We didn’t pause for introductions. The door to the first ward room on the other side of the lobby was ajar, and that was where we headed.
The room was small enough to hold only one bed. It had a bathroom and a closet and a window. The blinds were drawn, but if my sense of direction could still be counted on, I was pretty sure the view from that window would be of the part of the island on which the hotel was located.
It was nighttime, but the building had electricity, and the overhead lights were on. They were dimmed, but it was still easy enough to see.
Next to the bed, in a chair, was an imp with a notepad, a pen, and a lively look in his eyes. In the bed, evidently sleeping, was a human woman: the prophet who’d been ruining my life for at least the last week, and possibly longer.
She was Asian, and perhaps as old as sixty. Her skin was loose, baggy but not all that wrinkly, so it was hard to pin down an age because she could also have easily been in her forties but dying from consumption or something. Also, most prophets don’t survive into their sixties, and the weight of prophecy tends to age people prematurely.
Prophets are only lucid for short stretches. Most of them live short, miserable existences in which they are dealt with by whatever method the society of the time employs to handle the insane—and no society in history has dealt well with the insane—or they’re put to the sword for witchcraft. To say a prophet who develops a following is “lucky” is stretching things, but they are marginally less unlucky for having found people to care for them.
“Hello,” the imp in the chair said, ignoring Mirella to address me specifically. The doctor came in after us; Henri evidently decided to stay in the hallway, possibly because out there nobody threatened him with a sword.
Mirella took up a position at the window and, after concluding nobody in the room constituted an immediate physical threat, pulled aside the blinds and looked outside. There was no glass in the window frame—the wave blew it out—so we could hear the banshee wails and distant gunfire pretty clearly.
“Hello to you,” I said to the imp.
“I am Thelonius D’Artagnan,” the imp said. “And you are the eternal man.”
“I go by Adam, most of the time.”
“I prefer the more grandiloquent monikers,” Thelonius D’Artagnan said.
“You’re an imp. That’s to be expected. Are you really her scribe?”
“Yes, I am!”
“That’s either the most brilliant idea or the worst.”
He laughed. It was an infectious sound. It made you want to join in and have a seat and swap stories.
Stories are what imps are good at, which is why attaching one to a prophet may just be an act of genius; if there’s anyone who can draw a comprehensible line between two irrational statements, it’s an imp. On the other hand, imps have only a casual acquaintanceship with the truth, so the resulting story could very well be purely fictional.
“I need to speak to her, not to you,” I said.
“You can speak to us both! She knew you were coming, and is scheduled to awaken momentarily.”
“All right. How about if I look at your notes while I’m waiting?”
“My notes?”
“Your documents. You’ve been her scribe for how long?”
“Oh! Two years, perhaps.”
“Splendid. Then I expect there are two years’ worth of note pads lying around here. I can read most languages.”
“But there are no such things!” he said with a laugh. “Notes, I mean, not languages, there are many languages, of course. Why, one time…”
“Let me stop you. We’ve no time for a charming story on your discovery of a new language today. Please explain why there are no records, since you’re her record-keeper and you’re holding a pad of paper and a pen.”
He laughed again. “Why, I keep this ready to capture her immediate impressions, but only in the moment. She often prophesizes rapidly, and I need time to absorb the information. I’m ashamed to admit even needing it, but I am getting on in years, you understand. Oh! Perhaps you don’t!”
Imps have unusually long lifespans, so it’s hard to pin an actual age on most of them. This one looked to be a portly fifty years old, but they all look portly, vaguely paternal, and roughly fifty for something in the neighborhood of a century. I had no idea how old he actually was, and wouldn’t unless he told me.
“All right, so you take notes. What happens to the notes?” I asked.
“Why, I destroy them!”
“But, again, you’re her scribe. Keeping the records is what you do.”
Then I understood.
“Oh Zeus, It’s all in your head, isn’t it?” I said.
“Why of course!”
This was like some extended nightmare. If I wanted to know the truth about something, an imp is the very last person I would seek out. It was an imp who was responsible for turning me into a Greek god, and trust me when I say that no matter how cool that sounds, it was not cool at all.
The doctor was checking the prophet’s vitals.
“She’s dying,” Mirella said from the window, “isn’t she?”
“Yes,” Cambridge said.
“What’s killing her?”
“In the short term, I’d say malnutrition. Holistically… sometimes the body just gives up after enough abuse.”
“She has been abused?” Mirella asked, looking concerned.
“Not in the way you’re thinking,” I said. “Having a mind stuck in a different state than the rest of the world takes a physical toll.”
“That’s more or less so,” the doctor said. “But she has also suffered physical abuse. There are old wounds, long healed. I don’t know where they came from, and she never explained. Ah. Here she comes.”
Her eyes flickered open. They took in the doctor first, since he was closest. She gave him a brief smile and squeezed his hand. Then she took note of Mirella, at the window. Then me. They stopped there.
