Yuletide Immortal
By Gene Doucette
GeneDoucette.me
Amazon Edition
Copyright © 2014 Gene Doucette
All rights reserved
Cover by Kim Killion, Hot Damn Designs
This book may not be reproduced by any means including but not limited to photocopy, digital, auditory, and/or in print.
The Immortal Chronicles is an ongoing series of novellas written by Adam, the immortal narrator of Immortal, Hellenic Immortal and Immortal at the Edge of the World.
The Immortal Chronicles: Immortal At Sea (volume 1)
Adam's adventures on the high seas have taken him from the Mediterranean to the Barbary Coast, and if there's one thing he learned, it's that maybe the sea is trying to tell him to stay on dry land.
The Immortal Chronicles: Hard-Boiled Immortal (volume 2)
The year was 1942, there was a war on, and Adam was having a lot of trouble avoiding the attention of some important people. The kind of people with guns, and ways to make a fella disappear. He was caught somewhere between the mob and the government, and the only way out involved a red-haired dame he was pretty sure he couldn't trust.
The Immortal Chronicles: Immortal and the Madman (volume 3)
On a nice quiet trip to the English countryside to cope with the likelihood that he has gone a little insane, Adam meets a man who definitely has. The madman’s name is John Corrigan, and he is convinced he’s going to die soon.
He could be right. Because there’s trouble coming, and unless Adam can get his own head together in time, they may die together.
The Immortal Chronicles: Yuletide Immortal (volume 4)
When he’s in a funk, Adam the immortal man mostly just wants a place to drink and the occasional drinking buddy. When that buddy turns out to be Santa Claus, Adam is forced to face one of the biggest challenges of extremely long life: Christmas cheer. Will Santa break him out of his bad mood? Or will he be responsible for depressing the most positive man on the planet?
Yuletide Immortal
The first time I met Santa was in a bar.
I appreciate that this is a true statement about a lot of the people I’ve met in my life, especially the most recent portion, by which I mean the last hundred years or so. I spent most of the twentieth century in North America, in bars, clubs, restaurants, and so on. Any place that served alcohol. I also appreciate that this was not always a stupendous plan given for a solid decade there weren’t any places to legally purchase and imbibe alcohol in the United States, but at the same time Prohibition was going on Europe was a crap place to be thanks to the fallout from the War to End All Wars and plus, I was too lazy to get up and go somewhere else.
Still, by 1955 you’d think I would have figured out there were easier places to get drunk. Aside from prohibition, by mid-century I had also survived a nightclub fire and a mob hit in two different bars a decade apart, which is the sort of track record that can make a guy consider—if not drinking in a less violent country—abstinence or drinking alone.
The problem is I’ve been alive for a really long time—going on sixty-thousand years—and a whole lot of that has involved solo drinking. Generally if in a culture where I’m welcome, regardless of how dangerous that culture can turn out to be occasionally, I’d rather share a pint with some people than be alone with a bottle.
Which, again, is how I met Santa.
I was occupying a barstool in the Village in lower Manhattan at the time. It was December, of course—one does not meet Santa in August—and as I said the year was 1955.
I don’t like New York City all that much. I’m not sure why. I mean, there are times when it’s just the right kind of controlled hedonism, but there’s also a certain tribal rudeness to the inhabitants that I could never appreciate from the perspective of a fellow tribe-member. I think it’s probably also a lovely place to be if one has a lot of money, but for the century in question when I was there it was either as a common laborer or a modestly well-off tourist. I never got to enjoy it as a fabulously wealthy gadabout. Maybe if I had I’d have appreciated it more.
Anyway. Santa. He showed up as I was on my third or fourth pint of really crummy tap beer and engaged with a few of the locals on the subject of the new bridge opening up that month, and how this would or would not signal the end of civilization as we knew it.
I’m not really kidding. There were four other patrons in on the conversation plus the bartender, and they collectively seemed to think the Tappan Zee Bridge would be bringing all manner of aliens into the city.
This is a common affliction, historically, in which change is viewed as a negative regardless of what kind of change it is. I remember having similar arguments over pre-sliced bread, cars, and Roman aqueducts. Although in fairness I agreed with the argument against cars. I still think they were a bad idea.
“We have enough undesirables in this neighborhood already, thank you kindly,” the bartender was saying. He was a square-jawed Irishman named O’Shea, running an Irish pub full of other Irishmen. I was the only theoretical ‘undesirable’ in the room, but thankfully nobody had bothered to make that point as yet. “What do you think, Santa?”
He was speaking to the fellow to my right. I was aware the seat had just become occupied but hadn’t turned to look until then.
And… it was Santa. By that I mean it was a portly gentleman with a long, grey-white beard, a dark red suit with white trim, wire-framed glasses and a balding head. His cheeks were rosy either from the cold or the exertion of hoisting himself up on the barstool. He was not particularly tall.
“What’s the rumpus?” Santa asked, as a pint was placed in front of him.
