A Life Eternal

by Richard Ayre

  He said this as if he was talking about a chicken whose neck he had wrung for dinner.

  He didn’t seem to notice the look of disgust I gave him, but at the same time I remembered how much I had wanted to kill Bruno Gombos in my circus trailer. I sort of understood his callous, offhand opinions of the relative importance of human beings.

  He began talking again.

  ‘But as I cut his throat, so a startling revelation came to me. A sudden compunction if you like.

  ‘I wanted to pass it along. I wanted the infection to leave me. For some reason, as I stood staring down at his body, I just wanted it to stop. And the only way to make it stop was to pass it on to someone else.’

  I leaned even further forward, gazing at his gaunt face in fascination.

  ‘The idea had been hovering around me for a while,’ he continued. ‘I don’t know why. I think that eventually, life becomes too much for those infected. Those words the lavender woman spoke to me—“no more, no more”—there was such desperation in her voice. Such melancholy. I think it had been the same for her. God only knows how old she was by the time she came across me. But I also think it can’t be passed on until the infected person has come to this point in their life. And the only way to get to that point is to live. To live until you can’t bear to live anymore.

  ‘I also suspect that whoever it is passed onto must be near death for the infection to work. At the very point of death: within minutes of it in fact. I tried to pass it on to Forest, the man I killed, but he was already dead. I had been rather too energetic with my scalpel.’

  He sniggered again here, and I began to realise that whatever madness the woman’s touch had wrought in him, it was still there. Maybe he had been infected for too long.

  ‘So I escaped into the night, searching for someone to pass it on to. I believe I felt something like stags must feel in in the rutting season. Only one thought raging through their minds: to mate. It was the same for me. Suddenly, nothing was more important for me other than to rid myself of the disease. I had to pass it on!

  ‘I came across the church and the first person to fit the criteria was you, as most of the others in there with you had already died. I touched you and I passed it along.’

  I rubbed a shaking hand over my jaw.

  So this was it. The question that had haunted me for almost a hundred years was finally answered. And, in a way, it was just down to luck, as I’d always thought. No mystery. No reason for my difference, just pure luck that the first person Valin saw was me, and pure luck that he had come to his decision to rid himself of the infection of life at that time. No magic. Just luck. The roll of a dice.

  No purpose. There was no purpose or reason for my immortality. Whatever this disease was, I had not caught it to fulfil some great, unknown destiny. I had simply been the only one available. All this revelation did was make me feel slightly sick. My thoughts turned to Madeleine, aged before her time as she lay in the hospital.

  ‘I had a wife,’ I said, dully. ‘If you had come to me and told me, I could have passed it on to her.’ I stared at him. ‘She could have lived.’

  Valin seemed to think for a second, then shook his head. ‘No. Although she was near death obviously, you were not ready. It wouldn’t have worked.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I insisted. ‘You may have been wrong about that.’

  He just shook his head again. ‘Even if you had succeeded, what would it have done to her? You would have consigned her to the same fate you and I have endured. Would you really have wanted that for her? Seeing her begin to realise what her life would be like? Seeing her start to hate, as you and I hate? How would she have felt watching you grow old and die while she stayed the same? Do you think she would have forgiven you?’

  I was silent, not willing to give this man an answer.

  Because he was right. Madeleine did not deserve that fate and, as horrible as her death had been, as much as I still so desperately missed her, as much as I clung to her memory, she was at least now at rest.

  Unlike me.

  ‘Why did you write the address in Berlin down on the back of the telegram?’ I asked, eventually. ‘What was the point in that?’

  Valin smiled his smug little smile again. ‘I knew I was going to pass it along. I had to. I could feel it trying to burst from me. But I wanted to know what the person who received it would do with it. I was curious. I have spent my entire life trying to find out what was different about me. That’s why I became a surgeon. I searched for an answer to a question that has no answer. But I wanted to keep an eye on you for as long as I could, to see if you came up with anything different. I wanted to see if your curiosity would match my own. So the address was a magnet, a fly trap if you like.’

  He glanced at me with a quick, secretive motion. ‘I watched you, you know, watching the apartment. I watched you as you drank in the bars and clubs of Berlin. I was around you all the time and you never even knew.’ He sniggered again and I felt a burst of anger towards him.

  He was so alien, this man. He was repellent, and I wondered if he had been like that before his duel all those years ago, or whether it was the touch of the mysterious woman that had changed him into the deranged monster he now seemed to be.

  ‘So,’ I said, taking in a breath to calm myself down. ‘You followed me around Berlin?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, although I lost contact with you when you returned to Britain. And after that, my old curiosity was satiated in different ways. I used the chaos of World War Two to further my investigations. I still wanted to know if there were others, like you and I, even though I was now obviously mortal once again, getting older every day. But I wanted to know if you were truly the only other person on the planet like that. I had to find out if there were others, and I used the Nazis to help me.’

  ‘Auschwitz,’ I said.

  He nodded, eagerly.

