Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4)

by Gene Doucette

  I’ve known a few pixies, and a couple saved my life once or twice. The last one made a habit of it, until she was killed in a way that’s going to take me a couple of generations to get beyond.

  I wouldn’t have asked for a pixie guide, then, if I saw any other option.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Ha,” I said. I was walking around the lawn behind the house. We were on the other side of the yard, next to a free-standing structure that looked like a remodeled pigeon coop. Ha was one of several pixies, but the only one flying around. The others just sat and ate and ignored me.

  The walking was to get used to the shoes, which were not new, but also not broken in by my feet. I didn’t know who owned them, but thankfully they had the same shoe size. I would have resumed my barefoot walking, but the top was cold and rocky. I was planning to shed them as soon as I started downhill again.

  “Yeah okay,” she said, zipping past my head.

  This would be the first time I worked with a pixie I hadn’t tamed myself. I didn’t really know what to expect.

  “What do you do for Dmitri, usually?” I asked.

  “Check the line for treppers.”

  “Treppers?”

  “Treppers.”

  “Trespassers?” I guessed.

  “Yes. I said that.”

  “So you did. My mistake.”

  Dmitri also provided me with a backpack, a decent amount of water and dried beef (no protein bars) and dried mushrooms for Ha.

  He also had a radio for me.

  “We will be on channel seven,” he said. “Reception is spotty. Grundle believes our visiting friends may be causing some manner of atmospheric interference, but he can’t explain how. If you need to communicate, keep trying and we will make do with what we get.”

  We shook hands.

  “Best of luck, Dmitri,” I said.

  “And to you. See you downhill.”

  He pulled me closer. He was surprisingly strong for someone as old as he was supposed to be.

  “I also promise you,” he said, “if I find your woman I will keep her safe until you arrive.”

  “Thank you, that’s really kind.”

  * * *

  It was past midday by the time Ha and I got going, which would put us at the top at around sundown. This was not the best timing imaginable, but it couldn’t be helped.

  The pixie led us off Dmitri’s property and to the path, and continued to provide detailed step-by-step instruction right until she realized I knew the way from there, and then she started to get annoying.

  “Okay, I go back now?” she asked.

  “No, I’d like you to stick around.”

  “You know way, I go back.”

  “What I need is for someone such as yourself to range ahead and notify me of any dangers.”

  “Dangers,” she repeated. I wasn’t sure she knew what the word meant.

  “Trespassers.”

  “Treppers? No treppers on path. Can’t be.”

  It has been my experience that pixies don’t grasp concepts like ownership and private property. It appeared Ha only grasped these concepts and nothing else.

  “What do you look for, when you look for trespassers?”

  She buzzed around for a little while without answering. When a pixie flies in tight circles like this, it means she’s thinking. Kind of like pacing, in a human.

  The path we were on wasn’t all that challenging. I remembered being on this stretch on the one or two occasions Mirella and I hiked to the summit, but I had no idea at that time how close I was to Dmitri’s land. That probably would have been useful information, or at least interesting information to have.

  It did get steep from time to time. I tried to imagine doing it while carrying an incubus on a stretcher and decided it wouldn’t have been possible without a lot more people being involved.

  “Look for people,” Ha said.

  “People, like me?”

  “Like you and Di-Di, and Go-Go and like Grund. Talking people.”

  “But not animals.”

  “Animals hard.”

  “But they’re a lot smaller than people, and they walk on all fours.”

  “Four what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Some animals big. Big animals okay too.”

  “Like dragons?”

  “Buster okay.”

  Even the island pixies knew dragons weren’t extinct and I didn’t.

  “Dogs okay too,” Ha added. “Pigs okay.”

  “There are pigs on the island?”

  “Nobody own pigs, pigs okay.”

  “Wild pigs, then.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Fish okay.”

  I laughed.

  “You run into fish on the island a lot, do you?” I asked.

  “Walking fish, silly,” she said, and I went a little cold.

  “You’ve seen a lot of walking fish?”

  “Uh-huh. Big. Smelly like water, because fish.”

  “Where have you seen them?”

  “All over. But okay. Animals okay.”

  “What do you mean all over? Is there one near us right now?”

  She flew away, while I stood completely still, held my breath, and did a quick inventory of all the gods I could think of. Poseidon would be a good one to pray to in this situation, I decided.

  Ha came back pretty fast.

  “No,” she said. She was incredibly unconcerned, but it wasn’t like she was at risk. I’m so used to a tame pixie worrying about my wellbeing I forget sometimes that pixies are incredibly hard to kill. It’s like worrying about a laser beam getting eaten. Then again, it was that kind of thinking that might have contributed to my last pixie being murdered.

  “Did you ever tell Dmitri about the walking fish?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, in a tone that was a little condescending. “Animals okay, fish animals, fish okay. Talking people not okay.”