“This fella here don’t agree with us,” O’Shea said, meaning me. He then went on to describe the social ills sure to befall the neighborhood in the coming years thanks to a modest traffic improvement. He managed to roll the dismantling of the Third Avenue El into his dissertation, despite that being an event everyone there could agree was good.
Santa took all of this in, nodding patiently. He turned to me. “Who might you be, sir?”
“Stanley,” I said. It was a name I had just started trying on. It matched the identification in my pocket (along with the surname Jones) I’d only recently purchased from a very good counterfeiter not too far from were I was sitting. I had picked neither name.
It was around this era that I realized the world was going to be a whole lot more complicated if I didn’t have multiple documents identifying me as a member of whatever country I was in, on-hand, all the time. That meant finding someone who could make me multiple people so as to provide the sort of versatility I needed. That was what led me to an old Russian in an unsavory pawn shop in an unsavory part of town.
This was actually why I was in New York. I just hadn’t worked up the energy yet to leave.
“It’s a delight to meet you, Stanley,” Santa said.
“And you are?” I asked.
He laughed, and clapped me on the shoulder. “You’re a funny one!” Then he took a long drink of his beer and ignored the question.
“So what do you think, Santa?” O’Shea asked.
Santa put down his beer and looked around the room, which was already beginning to crowd around him in anticipation. “Well, gents, I’m afraid I will have to go against you on this one, and agree with our new friend Stanley.”
This prompted an exaggerated outcry, as if the bar had a bet going and he’d just lost it for them.
“I will explain,” Santa said, holding up a hand, “with a story.”
He cleared his throat and began. “I heard tell of
a village not so far from here and not so long ago. The village was almost entirely isolated, with a mountain face behind them and a thick forest in front. On a third side, a rushing river and swamp land. The only way in and out was down the raging river or through the dangerous woods, but the people didn’t much care, for they had all they needed. The ground was fertile, the crops plentiful, and the animals healthy.
“One day a man from the nearest village, on the other side of the forest, arrived in the town with a peculiar offer. If the villagers were to help him widen the road through the woods, it would make passage easier and safer for all of them, and then commerce could flow more freely, to the benefit of all. Or, so the man claimed.”
As Santa told this story more men from the edges of the bar started drifting over. I got the sense that this was not the first time they had been treated to a story from this person. I also got the sense that he was not a person at all.
“The village elders presented the idea to the people. Almost as one they answered: No! For they had no need of anything outside the town. All this would do, they said, is invite people from that other village to relocate, and none of them had any use for outsiders. Strangers! People not like them. Like Stanley, here.”
“Hey, leave me out of this.”
“Isolation, they said, was better! Isolation was to their benefit! And so the elders—taking the concerns of the local citizens under consideration, of course—discussed the matter in private, and do you know what they decided?”
The bar responded with a number of guesses ranging from no to never.
“They decided Yes! Yes, they would help build out that road.”
The men in the room practically rioted at this news.
“And after it was done, the people of the town, the ones who insisted that a better path would only lead to ruin? Why, those people saw all their worst fears come true! Strange men and women began appearing in the village! People never encountered before! People with odd languages and strange accents and bizarre skin color. People not at all like them! And they were angry with the elders for allowing such a thing to happen.”
“There you go,” O’Shea said, pointing at me, either because he thought Santa had proven the bar correct or because I was now representing the dangerous strangers in this imaginary village. I didn’t like the second option. I’ve been that stranger quite a few times, and am allergic to lynch mobs.
“Until!” Santa said, slapping the bar emphatically. “The rains came! It rained and poured, for days, a great storm that caused the river to swell above the banks and into the swampland. It rained so hard that Noah—if he were there—would have said, ‘My goodness but this is a lot of rain!’ And then more water came down off the mountains in great waves and the river rose again, out of the swamps and into the town. And the villagers looked at the rising floodwater, and did not know what to do.
“But also in that town were families who had come from a land beside the ocean. They knew flooding, and how to stem the waters, and they showed the rest of the village what to do. And for a while it worked! But the water kept rising, and so another people stepped forward. We can build boats they offered. And so they did, but by then the river water was too treacherous to risk, and so another group stood and said, we will send word to the other village.
“And soon people came down the newly widened road, with carriages and wagons and horses and men, and the strangers from the next town helped all the men and women and children from the village out of the town before they were drowned by the flood waters. An entire village—every single family—saved by the road they swore would bring about their demise.”
This brought actual applause.
“Ah, but that is not all, my friends!” Santa said. “For when the waters receded and the villagers returned, they found two men in the center of town sitting in a dinghy and drinking beer. And when they asked the two men why they didn’t also evacuate, they looked at one another and then at the questioners, and said, but it was just a wee bit ‘o rain.”
Laughter, more applause, and then someone bought Santa his next drink, and nobody tried to tie me up and set me on fire. I have few requirements for an effectively told story, but that’s one of them.
