“Pages from novels. Heinlein, Neil Stephenson, Bova, Grimwood, and a couple others.”
I leaned forward to identify some highlighted text. It was a quotation from a character named Lazarus Long. She sure knew how to hammer home a theme.
I moved to the third wall. A small table had been set up against the center of the wall, and in the center of the table was a scale model of a Greek temple I recognized as belonging to Dionysos.
More pictures took up the wall-space, mostly consisting of Greek statuettes and photos of artifacts. At the top of the wall was a banner, also in the Greek language.
“Dionysos,” Mike interpreted for me, possibly aware that he didn’t have to. “God of wine,” he added.
I leaned forward to focus on a small Polaroid just above the temple model. “God of the theater too,” I pointed out. “And madness.”
“Didn’t know that.”
“Every Greek god took on extra duties. It was easier than inventing new gods all the time.”
The photo was of a simple metal box. There was nothing in the picture to give it scale, but I knew from the last time I was near it, that it was roughly the size of a steamer trunk. I also knew that, like the copy of the ancient ritual that was still in my pocket, this box was supposed to have disappeared about two thousand years ago. I’d clearly underestimated the persistence of devotion.
With Mike preoccupied with another section of the room, I took the photo down and slipped it into my pocket.
“So what else?” I stepped away from the wall.
“There were papers on the desk,” Mike said. “The originals are getting the full treatment right now, but I got copies in the car. I’ll show ‘em to you if you think it’ll help.”
“It should.”
“You wanna share anything with me now?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“How about telling me what the hell you’re doing all over her wall?” Mike was obviously hoping for a stronger reaction.
“I don’t know,” I confessed.
“Sure you do,” he bit back.
I stared at him. “Maybe you have something you’d like to share with me, then.”
“Yeah. Let’s play that game again from the truck stop. For real this time.” He pointed to the poster depicting the Sandman character. “An Eternal, right? Lives forever?”
“That’s certainly implicit in the name,” I agreed.
“Lazarus, the Wandering Jew, both from the Bible, one risen from the dead, one reputed to walk the earth until Judgment Day. And here . . .” He pointed emphatically as he went, like a lawyer running through evidence. “References from novels with immortal characters in them. And I don’t know who the hell Ut-Nap-whatever is, but I bet if I went down to the library, I’d find out he was a guy with a pretty big lifespan.”
“You’d be right.”
“Thought so. Now I look at all of this shit, and I look at those photos of you—a guy who dropped in from nowhere with more money than a third world nation—and I think there’s a connection.” His tirade ended with him standing eyes-to-chin with me. “So why don’t we start with you telling me how old you are?”
Well. That was a pretty impressive leap of understanding for Mike. I mean, those of us who are aware of the possibility of immortality would probably view the steps required to reach that conclusion as somewhat logical. But most people don’t have an immortality wrench in their mental toolbox, just like they don’t have one for demons, vampires, pixies, and the like. Many others, when faced with a similar aggregation of facts, have managed to come up with a number of preposterous options specifically to avoid the obvious.
“How long have you been working on that speech?” I asked him.
“A little while. How’d I do?”
“Pretty good.”
“So?”
“So, I don’t really know how old I am.”
“Ballpark figure,” he prodded.
I sighed. “Hypothetically, let’s say I told you I was older than recorded history. What difference would that make? What haven’t you told me about Ariadne Papos? Why the hell do you care so much about her?”
Honestly, when I threw out the older than history line, he didn’t blink.
“I’m just doing my job,” he argued, which came off as a bit silly from an agent who had already admitted he’d wandered off the proverbial ranch. Mike pulled back the shutters on the windows and looked out over the back yard. I realized this was the edge of a new development; the whole back of the house fronted a deep copse of trees. “You ever heard the name Peter Arnheit?” he asked.
I chewed on that for a second or two while Mike tried to open the window. He was planning to smoke a cigarette, and amusingly—given the lady of the house was probably never going to be coming back home—was doing what every conscientious smoker does in trying to provide ventilation for his exhaust.
I did recognize the name, but only barely. I seemed to recall a number of news stories about a year earlier where the name figured prominently.
“Something about a murder?” I offered. But I didn’t get a chance to consider it more carefully, because then Mike was shouting at me.
“Get down!”
Now I was standing a good five or six feet away from him in roughly the middle of the room. I’m telling you this so you can understand that what he did next was basically impossible. He spun around, took one step, sprang across the room, hit me square in the chest, and brought me down onto the floor, in less than a full second. I know this because I tried to speak and never got the opportunity.
And it was a good thing Mike could move that quickly, because I scarcely had time to register that I was on Ariadne Papos’s hardwood floor before bullets tore through the window, past the open space I’d been occupying rather calmly a moment before, and into the hallway, where they struck and killed a portion of faux wood paneling.
It was over in a couple of seconds.
“What?” I finally managed to say.
Mike rolled off me and dragged me away from the window while my nervous system tried to catch up. “Are you hit?” he asked, drawing his own weapon and keeping an eye on the window.
I checked. No apparent bullet holes. “No.”
“Good.” Still not looking at me, he pulled his car keys out of his jacket pocket and dropped them on my stomach. “We have more to talk about, but not now. Take the car. There’s a diner we passed on the highway about ten miles back. Randy’s. Do you remember it?”
“I think so.”