  ‘I got myself posted there, again using a false identity, the one I’m using still. Ostensibly, I worked for that madman Mengele on his experiments. In reality I used him to look for others like you, like I had once been.’

  ‘You experimented on those people?’ I asked. I stared at him in horror. ‘How could you do that?’

  He flapped a hand at me in a desultory manner. ‘I care not what you think of me, Deakin. Even though I no longer had the infection running within me, I had seen too much by that point. Human life and death meant nothing to me. It still means nothing now. I simply wanted to know if there were anyone else like us.’

  He slumped a little. ‘I confess, I never found anyone like that.’

  I stood and turned my back on that wizened monster, lighting another cigarette and smoking it slowly.

  Was this my future? Was I cursed to become a cold and heartless murderer and torturer? How long would it be before I ended up looking upon the rest of humanity as a disease worse than the one that had stopped my body clock, yet kept me young and strong?

  This was the payback. I suddenly understood. This was the Yin to the Yang of eternity I had previously envisioned. This was the down to the up of never-ending existence. This was what Pfumpf had never understood in his cravings for immortality.

  No one should live this long. At that moment, I believed no one could. That was obviously why the craving to pass it along had caused the woman to touch this man I still thought of as Valin. Why he had felt the compunction to touch me. Why, one day, I would presumably feel the same.

  My body would live and live and remain young and healthy, but my soul would shrivel and blacken until there was no human emotion left in it at all. That was the reality of the touch. That was its curse. Valin had said it was a God-like existence. At that moment, I believed it to be the very opposite.

  I turned back to Valin, who just grinned up at me. A silver line of drool dribbled down his stubbled chin, but he ignored it. His mad eyes jumped around me. I finished my cigarette and ground out the stub on the floor, then I shook my head at him.

  ‘Thank you
for telling me everything, even though you’ve made me sick to my stomach to listen to you. Sick to be even in your presence.

  ‘But I promise you one thing. I will never be like you. I will never descend to whatever it is you have become. We may share the same disease, but I will not become a thing as lost as you are.’

  He sniggered once again, the drool hanging from his lip. ‘Maybe you just haven’t lived long enough yet.’ He nodded to himself, his eyes still on mine. ‘Give yourself another hundred years and then tell yourself that.’

  I crouched down in front of him and put my face very close to his. He had an unpleasant, sour smell about him. I was pleased to see that, even though he was completely insane, he drew back from me in sudden fear.

  ‘You will die soon,’ I whispered to him. ‘And when you do, the world will be a better place. I may go on, but I will not be like you. I will not allow myself to become whatever it is you are. And I will never allow anyone else to suffer this disease.’

  I stood and stared down at him. ‘I will not pass it along.’

  I turned and walked away, leaving him in his chair.

  I heard him laughing at the uselessness of my words as I left that stinking, decrepit home, and I could still hear him laughing in my hotel room later that night.

  Sometimes, I still hear him laughing today.

  XXIV

  I left Berlin the next day feeling numb and empty. Feeling so unutterably alone.

  Everything I had experienced, all the hopes and dreams that every person feels, multiplied by a thousand, was all for nought. I had been given something, something that made me different from every other person on the planet, and if Valin—or whatever his name really was—had been correct, all it would do was just turn me into a monster. I would become even hollower than I was now, even more remote. I would descend to such depths that I would be bereft of anything approaching humanity. Cursed to walk the world forever until the compunction to pass it along came upon me and another person would be changed. Another person would be cursed.

  I ruminated constantly on the point of it all. Everything I had been through—the wars, the heartache, the people who had flitted oh-so-briefly through my long life—was all pointless. Nothing mattered. Nothing they did meant anything at all; and nothing I did, or would do in the future, would ever matter either. Everything was just a huge waste of time.

  Time.

  That word hung over me like a sword. How often have we heard people complaining they never have the time to do the things they want, or know they should do?

  People make excuses for not doing things, for not living their life the way they want to. They say, ‘If only I had the time’. They complain about it and yet they do nothing about it. It seemed to me, as I sat on the plane back to the UK, that humans are essentially nothing but time-wasters. And life itself, that infection running within me, laughed at them like Valin had laughed at me. They both knew that they were right, I was wrong, and it was all just a sick joke.

  I returned to Britain and tried to go back to the life I’d had before, working in odd jobs around the country, but the memory of the Medic, what he was, and what I might become would not leave me.

  Madeleine was also constantly on my mind. Was Valin right? Could I have saved her? Should I have tried? But worse, much worse, was knowing that if I had—if I had given her this disease, this curse—she would have hated me for eternity. She would have turned out just like me.

  She was everywhere I went, she was in everything I saw. Every time I passed young, laughing lovers on the street—or worse, watched old couples sitting side by side in companionable silence on park benches—her ghost burned in me, and the knowledge that I would never be allowed to share such an ordinary existence cut deeper and deeper into my already wounded soul. I would stare mournfully at these fortunate, normal people, who had spent their entire lives together and who would be with each other until they both died, and the memory of Madeleine stabbed at me mercilessly.

