Immortal Stories: Eve

by Gene Doucette

  It wasn’t correct, thinking of it that way. There had always been early groups, or tribes, wandering communities of humankind that had cohered based upon familial relation or social/regional commonality, or something even more trivial. These tribes would rub up against one another and either combine or compete, and when they competed it was a war.

  Those wars weren’t real to her, back then. They were petty conflicts that happened to the less advanced, to people she barely even thought of as like her and hers. They were others. But then those others became an army, and then there was a real war. In her mind, that was the first.

  She and hers lost that war.

  “I’m sorry for my baggage,” she said. “But you’ve made me think.”

  “About witches?”

  “About war. Cee’s condition isn’t entirely unfamiliar. You remember I spoke of demons before?”

  “I do. Seems like a long time ago now.”

  “Demons are huge beasts. They are perpetually angry, bloodthirsty, violent creatures that can’t be reasoned with, and some are also quite shrewd. They are one of the most dangerous species on Earth.”

  “Cool. I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “They are the consummate warrior, and make ideal vanguard soldiers. But they have a weakness. Their bodies are unusually corruptible.”

  “How’s that?”

  “They become sick easily. And in death—through any means—they will dissolve. They melt, as your witch does when exposed to water.”

  “So, I just learned about pixies a few hours ago, but I’m gonna guess they’re not related to demons.”

  “No. And this is not how a pixie dies. More, demons don’t melt and then die, they die and then melt. But, it’s similar. How the two relate is not something I understand right now.”

  She stroked the side of Cee’s head. The pixie was still responsive, but just barely.

  “She can’t tell us where she’s been or how this happened to her. And she’s suffering. Dee?”

  Dee buzzed next to her head. “Yes. Can you fix?”

  “I can’t fix, no. I’m sorry. But I can help her go peacefully. You should say goodbye.”

  * * *

  Cee was executed as painlessly as they could manage, using a knife and a cutting board. They buried the pixie in an unused garden bed in the yard beneath his porch, and threw both the cutting board and the knife in the trash. Dee buzzed inconsolably and then flew away to mourn more substantively in private.

  Later, they slept, and Eve dreamed.

  She wasn’t used to the experience. She didn’t sleep often in the faery realm—for whatever reason, there was little need—but when it came, it didn’t bring along any dreams.

  It was a nightmare, in truth. It had been even longer since she’d experienced one of those.

  In the dream, the faces of many of the people she loved were right in front of her, but she couldn’t talk to them, or touch them, and they couldn’t see her. They were on the other side of a screen, in a movie or on the wrong end of the veil. They couldn’t hear her. They didn’t know she was there.

  This was terrible enough, but worse when they began to melt like so much candle wax.

  And then he was there.

  He had many names. Urr was the oldest she knew him by, but Adam was what he called himself currently. It was a poorly chosen name: Cain, from the same source material, would have been as accurate and more suitable.

  Adam could see and hear her, and also them, and he had the power to help her friends. She didn’t know how or why this was so, only that it was. And he wouldn’t do it.

  A young girl named Aia grabbed his arm and begged for assistance. Aia was a Gaulish woman Eve remembered with great affection from a time before France was France. She was a beautiful peasant maiden felled too young by consumption. Now half her face was sliding from her skull with her tears.

  Adam laughed, and pushed Aia away. She fell in a heap at his feet. The affront was so horrific, Alfarr—an elvin warrior whose name actually meant elf warrior—charged Adam, wielding a broadsword. Alfarr had been one of Eve’s favorite lovers. Seeing him disintegrate completely before reaching his target caused her to scream.

  Still, Adam laughed. He picked up the unused sword and began swinging it about the room, taking the heads of those who still had them.

  Eve slapped at the screen separating her from the world, but couldn’t get through. She could only watch, and she couldn’t stop watching.

  “They’re all the same,” Adam said. “Don’t you see?” Then he swung the sword at the veil, tearing it open.

  “We are the same too,” he said, stepping through. He raised the sword to strike her down.

  She awoke with what must have been a shout.

  “Hey, you okay?”

  Rick poked his head into the bedroom. He was fully clothed, in a collared shirt and slacks, and had a necktie on, loosely.

  “Yes, I am, thank you.” It was morning, as the east-facing porch doors betrayed. She blinked and tried to recall where she was and why. “Hello.”

  “Hello to you. I was gonna let you sleep. Left a note out here and everything, but… so you’re awake and I can just tell you. There’s a spare key next to the note so you can get in and out all you want.”

  “A key.”

  “Yes, you know. This is how people who can’t walk through walls get by. We have doors with keys and such. Also, please remember that when you leave we lock doors, like, all the time.”

  “Oh. Thank you. Where are you going?”

  “It’s Monday?”

  She shook her head. Something about Monday was important, but an explanation wasn’t coming. She was still living out the dream and wondering when Rick’s face was going to start melting.

  “I have to go to work,” he explained. “That’s what we do on this plane of existence or whatever. Are you going to be here when I get home?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He nodded. “It is what it is. For the record, I’d rather you were here and I hope you stay.”

