Immortal

by Gene Doucette

  When I reached the shore I found… no boats.

  “Oh, Hades,” I said.

  “Where boat?” Win asked from her perch on my shoulder.

  “It’s the middle of the day. Everyone’s fishing in the bay right now.”

  “No boat?” she clarified.

  “No boat.”

  Another massive blast from the mountain shook the Earth and sent me to my knees. Ashes were starting to rain down in force and the sky had darkened considerably. Clouds were forming over the mountain. If prior experience served, lightning would be next.

  I shuffled through my options quickly. There weren’t many. “Win, do you know where Torre del Greco is?”

  “Tory… ?”

  “. . . del Greco. It’s down the beach from here. I need you to fly ahead and see if there are any boats there. I know you can fly very fast.”

  “Very fast.”

  “Yes. See if there are boats there.”

  “You stay here?”

  “I’m going to run as fast as I can along the shore. I’d just like to know if there’ll be a boat waiting for me. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And Win? If the air gets too bad and you don’t think you can make it back to me, don’t. Just fly off to somewhere safe. I’ll be all right.”

  “I come back.”

  “Only if it’s safe.”

  “I come back.” She zipped off.

  I knelt down and removed my sandals. Nobody should ever be forced to run in sandals for any length of time. I wore them because everyone else did, but considering I went something like fifty millennia without footwear, for me they were more of a contrivance than a convenience. Plus, you ever tried running in the sand in wood sandals?

  I looked up once again and saw what looked like a giant rain cloud rapidly losing altitude. It was a volley of heavier ashes, and they looked hot. Time to run again.

  As I said, my muscles don’t seem to grow in time with exercise. I’m about as strong and fast as I was in the beginning. But I was always a good runner. At one time I had to be. It was how we hunted. There were animals that were faster, sure, but we could run for days without getting winded. (This is why I never understood why everyone made such a big deal out of marathon runners, twenty-six miles is a warm-up.)

  I took off down the beach. The sand made the going a little rough, but nothing unmanageable. I would have made excellent time if I didn’t have to breathe. Unfortunately I did, and that became a difficult thing to do when the ash fall really got going.

  About halfway to Torre Del Greco I had to stop just to find some air. It was a bit like trying to run while breathing through fifty lit cigarettes. I fell to my knees and cupped my ash-covered hands over my mouth, but when that didn’t make a difference I tried removing my toga and breathing through that instead. This helped. It left me stark naked, but people back then weren’t nearly as uptight about that sort of thing as they are today.

  Behind me, I could see that the town was on fire. The second floor of most of the buildings in Herculaneum were made of wood rather than the stone used on the bottom level, and a lot of that wood had surrendered to the hot ash and pumice. I wondered if the people now understood that this was not something to patiently wait out. Probably they would do the same as I did and flee to the water line. Maybe they would be safer there. I was thinking it might be a better idea to find indoor shelter and wait it out, but that was because I was trying jog in an ashtray.

  My eyes were burning, so I splashed some water into my face to rinse them. Then I started running again.

  * * *

  When I reached Torre del Greco I found an abandoned shoreline. No boats. No pixie. She’d apparently chosen discretion over valor. And it looked like I was screwed.

  Collapsing in a heap at the edge of the water I panted hard and tried to kick loose the sulfur that had nested in my lungs. The water was cool, so I lay down in it and let the tide splash loose some of the mottled grime coating my naked body and soothe what had to be at least a couple of second degree burns on my back. I imagine I looked something like a mud sculpture prior to the finishing touches.

  I could still see the western side of Vesuvius from my vantage point, and it appeared things were not going to end well for my about-to-be-former residence. A gush of lava had lipped out of the top of the mountain and was arcing its way right for the city. It moved extremely slowly, but it was most surely moving, and there was nothing that could possibly stop it except the water.

  I began to regret my decision to simply up and run. In practical terms, there were horses available. No doubt one or two of the wealthy landowners had thought of this and were now someplace with less airborne ash. In humanitarian terms, I could have convinced at least one or two people to go with me along the shore… so they could die in Torre del Greco, like I was evidently about to. Okay, so following me wasn’t always the best idea. Win certainly must have come to that conclusion.

  “Hey! Get up!”

  My tinny-voiced pixie had returned. She was hovering above my face and looking quite sternly at me.

  “Why?” I asked. “No boats. And, it’s a nice view.”

  “Stupid.”

  “I’m stupid? You should get the hell out of here while you can, Win.”

  “Win found boats.”

  I looked up and down the shore again. “Where?”

  “Not here. No boats here. Found boats down there.”

  I thought about it. “Stabiae?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “But there are boats there?”

  “Yes. Hurry!”

  I got back up again and half-ran, half-walked to Stabiae. I wanted to quit a dozen times, but Win wouldn’t let me. (She would have made an excellent personal trainer.) It helped that the closer I got, the milder the conditions got, with the shower of pumice and heavy ash replaced by a light ash shower that wasn’t half as scalding. Still, it was nearly the next morning when I reached Stabiae. Win had been right. There were boats.

