Immortal

by Gene Doucette

  I sat down in the snow beside her and pulled her head into my lap.

  “You did well.”

  “Did I?” she whispered, sounding very afraid. The pain must have been extraordinary.

  “Yes.” I pulled back my sleeve and thrust my bare wrist under her nose. “Let me help. Drink.”

  Blood kicks everything in a vampire’s system into high gear, and that includes healing. Think of it as a battlefield transfusion.

  A bloody tear streamed down her cheek. “Thank you,” she said, baring her fangs.

  It took her a few minutes to get her fill. She finished around the same time Lord Harsigny reached the clearing.

  Chapter 6

  Another day, another meal with mushrooms in it. I think they scored a deal with a mushroom merchant or something because lately that’s all I’m getting, and it’s a little tiresome.

  Might just be I’m going crazy with so little to do. Even prisons come with libraries, you know? It’s like they want me to sit around and plot ways to escape. And I am seriously considering escaping.

  Granted, even if I get out of my cell, I still have to contend with the guards I can’t possibly overpower, the fence, and the desert. Not the best odds in the world.

  * * *

  Brenda, the vampire hooker, reached her limit at around the same time spots started to appear in my vision, which worked out pretty well for both of us. (This is another thing most people don’t understand about vampires. Their limit is about four quarts. Only malevolence or severe starvation would lead them to consider overfeeding.) I reached across the bed and slowly pried my wrist from her mouth. She was half asleep, so I helped her the rest of the way onto the bed and then, very lightheaded, I lay down next to her.

  It had been centuries since I’d thought of the late Francois Etienne de Harsigny. Like so many thousands that came before and since, he was someone I called friend. That’s the truly shitty thing about being immortal, in case you were wondering. Everybody dies eventually. Even the vampires. Some of them end up slain by stupid mortals who think they’re acting in the name of whichever god is fashionable at the time, but most end up as suicides somewhere around the three hundred year mark. The way it works is you spend the first century doing all the things you always wanted to do, the second century doing things you never thought you’d want to do, and the third century doing whatever’s left. Then one night you look around and realize that not only have you done everything there is to do, but you’re no longer interested in doing any of it ever again. Suddenly death seems like an interesting option, if only because it represents the one experience left on your checklist. Compounding the problem, vampires young and old routinely suffer from depression. Never being allowed to see the sun ever again has that effect. And as I’ve said, I’ve been there a few times myself.

  Another unfortunate fact about immortality could best be explained by Harsigny’s reaction to the scene in the clearing. There I was, his trusted friend, nursing a vampire in the snow next to a slain dragon. After all this time, I can still see the stunned expression on his scarred face.

  Historically, mortal humans haven’t dealt well with the unknown. Their usual reaction is to kill what they don’t understand. Harsigny, willing up until that point to ignore the obvious fact that I never aged, was forced all at once to come to the only conclusion his ideology would allow him. His trusted friend was some sort of demon. And for a God-fearing fellow like him, my apparent demonhood was something he wasn’t willing to overlook. (Considering what real demons are like, this was a bit of an insult, but I let it go on the basis of the fact that Harsigny had clearly never seen one.) Thus, my days in Coucy-le-Chateau came to an abrupt end, all thanks to my charitable decision to rid Picardy of a human-eating dragon. Sometimes that’s just the way it goes.

  Harsigny was gracious enough not to run us through right then and there—which was good, as I didn’t particularly want to have to kill him, too—and he did let me keep Archimedes. He even gave us some gold in exchange for the guarantee that we’d leave immediately and never return.

  History wasn’t particularly kind to him, and so, while I’m quite certain he’s passed on, I don’t know when or how because there’s no historical record of his existence. Enguerrand de Coucy I do know about. He lived many more years after my hasty departure before dying in the Battle of Nicopolis. I regretted not speaking to him one final time before I left, if only to apologize for leaving.

  Eloise and I traveled from Picardy through the Holy Roman Empire and into Italy, where we witnessed the church schism firsthand. Boredom eventually led us to Egypt, where I regaled her with tales of pyramids and sphinxes and long-dead kings. Eventually we drifted apart, although I can’t for the life of me remember why.

  As I trailed off to sleep beside my new friend Brenda, it occurred to me—not for the first time—that death was the only constant in my life. If it weren’t so depressing, I’d laugh at the irony.

  * * *

  Brenda nudged me awake with a glass of orange juice in her hand. “You okay?”

  I sat up slowly and took the glass. “What time is it?”

  “Daytime,” she said. It was impossible to tell with the windows masked.

  “Yeah, but what time is it?”

  “Dunno. I don’t own a watch. What do I need one for?”

  True enough.

  The juice was cool and tasted supermarket fresh. “Where’d this come from?”

  “I have a cooler under the bed,” she explained. “I like to keep juice on ice, just in case. I figure the Red Cross gives OJ to its donors, I should do the same thing, you know?”

  “Do you charge extra for it?”