  She haunted me. Why could I not have what these people took so much for granted? Why should they have happiness when I had lost my love and was doomed to this non-life that would last forever? Why did the humans around me have so much freedom, when I had none? Despite the compassion I had been moved to at Auschwitz, the mortals surrounding me continued to irritate and anger me to such an extent that, within three months, I’d had enough of them. I hated them for their contentment.

  Tiring of the charade of pretending I wanted to be anywhere near them, I decided to give up on them. If I was so different to them, if I was such an outsider, then I would be an outsider on my own terms. I would disown them and their hateful lives.

  With the memory of Madeleine boiling within me, I made my decision and travelled as far away from humanity as I could. My stinging loss would be suffered by me and me alone. Humans did not deserve my presence. I made my way up to the far north of Scotland, to the Western Highlands. I bought a small stone croft there. It was miles from anywhere and anyone. There weren’t even any farms in the surrounding area, just mountains and glens. Here I would give up on my useless, never-ending life. Here I would suffer my pain alone.

  The croft had an old-fashioned boiler which was fed from a peat fire, a stream nearby for fresh water and the odd fish, and it was tucked away from prying eyes. I lived off the land, hunting rabbits and wild grouse for meat and growing root vegetables in the back garden. As infrequently as I could I visited the nearest village, which was twenty miles away, for cigarettes and alcohol and tinned goods.

  It was a raw, wild existence, but it was the only sort of existence I believed I could have. I occasionally listened to the radio to keep in touch with what was going on in the world of the humans I no longer belonged to.

  On my first night there, I lit the fire and poured a whiskey. I sat and stared into the flames. My thoughts were as black as the night outside. Trying hard not to think of Madeleine, Valin instead consumed my mind.

  Because he was right. I now knew he was right.

  I despised humanity. Yes, the trip to Auschwitz had caused some emotions to surface, but I remembered all the times I had viewed life with dispassion. All the times I had witnessed the violent acts of man and had ignored it because it simply did not interest me.

  His touch had changed my body, but it had also changed me, and I now knew why. Its function was simply to make me survive until I could bear to survive no longer. That was all. No grand plan. No reason for it. It was simply my lot in life. I was just a temporary host for the immensity within me.

  All life, whether human or animal or plant or germ, is designed to one day end. No one could stand to live forever, for it was not natural. Not normal. Valin’s touch had made me abnormal, and the touch of the lavender woman had done the same thing to him. But it shouldn’t have been so!

  What was the point of life, if it never ended? What was the point of love if, one day, that love would wither and disappear to leave one utterly alone? What was the point of existence if that existence was never-ending?

  I stared into the fire, imagining that the flames were like the disease within me. The peat and coals fed that fire and it burned brightly at first but, eventually, the flames consumed the source of their power. They needed new combustion or they would eventually die out themselves. The fire was the power within the touch. The peat and the coal were the poor souls the touch kept alive, but ultimately destroyed. It would always need to be one day passed along.

  This was probably why the compulsion to pass it on eventually came upon those people infected with life. Because, finally, life would become so horrifying and cold for them that they would crave death. They would yearn for it. They would need their life to just end.

  How long would that take for me? How long would I stumble onwards, watching the world change, watching new wars and new diseases sweep the globe? How long would I be the watcher of an existence I could never be a part of?

  I stared at that fire as the flames grew weaker.
<
br />   What if it never got the new coals and peat? What if it was not fed?

  I sat and watched the flames slowly expire, drinking more whiskey. When the fire was gone, I nodded to myself in the darkness, renewing the vow I had made to Valin.

  I would not be like those who had gone before me. I would not allow this awfulness to continue.

  I would not pass it along.

  *

  I stayed alone in my croft, up there in the Highlands, for years. I contained myself in a little world. The mornings consisted of making breakfast and coffee. I allowed myself only to concentrate on that, then I would leave the croft and walk.

  God, I must have walked thousands of miles over those years. I would take a direction based on nothing and just walked until I could walk no more.

  I trained myself to think of nothing. Not Madeleine, not Valin. I kept my mind blank. When I returned to the croft I would make my evening meal and then drink whiskey until I woke the next morning and did the same thing again. I did not allow myself to think.

  Like some form of mad hypnosis, I stopped myself from contemplating anything further ahead than the next minute, the next second. Time was too immense for me to consider, so I ignored it the best I could. The years roared quickly by.

  On New Year’s Eve, 1999, I listened on the radio to the booming of Big Ben and the cheering of the crowds and the crackling of the fireworks. I drank whiskey.

  I was drinking a lot by then. Why not? It couldn’t do me any harm. It got me through each lonely day and dark night. It stopped me thinking coherently. Sometimes it stopped me thinking at all. Three years since my meeting with the Medic had changed me completely once again. I was becoming incapable of any cogent thought process, even if I wanted to.

  The seasons came and went with boring regularity. I ate, I drank, I walked. I existed. And, every day, my thoughts grew darker and darker. Every second, my hatred of those I shared the planet with grew and grew. I wanted no part of them or their miserable existence, and I was too miserable myself to even wonder why.