than usual for the past day, but I attributed that to the thing about keeping things from her. Maybe it was more complicated.
“Of course I am,” she said.
“About me? I don’t even feel sick. And like you said, we can always just go back to the island again, if things get bad. But we’re fine. You’ve got my back, and I have yours. And Chicago is where I think we’re supposed to be.”
“I no longer feel heading to the island is necessarily the best approach. I’d just like to get to Chicago by plane instead of rowboat. And I’m not worried about you.”
She hesitated. I didn’t say anything, because it looked like there was something else on her mind.
“I need to show you something,” she said.
“Okay.”
“But I want you to understand that this doesn’t change anything. I feel fine.”
Now I was the one worried.
She took off the light jacket she’d been wearing since the boat, and rolled up her sleeve.
“Touch my arm,” she said. “Right there.”
She directed my fingers to a small spot on her left arm. I did. It was tacky.
“So you need a shower,” I said.
“In that one spot?”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“I think it does. Whatever killed the incubus, and Thelonius’s werewolf friend, and the others…I think I have it too.”
Transcript (2)
TRANSCRIPTION OF SECOND INTERVIEW WITH PATIENT ‘EVE’, CONDUCTED BY DR. LEW CAMBRIDGE, DAY FIFTY-THREE
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: I’d like to play a recording for you. I think it could help with your memory.
* * *
EVE: All right.
* * *
(Dr. Cambridge plays a fifteen second snippet of Eve, speaking in another language.)
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: Do you recall saying any of that?
* * *
EVE: Is that me?
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: It is. Don’t you recognize yourself?
* * *
(Eve laughs)
* * *
EVE: It’s the first time I have ever been recorded, that I am aware of. The voice sounds strange to my ears.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: Do the words sound strange?
* * *
EVE: No, those are familiar.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: What language was that?
* * *
EVE: That was what’s now called Elamite. It’s the same language as what is written on this wall above my head.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: What were you saying?
* * *
EVE: It’s part of a ceremony. Who wrote this? On the wall. I assumed it was Adam, because to my understanding nobody else could have, but I now question this assumption.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: It was written by someone else. I don’t think she knew what it meant either. Adam identified the tongue, but said that he couldn’t read it, because he never learned the written form of the language.
* * *
EVE: I understand. He was a farmer then. We didn’t teach farmers to read. Who was this someone else, that wrote Elamite but couldn’t understand Elamite?
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: She was a prophet. Remarkable person. She was my patient, until she died.
* * *
EVE: I see. I think these words were how I came here. That must have been why she wrote it. In my state…
* * *
(Eve concentrates, in silence for several seconds.)
* * *
EVE: Yes. I was looking for Urr. I recall this.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: And Urr is…
* * *
EVE: Adam. His older name is Urr. I was trying to find him. I don’t know why, now, but I remember wanting to do this.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: You said before that it was because he was in danger.
* * *
EVE: I was in the veil, looking for him, and evidently feverish…and these words drew me to this place. Where he was.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: The prophet wanted to help you find your way.
* * *
EVE: Yes, I understand this now. But why?
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: If you’ve met a prophet, you already know getting a straight answer on any kind of question is almost impossible. If it helps, Adam asked the same question. She was her customarily opaque self.
* * *
EVE: Yes. They’re very annoying. It’s why we usually kill prophets.
* * *
(Cambridge coughs for several seconds.)
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: Can you…um…tell me about this place? Elam, yes? Where Elamite came from?
* * *
EVE: It was called Haltamti then. I don’t know where the name Elam came from, but history has a habit of retitling places at whim. There was a city there, called Susiana. The largest city in the world.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: For the time.
* * *
EVE: I suppose. It was a matriarchal culture. It was founded before I ever happened upon the city, but when I arrived it was an easy enough matter to assume the role of their god-priestess. I find this is often the easiest way to interact with cultures. Or it was, back when there were gods.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: And the ritual was for you? On the wall.
* * *
EVE: It was for their god-priestess, and so for my stay in Susiana it was for me. The ritual written on the wall was chanted aloud by the acolytes, sometimes for several days. The functional intent was to coax me from the temple, to hold a day of blessings. For the crops, and…
* * *
(Eve falls silent for several seconds.)