Later, after things quieted down, I asked Santa, “Did you just tell an immigration parable and end it with a bad Irish joke? Or am I a lot drunker than I thought?”
Santa smiled. “It wasn’t so bad a joke as that. It suffered only from not being particularly funny, but I’ve found any story of sufficient length can be made into a joke with a little brogue tacked on the end. Especially given the audience. Even the Bard knew you have to throw some low humor in for the folks on the floor.”
I laughed. I knew my Shakespeare pretty well—because I knew Shakespeare pretty well—and he actually did say that. “Maybe so, but I doubt anyone here will be recalling the parable part of that story.”
“I don’t know that I agree with you, Stanley. In my experience, stories told well stick with a person, even if with details forgotten. Wisdom is like sunshine. It leaves behind evidence of exposure. Perhaps next month, when this crowd starts rattling sabers over the next Negro emancipation or suffrage motion or Filipino war, something of what I said tonight will show itself in their reasoning.”
“Or just the next public transportation improvement.”
“It doesn’t take much to excite a crowd, does it?”
“It does not,” I agreed. I held up my pint. “Well, cheers.”
“Cheers!”
“Now tell me how an imp such as yourself ended up in the Village, calling himself Santa.”
He nearly choked on his mouthful, swallowed, then laughed uproariously. “An imp, you say! My boy, it’s been years since anyone called me that.”
“It’s been years since I’ve met one.”
“Really. How many years, would you say?”
“At least a thousand.”
He laughed again. “O’Shea, I’d like to forward my next round to Stanley here. He and I have a lot to talk about.”
* * *
Imps can be a lot of fun when you know ahead of time what you’re dealing with. They are professional fabulists, by which I mean they tell fantastic stories that have an unfortunate tendency to be untrue. That’s fine so long as you’re ready for it. Problems with imps arise from the fact that they won’t tip you off when they’ve stopped being fully honest.
In the abstract, a guy who doesn’t distinguish true from factually accurate is mostly harmless, unless that guy also happens to command a lot of attention because he’s a gifted storyteller. One such imp was a fellow named Silenus, who nearly got me killed many times over because of the tales he was telling about me, specifically. Those tales gave the impression I was a god—my name at the time was Dionysos so you’ve probably heard a few of them—and then everyone in Greece wanted to take a poke at the god. It was awkward.
Imps also have longer-than-average lifespans, although I don’t know exactly how long because another annoying thing is that the men of a line of imps all tend to look very much alike. (The women don’t. I don’t know why this is.) This is tremendously confusing for an immortal. I’m really used to people dying off in a predictable timeframe, and have been known to use generations as a sort of crude clock, but with the Silenii, I usually couldn’t tell if I was talking to Silenus the elder, the younger, or the third, because they all looked the same when they reached adulthood. Yet the amount of time that elapsed between my meeting the first Silenus and the third—I never met anyone from the line after the third—was more than six hundred years. I could have asked how long their lifespans were, but asking an imp a question like that means never knowing if the answer you’ve gotten is correct.
They can also drink. Aside from iffrits—and women—imps are probably my favorite sort of drinking companion. The reason I don’t spend more time with them may be partly due to imps being very rare, but more likely because whenever I spend a lot of time with one I end up in
danger for some reason.
* * *
“You’re how old?” he asked. This was a little while later, after we compared stories about how we’d ended up in this particular pub, and also after two more rounds apiece. We had relocated to a table away from the bar. It was in a corner against the storeroom wall, where we were pretty sure nobody would overhear.
“Old enough so I couldn’t say for sure how old I am.”
“And you knew the Silenii? I’m deeply impressed, my friend. They’re an old line. Died off, I’m pretty certain. The last Silenus I ever heard tell of was a victim of the inquisition purges.”
Of all the creatures on the planet—other than perhaps vampires—imps are probably the most likely to take me at my word when I tell them I’m immortal. It goes back to the whole question of truth versus fact. To an imp, my truth is that I’m an immortal man, and that’s good enough for them to believe it too. As I said, this sort of thing can blow up in your face quickly if you aren’t careful.
“Those must have been difficult times for an imp,” I said.
“Oh, it was! In Europe especially! For a thousand years you couldn’t tell a single good story without it involving Jesus somehow. The clever ones figured out ways, but the Silenii… they were too proud, if you must know. Pride and stubbornness and inflexibility of mind are a dangerous combination. It’s a pity, they had so many stories.”
Another thing about imp lineage is the elders teach the young all of the same tales, so a line of imps is an unbroken chain of oral history. The stories mutate over time, as they have to, but generally at the discretion of the teller. It’s been said the mind of an imp is the mind of his ancestors, and implicit in that definition is that any change made by any generation to any story is sanctioned by the historic originator of that story. It’s a bit too mystical of an interpretation for me, but I could understand the appeal, especially for the imp who’s changing a story.
Yuletide Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 4) Page 1
