When engaging in conversation with an imp, it’s always a good idea to treat everything this way: as a tale with a beginning, middle and end. It’s how they ingest information.
“When I am faced with an unknown element in a story,” he said, “I often speculate on it until the truth comes to me.”
“You mean lying. That’s what regular people call it. Making something up and passing it off as equivalent to the verifiable bits.”
He shrugged.
“Who is to say?” he asked.
Mirella groaned, from the corner.
“No wonder you couldn’t get a straight answer,” she said, to Jacques.
This is the thing about imps: from their perspective, every story is true. It makes the tales they tell incredibly compelling, no matter how fanciful. If you hooked an imp up to a lie detector, you’d find that he is never lying, because he doesn’t think he is. (This says more about lie detector tests than imps, actually.)
“I’m hoping you can fill some of this in for us, Thelonius. Somehow, you came to Paris knowing both about the contract and about the fact that I happened to be here, and you also knew who to provide that information to. In doing so, you nearly got both of us killed, and the last time you and I spoke, that was clearly not on your agenda.”
“May I call you Adam?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Adam, I cannot talk freely in this company. As you’re intimate with my kind, you surely appreciate how much it pains me to say this.”
I glanced over at an impatient-looking Jacques.
“He means you,” I said. “Can you let us have the room?”
“You aren’t the only one this little person has put at risk on this day,” he said.
“I understand, but if he’s saying he can’t answer questions with you here, he means it, because there are few things imps enjoy more than an audience.”
“Did you say, imp?”
“I did. Not, ‘little demon’, if you’re a Christian. I mean, obviously.”
“So, he isn’t human?”
“He’s not, no. You must be used to this by now.”
Jacques didn’t look like someone who’d ever really get used to any of this.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll leave you. But I would like an explanation sometime before the sunrise.”
He exited.
“All right,” I said, to Thelonius. “Now can you talk?”
“Alas, no, I still cannot.” He looked at Mirella. “Can you hear?”
She looked confused.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Can I hear you? Of course.”
“No, not me. There’s a device in the room.”
“A microphone?” I asked.
“It offers aperiodic feedback, and echoes when one’s voice exceeds a certain pitch. I identified it earlier this evening and strove to fill up whatever recording device might be installed in here. I’m now of the opinion that we’re being listened to from another room in this building, and possibly recorded there, as none bothered to flip a tape whilst hearing my earlier tale.”
That Thelonius wasn’t familiar with digital recorders indicated he was one of the older ones.
As I said, he could be between 40 and 140, and there would be essentially no way to tell from looking at him. I’ve never known what the average imp lifespan was, because I could never get one of them to give me a straight answer to the question. (They might not know, for the same reason.) Possibly as high as two centuries, though.
Mirella began circling the room. Aside from the chairs we were in, there were a bunch of crates in the corner and an old desk against a wall, but that was about all. There was a cheap drop ceiling missing several panels, and for illumination we had bare fluorescents.
It was a big enough space to make a completely thorough search impossible—again, because digital recorders were a thing that existed, and were small enough to live in any one of the crates—but we only needed to find the one that was bothering Thelonius.
Mirella eventually located it, in the ceiling. She cut its cord with a well-aimed knife.
“Much better,” Thelonius said. “I confess to surprise that you couldn’t detect it directly. The heightened senses of your kind are legendary.”
It should be said that imps have exceptional hearing, thanks I guess to those big floppy ears of theirs. Being able to hear things nobody else is supposed to hear is undoubtedly a useful skill for inveterate storytellers.
“Legend doesn’t improve my hearing any,” Mirella grumbled. She went back the door to see if anyone was going to come running in, now that they couldn’t eavesdrop electronically any longer. Nobody did.
“All right, now explain yourself,” I said. “The last time we saw you was on the island.”
“Indeed! And my goodness, what a tale that was! I cannot tell you how difficult it has been to not recount that story. Mermaids! Prophesy! But the island, as you are aware, is a forsworn secret to all who visit, even the ones who arrived surreptitiously, as I did.”
I found it hard to believe there was anything an imp couldn’t find an excuse to repeat in a story.
“Why don’t you begin with after we rid the island of mermaids?”
Again, this is a long story, although probably not as long as Thelonius could have made of it. There was an invasion of mermaids and a tsunami, and we lived through all of that so we didn’t really need for him to give it back to us in more fanciful language. However, the last time either of us saw the imp, it was in the hospital as the prophet he was following died.
Her death made Thelonius D’Artagnan a lot more important, because he was her scribe.
Prophets are really bad at sounding intelligible. Their brains aren’t wired in a way that makes comprehensive sentences an expectation, which is why the good ones—by which I mean the ones who survive long enough for somebody to figure out what’s coming from their mouths are predictions of the future—end up with an interpreter. That’s really what a prophet’s scribe is: an interpreter of what might sound to the rest of us like gibberish. We call them scribes because what they’re supposed to do, after the necessary editing, condensing, and interpreting, is write down the stuff. That way, all of us can go back later and read what was written and go, “ohhh, that’s what this was about.” Because to be honest, these kinds of predictions are hardly ever actionable beforehand.
