Immortal From Hell

by Gene Doucette

  Then there was the bad version, which I didn’t really come to grip with until the last few weeks of the Fair. That was when I saw my old friend Herman.

  As I think I’ve mentioned before, I have a real problem with faces.

  I’m guessing this is a problem unique to me. I’ve met so very many people in this life that almost everyone looks sort of familiar. People with more of the usual lifespan probably don’t have this big of a problem, I’m guessing.

  (The exception—and I apologize if this makes me sound like a pig but it’s still true—is women I find particularly attractive. They all manage to look distinctive.)

  So, when I saw Herman, I wasn’t sure at first if I was looking at who I thought I was looking at.

  I was on the Midway at the time. This was the part of the fairgrounds dedicated to the traditional amusement park kind of stuff, which were admittedly a lot more limited in those days. Among other things, it was where the Ferris Wheel stood. (This was the first one ever built, and it was gargantuan and terrifying. It fit something like thirty people per car and felt like it was going to fall over every time the wind blew. I loved it.) I don’t remember why it was called the Midway, but I do recall that after that section of the park was claimed by an athletic field, the team that played on the field was nicknamed the Monsters of the Midway. They might still be called that—not sure if the field still is—even though I’m the only one alive for whom that appellation makes any sense.

  Anyway. I was walking along the Midway when I spotted a man accompanying two women. He had on a suit and a hat, and wore a big bushy mustache.

  None of that was unique. We all wore suits and hats even though it was the middle of summer because that was what men did at this stage in history, even when some of us remembered with great fondness how comfortable a chiton was in the heat. A lot of us also wore big bushy mustaches. But it was the combination of these things, along with the roundness of his face and, perhaps, just his general stature, that left me nearly convinced that this was Herman.

  We were walking toward one another, but they were coming along slowly, so I had plenty of time to step off the path, collect myself, and do the math. This is something I usually have to do after stumbling upon a familiar face in an unfamiliar place, because the odds are usually in favor of the person I think I see being long dead from old age. But I had last laid eyes on Herman in London in 1888—it had only been five years. Also, he was an American, and I was standing in America. I didn’t recall him discussing Chicago, but all the same the odds that this was him remained incredibly unlikely rather than literally impossible.

  After that was settled, I had to decide what I was going to do about this. He was the reason I’d fled London in the first place, and was possibly also indirectly responsible for a number of murdered women, a couple of whom were friends. I couldn’t involve the police because nobody would believe me, so the only remaining options were to flee town and start over again, or hope he didn’t notice me and pretend I didn’t notice him either, and go about my day.

  There was a third option, which was to kill him where he stood, but, annoyingly, it was no longer commonplace to walk about with a murder weapon all the time. (I miss swords.) I could have done it with my hands, but it would have taken a lot more effort. Plus, the lighting on the fairgrounds made murder really challenging to pull off without drawing a crowd.

  I was in favor of pretending this never happened, which would have meant turning around and walking away from the man I thought was Herman, so that later I could convince myself I’d been mistaken all along.

  I tried it, for about ten steps, before deciding it wasn’t going to work. I simply had to know for sure. So, I turned back around.

  Within ten feet, I was positive I had the right man. He and the women he was with were laughing at a joke he’d just told, and all I could do was stand in the middle of the path and stare as they approached.

  It soon became obvious that I was staring.

  “Hello, sir,” he said, as the three of them stopped in front of me. “Can I help?”

  “Herman,” I said.

  He blinked a couple of times, but it wasn’t in recognition.

  “I’m sorry, you must have me mistaken. Excuse us?”

  One of the girls laughed again, and called him Henry. Then they stepped around me and continued down the path, while I tried to process what had just happened.

  I could have sworn it was him. Was I really that wrong, or was he pretending he didn’t know who I was because of the women?

  It was substantially more likely that I had the wrong guy. The timbre of his voice did seem a little off, and his mannerisms slightly different… but I couldn’t shake the idea that I had the right guy.

  Without being entirely cognizant that I was doing so, I began following them.

  It ended up being the kind of long walk that should have made it impossible for the people I was following to not notice that I was doing so, except that they were too caught up talking about the fair and acting out some sort of three-way flirt to look over their shoulders.

  They left the park by way of 63rd St. and just kept on going. It was a good three miles, the sort of distance people were okay with back before the invention of sidewalks that did the walking for you.

  Their destination was a three-story corner building, with a shop on the ground floor. The other two floors looked residential. I couldn’t tell much more than that without entering, which I wasn’t going to do. They would definitely know I was following them if I tried that.

  By then it was getting late, and I was standing in Englewood, which wasn’t particularly near the flat I was renting in Chinatown. I hailed a cab, and tried to put Herman/Henry out of my mind.

  In this, I failed completely, because the next morning I was back out in front of the building. It looked like I was going to end my summer obsessing over this.