* * *
EVE: Yes. The crops and fertility and so forth. Things ended poorly in Susiana. I don’t fully engage with many societies any longer. Hardly ever, now. The inevitable descent is difficult to witness.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: It ended poorly in what way?
* * *
EVE: The usual way. As I said. Every society in the world of men eventually falls prey to war, rape, murder. This is what Urr built.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: You blame him?
* * *
EVE: Because he is to blame.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: His actions brought down the city of Susiana?
* * *
EVE: No. No, you misunderstand. His crime was more…originative. But there was a priest…
* * *
(Eve trails off, lost in thought.)
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: You were saying? A priest?
* * *
EVE: Where is Adam going? Do you know? Has this been shared?
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: I’m told he’s trying to book passage to America. I don’t know which part.
* * *
EVE: Is it Chicago?
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: I don’t know, as I said, but why did you suggest Chicago?
* * *
EVE: I’m not certain why. It came to mind first. But if that’s where he’s going, he cannot. Anywhere else, but not Chicago.
8
It took a couple of days to get out of England.
After settling in and verifying that Mirella wasn’t on the actual verge of death, we spent the better part of a day in the nearest pub. This was ostensibly done in order to map out our journey from the island to England, in order to identify the moment in which she might have become infected. The pub seemed like the best place to have that conversation.
It was an impossible exercise, of course. We knew nothing about this disease, and outside of what we’d picked up from movies and televised medical dramas, we barely anything about disease in general, never mind how it might
be transmitted. (That last part was mostly me. When you’ve spent most of your life being told that an illness in the village means the gods are angry, getting up-to-speed on germ theory takes some doing.) Our conclusion—after much alcohol—was that there was no way to pinpoint the exact moment of acquisition, especially given the last non-human we came into contact with was Thelonius, and he wasn’t sick.
A brief sidebar took place as we considered if perhaps he was a Typhoid Mary of some sort. It seemed like a promising pursuit insofar as the last non-human he was in contact with died of the thing. I was especially fond of this theory because I personally remembered Typhoid Mary, having been in the States (but having left New York City) around the same time she was in the news.
But once we broached this idea—that Thelonius was carrying it—we didn’t know what to do, other than to find another non-human and see if he could infect them too by his presence.
After enough ale and British pub food, which I actually like a lot, we dropped the matter entirely, and decided it would be more fun to keep drinking and pretend Mirella wasn’t dying.
Then Thelonius told a lot of really long stories, built up an audience, and created an inexplicable economic spike the pub’s bookkeeper would never understand. We ended up getting all of our meals and drinks comped by the tender, which is probably the best thing about drinking with an imp.
Somewhere in the downtime between his long-winded bits of fancy, I got the idea to ask Thelonius if any of the prophesies he was carrying about in his head had something to say about Mirella’s life or death.
He didn’t answer right away, which I took to be a bad sign.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said, with reticence. An imp being reticent was an even bigger bad sign. “I’ll re-evaluate, and let you know.”
I was pretty sure he was lying, and also pretty sure I wasn’t going to get a better answer. I made a note to revisit the question later, the next time I was out of earshot of Mirella, who had already indicated that her solution to this problem was to pretend there was no problem. and would be expecting both of us to follow suit.
The next morning, back at the inn again and cursing the same ale and pub food I’d been celebrating just a few hours earlier, I found that a note had been slid under our door. It instructed us to be outside the inn at four P.M., where a car would be waiting.
And so it was. The car—driven by an extremely truculent fellow who only knew yessir and no-sir—picked us up promptly at four and took us to Heathrow…or rather, to a private hangar near Heathrow.
“This would explain why no-one has provided us with airline tickets,” Mirella said, as the car pulled up to a rolling staircase.
It was a private jet.
“Nice,” I said. “I used to own one of those.”
Thelonius looked inquisitive.
“Did you crash it?” he asked. “Donate it to an orphanage? Parachute into the Andes as it was being shot at from the ground?”
“No, but those all sound much better than what actually happened,” I said. “It was sold along with the rest of my estate when I died.”
“Aha! You died!”
“Only on paper, and I’m not going to tell you that story either.”
