If you ever come across a demon, run. If there’s a large body of water available, jump into it, because they can’t swim. If you happen to have a vial of the flu in your pocket or something else pure enough to be reusable as a bioweapon, this is also useful because they have terrible immune systems. Other than that, you’re probably out of luck because they will do Terminator-level damage to get at you if they have been tasked with doing so.
I wasn’t running because Leonard wasn’t chasing me. He wanted to carry my generator inside, and I was going to let him do that. If he wanted to pick up my car and move it to the other side of the lot I’d let him do that too. Another good thing to know about demons is that if they want to do something and that something doesn’t involve disemboweling you with their fists, you should probably let them do it.
A thing that has been true of every demon I ever met was that they wore baggy clothing and large hats or hoods. This was to disguise the unmistakable non-humanness of their features, and it’s why you’ve probably never seen one clearly enough to realize you should be running. But Leonard had on a pair of shorts and that was all. (There were a number of places on the island with a “no-shirt/no-shoes/no-service” rule. I’m pretty sure nobody was going to be telling him to abide by this rule. In fairness, he was probably not carrying any communicable diseases.) It was impossible to mistake him for anything other than a non-human creature from just about any distance. But that was all right, because there were hardly any humans on the island anyway. I was one of the few.
“Beautiful day, hunh?” Leonard said on his way to the car. “I love that breeze, yeah? Cuts right through the heat. Just great. And lookit that sky!”
“It’s a nice day all right,” I said. “It’s always nice here.”
“Yeah, ain’t it? ‘Cept the rain. Don’t like the rain so much. No rain today tho.”
This is really the deepest any conversation goes with Lenny, at least with me. We rehash the current and most recent weather-related events, he picks up something heavy, and we go on our way.
I met him my first month on the island. At the time I was dressed much the same, by which I mean I had no weapons on-hand, I wasn’t protected by heavy armor, and I had no way to radio in an airstrike. I had the SUV, and was debating whether to use it as a weapon or flee in it when he held out his hand and introduced himself. Then he talked about puffy clouds for ten minutes while I held my breath. Things have gone more smoothly since.
“Might rain later,” I said.
“Nah.” He sniffed the air. “Couple days, maybe.”
I’ve learned that very nearly everything on Earth has a better sense of smell than humans. Even the ones with hardly any nose on their face.
Across the street, two tourists walked past the parking lot entrance, on their way from one of the local bed-and-breakfasts to the beach. They were incredibly pale-skinned men dressed in floral print shorts, carrying a beach umbrella, a couple of towels, and a cooler. If they noticed the demon in the parking lot at all, they didn’t acknowledge him. But they weren’t really men themselves. They were elves.
Hopefully, they packed sunblock. Their kind is not known to tan well.
Leonard waited as the car’s back hatch opened. (I have a button that makes the back door open and close. Whenever I use it to do the latter I worry we have perhaps reached the point where technology has made everything too easy. Then I go on a nice long jog and I feel better.) Once the hatch was opened he reached inside and with one hand picked up the generator.
“Tapped out, huh?”
“It’s a little low. Always keep a fully charged backup, you know how that goes.”
“Sure, sure.” He tossed it from hand to hand like a basketball. I closed the hatch. “Funny how they weigh the same.”
“The generators?”
“The full ones and the empty ones. They weigh the same whether they’re full or not. You figure when they’re used up they’d weigh less.”
I could have tried to explain to him that electricity doesn’t weigh anything, or if it does it’s not all that much, but to be honest I barely understand this concept myself. I will always be a caveman poking shiny things with a stick, but sometimes I’m good at pretending otherwise.
“Crazy, huh?” I said instead.
“That’s what I’m sayin’. Let’s get this swapped out for you.”
* * *
There are a lot of reasons for keeping the name and location of the island a secret, but the big one is that it’s essentially a vacation paradise for people of means who don’t happen to actually be people. These are goblins and elves mostly—they’re actually the same species, but don’t tell them that because they hate it—but also a healthy number of imps, satyrs, a werewolf or two, and lots of succubi and incubi. Even a vampire shows up now and then, which is just crazy, because sunshine and warm sand aren’t typically attractive features to a vampire.
Those are just the ones who can safely pass as human beings. Supposedly, a troll lives in the hillside somewhere, and the island appears to have an indigenous tribe of pixies. Every bar has a resident iffrit, and I swear one time I saw a faery, although this might have been my imagination. Faeries are terrifying and don’t play nicely with others, and almost certainly don’t go on vacations.
I’ve also seen a few beings I thought were extinct. Within a couple of months on the island, I saw a djinn for the first time in a thousand years, and I’ve heard rumors of a real dragon in the woods on the other side of the mountain. I don’t believe the rumors any more than the ones about a troll, but if ever there was a place capable of proving me wrong, this was been it.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the island is that there are natural enemies here that don’t behave like enemies. It’s a fully demilitarized zone. I don’t even know how this is accomplished. It just is. It means a demon like Leonard—he’s the only demon I’ve seen on the island—can hang around at the local general store and chat up customers, and not only does nobody run away screaming, nobody even thinks twice about engaging him in civil discourse. It’s legitimately crazy.
