But before that happened, I had to acknowledge some of the basic pleasantries that come along after everyone has decided a siege is finally over and everyone’s safe.
Esteban made it through. I got a chance to say shake his hand and express sentiments along the lines of I’m glad you too are still alive, which was nice. Dmitri offered me the use of any illegal thing I wanted at any time in the future, which was also nice. Paul took a minute to thank me for whatever blah-blah thing I might have done (he had no idea, he only heard I fixed things somehow) and then he was off, a list of guests in his hand and an expression that suggested what came next was definitely going to suck more than what had already happened. And there were others, whose names I mostly didn’t know, and mostly we were all happy to have survived.
Then the hard part began.
Someone was able to get a hold of Grundle, which I guess was easier without all the electrical interference. He was the lifeline to the mainland, so any coordination of the rescue teams would go through him. He was already in touch with the necessary parties.
Paul, Esteban and Dmitri, meanwhile, had to go through that guest list and start counting the living, as a way to tally the dead, at least so far as the hotel itself was concerned. (The dead resident count was going to have to wait.) This task meant going from room to room.
Mirella volunteered to help. I declined, and nobody gave me a hard time about it. I had something else to do that was probably more important, but I didn’t want to tell anyone about it, including my girlfriend.
So it was that a couple of hours after ridding the island of a banshee infestation, I sat in the dark at one end the bar in the hotel’s night club, enjoying the best bottle of bourbon I could find.
I wasn’t alone.
“Y’understand, if you pour it in a proper glass it breathes nice and taste better,” Calvin the vampire said.
I was drinking straight from the bottle.
“Tastes fine like this.”
“Yeh sure, it tastes fine, just that it could taste better.”
As a guest, Calvin wasn’t asked to help with the door-to-door canvassing currently underway, but even if he had been he likely would have turned it down inasmuch as this would probably take all night and half the day, and he had a certain aversion to daylight.
“You want some?” I asked. I was standing on the bartender side, because that was where the alcohol was located. It didn’t exactly feel unfamiliar; as you can imagine, tending bar is one of my favorite jobs.
“Alright sure.”
I dug up two rocks glasses and filled both with bourbon. I could have maybe offered him blood, but I didn’t know where that might be stored behind the bar—I never tended one that catered to vampires—and he couldn’t have any of mine.
“Now you swish it round,” Calvin said, rolling the liquid in his glass, as one does.
“I promise, I have more experience drinking alcohol than you do,” I said. “I’m not interested in savoring this, I’m interested in drinking the hell out of it. Cheers.”
We clicked our glasses together.
“So what did this prophet say to you?” he asked.
I’d been recounting how I spent the past few days, which was way more interesting than how he spent them. He woke up underwater, but not much had happened since. He didn’t even take part in the battle outside, which is a shame since he probably would have been an excellent ally, if he knew how to fight at all. He may not have. I’ve met my share of pacifist vampires.
“I already told you,” I said. “A bunch of crazy.”
“Sure, but what kind of crazy?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. In the time since I’d been in Lorelai’s company, I hadn’t had much opportunity to dwell on the particulars. There was the middle part—the official prophecy I was going to need her scribe’s help in unraveling—but the beginning and end were pretty clear, in my head.
“I think she actively enabled the events which lead to this entire disaster,” I said, “and I think she did it specifically so I would still be here at the end of it all, and I don’t know why. And that’s kind of messing with my head.”
“Oh. Well.”
Calvin gulped his drink, perhaps coming around to my way of thinking. This was not a time for sipping.
“Well that sounds like bollocks,” he added.
“Maybe. I don’t think it is. But I’m really tired of people dying because someone thought I was worth saving.”
“I can see that, yeah.” He refilled his glass and thought about what he might say next. I was half-expecting one of those pithy you can’t blame yourself speeches that always tend to surface around conversations like this. I’d both received and delivered a version of that exact speech on dozens of occasions, and they never really worked in comforting the afflicted. Maybe Calvin was old enough to appreciate this. Or, maybe he thought it was appropriate to blame myself. Either one.
“So is that why we’re drinkin’ now?” he asked. “You feelin’ bad about yourself?”
Honestly, this might be half the reason I drink, just in general.
“No, actually. Although that’d be a pretty solid reason. I’m drinking because I’m not ready yet for what comes next.”
“Yeah, not following you.”
I refilled my glass, emptied it, and then refilled it again. It was easier when I was drinking straight from the bottle.
“The prophet had three messages for me. The first was that she killed an entire island because I was more important than anyone here. The second was why I was more important, although it was gibberish. The third was to notify me that someone else was coming.”
“Right.” He gulped his drink and I wondered if being around me caused people to drink more. This would hold up, historically. “Still not following.”
“Elamite,” I said. “The prophet spoke Elamite. You understand prophets see the future and not the past, yes?”
