Hellenic Immortal

by Gene Doucette

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Quotes

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  First published by The Writer’s Coffee Shop, 2012

  Copyright © Gene Doucette, 2012

  The right of Gene Doucette to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Writer’s Coffee Shop

  (Australia) PO Box 2013 Hornsby Westfield NSW 1635

  (USA) PO Box 2116 Waxahachie TX 75168

  Paperback ISBN- 978-1-61213-101-6

  E-book ISBN- 978-1-61213-102-3

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the US Congress Library.

  Cover image by: © Nuttakit/© Linas Lebeliunas/© Yur1956/© Sinisa Botas/© Edward Shtern/© angelo.gi/© iruhsa

  Cover design by: Megan Dooley

  www.thewriterscoffeeshop.com/gdoucette

  In addition to ghost writing for an immortal man, Gene Doucette has been published as a humorist with Beating Up Daddy: A Year in the Life of an Amateur Father and The Other Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: A Parody. He is also a screenwriter and a playwright. This is his second novel. Gene lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife and two children.

  Third Apparition: Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be, until

  Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him.

  Macbeth: That will never be. Who can impress the forest, bid the tree,

  Unfix his earthbound root?

  --from Macbeth, by William Shakespeare

  Priest: . . . You are not one of the immortal gods, we know;

  Yet we have come to you to make our prayer

  As to the man surest in mortal ways

  And wisest in the ways of god.

  --from Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles

  It was Liakhil who came for me.

  I remember it being on a day where the woods seemed quieter than usual, but it’s possible I decided this after the fact to make myself feel better. I’m the same way with volcanoes and earthquakes—the signs were there, and I simply missed them.

  This was neither volcano nor earthquake, which was either a good thing or a bad thing depending on whether one was in its path or not.

  I’d known Liakhil since he was a stripling, so seeing him as an adult always made me catch my breath. This was partly because the passage of time, not easy for me under normal circumstances, was even harder to gauge when living by myself in a temperate zone. Also, Liakhil had grown into the largest satyr I could remember, yet I still saw the boy I first met beneath that hard, impassive, bearded face.

  He appeared in the woods behind me, said my name, and nearly caused me to soil myself. I always hated his kind for being able to do that, as I pride myself on being the kind of guy that’s difficult to sneak up on.

  “It’s coming,” was what he said, and when I asked him what he was talking about, he just shook his head. “Hurry.”

  I’d have argued, but I try not to argue with satyrs, just as a rule. Also, Liakhil looked afraid, which was alarming because I didn’t know that was one of their available expressions. So we ran. Or rather, I ran as hard as I could while he sort of jogged. The destination was never really in question as their enclosure was ahead of us and I didn’t know any other place a satyr would have wanted to be.

  Then came the noises. A tree makes a very distinctive groaning sound when it is bent that’s hard to describe, but impossible to mistake for something else. I’d first heard it in the middle of an elephant stampede. (Or, something approximating an elephant. A large land mammal, let’s just say. When you’re as old as I am, sometimes you’re just waiting for paleontologists to discover things and name them for you.) The ground shook in a manner similar to a stampede as well, except it wasn’t a constant

  thing like it would have been with many land creatures trampling the landscape. It was the thud-thud-thud of a biped.

  And while I knew it couldn’t have been, it felt like it was directly behind us. “What is it?” I shouted to Liakhil. He either didn’t hear me or didn’t feel like answering, but he did share my anxiety regarding our relative proximity to it.

  Fortunately, we were nearly to the wall of the enclosure. Without breaking stride, he grabbed my arm, pulled me over his shoulders, and then jumped up into the canopy. This would have been a good time to see what was behind us, but my eyes were closed. I also may have been screaming.

  We landed hard on the other side of the wall. “What was . . .” was all I could say before he had his hand over my mouth. He shook his head at me, and I nodded.

  The ground thrummed. I realized the thriving satyr village I was used to seeing was silent and looked completely empty, something I’d never witnessed before. It occurred to me that Liakhil had taken an enormous risk by leaving them—they were hiding in their homes, I later learned—to bring me over the wall.

  How enormous a risk was spelled out as soon as the thing on the other side hit the wall.

  It nearly buckled. I had been on the planet for a very, very long time by then and I had never seen any being capable of that. And I have not since.

  I held my breath, but there was no second blow. Instead, it marched off.

  Once it was fairly distant, I turned to Liakhil and asked my question. “What was that?” I asked, invoking a few choice Minoan gods, plus a Sumerian deity or two.

  “The Duh-ryadh,” he answered.

  I had heard this word before, but not for anything I could have imagined to be real. In the tongue of the satyros, it meant evil personified. It meant the devil. And the devil wasn’t supposed to actually walk the earth, right?