  “I enjoy your company as well.”

  “Good to hear. Oh, also, your pixie came back this morning. She keeps hanging around me. Followed me into the bathroom. That was weird.”

  “I believe she is more your pixie than mine, Rick.”

  “Super. Can’t wait to explain that one to the boss. Okay, I’m late. Like I said, hope you’re here later.”

  “I… yes. Yes, I hope I am too.”

  “Then it’s an almost-date-thing. Bye.”

  He left with no kiss or hug or other manifest display of affection, which only meant he understood her well. The truth was, she had no idea if she would be there either. Asking for a promise would have been a mistake.

  They’re all the same.

  Dream-Adam’s voice still echoed in her skull. There was some truth buried in that sentiment. She was going to have to figure out what it was.

  FOUR

  There was so much she had forgotten.

  It was difficult to explain what it was like to be on the other side of what she called the veil. To begin with, the very definition—while descriptive—wasn’t accurate. Going there wasn’t like pulling aside a curtain (or cutting it with a sword) and stepping through so much as it was traveling in an entirely new direction. Putting that into words was a little like trying to explain up to someone who only knew left-right and forward-back, so instead she used terminology that was more at home in legend and mysticism.

  Traveling the Earth while using this new direction was simple, and fast because time and space were much more flexible. In the veil, to get to where she wanted to be, she could walk, and jump, and be there in an instant of veil-time.

  In the world outside the veil, she had to take a bus.

  It was unpleasant. The bus moved in fits and starts and spat out black clouds so routinely it had to be an indication of its proper function rather than a grievous manufacturing error. The best that could be said was that it was not ful
l; the rush of the morning commute had already passed by the time Eve got out of bed and showered and put on clothing.

  As to where she was taking the bus, she didn’t know. Had the events of the prior evening never taken place Eve imagined she would be looking into what was needed in order to obtain a job. This had been the original plan, but it was making less sense the longer she considered it. To have a job she needed a name, and a document showing that the name wasn’t one she’d just made up. There had to be numbers attached to that name, and those numbers had to have a validity that made them impossible to invent. Without those things, she didn’t know how she was going to find a job.

  Not, it had to be said, that she wanted a job. What she wanted was to immerse herself in this world for at least long enough to appreciate it as something to not despise, the way he appreciated it.

  For too long she’d treated the world—the entire thing—as his tribe. She visited, but didn’t join. She didn’t want to join, but there were no other tribes from which to choose, and she needed to belong somewhere again.

  The plan made more sense in general terms. The specifics were a good deal more complicated.

  The bus would eventually stop in a downtown hub. She hadn’t concerned herself with which hub or what town. City buses returned to cities when they were done with their circuits, and that was all she needed to know for the moment. It was what she would have done in seeking out a job, or the paperwork for one, and what she was still doing in order to figure out why she had to mercy kill a pixie on a cutting board.

  As goals, neither task seemed attainable, but at least with the pixie problem she had something that seemed close to a plan.

  * * *

  The bus did indeed arrive at a downtown destination, full of achingly tall buildings and uncomfortably overdressed people. She got out and wandered around until finding a bench near an active central spot—an outdoor market. Then she sat down and began watching as the whole of humanity hurried past.

  She had a tremendous amount of experience watching people, but less experience being seen doing it, so she had to keep reminding herself not to actively stare at the passers-by.

  It was difficult.

  So much about a person could be discovered in a close observation of the sort that simply wasn’t polite in most public circumstances. For instance, there was the obese man in a cavernous jacket and white shirt, with suspenders keeping his pants up. The suspenders stretched to the left and right of his gut. He had wire-rim glasses and a large nose, and sweat stains on his collar. His walk was bow-legged, as if he’d just climbed off a horse.

  He looked like someone who should be miserable, but underneath all the external trappings of excess and self-evident physical limitations, he twinkled with a happiness that suggested he was using a different set of measuring scales than she was. She wanted to understand why, but to do so would be to intrude on his life in a way that was unforgivably bold.

  Five teenaged girls pushed past the man. They were dressed in shorts and comfortable shoes, and short-sleeve blouses with a hint of fashionable distinction. They were too thin and too tall for their own bodies. Puberty was making them awkward and giggly, horribly insecure separately but operating as a unit with a pooled confidence that made it all okay. Eve wished she could follow them too, to see how their dynamic played out and what choices they made and what they deemed important collectively.

  But that wasn’t why she was there.

  Amidst the hundreds of people rushing past one another in the market, there were other beings. It was a secret thing, only she never remembered it was a secret; she could see them clearly enough. They were easy to spot, and they were almost the reason she was there.

  The marketplace was an open cobblestone pavilion with vendor carts set up in rows running alongside buildings containing more goods. The foot traffic was chaotic on a local scale, but there was a consistency to the flow around the carts. There was a current, essentially, and it picked up everyone. It moved quickly enough that the obese man never noticed the teenaged girls, and they never noticed the two older women with bags on their shoulders in slacks and heels and soft shirts stopping in front of a vendor of fresh pastries. The teens also didn’t notice that one of the women was a goblin. Neither, Eve suspected, did the goblin’s human companion.