“Sure. So she looked into the future, and in that future, someone spoke the language. So what? She could’a seen you. You speak it, yeah?”
“You’re right, and you’re wrong. She was quoting the future. But she wasn’t quoting me.”
18
I arrived at room four twenty-two a couple of hours later, less sober but not drunk, which was more or less my default state for most of history.
The door was unlocked, which wasn’t a real surprise. All the rooms at the hotel were unlocked. It was a security feature that existed for exactly this situation, i.e., when going door-to-door looking for people who can’t open doors for themselves. Although honestly, Paul may have been saying that to hide the fact that all it took to gain access to any room was a large-scale power interruption.
It didn’t look like the interior had been hit by the water. This was perhaps one of the reasons the prophet chose it. The room looked more or less precisely as it had when I was there last. All except for one detail: Gordana was sitting in the chair next to the window.
She looked as if she’d been waiting for me the entire time, as she may well have been.
“There you are,” she said, smiling. “The shrieking stopped, and I hear people in the hallway, so I know it’s over. Yet you leave me waiting.”
She was dressed exactly as she was when we parted, but looked a little better for having had access to a shower, and the opportunity to at least rinse her clothing. I imagine I looked considerably worse than when she saw me last, because I hadn’t gotten my shower yet.
“I didn’t see any reason to hurry,” I said.
Perhaps the only good thing about prophecy is that since it’s unavoidable, whatever time I showed up in the room was the right time for me to show up in the room.
“I was worried someone else would get here first and I would end up evicted.”
“They’re searching occupied rooms,” I said. “This one is notoriously unoccupied.”
The message was still on the wall. I took a minute to try reading it again, this time with the word
s the prophet spoke laid over it.
The sounds lined up. That is to say, repetitive consonants from the words belonging to the ancient ritual landed on the same characters in the phrase on the wall. Hard ‘G’ was the same squiggle in three places, for instance. Not that I had any doubts; it was just good to see that for myself.
If I read the passage aloud, I could have created the circumstance by which the prophet looked into the future and heard me speaking the words. But I didn’t know how to read the message until I heard her recite it in the hospital room. Her getting it from me getting it from her would just create a paradox that honestly made my head hurt.
As much as I wasn’t looking forward to what was about to happen, I also didn’t want to deal with any kind of paradox. It just seemed like a bad idea.
That said, just because Lorelai heard someone read it didn’t mean she knew how to write it. At some point I would need to account for her receipt of the Elamite text.
But not right now.
“She told us it was a summoning,” Gordana said.
“I guess it is, sure. Or a prayer. Or a chant. They’re all pretty close to the same thing.”
“I think a summoning is different, no? There’s an expectation of an arrival. Is it to summon a god?”
“No. Well, yes but also no. A human considered a god.”
“To summon you, then.”
I smiled.
“At a different point in history, maybe. Not in Elam, though, and not with this phrase. The last line on the wall there… in the ritual, it’s only spoken once, while the rest of it is repeated as long as it has to be to realize the coda. Translated, it means the priestess comes.”
“Priestess. A woman.”
“Yes. I’ve been many things, but never a woman.”
I sat down on the edge of the nearest bed, and added this to the list of situations it was weird to be in with a succubus without sex being involved.
“I should have figured it out earlier,” I said. “I’m not the only immortal in the world. Did I tell you that? There’s another: just like me, but older. She would have been just as drawn to a city-state like Elam as I was. Only, not as a laborer. That wasn’t her style.”
Gordana jumped in the chair, startled by something that had just happened behind me. I knew without turning what that something was.
The priestess came: Eve was in the room.
That she had appeared out of nowhere, silently, without the use of the door, was one of the few things that separated us. It wasn’t magic, but it was about the closest thing to it in the world. I sort of know how she does it, but I can’t do it myself. Maybe one day.
Eve began by reciting the incantation on the wall, closing Lorelai’s temporal circle without creating any paradoxes, which was nice.
She always spoke with a curiously melodic cadence that echoed languages even older than I was. I think to modern ears it sounded southern European, but I heard ancient African tongues.
I turned, and waited for her to finish the stanza. She looked as amazing as ever: bright red hair and pale skin, with stunning blue eyes. I chased her for ten thousand years, in part because she was the only other immortal I knew of, and in part because she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever laid eyes on.
“Hello, Urr,” she said quietly, noting the presence of other people in the room for the first time.
I still found it difficult to find my breath and my voice when sharing the same space with her. This was true even after our last encounter, when Eve made it clear she more or less hated me, and for some really good reasons. The sting from that conversation was still there, and I had no reason to expect anything different this time around. Maybe she was here to harangue me for letting everyone on the island die, like I wasn’t beating myself up enough for that already.
“Hi,” I said. Eve could kill me any time she wanted, the same way she was capable of appearing in a room without using the door. I sometimes have trouble sleeping, knowing this.
She looked at Gordana.