  * * *

  We ended up stuck in Stabiae for two more days. Nowadays when you think of a boat you think sailboat or motorboat or rowboat. We had flat, ugly beasts with square rigged sails that were entirely dependent on favorable winds. I made myself fairly useful on board a ship owned by an excitable fellow named Pompanianus, and I got to meet the recently deceased body of Pliny the Elder, but other than that, it was a dull, unpleasant couple of days marred by the intense feeling of impending doom.

  When the winds finally smiled upon us, we set out for the open waters of the bay with as many living persons as we could fit on six ships (two owned by Pompanianus, four consisting of Pliny’s fleet). Herculaneum and the landward town of Pompeii were both gone by then. We all hoped that more had escaped death and simply chosen a route deeper inland to flee the mountain.

  The ships quickly spread out to take advantage of the winds. As I stood on the deck of Pompanianus’s largest vessel, I looked across at one of Pliny’s smaller ships as it receded from us. On the bow, facing me, was a tall pale woman with striking red hair.

  * * *

  We landed on Capri, where I remained for another two years. (It was six months before I stopped coughing up ash.) Win stayed with me up until her death, which came about a year after the Vesuvius eruption. An unfortunate fact about pixies is that their life span is only about twenty years, so it was not a big surprise for either of us. I buried her in an olive grove.

  Many hundreds of years later, I got a chance to see a museum exhibit showing some of the artifacts uncovered in Pompeii and Herculaneum. It was, to put it mildly, a strange experience, especially since I recognized several of the preserved dead. I also saw my broom on display. I considered reclaiming it but decided it would take more effort than it was worth.

  Historians had long speculated that Herculaneum got off easy by being wiped out by a large mud flow, and for a while I thought maybe I’d been wrong about the lava. But I was vindicated by the recent discovery of skeletal
remains and half-preserved bodies when the beach houses on the shore along which I ran so long ago were excavated. It looked like half the village opted to wait it out rather than flee, and died when lava engulfed their refuge.

  I still feel kind of bad about this.

  Chapter 9

  So far, the mushrooms don’t seem to be doing anything, except adding to the overall bouquet of the room. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’m losing my mind.

  I’m wondering now who’s in the third cell. I know the one next to me is occupied, and I know who’s in the fourth cell—I think—but the third one is a mystery. I initially assumed it was unused, but lately I’ve been hearing noises that have me thinking otherwise. Viktor and the others have been mum about it—as they have been about everything except the tests they’re running on me personally—but that just makes me more curious. I might have to ask one of them point blank.

  Whoever it is in there, he’s in a lot of pain. I can hear the moaning. Is he a volunteer, or a prisoner like the rest of us?

  * * *

  Waiting for Iza to return, I sat in a coffee shop two blocks from the police station reading the morning paper and enjoying—if one could call it that—a bitter latte sweetened by a splash of schnapps.

  My relationship with alcohol is complicated. Give or take a few days here and there, I hadn’t been dry since the speakeasy fire in 1922. By all normal human standards that would make me a raging alcoholic, except that by those same human standards I would also be dead by now, if not from old age then from cirrhosis of the liver. But eighty years for me is like a glass of wine with dinner for anybody else.

  Many times over my long history, I have allowed myself to become entirely dependent upon alcohol to the point where I now make advance plans in anticipation of being drunk for a decade or two. The unspoken understanding is that I will eventually either grow tired of being drunk or something interesting will happen that will demand my undivided attention for a while.

  You might think this is terribly naive, and perhaps I should just admit that I’m being stupid, as I am clearly already an alcoholic, but I don’t think it’s altogether fair to apply that term to me. More to the point, I think if you gave any drunkard immortality he would eventually pull himself together with a century or two to work on it. And trust me, alcohol is just about the only way to get through the duller periods of history. For instance, I spent most of the tenth century in Spain when there was simply nothing to do except drink wine. Everybody else did anyway.

  Not that I’m lumping twenty-first century America in with tenth century Spain. On the contrary, the last hundred years had been very interesting, and despite being sauced most of the time, I’ve kept up-to-date on the big stuff. But I’ve also been in mourning pretty much since that 1922 fire, which upset me perhaps more than I realized.

  One thing that hadn’t improved with time was the coffee. I’m not sure when bitter coffee became cool, but I don’t like the trend. Still, I drank away, because that’s what one does when one wants to fit in with the upscale crowd these days.

  * * *

  The update on the murders in the morning paper (reading the paper two days in a row had to be some kind of record for me) wasn’t any more enlightening than the initial story had been. It was mostly a lot of puff about Gary and Nate and how everybody loved them and so on. Attaching presumptive sainthood to murder victims is a time-honored tradition, so I can’t say I was surprised by any of it. Can’t say I knew them well enough to contradict anything either, and they were nice enough for me to want to go through the trouble of finding out who killed them, but still… You’d think there was someone, somewhere—other than Jerry—who didn’t like them.