There are a lot of reasons it’s a bad idea to hire an imp as a scribe. Number one, the predictions require a modicum of interpretation already, so while we’re talking about a species that can spin all kinds of nonsense into a story, they’ll also fabricate freely to make that story better. It isn’t that an imp scribe would or wouldn’t embellish a prediction so much as that they wouldn’t themselves know where the embellishment began. Number two, it wouldn’t occur to an imp to write any of it down. They are—and this is an extremely generous definition—oral historians.
This prophet happened to see a future in which I died, and took direct action to alter that future, at great cost to a lot of lives and a few fortunes. Then she passed away, and now the only location of whatever remaining prophesy she left behind was stuck in the mind of Thelonius D’Artagnan…because he couldn’t be bothered to write any of it down.
I knew exactly how important he was, but didn’t bother to alert anybody to grab him and hang onto him, because I was occupied with other things. (Eve in a coma sort of took up all my free mental space for a while.) At the same time, i was under the impression nobody was leaving the island for a while, so I didn’t concern myself with the possibility that he would vanish on us.
Then, he vanished on us.
“How did you get off the island?” I asked.
“On Lorelai’s instruction, I was to seek the future elsewhere.”
Lorelai was the name he gave to the prophet. Nobody knew her real name.
“She was dead by then.”
“Yes, but we are still in the thrall, eternal man! Surely you have
come to this understanding on your own.”
“Whether or not I have, I think I’ve made it clear I don’t care for prophesy, and plan to ignore it whenever I can.”
“But that hardly matters! Did you ever hear the story of the frog and the castor oil? It seems that many years ago…”
“Please stop. I asked you how you got off the island and you began with why.”
“The frog and the castor oil is a quite illustrious tale.”
He looking incredibly put out, at not being able to convey the story of the frog and the castor oil.
“Thelonius, I promise that you have never in your life met a person less interested in hearing a long-winded story from an imp than I am.”
I actually enjoy the company of imps during times of peace, which is to say when there’s alcohol and no curfew, and there isn’t anyone trying to kill me. They’re incredibly annoying when you’re in a hurry and require information, because imps have no off-switch.
“For the purposes of allegory…” Thelonius began.
“Good lord, Adam, can we just beat him up some more?” Mirella asked. Going by her expression, it wasn’t a casual threat.
“Why?” I asked. “It didn’t work when Jacques tried it.”
“I meant, for fun.”
“I left the island by boat,” Thelonius said, possibly deciding on a direct response or two before Mirella acted on the torture idea.
“What boat was that?” I asked.
The first boat to take survivors off the island didn’t do so until two days after the last time anyone saw Thelonius, and I’d seen the travel manifests already. It was the first thing I did after realizing he’d gone missing.
“On a merchant vessel, full of hard men and captained by a leathery woman as old as the sea itself. She took to anchor on the leeward side late one night, two days past the calming of the sea. We rowed by lantern from the jagged rocks that punctuated the shoreline to the breast of the old fishing scow. Never before have I…”
“All right, stop,” I said. You have to know where to interrupt imps to get what you want. Like I said, this is a process. “Lorelai chartered a boat for you to leave by, after the threat was over, do I have that correct?”
“The old woman of the seas owed a favor, it was no charter. Or, more fairly, Lorelai dealt in a different manner of coin than most of us. An open channel to the fates was her currency.”
This made a lot of sense. I had to think any merchant vessel given advance warning of a tsunami might be inclined to do a favor for whomever provided them with that warning.
“Who is we?” I asked.
“Is this a philosophical question?” Thelonius asked. His eyebrows twitched, which I guess was a display of excitement for the many hours of verbal sparring that would follow if my answer was yes.
“You said we rowed by lantern. Did someone leave the island with you?”
“Oh. Yes. Henri. Fortuitously, we did not depart during a full moon, or my lupine companion would surely have been a hefty challenge. He is far stronger than appearances indicate, and indeed rowed us there unaided.”
There was a lot going on in that explanation. First off, Henri was a werewolf, which was why Thelonius brought up the full moon. But, as anyone who’s spent more than thirty days with one knows, the entire full-moon-transformation thing isn’t true.
Werewolves are the occasional genetic byproducts of a mating between a satyr and a human woman. (There are four options, with the most likely by far being a male satyr or a female human. Male werewolf is less likely. The fourth option—female werewolf—is so rare I’ve only ever heard of it happening once.) The imp undoubtedly knew this about werewolves, but since the idea of them transforming into monsters by the light of the full moon was a much better story, it wasn’t a surprise that he leaned in that direction.
For the rest, I doubted Henri decided to do all the rowing by himself so much as Thelonius declared he would be unable to. Imps don’t do manual labor except under threat of death. I said before that the Santa I met was an imp, and while there’s nothing about the myth of Santa that corresponds to the reality of the man, the part where he doesn’t build any of the toys himself is pretty on-the-nose.
“Is Henri still with you?” I asked.