“And now we are here,” she said. “At last.”
She had a strong voice for such a frail-looking woman. Her English was sketched with a Chinese dialect I couldn’t put my fingers on. She seemed lucid, focused, and lively.
“At last?” I repeated.
“The ending.”
“Whose ending?”
She didn’t answer. She just kept staring.
“What is your name?” I asked.
She didn’t answer this, either. I looked over at her scribe.
“Her name?” I asked him.
“She never gave any of us with a name. I had hoped that in this moment she might provide one to you, given your import. I’ve assigned her the appellation of Lorelai, and she answers to it on occasion.”
“All right.”
I turned back to her. It felt uncomfortably like being in the presence of an oracle. Oracles had a habit of waiting for a formal question before acknowledging the questioner’s existence. It was creepy.
Instead of posing a question right away—and I did have a couple—I went in another direction.
“Lorelai, then. Let me tell you what I’ve put together so far. You and your band of followers arrived on this island in secret, decamped in a hotel room for a while, and then went up into the hills. At first, I didn’t understand why you did this, but now I think I do: it was to capture a mermaid.”
“Capture?” the doctor said. “She’s sick. They found her and tried to help her.”
“I agree that they found her, and that they tried to help her, but I also think had they done neither of those things she’d have returned to the ocean and died there. I don’t think she stayed willingly. She wanted to leave, didn’t she?”
Lorelai still had no words, because that wasn’t the question she was waiting for. I looked at the scribe.
He gave a nearly imperceptible nod. It was without question the most understated thing I’d ever seen an imp do, so I knew it represented the kind of story he didn’t want to tell.
“When she
couldn’t leave,” I said. “She called for her people. And they came looking, because for some reason or another, that mermaid is important to them. Very important, as it turns out. She’s the queen bee.”
For this point I got a flicker of a nod from the prophet. Her imp scribe looked bewildered, as it appeared I was coming up with a version of the story he hadn’t considered.
“You knew exactly what that meant and what would happen,” I said, “and you did it anyway.”
“Well of course she knew!” Thelonius D’Artagnan said. “How else would she have helped us escape the great wave? And to send help to you! She is the keeper of the future!”
“You misunderstand. She’s the keeper of all of the futures. This is the nature of her curse. She sees an outcome, and can act to alter it. My issue is that the outcome she manipulated the future toward was one which involved a tsunami that drowned half of the island.”
Appropriately, the imp gasped, because as soon as he said it he realized I was right.
“Adam, now, come on,” the doctor said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Doc, I don’t know how it’s possible for those things out there to manufacture a tidal wave, but it’s a more credible explanation than coincidence.”
“It’s preposterous,” Mirella agreed. “But it fits the evidence.”
“We knew the creatures were looking for something,” I said, “and I was all right with the idea that whatever they were looking for washed ashore with the wave. But Doc, you examined the mermaid two weeks before the tsunami, so I know that can’t be right. She isn’t here because of the wave. The wave came because she was here.”
“It’s a magnificent story!” Thelonius said. “But let me be the first of my kind to say such a thing: it sounds impossible!”
“Maybe you just haven’t lived long enough to appreciate how often the seemingly impossible happens,” I said. “But we have someone in the room who can tell us what the future would have looked like without the captive mermaid. So. Am I right?”
She stared for a while. I’d say she was hesitating because she didn’t want to answer, but it seemed more like she was waiting for the right moment in history in which to respond, like we hadn’t reached the part yet where she was supposed to acknowledge this question, and we were all going to have to wait until it came up.
Finally, she nodded, slowly, and then went back to staring and waiting.
“But why? If you knew what would happen if you kept her, why did you keep her?”
“It was the more desirable outcome,” she said.
“Because I got to live? Your succubus told me this was why you came to the island. I’m not nearly that important. Plus I was doing great before you sent a tsunami in my direction.”
“You are all.”
“I am all? I mean, I’m flattered, but…”
“Princes, kings and awful things, and sprites in flight all dust. The man behind the table is always in the shadows, and the shadow is death. Unstable is the world without the one who walks the path. Do you see?”
“No. I mean it kind of rhymes, which is cute, but no.”
God, I hate prophets.
She looked a little exasperated, like what she just said was the clearest thing ever, and maybe for her it was.
“The beginning must be here for the ending, or the impossible will be. Do you see?”
“Again, no.”
I looked over at the imp in the corner, scribbling down what she just said.
“A little help?” I asked.
“I will offer an interpretation, but I need time to meditate on it.”
“Super.”
“Can you give me something a little less cryptic?” I asked her. Her response was to close her eyes and resume waiting. Or something. I mean, I knew she could see the future, but a little improvisation never hurt anyone.
“The battle’s escalated,” Mirella said. She was back to looking out the window.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Hard to say, it’s too far. But gunfire has escalated, and I just heard something which sounded suspiciously like a rocket.”