  “No, silly, it’s free,” she smiled. “You know… you taste, um, you taste really good. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “I bet you say that to all the boys.”

  “I’m serious! It’s really weird, your blood it’s, like…”

  “Old,” I offered. “I have heard it before. I’m a very old vintage.”

  Brenda smiled again. She had quite a nice smile. Had she reached her mid-twenties, she would have been a brilliantly attractive young woman. I wondered what made her decide to arrest her development younger than that. Eighteen, I guessed. Possibly it wasn’t her decision, but that was very unusual. When you meet a vampire nowadays you’re generally meeting one who chose the life.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “A little lightheaded,” I said, “but that’s the worst of it. Can you hand me my bag?”

  The bag was one of those nondescript army duffel bags. I bought it off an RAF paratrooper in 1952. It contained seven of my lives.

  About two hundred years ago, I realized if I was going to continue to travel freely about the planet, I was going to have to officially establish myself. Back in the day a guy could wander from place to place, and his word was pretty much the only identification he ever needed. Now I need a passport, name, and nationality to get from country to country and sometimes from state to state or town to town. Fortunately, every lawful society has an unlawful element, so it’s usually not that tough to pick up a new ID whenever I need one.

  I dumped the contents out on the bed. It wasn’t much: a change of clothes, the seven passports (they were each good for another two years), a shaving kit, about twenty grand in cash, and the passbook for my Swiss bank account.

  “Wow!” Brenda exclaimed, specifically regarding the cash.

  “It’s just walking-around money.”

  “Forget walking, why don’t you buy a car!”

  “It’d use up most of the cash,” I explained. “Plus I haven’t driven one since 1965, and that was a disaster. And if you think I’m going to drive in this city…”

  “What’s this?” she asked, her eyes drifting across other items.

  “That’s a bank book.”

  “Cool.” She flipped it open and frowned at the handwritten notes inside. “What language is this?”

  “It’s
a code I invented a long time ago,” I said, “so nobody else could read it.” By the way, thank God for the Swiss. I gave up on everyone else’s banking system long ago, but they’re still going strong. Plus, nobody there seems to have a problem with the fact that I should have died fifty years ago.

  “How much do you have?” she asked.

  “A lot.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know how much. I haven’t asked for a balance in a very long time.”

  “So, you could be, like, a billionaire or something.”

  “Could be, but I doubt it.”

  She actually had a point. My last directive was made in 1957 and it was to allocate a portion of my money toward the purchase of U.S. tech stock. This was after I’d gotten drunk with an English mathematician who spent the evening prattling on about the Manhattan Project. About ninety percent of what he told me was top secret, but he was really, really drunk. I think I even told the Swiss to pick up some IBM stock. I don’t remember. (I was mad drunk myself when I made the call.) It wasn’t the first time I made a snap decision like that, and while this one may have worked out okay—provided I actually made that phone call and wasn’t imagining the whole thing—most of them didn’t. For example, I once put a load of money down on commercial zeppelin travel. And don’t even get me started about perpetual motion machines.

  “I wish I were rich,” Brenda said wistfully.

  “You will be,” I said.

  “Yeah? Can you see the future?”

  What have the other vampires been saying about me? “No. But if you want to be rich, you can. It’s just a matter of patience and discipline and finding a bank that’s open at night. You’ll figure it out.” I picked up the cash. “No, I don’t think I need a car. But I definitely need to do some shopping, and maybe a shower and a shave. You don’t happen to know where the nearest Y is, do you?”

  * * *

  Brenda did me one better. It turned out there was a community bathroom, with a real shower, down the hall from her almost-apartment. It was perhaps the filthiest place I’d spent time in since nineteenth century London, but it did have hot water and a mirror. An hour later I emerged into Chinatown, clean-shaven and less odorous, although my clothes were still as crappy as ever, hence the need to shop. My plan was to hit the nearest big bank, set up an account for myself here in the States, transfer some money into it and live the high life for a little while, or at least until winter was over. But to do that I had to show up dressed somewhat better than a guy who just woke up in a gutter somewhere.

  I headed for the nearest subway station, my bag over my shoulder and my coat tightly wrapped. (It wasn’t a whole lot warmer than it had been the night before. Why couldn’t I winter in the tropics?)

  My path to the train took me past a news vendor who looked nearly as cold as I was. Ordinarily I pass newsstands without pausing to examine headlines, because only rarely do any of them make sense to me. The last time I sat down to read a paper was in 1992.

  But on this particular day something made me look up. Don’t know what it was. Fate, I suppose. And this time the first headline I saw did mean something to me.

  STUDENTS BRUTALLY SLAIN, it read.

  It was about Gary and Nate.

  I skimmed the first two paragraphs, just enough to discover that I was a prime suspect.

  Chapter 7

  The longer I sit here running through everything, the more aggravated I get. I was so stupid. I should have cut and run the minute I read that headline. It’s what I’d have done a hundred years ago, and exactly what I did do in response to the Whitechapel murders. I fled to the States before someone decided to point a finger at me. I knew two of the victims then, too. Did I stick around to catch their killer? No, I did not.