  Behind the goblin, in an alcove set off a distance from the main thoroughfare, a large man in a hooded jacket stepped onto the sidewalk, looked around for a particular individual he failed to locate, and then stepped back into the shadow. He was a demon. Nobody noticed him either, which was to everyone’s benefit.

  There would be more as the day went on. An hour after the goblin left with her friend and her meal, a man dressed in clothing that was historically anachronistic arrived at a meeting spot at the edge of the market. It was no small thing for his clothing to be so out-of-place that even Eve recognized it as being inappropriate for the period, so there was little question he stood out in the eyes of the crowd. People began to follow him around as he told incredible stories about the historical relevance of nearly every brick under their feet. The stories beggared belief, yet the man’s storytelling prowess was such that it was hard to question any of it.

  He was an imp, without any doubt.

  She spotted another goblin toward the end of the day, and a pair of elves, and a man who may have been a werewolf. And when she decided to leave her bench and walk through some of the nearby stores she found an incubus selling shirts. She expected come nightfall, there would be a vampire or two, and no doubt one of the bars ringing the marketplace had an iffrit hiding within its recesses.

  None of the beings she saw looked ill. There were numerous instances of human ailments on display, but nothing notable in the much smaller sampling of non-humans.

  She heard a familiar buzzing as the sun began to set.

  “Hello, Dee,” she greeted. The pixie landed on her shoulder.

  “’Lo.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Man sent.”

  “Rick sent you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Eve laughed. It didn’t take long at all for Rick to figure out how useful a pixie could be, especially when trying to find someone.

  “Did he give you a message?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  A woman pushing a child in a wheeled device took note of Eve talking to her shoulder, but continued past. Eve hardly concerned herself with what other people thought, but was mindful of the merits of not causing a scene. She decided to relocate from the bench she’d claimed for much of the day to a secluded spot under a tree that the streetlights hadn’t discovered.

  “What is his message?”

  “He cook.”

  “That’s… all?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Eve had left behind her bag with most of her money and all of her clothes. She did take the key he’d left for her, and hoped it was self-evident that in doing so she had decided to return. It didn’t make sense for him to send Dee just to notify her dinner was going to be ready soon.

  “Are you sure you aren’t forgetting anything?”

  “Nope. Tell girl about cooking and give note and that’s all.”

  “All right, so there’s a note?”

  “Yes, note,” Dee said, with a hint of frustration in her voice. Pixies tended to think humans were just as stupid as humans thought of pixies. “Here.”

  She handed over a rolled-up piece of notepaper that, in the twilight and under the tree, Eve couldn’t read. She stepped into a pool of lamplight.

  It was his address. Or so she assumed. It was an address, at least.

  “In case you lost,” Dee said.

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “Uh-huh. Silly.”

  “Why is that silly?”

  “You not lost, you right here.”

  “I am indeed.” But as she looked around the market where she’d spent her day, she realized she couldn’t recall the exact bus that had brou
ght her. “The question is, where precisely is here?”

  * * *

  Rather than attempt to retrace her steps via public transit, Eve put the funds in her pocket to use and paid a taxi to get back to Rick’s.

  “There you are,” he said, from the kitchen space. He was indeed cooking. He had an apron on—it looked so perfectly clean he surely dug it out of a drawer, or purchased it that day—and was standing over a vat atop the stove. “I’m making my famous pasta.”

  “You’re known for your cuisine?” She took a seat at the dining table.

  “Oh yes. I buy the very best canned sauce. Should be ready in a few. Did Dee find you?”

  “She did. That was very clever.”

  “She offered. I think she’s crushing on me.”

  “It’s not uncommon,” Eve said, not entirely clear on what crushing was but inferring the meaning from usage. “Why did you send me your address?”

  He laughed. “Just in case. Did you need it?”

  “I did. But how did you know I would?”

  “I have family in Venezuela,” he said. “Distant, you know, we’re not close or anything, but one time I get this call from my dad letting me know I have a cousin who’s gonna be visiting, and can he crash here? So I say yes, because, family and all. So this kid shows up, never been to the States before, and he’s, like, saucer-eyed about the whole experience. Starts wandering around his first day without any idea where he’s gonna end up. He gets so lost the police end up calling his family in Venezuela, who call my dad, who calls me, because the kid didn’t even think to take my number with him and he couldn’t remember my name or where I lived. So the second day he was here, I wrote my address out and my phone and made him keep it in his wallet. You don’t have a phone, but once I saw you were planning on coming back I figured why not make sure you knew how to do that.”

  “Well it was very thoughtful.”

  “Yeah, plus I can’t eat all this tortellini by myself. Hope you’re hungry.”

  She was. At the market she’d purchased a meal constructed primarily out of animal fat and cooking oil. It was distressingly tasty, but she disliked the way it felt in her stomach. The consequence of remaining in this reality appeared to be a rediscovery of her appetite for many things, with a voraciousness that was perhaps not healthy.