  I wondered how often he sent pixies to find the source of the banshee howls, and how many times those pixies found a “walking fish”, concluded that wasn’t what they were there to report on, and came back saying everything was okay.

  “I go home now?” Ha asked.

  “No, Ha. I want you to fly ahead and tell me if there is anyone on or around the path. I especially want to know about any walking fish you find.”

  “Okay. Other animals too?”

  “How about, anything the size of a dog or larger?”

  “Okay.”

  * * *

  I’ve probably spent more time walking through jungles than I have through just about any other natural environment, which is to be expected given my history. I have really good instincts when it comes to distinguishing between forest floor sounds that represent possible danger, potential prey, and probably nothing important.

  I’m saying this because there is no good explanation for the fact that the afternoon climb to the summit was one of the most terrifying afternoons I’d had in a profoundly long time.

  Not only am I really good at identifying the beasts of the jungle based on sight and sound and spoor and track, I had an obsessive/compulsive pixie checking in every few minutes to re-notify me that there was nothing up ahead, everything was okay, and can she go home now?

  My heart was racing the whole time anyway. It was probably because of how little I knew of the banshee/mermaid/walking fish things sharing the jungle with me, and that was not at all helped by the frequency of their cries.

  But, I reached the top unmolested and only bothered by a couple of mosquito bites and one annoyed pixie.

  As Dmitri accurately described, the summit was an unpleasant place. The surface was a mess of jagged rocks and the wind was completely unreasonable. I couldn’t see the lower island, either, and the view was supposed to be the best reason to make the climb. The hill beneath wasn’t steep enough to turn this into a compelling lookout spot, though. Instead, in the direction of town there was a drop-off, then a leveling, which lasted long
enough to block anything beneath that point. Trees and ocean, and that was all to see.

  Also, and to my tremendous disappointment, nobody was living up there. I should have known this already, since Ha would have notified me if anything larger than a dog was ahead of us, and this would have included the summit. I didn’t think of that until I got there, though.

  I walked around it anyway.

  “What you want here?” Ha asked.

  “I was looking for people.”

  “Oh. No people, I go home now?”

  “Not yet. How about any evidence of people?”

  “Dents?”

  “Evidence. Things people own.”

  “Like tent?”

  “Yes, like a tent.”

  This was an incredibly specific response from her, considering all the different things people could potentially own.

  “Did you see a tent?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  She led me to the lip of the summit, and then down the gentle slope of what I would call the back of the mountain if I were looking at the top of it from the bottom.

  Just below the wind was a tent the same approximate shade of dark gray as the rocky top. It was the sort of thing that might just go unnoticed in an overhead surveillance if one weren’t looking for it.

  I scrambled down the slope, taking note as I went of the number of tent-spike holes. There were more than I could count on quick review, but enough to indicate that at one point, recently, there had been a lot more tents.

  The one remaining tent was nothing special. It was several steps up from a standard-issue army tent, but not as luxurious of some of the better ones I’ve seen. I’ve never been a big fan of them unless it happens to be raining out and I can’t find shelter any other way. I don’t like the idea of sleeping behind walls that aren’t strong enough to protect me but are strong enough to keep me trapped inside and unable to see or hear something looking for dinner.

  But—and I probably overstress this—I came of age when the likelihood of being eaten during the night was pretty high.

  There was nobody inside. The tent offered decent shelter from whatever wind made it past the lip of the summit, and had a floor that would have kept any rain washing off the top from getting under the walls, but I had to assume whatever cot or sleeping bag used—the ground under the tent was not at all forgiving—had gone with the inhabitants when they left.

  The only question was, why didn’t they take this tent with them too?

  The answer may have involved the one thing in the tent that wasn’t me or Ha.

  Sitting in the center of the vinyl floor was what looked like a small ice cooler, the kind with a handle on the top for transporting small quantities of chilled beer.

  A note was taped to the cooler, but it wasn’t bright enough in the tent to read it, so I carried the whole thing outside into the fading sunlight. It would be dark in under a half an hour, which meant I had about that long to decide where I was going to take shelter for the evening. The tent was an option, but I’ve already explained my objection to tents, which held strong in a circumstance where the woods were full of walking fish and my only companion was an obnoxious pixie.

  The note read: She is too sick we have to take her to the hospital. Doctor thinks he can save her. Meet us there. Good luck.

  I read the note twice, and then I read it aloud for Ha, who was curious and apparently couldn’t read.

  “Who she?” Ha asked.

  “Their prophet, probably. They tend to be sickly. Can’t imagine anyone else so important that they’d risk going to the hospital.”

  “Hospital good.”

  “Hospital was just under water until recently. It’s probably wrecked.”

  “Oh. I go home now?”

  “No, not yet.”

  I reached into my backpack and laid out some dried mushrooms for her so she’s shut up for a few minutes.