  “WAGERING IS FOR MEN WHO CAN NO LONGER HUNT,” SAID HE TO SILENUS. “AND IN HUNTING, IF YOUR PREY IS AS LIKELY TO SLAY YOU AS OTHERWISE, THE WISER PATH WOULD BE TO FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO KILL.”

  From the archives of Silenus the Elder. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne

  Someone was following me.

  It was more than a little annoying, because I’d only just re-entered society at large after a couple of years away, and I was still getting used to the idea—again—that the world was overfilled with people.

  Las Vegas was probably not the best city in which to make this adjustment. Even without the crowds to consider, it’s a terribly confusing place for someone my age. For instance, I was in Egypt when some of those pyramids you see on postcards were built, and I don’t care if the one on the strip is made of glass and has lights shooting out of the top, it’s still goddamn disorienting. And the togas at Caesar’s Palace give me fits.

  If I’d been smart about it, I would have dropped myself i
nto the middle of Montana and worked my way into a city or two gradually, like a one-man Visigoth horde. But I had drinking to do, and Montana didn’t seem like the place to do that. So instead I was drinking in Las Vegas and quietly wishing for a nice plague or two to make the planet a bit less crowded.

  The woman following me was a longhaired brunette, and the first time I saw her she was dressed semi-formally in a knee length skirt and scoop-necked blouse, all just a bit too classy and clean for two in the morning. She had been standing in front of a slot machine, but when she shifted and sat down, her skirt rode up and showed off some leg. This is really what caught my eye, because I am a heterosexual male.

  There are perhaps only one or two things on earth that will draw my attention more quickly than the flashing of a well-formed leg atop a three-inch heel—the flashing of a well-formed breast would do it, but that’s considerably less common—and so I noticed her. I then managed to get back to my poker game, but from that point on, I made sure I kept her in my peripheral vision.

  I’m something of a voyeur, in case you didn’t get that.

  It didn’t take long for me to realize that my friend with the nice legs was watching me, too. This was puzzling because I frankly didn’t look like much at that particular time. I had more or less rolled out of bed and directly onto the casino floor, pausing only long enough to put on shoes. And I don’t think of myself as one of those guys who looks great at 2:00 a.m. No, whatever it was that had her lingering wasn’t sex appeal, and it wasn’t money, because despite being extremely wealthy at the moment, I was keeping that information to myself.

  Possibly, she simply knew I was looking and decided to look back. I dismissed it as such.

  But then she turned up the next night. She’d gone from a skirt to black slacks and a halter, and had pulled her hair back, but it was definitely the same woman. She situated herself at a different slot machine and acted as before, playing as long as I was playing and keeping me in her side view.

  It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. If she was following me for subversive reasons, keeping herself in my range of vision was just not the smart thing to do; she could see the back of my head just fine from behind me and I don’t have eyes there.

  So she wanted me to see her seeing me, but why? I considered prostitution, but a call girl would have approached me eventually; they don’t usually get paid—or not well—just to be looked at from across the room, and if someone was paying her for that, it wasn’t me.

  I cashed out after the next hand and walked over to introduce myself, but she got up the minute I did and left out of a side door. I considered following, but that seemed a little too stalker-ish. Maybe, I told myself, she just liked playing slots before bedtime and I was misconstruing what was going on.

  Except she continued to turn up: evening gowns, pants suits, bikini (by the pool), hair down, hair pulled back, glasses, no glasses. Same girl. And every time I got close to her, she made a hasty exit. Either she really was following me, or I’d developed some sort of psychosis. I suspected the former, but the latter wasn’t entirely out of the question.

  * * *

  It was because of another woman that I was in Vegas in the first place. Her name is Clara, and she’s currently somewhere in Europe spending money—her own, although she could have asked and I would have given her some—and probably having a fantastic time doing whatever it is twenty-five year olds do with ample funds in Europe these days. And since this particular twenty-five year old is always going to look twenty-five, she may be away for some time.

  Clara, thanks to a medical procedure that is unlikely to be repeated any time soon, is going to live forever, provided she avoids sharp objects and volcanoes and the like.

  I am too. I already have lived something like forever, provided one collapses one’s definition down to the past sixty thousand years or so. Also like me, Clara will never age, get sick, or just die of natural causes. We can both be hurt—I mean physically, although I guess emotional pain is on the table as well—and otherwise die of exceptional or intentional causes, or so I assume.

  It would have been a fantastic coincidence if the one woman on earth who could grow no older with me was also my soul mate (or true love or whatever romantic metaphor you prefer) and we could live happily ever after in a way no fairy-tale writer could have imagined. But this was not true love, and it wasn’t anyone’s fault except maybe whoever thought of the idea of true love in the first place, because I’m nearly positive it doesn’t actually exist. Or rather, it’s easily mistaken for something else, as I believe I have met my true love at least a dozen different times. And Clara isn’t one of those dozen.