We were met at the door by the captain and crew, who notified us that they were all very, very happy to have us aboard, and also that takeoff wasn’t until Midnight, and would we like to make ourselves comfortable and have a drink?
Things got a little weird once we made it into the cabin.
“As you said, you used to own one of these,” Mirella said, looking around and sniffing. “I would swear this is that very plane.”
“I have the same feeling,” I said.
There were a couple of minor changes, but they weren’t profound enough to argue that it was a different plane. Chief among them was that someone had affixed much more thoroughly effective shades on the windows to prevent even the slightest chance of sunlight getting through. I could sympathize. More than once, I’d woken up on the couch/bed with sunlight hitting my face through a crack in one of the windows. (It was uniquely the case on an airplane that there could be no place to put the bed where it wouldn’t be sun-facing part of the time.) But for the rest, the chairs and desk were the same, as was the aforementioned couch/bed.
“Your Path would appear to be exceptionally well-funded,” Mirella said. “I was expecting a slow trawler to the States, and that was optimally.”
“I kind of was too. But, I mean, I am the founder and all. This is how it’s supposed to work.”
“But you didn’t expect it to.”
“Not really, no.”
A day earlier, waiting for Oscar to give us our travel instructions, I was thinking I should have left some of my money to the Path before I pretend-died. I imagine getting that done would have been more difficult than it was worth, and I was under something of a time constraint, but it would have still been a decent idea.
Now, it looked as if that sentiment was unnecessary. The Path’s coffers appeared to be full.
The bar was also full, which I would have been much happier about were I not still feeling the effects of the prior night’s ale.
There was also a bottle of French champagne on ice. I was pretty sure the champagne was a message of some kind, but I couldn’t figure out what that message could possibly be.
The hostess—the flight had a hostess, which was super—opened the bottle without prompting, and passed a plastic cup to each of us.
“I was told to open this right away,” she said. “Are we celebrating something?”
“It would appear,” Mirella said. “Who told you to open it?”
The hostess laughed, as if this was a silly question.
“My dear, life is a celebration!” Thelonius said, raising his glass. Then he dove into a story that sounded like it was going to last all the way to the States.
It was going to be a long flight.
My first direct experience with the United States was New York City, at the tail end of 1888. I didn’t choose the city—it was the only option. I arrived as a deck hand on a cargo ship, and at that time most cargo ships made port in New York Harbor.
Honestly, on arrival I wasn’t terribly impressed with New York, or with the country surrounding it, and I remained underwhelmed for the first few years that followed, right up until I left the city.
In a lot of ways, if you see one city, you’ve seen them all. It’s true that New York has since evolved into something larger and louder and somewhat more interesting, but in 1888 it wasn’t that big a deal. It had all the same smells and the same division of labor, the same diseases and the same ethnic biases. There were admittedly fewer titled nobles, but that wasn’t obvious from the bottom rung.
All cities started out as marketplaces that just got out of hand. The ones that lasted had certain geographical advantages over other areas, like having multiple paths for goods and decent weather most of the year. They also had to be easy to defend and difficult to attack, although that requirement was barely the case by the time we were calling New York City a city.
So I could understand how New York became important, and why my cargo ship headed to it, in the same way I understood Carthage, Tbilisi, Constantinople, Athens, Cairo, London, and so on. What I didn’t get was why New York won this stateside economic lottery and not one of the other emerging cities on the continent. It seemed like Boston had a better claim, unless it was too cold, or the harbor too small. If not Boston, maybe someplace in Virginia.
I’d expected New York to feel like someplace new, and it didn’t. It felt a lot like London, which I’d just left after residing there for (off-and-on) close to a century. Sure, the population in the States was more diverse, and the class distinctions weren’t nearly as well-established, and it felt a bit roomier, but it was just as filthy, the working poor were just as poor, and the taverns were just as violent.
In that sense, then, I felt right at home.
I didn’t com
e in through normal immigration channels—Castle Island in those days; Ellis Island wasn’t a thing yet—which is another way to say I was there illegally. I had paid the captain of the cargo ship to get me there, and then I spent my time on-board learning how to pass as a crew member once. Then, once we docked, I just hopped off the boat one night and walked away.
Immortal From Hell Page 15