I didn’t know the island existed until Mirella brought me here, and I’ve been marveling at it ever since. She doesn’t seem to understand how incredible this arrangement is, but she hasn’t seen as much discord as I have, and is also perhaps a bit less cynical. That by itself is fairly amazing, because before retiring she was a bodyguard, and bodyguards are trained to anticipate the most likely violent outcomes in every situation. This place is one giant potentially violent outcome waiting for someone to show up with a tinderbox and a fuse.
That I am no longer anticipating such a possibility is surprising.
* * *
The generator swap took hardly any time thanks to Leonard, who after helping out went on his merry way, undoubtedly to find other heavy things that required lifting. As far as I knew, he mostly wandered around the bottom of the island looking for stuff to do. My theory was that moving stuff around all day was how he channeled his innate desire for violence, provided that was actually innate and not learned.
I always meant to ask him what he did for money and where he lived, but I never ended up in a conversation that lasted long enough to get to those questions. The answer might be the same as the punch line to the joke: where does an 800-pound gorilla sit? (Answer: wherever he wants. Cue laughter.) It was probably close to the general store, though, since that was usually where I ran into him.
Anyway, I didn’t need to know that badly, obviously, or I would have figured out how to ask by now.
The only part of the island that deserved to be called a town was a five-block-by-five-block grid, all perfectly squared and equidistant, an imposition of artificial order on a landscape of natural variation. From overheard, the streets offended the eye. They were, thankfully, all gravel and seashell, but still struck a blow to the sartorial elegance of the nature around it.
Although perhaps that’s just my personal reaction. For someone who grew up i
n a city, it might be comforting.
The order of the layout made it more difficult to get around than it should have. Since the whole grid had been built at the same time, most of the buildings on it were constructed from the same architectural plans, so the only way to tell if you were on one street and not two blocks distant was to look at the names on the buildings or the mailboxes. For instance, the town had a library in a building that was externally identical to the island’s only hospital. I’m pretty sure these are two things that are bad to confuse with one another. I’d done it myself, about five or six times, but only when looking for the library and entering the hospital on error. I have no use for a hospital, but a great need for books.
I decided to walk to the library from the parking lot, because street parking was scarce, I cannot be trusted to parallel-park anyway, and it was only a few blocks. Plus, there was a nice bar between the lot and the library, and it had just opened for the day.
All right, so maybe I did have an ulterior motive for going into town.
* * *
I’m not an alcoholic.
Probably.
Sure, there’s a mountain of evidence to suggest otherwise—like having blacked out on entire decades—but I just think the rules for an immortal man are different than for someone whose life expectancy is seventy-five years. I can waste a lifetime drinking. I can waste fifty lifetimes drinking. I’m not going to get cirrhosis, or catch pneumonia from exposure, or whatever. I might end up in a fight I shouldn’t be in, but I’m generally not a mean drunk so that’s unlikely, and I’m also good in a fight regardless of how much of me is composed of alcohol. I can function at a high level with a decent buzz for a long time.
What I cannot do is drive with that buzz on, but only because I’m an awful driver already.
Can I go without alcohol? Sure. Forever? Probably.
I’m not interested in proving that, though, to myself or anybody else.
Something I am definitely addicted to, though, is the camaraderie that comes with drinking in public. This was a thing I wasn’t getting out of my own personal bar in the house. The house came with an often semi-naked woman who liked me a lot, and finding someone like that is about a thousand times more difficult than finding a guy in a bar with an interesting story to tell. But I still missed talking to the guy in the bar now and again.
I was pretty sure Mirella knew this about me, and I was pretty sure she didn’t mind. We’ll see.
The name of the place was The Fancy Mermaid, and it claimed to be the oldest pub on the island. There were three other pubs that made the same claim, and I had no idea which one had the best argument. If you stacked up the creation stories against one another it was possible to conclude they were all built and opened the same afternoon and were arguing over what time of day they unlocked their doors.
I personally thought The First Pub had the best claim on the title, both because of the name and because it wasn’t in the lower island proper. You had to drive away from the grid and onto a small side road and up the mountain a tiny ways to get to The First Pub, and that made it seem like the sort of place that might predate anything in the town itself.
Meanwhile, both The Fancy Mermaid and the other claimant, Crabby’s, insisted the town was built around their establishments, in part because of their popularity.
It’s a silly argument that people with short lifespans have all the time, as if surviving unchanged for a period of forty or fifty years is an achievement. But every establishment on the island was built in the late twentieth century, so to my ears they all sounded like three-year olds disputing a two-hour age difference. Last longer than Europe first, and then start bragging.
