She probably meant Jerry, an iffrit who could indeed be shoved into a sack and carried around. He was doll-sized. There was also a chance she meant Clara, my ex-girlfriend, who was a normal girlfriend-size, but who Mirella probably could have crammed into a sack if she really had her heart set to the task.
“I’m glad we agree to the thing I didn’t even suggest yet,” I said. “I’d add that since we’re evidently still working through the predictions of the dead prophet, her scribe might come in handy. I hate prophecy, but I’m not philosophically opposed to knowing the future.”
Jacques, lingering at the edge of this discussion, but probably only caught some of it, as we were trying to whisper.
“What did you learn?” he asked.
“Only that he knows as much as he said he did,” I said.
“But how?”
“It would take too long to explain. Right now, I need for you to arrange passage for the three of us out of the country.”
He nodded.
“Of course. Are you certain you wish to include this… imp in your plans? I could dispose of him for you, it would be much more efficient I’m sure.”
I put my hand on Mirella’s shoulder, to stop her from jumping at the offer.
“No, he’ll be useful.”
“All right. Do you mean to fly? The airport will be…I wouldn’t recommend it. I can do it, but it will take time and there will be risks.”
“No, a boat.”
“To America?”
I imagined he was trying to remember whether Chicago was on a coast.
“No, just as far as England. We need to get to Devonshire. Can you do that?”
He looked immensely relieved.
“This I can arrange.”
He walked off, pulling a cell phone from his pocket.
“Devonshire?” Mirella asked.
“I told you, I have another solution. We can’t use Dimitri’s network any longer, and I’d rather not trust Jacques any more than we have to. We need a new way to get around.”
“And that way around begins there.”
“It does. I have an old contact. They just don’t know it yet.”
Transcript (1)
TRANSCRIPTION OF INITIAL INTERVIEW WITH PATIENT ‘EVE’, CONDUCTED BY DR. LEW CAMBRIDGE, DAY FORTY-EIGHT
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: Hello, I’m Lew Cambridge. I’m going to call you Eve, is that all right?
* * *
EVE: Yes, it’s all right. Did he tell you to call me that?
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: If we are speaking now of the man known as Adam, yes. Would you prefer it if I called you something different?
* * *
EVE: No, that will do.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: Eve, do you know where you are?
* * *
EVE: I’m told I’m in a hotel room on an island.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: That’s so, yes. Do you recall how you got here?
* * *
EVE: No. (In thought.) I expect I passed through the veil to reach these shores.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: The veil? Can you tell me what that is?
* * *
EVE: No. But that way is closed to me right now. Are you doing that?
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: I wouldn’t know how to do such a thing. We understand you appeared in this room from empty space. Is this what you mean when you talk about the veil?
* * *
EVE: Yes.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: We’ve had a time…keeping you here. No, let me restate that. We’ve had a time moving you from here. You keep disappearing when we try.
* * *
EVE: (Smiles.) I cannot explain that, because as you can tell, I’m unable to do any such thing now. Otherwise, I would have. I appear to be too weak to rise from this bed. Are you here to tell me why this is?
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: You were sick. You still are, but it appears you’re improving.
* * *
EVE: That’s impossible.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: I’ve been told. I can’t explain why or how, because there’s very little I do understand about your biology. There are only two of you available for study.
* * *
EVE: He’s not here. I can tell. He would never miss an opportunity to speak to me under these circumstances.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: Circumstances?
* * *
EVE: As a captive of this bed.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: I think I’ve explained that this isn’t something we’ve done to you.
* * *
EVE: A poor word choice, I apologize. I only meant to underscore my current sense of helplessness. I’m not used to feeling this way, and in truth the last time I did, it was because of him. Can you say where he is?
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: Adam is trying to retrace your steps in the world in order to figure out how the impossible happened. Now that you’re awake—
* * *
EVE: No.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: No?
* * *
EVE: There are more than two. You said there are only two of us to study but that’s not right. There’s…there’s a third.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: A third immortal?
* * *
EVE: Yes.
* * *
(Eve looks confused, falls silent before speaking again.)