“Don’t suppose you can tell who’s winning?”
“No, but the field of battle is very wide.” She looked me in the eye, to underline the point she was about to make. “It is undoubtedly drawing the mermen in the direction of the hotel and away from the streets.”
“I understand. I’m nearly ready. First I want Lorelai to tell me why I’m so important.”
“But of course you’re important!” Thelonius said. I ignored him, because his prophet was busy having an event of some kind.
She opened her eyes, and I felt like I’d unlocked the next phase of this prophecy or something. Then the eyes rolled up in the back of her head, just long enough to worry me that perhaps this was the start of a seizure. Then she spoke, but what came out of her mouth wasn’t in English.
When she was done, she closed her eyes and sagged back into the bed, as if she’d just accomplished something that took great effort. Maybe it did, who am I to say?
“I don’t know what that was,” the imp said. He was writing anyway, though, I assume just to capture the utterances phonetically.
“What language was that?” Dr. Cambridge asked.
“It was Elamite,” I said. To the prophet, I asked, “Do you even know what you just said?”
She didn’t respond. Possibly, she went back to sleep, which was kind of rude, really.
“What did she say?” Mirella asked.
“It’s a bit of ritual doggerel. The kind of thing you say when you want a god to show up and help.”
“A prayer.”
“Sure, kind of.”
“Did it answer your question?”
“No, it raised new ones.”
“I don’t think you’re going to get a chance to get your new questions answered,” the doctor said. He had his fingers on her neck. Why she wasn’t hooked up to a machine that beeped her heart rate out I didn’t know, but then again I’d never been in a hospital that specialized in non-human patients before. Maybe heartbeat wasn’t as important here.
Either way, something was wrong. He began to minister to her, slowly at first and then more frantically, while her scribe stepped between us and the door.
“She left me in charge of a final message,” he said quietly.
“She’s dying,” I said.
“Oh yes. And she wanted you to know that if you are to accomplish what you’re about to do, the time to do so is right now. The opportunity will pass otherwise. So go.”
I looked over at Mirella, but she was already vacating her spot at the window and heading for the exit
“One thing,” Thelonius said, grabbing my elbow. “What are you about to do?”
“Save the day,” I said. “Or what’s left of it.”
17
The easy part was locating an ambulance.
The island only had two, and calling them ambulances was generous because they were essentially box vans with the back seats removed.
One of the two was still in the bay at the back of the building, and the only reason it was there was because it had been stored inside and protected by garage doors. The doors didn’t keep the water out, but it did prevent the vehicle from being washed away. My guess was, that was what happened to the other one.
Much harder was getting the mermaid to the ambulance. First we had to find her again, which was not a small challenge given the non-intuitive floor plan of the hospital. Once we located the ambulance bay, and after several minutes of aimless wandering, we decided to follow the directions nailed to the wall—one of those “you are here” maps that would have served me so well in the Middle Ages—to get back to the lobby, from which we retraced our steps.
On the way, we found Steven, who I actually thought was still in my bag. He was leaned up against a wall in the hallway that took us to the mermaid, drunk, and unconscious.
I checked my bag verify tha
t the tank containing alcohol was still there. It was; he’d found another source.
“She’s this way,” Mirella said, urging me to step past the drunk iffrit and proceed down the hall.
“Yeah, hang on a sec.”
I pushed open the door next to Steven. A storage room was on the other side.
Ten minutes later we’d found a wheelchair that wasn’t doing anything else and loaded it down with as much rubbing alcohol as we could find.
The mermaid was where we left her, and in about the same state.
“We need something to move her on,” I said.
“You mean like the wheelchair you’ve loaded with alcohol?”
“Yes, like that, but not that.”
Mirella went off to find something that would help, while I dealt with a much more challenging problem: if the mermaid didn’t want to come with us, we didn’t really have a way to make her. My assumption was that for most of her stay on the island, she’d been too weak to defend herself adequately, because I didn’t see anyone in the prophet’s entourage strong enough to overpower her. I also wasn’t strong enough, and neither was Mirella. We could kill her and drag her, certainly, but that would be somewhat self-defeating.
I sat down on the side of the tub again, as before, and put my hand on the mermaid’s. Her big black pupil-less eyes blinked open and found my face. I held my hand out, palm up.
“It’s time to go home,” I said.
She looked around the room, and noted we were alone. A low whistle came out of her mouth that sounded like a dolphin cackle. I appreciated the lack of volume. She could probably burst one of my eardrums at this distance, as well as notifying everyone in the hospital that something was up.
She reached out and took my hand, and then I stood. The intent was to help her to her feet, but she neither had feet nor actually required my help. When she stood, it involved gathering her fins beneath her torso in a way that would have been impossible for a being with proper legs, and pulling them together into a firm, conic shape. It was pretty cool, to be honest.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 30
