Immortal From Hell

by Gene Doucette

  The bills looked to be about $200, which was a lot of money, more than I really needed at the moment. I took a handful, tossed a couple of balled up bills across the table for the house’s other jars—being a legate meant always paying forward—and closed the box again.

  “Thank her for keeping to the tradition. This is more than enough money for my current circumstance.”

  Lo translated.

  “What you need?” the woman repeated. She had a way of shouting almost everything, so it difficult at first to tell she was offering hospitality, and not demanding that I finish and go away.

  “I could use a good forger,” I said. “Also, I’d like to get the hell out of New York, because I’ve learned to hate this place. Are there other stations in this country? Maybe I’ll go there.”

  Lo and the woman talked amongst themselves for a good thirty seconds.

  “We know of only one other house such as this,” Lo said. “Her discussion of the subject is full of obvious exaggeration, so I can’t say for sure if there are actually more, or if she just has faith that it must be so.”

  “What is she saying?”

  “She claims the Path stretches to all corners of the world. I don’t know why she speaks this way. She knows the world has no corners. She imagines if you are a legate on the path, you can walk anywhere and find evidence of the Path ahead of you. But practically speaking, we have only ever been contacted by one house in America. If there are more, I suspect they will know. It also meets your needs, as it is not located in New York.”

  “Chicago,” the old woman said.

  “Yes,” Lo said. “I understand it’s a terrible place, but truly, I’m sure the same is said of this city. And, they are having a fair shortly.”

  And that was how the second city I ever visited in the United States ended up being Chicago. Lo was right about the fair, as I arrived in time to experience the Chicago World’s Fair, which was one of the highlights of the 19th century, so far as I was concerned. It was interesting enough that I decided to stay in the country for the next hundred-plus years.

  With the benefit of hindsight, it was also the moment when everything began to go wrong.

  Interlude (5)

  From the journal of Dr. Lew Cambridge

  Day fifty-five.

  * * *

  The patient is feeling well enough to walk around the hotel room. We’ve asked her to consider relocating to the hospital—conveying the needs of hotel management as gently as possible—but she didn’t seem at all interested in the idea.

  * * *

  It’s likely the words on the wall are giving her solace in some way. That would correspond to her unconscious reaction to our attempts to move her previously.

  * * *

  While declining to leave, she has offered to satisfy my curiosity regarding this veil. Her strength has been restored sufficiently that she was able to take “quick trips”, as she described it. And so, while I observed, she walked from one end of the room to the other, without traversing the distance between.

  * * *

  It was precisely as had been described by others witnessing the feat. She literally vanished, with the tiniest of audible ‘pop’ sounds, and then reappeared. (The ‘pop’ is, I believe, the air rushing to fill up the space she vacated. There was no such sound when she reappeared.) I asked her to walk across again, only without leaving. It took seven steps. Then I asked her to do it through the veil, and after, I asked how many steps it took.

  * * *

  She said six.

  * * *

  The difference in elapsed time between the control and test attempts was negligible enough to be accountable to slight variations in her pace, but the self-reported difference in the number of steps required was not at all trivial.

  * * *

  She was unable to fulfill my next request, which was to provide a more direct experience: taking me to the other side of this veil. This was something I’d been told was possible—by Adam—but while confirming that it was indeed within her power to do, she wasn’t strong enough yet. She was already drained, clearly, from the effort of going across the room alone.

  * * *

  In other good news/bad news, my non-serious plea for another test subject has been answered, twice. Gordana the succubus has checked herself into the hospital with the disease, as has an iffrit named Carlos.

  * * *

  I would love to tell them there’s hope for a cure, but the truth is, the fact that they are ill only makes it slightly more hopeful that the next one to acquire the disease will have a cure waiting. I’ll do all I can for them, of course, but the prognosis is not positive.

  * * *

  I’ve asked permission from the council to reach out to the mainland for medical expertise. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be an issue, as there are a number of off-island physicians I could touch base with, no permission needed. (The reason this is so, is obvious: they already know about the island because they’ve vacationed here.) However, my request would go to an outside lab, where the island’s secrecy can’t be guaranteed. We’ll see if the council continues to value privacy over life.

  Day fifty-seven.

  * * *

  Eve is gone.

  * * *

  I wasn’t in the room when it happened. According to Janet, she arrived to check on Eve, and found her pacing the floor. When Janet asked what was the matter, Eve said that she remembered. (Or that she “figured it out.” Janet’s recollection is foggy on the precise wording.)

  * * *

  Janet asked what it was Eve had figured out, and/or remembered. Eve stared at Janet, and said—and on this Janet claims her recall is precise: “he’ll do it, just for fun.”

  * * *

  Then, Eve stepped into her veil.