  It was late morning by the time they emerged, this time hailing a cab at the corner. That should have been the end of it (since I was without a cab of my own) except the traffic on 63rd was scarcely faster than traveling on foot, so I didn’t have any trouble keeping up. Even if this wasn’t the case, it looked as if they meant to return to the fair, so I knew which direction to go and where to hunt for them.

  At the fair, once I figured out that they preferred the attractions on the Midway to the rest of the exhibition, following them around without being detected became almost mundane. Espionage of this variety is something I’ve gotten a lot of training on, and am modestly good at; once I had their patterns down, keeping track without risking exposure wasn’t tough.

  That was assuming the people I tailed had no counter-espionage experience. The fact that they stuck to predicable patterns should have been an indication that no, they did not, but this turned out to be an overly generous assumption on my part.

  I didn’t really know why I was bothering, but once I decided to start following them around, I couldn’t seem to stop. There was no endgame. Maybe I was holding onto the hope that Henry would eventually break down and admit to being the very same Herman who tried to pin the Ripper murders on me, but even if that were to happen I didn’t know what to do after.

  It was something I couldn’t admit at the time, but I think I probably missed him, in some weird way. He did convince me to go to America (I mean, before I was forced to flee to the States as a consequence of his actions) and aside from the difficulties that were New York City, I’d found the place to be exactly as exciting as he’d said. So I sort of owed him for that—in a good way—and I was a little sad I couldn’t talk to the man I thought he was about this country, because of the man he turned out to be.

  I followed them for four days before their pattern changed. First, on the morning of day five, nobody came out of the building at all. This was a Sunday, but the fair was open on Sunday so unless there was a religious element to their threesome, the day of the week didn’t offer much of an explanation. The following day, they didn’t emer
ge all at once. At around the same time the three typically showed up on the street, Henry came out alone. Whether the women were lagging, decided not to attend the fair, or there was some other explanation, I couldn’t say, because I decided I would follow him. Probably, they would exit later, and meet up with him.

  Following only him was slightly more of a challenge, since he had nobody by his side to serve as a distraction. However—after stopping in the store on the ground level (it was a drug store)—he went to the fair, as before, and on foot. I was able to put more distance between us as a consequence.

  The next change in pattern was that he went to the White City proper, instead of the amusements promenade. The White City was the part of the World’s Fair dedicated to the country-specific pavilions, and the technology displays. The part of the fair I preferred, essentially, but which he and the women didn’t evidently care to see.

  For half a day, we went through different country pavilions, as Henry showed at least nominal interest in the dioramas. He looked more like someone trying to pretend he was interested than someone who actually was, which was when I thought for the first time that he knew he was being followed. Perhaps we had reached the point where he’d confess to being Herman.

  I lost him in Cairo.

  The Streets of Cairo was one of the most popular spots in the fair. I personally found it a little hokey, and a good indication of the fake foreignness that was always popular with ‘civilized’ people. They served mocha drinks, and had fake mummies, and exotic dancers the likes of which I never actually saw in Egypt in any of the three or four times I was there. It was no different than the artificial authenticity that made up the whole White City, but somehow in Cairo it bothered me more.

  Anyway, because it was so popular, it was harder to tail Henry through it. Obviously, because I lost track of him.

  Wandering around, trying not to look too much like a guy who was just tailing another guy, I ended up in a fake mausoleum with a fake sarcophagus.

  “He does know you’re following him,” a man whispered in my ear. He was standing directly behind me, which was something I might have noticed had the place not been so crowded. “He’s no simpleton. Not like the last one.”

  I turned, and there was Herman.

  As soon as I was face-to-face with the man, I realized that Henry was indeed a different fellow. But the differences were subtle enough that mistaking one for the other was something anybody could have done.

  “Hello, Jack,” he said. “Happy to see you made it out of London all right. You look healthy!”

  “Are you happy to see me?” I asked. My heart rate tripled, as my fight-or-flight instinct pushed the needle firmly to the fight side of the dial. I started assessing the surroundings, to see if I could get away with killing him right there. Since there was just one exit, the only chance I had was if the sarcophagus was real enough to be opened, and was also empty. Otherwise, I’d have to get him out into the open somewhere.

  I wondered how he felt about taking a boat onto Lake Michigan with me.

  “Of course I am!” he said. “What kind of friend would I be otherwise? Come on, let’s go find a proper meal, we have so much to talk about.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m considering wringing your neck.”

  “Well! I’m sure a number of people feel that way, in a place like this. Such a funereal atmosphere. But, I mean it, I intend no harm, and I feel as if we simply must catch up. You’ve spooked my associate quite enough, wouldn’t you say? It’ll be a public place, but if you want to wring my neck later, I understand entirely.”

  When I still didn’t move—honestly, I was counting witnesses—he laughed and clapped me on the shoulder.

  “I’ll tell you what, Jackie, there’s a German restaurant on Adams Street, can’t miss it. I’ll be at a table in the back, tonight, holding a seat for you. Why don’t you get yourself together, gather whatever implements of violence you’d like to have on hand, and we can get a pint and talk this whole thing out like civilized men.”