“The message, is it yours?” Eve asked.
Gordana shook her head mutely.
“Well. My thanks to whomever put it there, as I would not have found you otherwise, Urr. Or should I call you Adam now? I have been looking for some time.”
“That’s… a little terrifying, actually. I don’t suppose you have good news.”
Or maybe she changed her mind after the last time and decided she did want me dead after all.
She took a step in my direction and stumbled a little, as if she was having trouble with her shoes… except she was barefoot. I reached out to steady her, but she caught herself in time, on the edge of the bed.
“Are you hurt?” I asked, surprised.
She was in a simple white sundress; if she were bleeding from somewhere, it would be obvious.
“I… I need your help, Adam. Something awful is…”
Then she collapsed into my arms.
Gordana, stunned and frozen to this point, leapt to her feet.
“She’s ill!” the succubus said.
“No, no, she can’t get sick. This is something else. We have to check for wounds.”
With Gordana’s help, I got Eve onto the bed, forming a tableau: her unconscious body beneath the Elamite phrase. If I saw the future, and witnessed this moment, it would probably stick out for me too.
There weren’t any obvious wounds or bruises on Eve that I could see. Gordana, searching under the dress, came up empty too.
“A blow to the head, maybe,” I said. “Or an internal wound. We should get doctor Cambridge here.”
“Are you sure she isn’t sick?” Gordana asked. “She’s burning up.”
Of course I was sure. It was the one thing I could count on in my own ridiculously long life, and one on which Eve’s even longer life also depended: we simply didn’t get sick.
And yet…I put my hand on Eve’s forehead. Gordana was right, even though she couldn’t be.
“She has a fever,” I said, mystified.
“This is what I’m saying. For a being who cannot be ill, she is surely displaying the symptoms of illness.”
When I took my hand away from Eve’s forehead, I realized the skin on her body was sticky.
“It can’t be,” I said, although clearly it was. “It’s… impossible.”
About the Author
Gene Doucette is an award-winning screenwriter, novelist, playwright, humorist, essayist, father, husband, cyclist, dog owner – and a few other things, too. He is, in other words, a writer. A graduate of Boston College, he lives in Cambridge, MA with his family.
For the latest on Gene Doucette, follow him online
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Also by Gene Doucette
The Spaceship Next Door
The world changed on a Tuesday.
When a spaceship landed in an open field in the quiet mill town of Sorrow Falls, Massachusetts, everyone realized humankind was not alone in the universe. With that realization, everyone freaked out for a little while.
Or, almost everyone. The residents of Sorrow Falls took the news pretty well. This could have been due to a certain local quality of unflappability, or it could have been that in three years, the ship did exactly nothing other than sit quietly in that field, and nobody understood the full extent of this nothing the ship was doing better than the people who lived right next door.
Sixteen-year old Annie Collins is one of the ship’s closest neighbors. Once upon a time she took every last theory about the ship seriously, whether it was advanced by an adult ,or by a peer. Surely one of the theories would be proven true eventually—if not several of them—the very minute the ship decided to do something. Annie is starting to think this will never happen.
One late August morning, a little over three years since the ship landed, Edgar Somerville arrived in town. Ed’s a government operative posing as a j
ournalist, which is obvious to Annie—and pretty much everyone else he meets—almost immediately. He has a lot of questions that need answers, because he thinks everyone is wrong: the ship is doing something, and he needs Annie’s help to figure out what that is.
Annie is a good choice for tour guide. She already knows everyone in town and when Ed’s theory is proven correct—something is apocalyptically wrong in Sorrow Falls—she’s a pretty good person to have around.
As a matter of fact, Annie Collins might be the most important person on the planet. She just doesn’t know it.
* * *
The Immortal Novel Series
* * *
Immortal
“I don’t know how old I am. My earliest memory is something along the lines of fire good, ice bad, so I think I predate written history, but I don’t know by how much. I like to brag that I’ve been there from the beginning, and while this may very well be true, I generally just say it to pick up girls.”
Surviving sixty thousand years takes cunning and more than a little luck. But in the twenty-first century, Adam confronts new dangers—someone has found out what he is, a demon is after him, and he has run out of places to hide. Worst of all, he has had entirely too much to drink.
Immortal is a first person confessional penned by a man who is immortal, but not invincible. In an artful blending of sci-fi, adventure, fantasy, and humor, IMMORTAL introduces us to a world with vampires, demons and other “magical” creatures, yet a world without actual magic.
At the center of the book is Adam.
Adam is a sixty thousand year old man. (Approximately.) He doesn’t age or get sick, but is otherwise entirely capable of being killed. His survival has hinged on an innate ability to adapt, his wits, and a fairly large dollop of luck. He makes for an excellent guide through history ... when he’s sober.
Immortal is a contemporary fantasy for non-fantasy readers and fantasy enthusiasts alike.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 32