  But then nobody ever did catch their killer, so far as I’m aware. Maybe that was my motivation this time around, delayed Jack the Ripper guilt.

  Anyway, that was my shot. That was when I should have left town. Or the country. Instead I waited until New York, and by then it was too late.

  * * *

  According to the full story—I went and bought the paper—Nate and Gary were assaulted with a blunt object. This told me hardly anything, as there are a whole mess of blunt objects one could use to kill a person, starting with an automobile and working down. (I didn’t think they were run over in their living room but you get my point.) The place was also ransacked, and the police were speculating that robbery might have been a motive. And then there was this sentence, “Police are looking for a local drifter who may have spent some time in the victims’ apartment.”

  That wasn’t much, but I knew tomorrow it would be “a drifter named Adam” and the day after that, one of Gary and Nate’s party friends would cough up a description and I’d be looking at a composite sketch of my face on the front page. They’d say it was just for questioning, but I didn’t have one of the most well developed alibis on the planet. If you start digging deep enough into any of the names on my passport, you’ll quickly find that none are genuine. And Adam isn’t even one of those names. That couldn’t help. Worst of all, the only person who could possibly prove I wasn’t in the apartment when they were killed, was a teenage vampire hooker.

  In my favor, I was probably the only “drifter” in town with twenty grand on hand to work with, so I could get out of Boston pretty fast and be done with it whenever I wanted to. It was a much better option than jail. (Astonishingly, I’d managed to avoid long-term imprisonment for most of my life. Good thing. Can you imagine me under a life sentence?)

  But there was a nagging little voice in the back of my head that wanted to know who had killed Gary and Nate. I hate that little voice. It always gets me in trouble.

  So, I stuck with my original plan, which was to get to Newbury Street and shop for a decent set of clothes, plus a few other goodies, like a watch. For good measure, I stopped in a hair salon. When I returned to Brenda’s hole in the wall a few hours later she almost didn’t recognize me.

  * * *

  “You’re bald!”

  “What do you think?” I asked. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s… I don’t know…” she circled around me, examining the damage. I’d also gotten my ear pierced. With the Armani suit thrown in, I looked like a pimp.

  “Hang on.” I slipped on a pair of Ray-Bans. “Now?”

  “Yeaaah, that’s better. Jesus, you look completely different.”

  “That’s what I was shooting for.”

  “What, are you on the lam now?”

  I thrust the newspaper into her hands. “Apparently, yes.” She read the article while I explained who the mysterious drifter was.

  “You didn’t do this, though, right?” she asked. I guess this is a polite question to ask when you’re a vampire.

  “Of course not.”

  “Had to ask.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” I repeated.

  “Okay,” she said. “I wouldn’t have minded, you know. I think if you were, like this big killer or something… that’d be sorta sexy, actually.”

  I snatched the paper from her. “Boy, did you make the right career choice.”

  “Hooking?”

  “Bloodsucking.” I dropped my new leather satchel onto the bed (the duffel didn’t work with the suit) and zipped it open.

  “What is that smell?” Brenda of the hypersensitive nose asked.

  I pulled out the bag of goods. “Oh, sorry about that. It’s diced garlic.” Garlic doesn’t fend off vampires, by the way. They just really hate the smell. “Also mushrooms, fennel seed, balsamic vinegar, and this…”

  “Molasses?”

  “It’s the critical ingredient.”

  “You know, there’s a McDonald’s right down the street.”

  “It isn’t for me. You don’t by any chance have a hot plate, do you?”

  * * *

  She didn’t, but the old Asian lady down the hall did. She wasn’t initially all that interested in helping
us, up until I sweet-talked to her in Mandarin. She even loaned us a saucepan.

  An hour later I had a deeply foul-smelling dish that no human would ever consider eating, even on a dare.

  “Ugh, God, I’m gonna be sick,” Brenda declared.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have done this in the apartment,” I said.

  “I may have to move.”

  “Sorry. Are you ready to go?”

  “Go where?”

  “The alley down the street. Come on, the sun’s down already.”

  “Is this some sort of immortal trick or something?”

  “Yeah. Hurry up.”

  * * *

  I set the saucepan on the ground at one end of the alley and then joined Brenda behind the dumpster at the other end.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Shh. Now you watch for me. Your eyes are better from here.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Focus on the top of the pan,” I said. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

  “Is this magic? Did you cast a spell or something?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “There’s no such thing as magic.”

  She looked at me with the kind of disbelieving expression only a vampire can give to an immortal man who doesn’t believe in magic.

  “Honest,” I added.

  “Whatever.” She refocused on the pan. And we waited.

  About an hour passed, and I was still crouched uncomfortably behind the dumpster watching the back of Brenda’s head while she stared down the alley. She stood dead still the entire time, and I swear she didn’t blink once. Police would do themselves a service by hiring vampires specifically for stakeouts.

  Finally… “What the hell?”