  I found him exactly where he said he would be, five hours later: at a table at the back of the restaurant.

  It was really more of a pub than a restaurant, but the distinction was pretty muddled back then, before people concerned themselves so much with things like legal drinking age, which wasn’t invented until around the time child labor laws were invented. (I’m guessing.) I could probably make a compelling argument that the reason I spent so very much time in bars and pubs over the centuries was because that was the only place to get a meal when you didn’t have a proper home to go to. It wouldn’t be accurate, but I could make the claim.

  “There you are!” Herman greeted once I stepped into view. The pub had too much tobacco smoke, too many people, and not enough lights. At the table in the back, I probably could have murdered him and left, and nobody would have been wise to it for a good hour or two. Oddly, I thought this choice of venues was a deliberate gesture of hospitality on his part.

  I took a seat in front of a pint of ale.

  “I ordered it an hour ago,” he said, “to give it time to reach room temperature. Half of the places in this county chill their beer, which is a special sort of madness, I think.”

  “You talk of it as if you weren’t born here,” I said. I tried the beer. The German pavilion’s draught was better, but this was okay.

  “And you talk as if you were,” he said. “I notice your accent has undergone some sort of transformation. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were born to an Irish wench fresh off the boat in New York. You’re quite the chameleon, my friend.”

  “Let’s dispense with the friend talk, Herman. You tried to pin the Whitechapel murders on me, and that’s frankly not the thing I expect from friends.”

  “Only because you had me in a corner! We both know you were preparing to attach my name to them.”

  “Yes, but you were actually responsible. Do you see the distinction?”

  “A minor difference,” he huffed, taking a sip of his own beer.

  “Is Herman even your name?”

  “Oh excellent, good question. Herman is not my real name. It belongs to the man you’ve been following.”

  “He says his name is Henry.”

  “It is now. He changed it.”

  “When I called him Herman he acted as if he’d never heard the name before.”

  “Well, he’s a decent actor. A terrible person, but…let me put it this way: Henry’s something of a professional confidence man. Which is really interesting because he’s also an actual medical doctor, and one almost never sees those two things together. Certainly, a man might exaggerate his credentials, for example, by lying about going to medical school. But he actually did go, albeit as Herman Mudgett, and not Henry Holmes. Not that this in any way stops him from calling himself Dr. Holmes. Honestly, I wonder why anyone bothers to actually attend medical school, when one merely needs put ‘doctor’ in front of their name and hang a shingle.”

  “All right, let me see how much of this I’ve figured out,” I said. “You knew this Henry person, realized you bore something of a resemblance to him, and then… what? Pretended to be a doctor yourself?”

  “I wanted to travel overseas, and Henry, as I said, is more of a confidence man than a doctor, but that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily an exceptional confidence man. There was a decent amount of legal issues attached to the name Herman Mudgett, and so I proposed two solutions. First, he should change his name. Second, to prevent anyone from connecting the old name to the new, I could take on the old name and escape the colonies with it for long enough to allow him to establish the new persona. That’s how I ended up traveling London under his name, ducking his creditors.”

  “And pretending to be a doctor. I’m assuming you’re not really one.”

  He waved his hand in the air, a dismissive gesture.

  “It hardly matters, as I said. I think you and I had more than one conversation about the shabby condition of the medica
l sciences. But if you needed to understand why my focus was more on the infirmity of the mind than the infirmity of the body, now you do. I could pass more easily that way. Although I did participate in a number of surgeries, and frankly nobody noticed. Appalling. As for Herman’s family background and finances, all of that was true. While I traveled Europe with his name, those finances came very much in handy.”

  “I see. And then I show up out of nowhere and call him by his old name.”

  “He was left to assume that you were either there to collect money for one of his old debts, or you were someone who knew me as him. He reached out to me in the hopes that it was the latter and not the former, as would anyone who’d gone through so much trouble to distance himself from his old name.”

  I nodded, and drank some more. It was a ridiculous story, but I believed it anyway.

  “Does he know you’re a lunatic?” I asked.

  “Well, that’s just unnecessarily combative. I thought we were past that.”

  “We’re not getting past that, no.”

  He laughed.

  “I’m no lunatic, Jack. I’m in perfect retention of my faculties. And I’m rather insulted! I’ve met actual lunatics, as you know better than most anybody. What I am is a student of the human condition, that’s all! Sometimes, given my chosen field of study—murderers—this requires that I make good company of unsavory types. If anything, my lack of inhibition in doing so marks me as a true man of science.”

  “That’s a convenient rationalization,” I said.

  He ignored the point.

  “So, to your question: Henry thinks I’m no less a lunatic than he himself is,” he said, “which is fair, only because I would argue he is not a lunatic either. Let’s say he’s quite the engaging subject for my continued studies.”

  “Ohh, you’ve adopted another one to do your killing for you, I understand. I can’t wait until your studies are complete and you look to publish the results. I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone being hanged before for a medical thesis.”