  She also isn’t the only woman on earth who doesn’t get any older. She just happens to be the least complicated of the two.

  Anyway, I bought an island in the Queen Charlottes a little less than two years ago in an estate sale. The last owner was one Robert Grindel, recently deceased, (deservedly so) and I decided to live in the modest private home that came with the island. Clara decided to come with me. This was fantastic for about eighteen months, but things started to go downhill after that.

  So yeah; she left. And I don’t really want to talk about it.

  * * *

  Having an attractive woman playing amateur espionage with me was something that I would have quite enjoyed in a different time or place, but as I’d recently had a bounty on my head, I was much more wary than titillated. So I checked out of the Bellagio and into the MGM Grand, and went from poker to blackjack.

  I switched to blackjack because you really don’t have to pay much attention when playing it, unlike poker, which I’m quite good at when fully engaged, but which I find difficult when concentrating more on the people watching than the people playing. Both are preferable to slots, which I simply don’t understand. I mean, it’s a machine. You can’t read a machine for tendencies; you just have to hope it’s not cheating. There’s luck involved in cards too, but there’s also a little skill. It’s like the difference between praying for a fatted calf to walk into your camp versus going out and hunting one. You might not get dinner either way, but at least in one case you’re not relying on the beneficence of fate or some random god to help you out. And yes, I know I just equated the gods to a slot machine. That was my point.

  Also, and this is possibly related, one of the kicks I get out of cards and dice is that both were once used for telling the future, so the idea of employing them in games of chance just cracks me up. Every time I crap out at the table, I’m thinking not only did I lose my money, I also just foretold a drought for my village. You can’t get that kind of entertainment from a slot machine.

  Anyway, I was at one of the blackjack tables riding an improbable streak of heinously bad luck when I saw her again, sitting at the bar. She had followed me to the MGM.

  For this evening’s game of tag, she went with a black sweater and skirt combo, with a cute little beret and a pair of those tiny oval glasses women nowadays wear because they look retro.

  Wasting no time, I cashed out and headed for the bar, fully expecting her to turn around and walk off like she had every other time—and also planning to chase her for a change, as I was now convinced this wasn’t simply the consequence of my overactive imagination. But she didn’t run. She held her ground, which was modestly exciting.

  I slid into the seat next to her and caught the bartender’s attention. His name was Chester, and he didn’t have a lot to do because it was nearly 3:00 a.m.

  Gambling at night was how I coped with the crowds.

  I tapped on the bar to get his attention. “Do you have any scotch that’s of the legal age?”

  “I got a twelve year old,” he said.

  “That’s close enough. Neat, please.”

  “You got it.” Chester served me my drink and then scooted to the other end of the bar to fill a cocktail waitress’s order.

  After a moment’s pause I cleared my throat and asked, “Don’t you want to run off again?
”

  My erstwhile stalker turned in her swivel chair and looked at me. “Excuse me?” She smelled like primrose. I probably smelled like the cigarettes my tablemate had been chain-smoking all evening.

  “Or you could just move to the far end of the room,” I suggested, pointing to the tables by the door. “To keep a safe distance.”

  She grinned toothlessly and sipped her drink, which appeared to be a rum and coke. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

  “Apparently yes, you do. Someone paying you to keep an eye on me?”

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  It was the first time I had heard her voice, which was deep and melodic, with the cadence of someone who might have started life in a language other than English. I decided I could listen to it all night. “Of course you don’t. Well then, let me introduce myself. I’m Jason.”

  I’d changed my name before leaving the island, going with Jason Stargill. This required repeating it a few dozen times so it rolled out naturally, which is something you learn how to do when you switch appellations like other people do shoes. I felt fairly comfortable with it.

  We shook hands. Finally close enough to get a good look, I noted her deep black eyes and round face that bespoke a Hellenic ancestry. She was also far more attractive than I’d realized from a distance. Sometimes this causes a bout of stammering on my part.

  “Jason?” she repeated. “Funny. You don’t look like a Jason.”

  “And you are?”

  “Ariadne.”

  “Greek.”

  “Mm-hmm,” she nodded. “My parents always loved the classics.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, downing my scotch. “Listen, Ariadne—and let’s just pretend that’s your real name for now—I’m the kind of guy who likes his privacy. I’ve been known to go through a whole lot of trouble to preserve that privacy. So as much as I’ve enjoyed the eye-fucking I’ve been getting for the past week, I’d appreciate it if you stopped following me. I’m sure you understand.”