“Alas, no. After we were reunited with the shore, he fell ill. A terrible malady the likes of which no man had ever suffered before!”
I shot a glance at Mirella, who looked about as concerned as I suddenly was.
“I hate to say this, Thelonius, but could you elaborate?”
“Certainly! We holed up in a ramshackle hovel at the edge of a town with no name on the Indonesian coast, close enough to the ocean we could smell the changing tides. It was balmy, and water was scarce, but the local delicacies…”
“Sorry, can you elaborate slightly less? What did Henri die of?”
He looked aghast.
“I didn’t say he died!”
“Oh, he didn’t? He got better?”
“No, he perished tragically, and most painfully. It’s only that you gave away the ending. How did you know it? Has someone else recounted Henri’s death?”
“No. No, sorry, I jumped ahead. Maybe you don’t realize this, Thelonius, but we’re sort of on the clock here.”
“You guessed?”
“I’m very sorry. Tell me how he died anyway.”
Mirella was trying to roll her eyes all the way out her head, but I sort of understood his mortification. There’s nothing that can ruin a story faster than someone blurting out the ending beforehand.
“It was a wasting condition. The local practitioner—a wise herbalist of great renown—claimed to have never seen such a thing as this. After Henri died, the herbalist ordered the hut burned to the ground, and had I not chosen to depart when I did, I suspect he would have insisted I be included in that fire.”
“Wasting how?” Mirella asked.
“His body became dissolute, and ran like a frozen treat in the midday sun. It took many days.”
“He dissolved,” I said.
“Yes, I suppose you could say this. Only, that word implies a suddenness that doesn’t correspond. As I said, this took many days.”
I’d already witnessed an incubus die in this fashion, and Mirella and I both watched a demon fall apart in the same manner, albeit much faster. The mermaid—whose apparent captivity on the island caused a lot of things to go very badly—also suffered from some form of this disease.
And there was Eve, who exhibited the same symptoms. If we added her to the list, Henri made the fifth species to come down with the disease. I was growing more comfortable with the word pandemic. Also, I’m in no way a medical doctor, but I was pretty positive this wasn’t normal behavior for a disease.
“All right, so: Indonesia. And from there?”
“Why, Paris. Of course, as this is where you have found me.”
“It seems more accurate to argue that you found us, than to say we found you. How did you know where we were going to be?”
“This portion of my tale was where I met the most…violent skepticism from the men by whom I was previously questioned, Adam. You see, I did not know that you and I were to encounter one another again, here, under these circumstances. I also did not know the consequences of my actions would put the two of you in danger. All I have is my faith in Lorelai’s words: that my deeds, performed at a certain time and in a certain place in a certain manner, will bring about the preferred future.”
“I can see why they had a problem with that,” I said. “What were those deeds, exactly?”
“The passage I followed was: bald anchor rues peace, mister fortunate rooftop German found.”
I blinked a couple of times.
“That’s…nonsense,” I said.
“Of course it’s not nonsense! Why, it’s all right there!” He laughed heartily. Imps have pretty infectious laughs; it was honestly a challenge not to join him.
“I mean, it’s obvious,” he continued. �
��I went to the pub and told the man I met there that the one he was looking for was in the penthouse. I didn’t know you were the one he was looking for, nor did I know the intent was to kill you. I only learned this later.”
“Sorry,” Mirella said, “what pub?”
“The one on Rue de la Paix, of course! With the ship on the sign.”
“Where you saw a man?” she asked.
“The bald man!”
He looked at me and shrugged, as if he and I were in on this and Mirella was the one who couldn’t grasp basic English. I was just as mystified as her.
“It’s hard to argue with the accuracy of your interpretation,” I said, “but we’re clearly missing some of the nuances. So, you don’t know who this bald man was, and it sounds like you also don’t have any useful information about the contract he was trying to fulfill.”
“Again, had I known I was putting the two of you in danger, I’d have never done it! But, such is the nature of prophesy, is it not? Truly, the greatest kind of story.”
“Do you have any information on this man now?” Mirella asked. “A name? We could find him and work our way backwards to the source.”
“Alas, no. It was as if he had been sitting in that pub just awaiting the news I provided. He thanked me, and left with a phone in his ear. I have no direct knowledge as to what happened next or to whom he spoke.”
“And then another aspect of this prophesy you’re working from led you to one of Jacques’s men,” I said. “What did you tell that man?”
“Only that I’m the foreigner he seeks. I’ve gathered that by that time, an active search was being undertaken. And now, look! We are reunited, and together can continue in your quest.”
Mirella shot me a look.
“Give us a minute,” I said.
She and I stepped out of the room. It was only separated from the rest of the warehouse by a thin wall with windows that looked like they belonged on the outside of a building. Jacques was out there, waiting.
“I know what you’re going to say,” she said. “You’re going to say, better to have him with us than out there spilling his bits of prophetic doggerel on the wrong people. I agree with you, but that doesn’t mean I intend to enjoy it. The last one we traveled with who was this annoying, was small enough to fit into a sack.”
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