* * *
EVE: Oh, he’s in danger.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: The third immortal is in danger? Is that who you mean?
* * *
EVE: No, Urr. Adam. Adam is in danger.
* * *
(Eve concentrates in silence.)
* * *
EVE: I don’t know why I came here, and I can’t remember where I came here from. I’m so tired.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: You came here to see Adam. You appeared before him.
* * *
EVE: That seems unlikely.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: We took it to mean you needed his help. Or, to warn him about something.
* * *
EVE: Those are also unlikely. But perhaps. Perhaps. Only no, not here. He would have been safe had he stayed here. It’s all… I can’t think straight.
* * *
(Eve is silent for a long while.)
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: I’m told…I took a family history of Adam before he left. We were looking for anything that could help. He mentioned a woman with whom he fathered a child. Could one of those be this third immortal?
* * *
EVE: The woman, yes. Yes. Clara. She called me all-mother. I remember her. She is not like us. She is now, but she was not. I’m sorry. I’m very tired. I’ve never experienced sickness before; it’s ghastly. She could be the third I’m thinking of.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: Why do you think Adam is in danger?
* * *
EVE: I don’t know. I can’t remember. I need to sleep.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: All right. I’m sorry, I have a lot of questions. We can talk again later, after you feel better. There is…I’m sorry, just one more question. When we were trying to figure out what’s wrong with you, we found some evidence of goblin in your genetic signature. Do you understand?
* * *
EVE: I know what a goblin is, and I have heard of genetics.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: Can you explain this? We’re stumped.
* * *
EVE: No.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: All right. I’ll leave you.
* * *
(Eve thinks.)
* * *
EVE: Wait. I think I remember putting my hand through one.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: You…put your hand through…?
* * *
EVE: Yes. I apologize. I can’t
remember why I did that.
* * *
CAMBRIDGE: Can you recall what happened to the goblin?
* * *
EVE: I’m sure he died. That is generally what happens.
6
I have a decently long history with England. I lived there on four separate occasions, twice in and around London. This may be surprising given how often I’ve picked on that city for being unpleasant, but for the most part that’s a post facto judgment on my part. That is to say, I didn’t really appreciate how unpleasant it was until after I’d left. Also, that unpleasantness didn’t keep me from going back again later.
Cities in general hold a lot of obvious advantages over rural areas. They’re usually the center of whatever progress one happens to be enamored of, along with the kinds of progress one might find distasteful. Progress, either way. Cities have the latest in art—portable art, mostly, but also the architectural kind—and inventions. I saw my first flush toilet in a city, and the first timepiece that didn’t rely upon the sun. They also tended to be the center of commerce. I could go to a city to buy things that were native to a wide range of territories it would take months to travel between on my own. And the latest in political, philosophical and religious thought didn’t really receive any kind of attention until it surfaced in a city somewhere.
At the same time, if you wanted to catch up on the newest plague, by literally catching the newest plague, a city was probably also the place for you. They were also insanely overcrowded, smelly, and just in general not the kind of place to be if you valued your privacy.
Unless you were rich. Then it wasn’t so bad. You could buy some privacy, and some soap too, if you couldn’t stand the smell. (Most of the really wealthy citizens made their own soap. It wasn’t to keep themselves clean so much as so they could smell something nicer than the people around them.) You could also own multiple properties and the means to travel between them: keep an apartment in the city, say, and an estate in the country.
This was a popular rich-people thing to do in London, but was a practice I witnessed in some form or another as far back as the height of Athens. Earlier than that, if we’re counting the pharaohs. (I don’t, because they weren’t a wealthy family within a merchant economy; they were incarnations of gods on Earth who effectively were the economy. At the same time, they did have their own summertime getaway temples, so maybe.)
My last time in London—and England in general—I was a modestly wealthy merchant. It wasn’t the kind of wealth that resulted in a lordship or anything, but that was how I preferred it. Titles are meant to be hereditary, and I would never have offspring to pass it down to, so it was better for everyone that I didn’t end up Lord Duke Viscount Earl something.