  I wondered what made anyone involved in this think I’d willingly follow them down the mountain. The safe play was to head back to Dmitri’s and wait for the expected rescue from the mainland. Surely it would be possible to call in a whole lot of guns—if necessary—to deal with the banshee issue. If that didn’t work, and Dmitri insisted I couldn’t stay and had to go fight with him, I could probably hide out with the troll instead.

  I had options, in other words, that didn’t involve chasing a prophet down a mountain and into the teeth of undeniable danger. Granted, those options also included signing off on the possibility my girlfriend was dead or dying somewhere, but I wasn’t too far away from accepting that already. I just didn’t have enough alcohol to cope with it appropriately yet.

  I also didn’t know what putting myself in extra danger would do to change that.

  But I wasn’t done deciphering what was left behind. There was the cooler to attend to.

  A symbol was on the side of the cooler, some kind of company logo I didn’t recognize: rectangles representing bottles on a vertical line representing a table. It was an extremely old pictogram that used to refer generically to a store or shop but looked to have been borrowed for a more pharmacological reason by a modern company. I doubted they fully understood what it was when whatever marketing company responsible for corporate branding found it in an Internet search.

  Anyway, modern eyes probably saw something representing medicine. I saw alcohol, but I’m probably the exception.

  I pushed a button on the front, which allowed the top to swing open. For a second or two I wondered if maybe this was a bad idea, since coolers from medical facilities tend to hold bad things whenever they turn up in movies, which is my only frame of reference. But, I couldn’t not open it after all of this, and on top of that I can’t get sick anyway.

  This is not to say opening it wasn’t a mistake, just that those were the concerns I worked through beforehand. And it was definitely a mistake.

  There was a lump of… something, inside. It was a semisolid piece of white fleshy matter. I reached in and picked it up, and it nearly oozed out of my hands.

  “What the heck is this?” I asked aloud.

  It felt a little like I imagined picking up a jellyfish might feel like, had I ever tried to pick one up. I was also reminded of some of the things I used to eat out of that tide pool near the cave on the African coast, way back when. Protein. Slimy, gooey protein that had to be swallowed whole, but protein.

  “Fish,” Ha said, buzzing past.

  “Did you see a walking fish?”

  “No see, smell.”

  “This?” I took a sniff of what was in my hands. It did have a fishy smell, but it was faint. “Smells a little like fish.”

  “Smell like walking fish.”

  “It’s skin,” I realized. “Something shed this. Why would they give this to me?”

  “Walking fish smell,” Ha repeated.

  “Yes, I know it’s the same smell.”

  I didn’t fully appreciate the point she was making, which either underscores how clueless I was being about the entire situation or how much smarter pixies are than I really give them credit for. Either way, I began to notice the banshee howling—a constant throughout the afternoon—had begun to accelerate in frequency.

  They also sounded like they were getting closer.

  “Ha…” I began, but she had already zipped away. I threw the skin back into the cooler and closed it, which only did me a little bit of good since I also had the smell of it all over my hands. I needed a shower, but I was a long ways away from one.

  Ha returned.

  “Is someone here?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Walking fish?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “All over.”

  They were attracted to the smell. And until I found a way to get it off my hands, they were also attracted to me.

  My eyes drifted to the last line of the note taped on the cooler.

  Good luck, it said.

  13

&nb
sp; My first impulse was to open throw the contents of the cooler as far away as possible and then run in the opposite direction, but while that wasn’t a terrible idea, this was not the best place to try misdirection. Instead, I grabbed it by the handle and located Ha, still buzzing in nervous-tension circlets around the vicinity.

  “I need a path down the mountain,” I said. “Can you show me?”

  “Uh-huh, you fly?”

  “No, I can’t fly.”

  “Okay, harder.”

  “I know. I can climb, though, if I have to and there’s a tree nearby.”

  “Okay, but you should learn to fly.”

  “I agree with you completely.”

  “This way.”

  My last pixie—her name was Iza—used to provide directions by doing a gentle hover in front of my face at a pace that was easy enough to follow from anywhere between a brisk walk to an all-out sprint. Ha appeared to have never been in a situation where she led a human-sized being anywhere, because she kept zipping ahead and then doubling back, making loud huffing noises, circling five or six times as if this would speed me up, and then shooting ahead again.

  The route we took had no attendant footpath, which was really okay because we were going downhill. The great thing about heading downhill rapidly was even if you made a mistake you tended to end up going in the correct direction anyway. Sure, you could land on something more durable than you are, but you were still falling the correct way.

  I was carrying the cooler—not heavy, but awkwardly large—and a backpack that was more than half-full of water, so I was a little more weighted down and a little less in balance than I was used to, but I could still get down the hill at a decent clip. Not decent enough to keep the pixie happy, but better than your average two-legged prey.

  Ha was less than understanding about the vagaries of the terrain, though, which became a problem when she indicated a left turn into a drop that was about ten feet steeper than I was okay with. I skidded to a stop.