  On the hard news front, the papers were a day earlier than predicted with the artistic rendition of my face. It was a pretty good likeness.

  It was a bit unsettling seeing my own face in the newspaper. Historically, I’ve gone to great lengths to keep myself in the background, just in the interest of survival. I’ve lived through one Inquisition already, you know? I moved on.

  Paging through to the crossword puzzle, a full-page ad caught my eye, mainly because it was addressed to me. Also, it was in classical Latin.

  The Latin was pretty rough, penned no doubt by a modern scholar who didn’t appreciate the subtleties of the spoken language. And since nobody spoke Latin outside of the Vatican, I guess this was understandable. But I understood it all right.

  Translated, the message read:

  For the Eternal Man

  We are trying to find you. You do not have any reason to fear us. You do not have to run. We want to help you and we believe you can help us. We have the answers to many questions. Stay where you are and we will find you. Do not make this any harder than it has to be.

  The message was unattributed and the paper did not note who purchased the ad.

  I didn’t know what to make of it. On the one hand, it sounded like a friendly attempt to establish a dialogue. On the other, it made it clear “they” were after me in some capacity, possibly the same capacity that resulted in two dead college students. It was an offer of knowledge and a threat all wrapped up into one cryptic passage—don’t run, don’t be afraid, don’t move and don’t make this any harder than it has to be. Very convincing. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that the minute someone feels obligated to tell you not to be afraid of them, that’s the time to start being afraid of them. I wondered how long these little letters had been getting printed. Maybe I should have started reading the newspapers sooner.

  * * *

  As I sat there at my little, two-persons-max table, contemplating the passage and deciding whether I should wait until I’d heard from Iza before hopping aboard a transatlantic flight to someplace remote, someone sat down opposite me.

  If you’ve ever hung out long enough in a Starbucks you know this isn’t a terribly uncommon experience, especially when all the other tables are taken. Usually people bother to ask first if the chair is being saved, but… Anyway, I tried to act nonchalant and flipped ahead to the crossword puzzle to look busy.

  “Hello,” my tablemate said. I looked up briefly. He was dressed in a sports coat and a white shirt, no tie. He had a couple of gold chains around his neck with symbols hanging from them that he probably couldn’t identify the meaning of at gunpoint. He was white-skinned, stocky in build, and looked to have some Norwegian ancestry in him. I was singularly disinterested in having a conversation, so I pretended to be a foreigner. Which I sort of am.

  “I don’t speak any English,” I said in German. Middle-high German, which nobody speaks any more. I didn’t feel like running the risk that he was fluent in the modern form. Most of the time when someone hears a foreign language they don’t probe. And they almost never ask what language it is, just so long as it sounds like an actual language. This doesn’t always work. I once spent a half hour trying to get rid of an inquisitive elderly wino in a bar in Ontario while speaking Sanskrit. Sometimes people just can’t take a hint.

  This appeared to be one of those times. He smiled as if I had responded in the King’s English and said, “I’m fine, thanks.”

  I nodded and tried to go back to my paper. Five letter word for draining aid. Sieve?

  “How about this weather?” he added.

  “You are ugly and smell like pig dung,” I suggested helpfully.

  “Yeah, it looks like snow to me, too.”

  This would have been amusing, if it weren’t so very annoying.

  “Look,” he whispered, leaning forward conspiratorially, “I know you speak English. You’re reading the fucking paper. Okay?”

  “Your mother eats raw salmon,” I offered. Was this guy slow?

  He snatched the paper from my hand. Now we were past the “invasion of personal space” phase and fast approaching “punch you in the nose” phase.

  He slapped the paper down on the table and pointed to the artistic rendition of my face, circa two days ago.

  “I know who yo
u are. Now let’s talk in the same language for a bit.”

  For the first time, I noticed that the coffee shop was half empty. There were four other empty tables he could have chosen from. I should have been paying better attention.

  I snatched the paper off the table. “I am the god of cabbage,” I declared angrily. With any luck somebody would step up and ask him why he was bothering the foreign guy.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “Do me a favor. Look under the table. I have a gun pointed at your balls right now.”

  Well now, that was obviously a trick, right? If I peek under the table, I clearly understand English. And for all I know he’s got his penis out or something. The correct response was to ignore him. Except I knew as soon as he said it that he wasn’t kidding. So, I peeked. He wasn’t kidding. I sat up again.

  “What is that, a .22?” I asked.

  “It’s a .38. Makes a little ‘pop’ when you pull the trigger, sounds like a wine bottle uncorking.”

  “That’s nice. What do you want?”

  “I want you,” he said, smiling.

  “I’m charmed. Are you a policeman?”

  He laughed. “Hardly.”

  “Well then. If you’re not a member of law enforcement, why should I go anywhere with you?”

  “Because I’ve still got a gun pointed at your balls?”

  “It would look terribly silly if I got up and we walked out together with you holding a gun to my groin, don’t you think? One almost never sees that sort of thing.”

  “You could give me your word that you’ll leave quietly,” he suggested.

  “Supposing my word isn’t worth anything?”