The Fancy Mermaid was not fancy, but wasn’t a dive either. There were no proper dive bars on the island, which was nice from a tourism perspective, but it had the strange effect of making me miss them. This happens sometimes, where I discover nostalgia for something nobody should ever miss. Like hardtack, and plagues.
The interior of the bar was polished wood with the expected nautical themes, all tied to the iconic mermaid figurehead trussed to the ceiling and dangling over the bar.
I took a seat underneath her kelp-covered breasts and signaled Anh, the bartender, who soon had a pint of tap beer in front of me.
In terms of popularity, the Mermaid was somewhere in the middle of the pack. The most successful places on the island were the ones with a direct view of the beach, and the ones that were actually clubs playing ear-bleedingly loud music. We went to a club one time, and while Mirella seemed to enjoy herself okay, I was anxious the entire night. It wasn’t until later I realized the rhythm and pace of the house music was the same as the drums we used to pound before going to war. I’m not a fan of the tribal war-drum sound as entertainment, it turns out. By the end of the night I was ready to brain someone with a femur bone.
There was a view at the Mermaid, but it was a view of the street. The windows were open to allow the trade winds through, and that ever-present sea smell was there, so the bar still felt connected to the island, but an ocean angle would have helped. I imagined the place was very popular with people who’d been at the beach all day and had had their fill of tides.
I mostly had the place to myself, but there were a few tables set up near the windows with tourists eating an early lunch. Goblin/goblin, goblin/elf, and human/succubus were the pairings I could see. I tried not to stare at the succubus, who was in a bikini top and short-shorts, with completely impractical four-inch heel sandals that I assume she removed when walking in sand. The human was every inch an American, and I mean that in the most unflattering way imaginable. He looked like the kind of guy who could afford to take a personal succubus to the most private island in the world while the bank he ran was busy wrecking someone’s economy. I hoped she took him for a lot of money by the time she was finished.
I should mention that English was the main language on the island. This had nothing to do with location—if it did we’d be speaking Tagalog or Malay. It had to do with what language most of the people coming to the island were fluent in, and that had to do with what language the wealthiest people in the world were fluent in. I don’t think anybody ever decided that English was to be the lingua franca; it just made the most sense.
Having said that, I spent ten minutes talking to Anh in Vietnamese, which I’m partially fluent in. I’m thoroughly fluent in every European language you can name, including ones nobody else alive is still fluent in, but the further East I go the less impressive my language skills become.
Vietnamese I’m okay with because at some point in I learned Khmer, which is similar. Most of the tongues native to the Philippines and Malaysia are new to me, though, as is a lot of Japanese. Chinese, I’m rusty with, but I can hold my own.
This is another way I keep from losing my mind entirely: finding practical things to learn. After this long a life you’d think I was mostly out of new stuff to pick up, but the world changes faster than I can absorb so there’s always something else to get good at, even as old skills become useless. For instance, I know how to turn a live plant into papyrus, make a poultice from the blood of a wildebeest, perform a complicated rain dance, and track a wounded animal in a forest. I haven’t needed to do any of those things for a very long time, although I did perform the rain dance for Mirella once, for kicks. It rained the next day, but I’m pretty sure that was a coincidence.
“Just the man I was looking for,” said someone behind me. I turned to greet one of the few other human full-time residents of the island.
“Morning, doc,” I said. “Here for a drink before you start your shift?”
“My shift just ended,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder and sliding into the seat beside me.
Doctor Lew Cambridge was the chief resident at the hospital. He had the dubious distinction of being an expert the field of cryptobiology, which doesn’t officially exist. It’s the study of beings that also don’t officially exist.
I’m
not sure how much the island pays him, but I imagine it’s a tremendously large amount of money, because his research would probably be world-alteringly important if it ever got out and people believed it. Although maybe the second part of that sentence is the problem, because one thing I’ve learned about human beings is that we are really bad at accepting the idea of hidden species among us.
There are, as you may have already figured out, a great many sentient non-human species out there. Some are common enough and human-looking enough to have inserted themselves into society at large without being noticed. Others are rare and weird. A few are incredibly dangerous. I’ve come across most of them in my life, because it’s been a really long life.
Doc Cambridge has come across a lot of them too, because many examples of impossible species live on this island. He loves talking to me for my evidently encyclopedic knowledge of these creatures, although he doesn’t know where my knowledge came from. I’m a bit reticent to share the fact of my immortality with anybody, and especially not with someone in the medical profession.
I call him Doctor Moreau sometimes. I’m the only one who thinks it’s funny, but that hasn’t stopped me from doing it.
“How’s the medicine biz, doc?” I asked.
He placed what looked like a stone on the bar.
“Take a look,” he said.
I picked it up while he signaled to Anh for a drink. It was stone-like, but not a stone.
“Is this a bezoar?” I asked.
“It is!”
I handed it back to him.
“Ew,” I said. “I feel an urge to wash my hands now, thank you.”
“I pulled it from the intestine of a djinn.”
“Not making it any better.”
“But you understand the import of the bezoar, yes?”
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 3