I was well-off enough to keep an apartment in London and a small cottage in the countryside, which was nice. I used the cottage for weekends with interested women when I could find interested women. (Or succubi. It worked much better for succubi, because they tended to not be interested in furthering their lot in life via marriage.)
I sold fabric. It’s not flashy or exciting, I know, but I had longstanding contacts I could rely upon, some dating back to when the Silk Road was still a thing, so I did pretty well. And the city had a lot of tailors, dressmakers and haberdashers, who needed a regular supply of bolts of fine cloth.
It was a good business to be in. I was able to travel freely among all classes of citizen in London and take time off whenever I felt like doing so—I had surprisingly little overhead without a family to support, and by the end I’d been running this ‘family’ business for over fifty years, so I had a lot saved up.
It did end, though. Usually, my merchant ventures ended because they ceased being profitable, or because the civilization collapsed around them, or there was a war, or just that I got bored of pretending to be my own son to every new generation.
This was the only time I abandoned a business because of murder. A lot of murders, actually.
They were called the Whitechapel murders at the time, but you probably know them better as the Jack the Ripper murders. (I preferred the Leather Apron murders, personally.) Now I know you’re probably thinking less of me right now, a little, because this is going to sound like what you’d expect from every immortal (humor me): claiming to be in all the interesting places at all the right times. But look, I wasn’t at Woodstock, I really never met Jesus, I was out of town when Rome fell, and on a different continent when the French Revolution got interesting. But, I was there when Mount Vesuvius erupted, I knew Marie Antoinette, and I was in a few other significant places at particularly important times. And, I was in London during the Whitechapel murders.
I’m only being honest here.
The thing is, it wasn’t really all that big a deal as it was happening, unless you were a journalist. If you talked to anyone else who was alive back then—and you can’t, unless you know a jocular vampire who’s lasted more than a century—they’d probably be about as amazed as I am that anybody is still talking about these killings at all.
Maybe it’s the name: Jack the Ripper. It’s a good name. Catchy. Whoever dreamed it up was on their game.
But it all lasted only about four months, and took place in what was frankly a pretty nasty part of London already, the kind of neighborhood where it just wasn’t surprising to learn that people were ending up violently dead. It was overpopulated with poor Irish immigrants crammed together on a hot summer at a time when we were all wearing too much clothing in general, and certainly nothing breathable, where everyone drank too much all the time, and where law enforcement was largely indifferent. Violence was an inevitable consequence.
It’s not impossible to imagine that if, today, five women were killed in the same section of a major city, the same way, over a period of only four months, it would be a big news story. But would it be so big that we’d still be talking about it more than a century later?
It’s just hard to believe is what I’m saying.
It could be argued that there were more than five women who were killed—I saw as many as eleven attributed to the killer—but this seems specious, and besides it only further illustrates my point that Whitechapel at that time was kind of brutal.
I’m pretty sure the media is the best explanation for all of this. There was what might be called a subscription war going on at the time, and the newspapers were all trying to gain a monopoly on the interests of Londoners. That led to a lot of problems with the investigation itself, up to and including inventing the name Jack the Ripper in the first place. I mean, the media today is bad, but not “write up a fake letter from the killer to boost readership” bad. At least, I don’t think so.
Anyway, so I was there, and it was big news, but almost everyone I knew, on reading about it, just shrugged, said something bigoted about the Irish, and moved on.
I’m not a very good bigot. As a species, we’ve pretty much always hated people we could identify as being ‘not of our tribe’ in some way, whether that was by skin color, language, nationality, immigration status, or just that they were over there and we were over here. It never took much. But considering I’ve never been a native-born member of any tribe—save for the first one, sixty-odd thousand years ago—I pretty much see everyone the same way.
Which is a long way of saying I was friendly with a fair number of people in the Whitechapel district, and I didn’t think anything of it. Oh, and also, the number of those people who were prostitutes was larger than zero.
I used to give them my scraps. Cloth was usually sold in full bolts, but sometimes tailors bought lesser quantities of the pricier stuff—the silks, mainly—meaning that I’d have to cut the necessary measures off the bolt for them. By the time I got to the end of the roll, there’d sometimes be an unsellable scrap amount left over.
Immortal From Hell Page 8