  * * *

  She hasn’t been seen since.

  * * *

  We have no idea who the “he” was that she spoke of, or what it is that he would do just for fun. I’d like to think, had I been there, I would have gotten more information from Eve, but perhaps not. Hopefully, she’ll turn up again soon, and explain herself.

  9

  Chicago was where I fell in love with America.

  Actually, that’s not entirely right. Chicago was where I understood America for the first time. More accurately still, it was where I understood what America was trying to be.

  To get to where I was, you have to come at this from the other end of history. Large societies had an approach to things that was refreshingly straightforward, while at the same time hugely unfair to the majority of the people who made the mistake of being born into families with no connections. What I’m talking about is basically a bastard form of feudalism. The modern versions in Europe and Asia were built on a structure established by the Romans and colored somewhat by early Greek and late Turkish and Muslim caliphate philosophies. Throw in the tribal god-king idea, and you’re just about there.

  Here’s how it worked. Fundamentally—and this is going to sound dumb the more basic I make it, but here goes—entire societies were built on the idea that a certain subset of people was just better than another subset of people. All the way back to Athens, you had people who were citizens, and people who were laborers or slaves. Citizens got to own all the land and had all of the money, and because they had a labor class beneath them, they also had all the time in the world to better educate themselves. That freedom meant they were the only ones who could read and write, so that was where the poets and the sculptors and the mathematicians all came from. Meanwhile, other people were building their houses for them, hunting for the food they ate, making their wine and—a lot of the time—fighting in the wars the ruling class started.

  That’s honestly how it worked. Everyone just agreed that so-and-so born to such-and-such a house was better than the so-and-so born three blocks away. Whether that first person was of royal blood (which, again, is just a holdover from every culture that considered its king an actual god), or happened to have fair
er skin, or whatever, they were just supposed to be inherently better.

  It wasn’t even a wealth thing, a lot of the time. The poorest nobleman was still generally considered a person of higher character—more noble, if you will—than the richest merchant of modest upbringing.

  But there weren’t any noblemen in America. It was the first country I’d been in where they flat-out discarded the concept and put the merchants in charge of everything.

  Well, all right, it didn’t actually end up working like that, which was why when I landed in New York City, initially I couldn’t see the difference between where I was and where I had been. America was still founded on the back of a laborer class—worse, really, because the country was built by slaves as much as by anybody. The early colonists also had a big leg up on most of the other British colonies, because the first thing they did was clean out almost the entire native population, which left a ton of space, some of it already cultivated for farming. And, every wave of immigration to the country renewed the notion that the newly arrived they was inferior to the existing we. Some things are just hardwired in human minds, and that impulse appears to be one of them.

  But they aspired to be more egalitarian than just about any of their government contemporaries. The cynic in me would argue here that all the founders did was establish royalty-by-other-means. The optimist sees a nation where that royalty can be acquired through one’s actions in life, rather than one’s accident of birth.

  I thought that was great. It took the Chicago fair—plus a shower or two, some sleep, a little sobriety, and affordable room-and-board—before I saw it that way, but once I did, I was hooked.

  The first thing I did, on reaching the city of Chicago (I took a train,) was touch base with the local Path way-station. They’d been sent word of my arrival, but I still had to go through a second lengthy vetting process under an implied threat of violence, because modern man isn’t good at embracing the idea of immortality. Like in New York, they were Chinese, and were just as confused to discover that I was not. (This was actually a larger hurdle to get over than the part where I happened to be a founding member of a 1000-year old secret society.)

  I had arrived with what was left of my last paycheck, plus the money given to me by the New York satellite. It was a decent sum, although I say that with the important caveat that I was measuring the value of my money according to how many bottles of liquor I could acquire with it, which is a fairly limited metric. I also had just-forged paperwork that provided me with my new American name: Stanley. This was possibly of greater value than the cash.

  What I needed from the Chicago office was whatever additional cash was owed from the founder box, and a place to stay. I also asked about—and was provided with—a way to exchange the British pounds sterling I’d absconded from England with, as I was under the impression these funds would translate into a decent pile of US dollars. Like, a hundred bottles at least.

  I considered requesting a letter of introduction, so that I might obtain gainful employment in a profession that didn’t require the lifting of heavy things and the fighting of Irishmen to the death behind bars. But by the time all of the pounds were converted and added to the dollars I arrived with, plus the dollars in my Chicago box, it turned out I was really quite well-to-do. Not wealthy enough to require no employment for the foreseeable future, but well enough to not have to concern myself with a job for a good year or so.

  So began what ended up being one of my favorite summers. I appreciate that this sounds like a tremendous exaggeration in the context of my lifespan, but…well, all right, it is kind of hyperbolic, especially given how the summer ended. I liked it, though, enough that I stayed in Chicago for the next fifty-odd years, and in America for the next hundred plus.

  All of that was because of the Chicago World’s Fair.

  That wasn’t its actual name. Its actual name was World’s Fair: Colombian Exposition. Also acceptable was Chicago Colombian Exposition and World Colombian Exposition. Every version with the word “Colombian” in it was a mouthful, basically, and probably half the people attending didn’t know the reason that word was even involved, which was why we mostly called it the World’s Fair and left it at that.

  There was a reason, though: it was the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus discovering the New World, for a very specific subset of European humans. I always thought this was sort of funny, because Columbus was most certainly not the first person to notice the continent, even if one excludes the people already living there. His claim as the person who discovered America was about as solid as Amerigo Vespucci’s claim that the place should be named after him because he was the one to draw the map. Basically, the country’s purported discovery and naming can both be traced to someone exaggerating on their résumés, which is just about perfect for this country.

  It’s possible my reaction to the fair (and the United States, by extension) could be because I was a whole lot more tired of everything Europe than I appreciated up to that moment. It’s also possible that the best way to enjoy anyplace, New World or not, was to have enough funds to not have to worry about where one is eating, drinking and sleeping from day to day.

  I want to explain how breathtaking the fair really was, but it’s hard to impart that, because everyone stopped having World Fairs, so for the most part the modern person doesn’t even know what I’m talking about.

  Try and imagine the Olympics, but for technology, during a carnival.

  That’s not really right, but it’s close.

  Let me try again: a technology convention, but it’s every kind of technology you can think of, and it’s taking place at the world’s best amusement park, and the park is in the middle of a city.

  Better.

  At the fair, I saw electrical light for the first time. I saw my first camera—although those had already been invented, I was just late to it—and posed for my first photo. (This ended up being a tremendous mistake.) I had my first bite of sweetened chocolate, rode the first Ferris Wheel, saw my first Wild West show and my first hula dance, and saw the sedentary culture of the future in the form of a walkway that did the walking for you. (It even had chairs.) I also decided I disliked a number of things for the first time, such as breakfast cereal and American football.

  The fair took place in Jackson Park, a decent-sized stretch of greenery on the shore of Lake Michigan, and a pretty good distance from what anyone would consider to be the proper downtown portion of the city.

  (Chicago is huge. It was one of the first major cities I came upon that didn’t take defensibility into consideration. The best you could say is, if Huns showed up to lay siege, they wouldn’t know where to start, because the city limits aren’t in any sense obvious. Los Angeles is just as bad.)

  What they did was, they built a bunch of temporary buildings, just for the fair, right in the middle of Jackson Park. So, to the list of things I’d never seen before I got there, we can add ‘temporary buildings’, because this is just a lunatic concept to me. I mean, I guess you could say I saw a lot of temporary buildings in my time, but they were either A: meant to be permanent, but someone made a drastic construction mistake, or B: a tent.

  These kind of were tents, I guess. Big rectangular ones. The facades were made of plaster and designed to look like stone, but beyond that I have no idea what went into putting them together and making sure they stayed that way for the whole summer.

  A lot of the buildings mimicked a style I’d been looking at for a thousand years already, in several parts of Europe. Lots of columns and what-not, and all of it painted bright white. Hosting a big fair to say, hey, America is totally different from Europe and then borrowing all of your architectural plans from Europe didn’t make a ton of sense to me, but I’m not an architect, so I don’t know. Maybe there are only so many ways to make a temporary building.

  Other countries had their own areas at the fair, which was probably pretty fantastic for all of the local American citizens who’d never been overseas them
selves, but for me it was amazing. It was like a This Is Your Life: Greatest Hits special. All the best things about these countries and none of the violence, disease, and war, essentially, along with a glimpse at a few countries I hadn’t been to yet, like Mexico and the Philippines.

  I spent a stupid amount of time at the German pavilion because they had beer there, and up to that point my experience with American beer hadn’t been all that positive. I remember on one occasion having partaken of too much and then stumbling on the Norway exhibit at twilight. The Norway exhibit included an authentic built-from-scratch Viking ship. I can’t begin to tell you how confusing that was. Were it not for the fact that the electrical lighting on the grounds was impossible to miss—and thus served as an ever-present reminder of what era I was in—I probably would have started speaking Old Norse just out of habit.

  The World’s Fair gave me everything I needed to understand America.

  There was the good version: a little artificial and with a tendency toward grandiosity, but trying very hard to be authentic about something.

  And there was the less-good version: a grand White City in which black people went almost entirely unrepresented, and the murder of Native Americans was re-enacted twice a day at the edge of the fairgrounds.