“Fine. I’ll meet you there.”
“I’m really not a good driver,” I insisted.
He looked down at me. “Learn fast. Look, somebody heard that, and that somebody is calling the police right now. You can’t be here when they are.”
“I see your point.”
“Good. Go to the diner.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Figure out who wants one of us dead, and then clean things up with the cops.”
“How are you going to . . .” But I didn’t get a chance to finish that question. Mike jumped up, and in one fluid motion broke right through the half-shattered window and into the back yard. Surprisingly, whoever was out there with the semi-automatic weapon (it sounded like a TEC-9) didn’t open up on him. Either Mike was really lucky, or he already knew the shooter was fleeing the scene. I suspected the latter.
Any doubts I still might have had about Mike were gone; he definitely wasn’t fully human.
THE GOD BERATED SILENUS. “YOUR STORIES DO NOT ENRICH THE WORLD FOR ANY WHO LISTEN.”
“BUT MEN DO WEEP, AND CLAMOR FOR MORE TALES,” SILENUS PROTESTED. “WOULD YOU STARVE THEM OF THESE THINGS?”
“STORIES HAVE A PLACE IN THE BREAST OF ALL MEN, BUT ONLY WHEN NOT SUPPOSED TRUE. THERE ARE MANY ENOUGH REAL PERILS IN THIS LIFE FOR MEN TO FEAR; BIRTHING IMAGINED HORRORS SERVES NO PURPOSE, AND IS A DANGER TO ANY WHO CANNOT PARSE THE DIFFERENCE.”
“YOU SPEAK OF GODS AS IMAG
INED HORRORS?”
“I DO EXACTLY.”
From the archives of Silenus the Elder. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne
The first time I saw an automobile, it nearly ran me over, and that’s pretty much colored how I’ve felt about them since. Granted, it was easier to show disdain in the early days when they were only occasionally capable of outstripping a horse in full gallop, made a profound stink, and broke down every few miles. And that was just what you had to deal with when sharing the road with them; riding inside of one was infinitely worse. Imagine letting all the air out of your tires, removing your windshield, your shock absorbers, and the cushions in your car seats, and then driving on a dirt road. You’d start pricing horses pretty fast.
Mike’s convertible was a standard transmission, which was okay since I learned how to drive a car with a stick. That was in 1942, back when cars still traveled at a moderately acceptable speed and a stick was all you got.
It still took me five minutes to start his car. First, I had to crawl to the front door of the house and duck and bob my way to the driver’s seat, not entirely certain the gunman from the back yard hadn’t simply relocated to the front under the reasonable assumption that we might wish to drive the hell away once we found out somebody was trying to kill us. I even entertained the notion that Mike had sent me out the front on purpose. Seemed out of character for him but hey, he’s not human, and since I didn’t know for sure exactly what he was, being a good liar might have been part of the package. (Goblin was definitely out; they can’t move that fast.) Once in the seat, I relaxed a little, but then there was the matter of remembering how cars work.
I stuck the key into the ignition and turned it, and nothing happened. I tried turning it a half-dozen more times to the same effect, feeling more and more like a caveman with a cell phone, until it occurred to me to step on some pedals. Through trial and error, I discovered that in order to fire up the internal combustion engine, I had to stomp on both the clutch and the brake first.
The next few minutes were spent reviewing the steps necessary to propel the car in some sort of direction, and discovering how easy it was to stall with very little provocation on my part. I eventually discovered reverse, and even better, first gear. Then I tried second gear, and that was so wonderful, I stuck with it for several blocks, until a burning smell suggested that it might be time to try third gear.
By the time I reached Randy’s Diner, a couple of hours had passed and I hadn’t killed myself or anybody else, but Mike’s car wasn’t sounding too hot. As I locked it and went in, I reminded myself that the next time I took a car onto the highway, I was going to have to use a higher gear than third.
* * *
“More coffee, hon?” Linda the waitress asked me. She was a cheerful older woman with a vague trace of a moustache and teeth the color of tea. Since I had gotten to the diner, she’d been offering me refills on a highly regular basis.
“Sure,” I agreed absently. My head was stuck in the files Mike had left in the car. He probably hadn’t meant to, but his bag of interesting FBI case files had been left under the passenger seat when we’d gone into Ariadne’s home and I certainly wasn’t going to leave it there unread. Not with all this time to kill.
Linda splashed another load of the brackish, coffee-like substance I’d been drinking for the past two hours into the cup and toddled off again. Preoccupied as I was with Mike’s files, my devotion to the coffee had become nearly Pavlovian; I didn’t want any more, but I couldn’t stop drinking the refills.
The first file I turned my attention to was my own, and I found it satisfying to discover that Mike hadn’t held anything back in that regard. Except there had to be a much larger version of it elsewhere, given how slight it was and the fact that there was nothing inside it that justified the full-on 24-hour observation I’d gotten. Maybe, I reflected, Mike didn’t have access to the rest. More likely he anticipated handing over the file at some point, and had deliberately omitted documents.
The folder on Ariadne was considerably larger and more involved. I found photos of her house, her apartment in Sacramento, and her workstation at the office. None of that was particularly intriguing; I’d seen the most important stuff in person already. What I hadn’t seen before was the notes and documents she’d left behind in Rancho Cordova. The originals were probably being dusted, treated, and fingerprinted within an inch of their lives in some sort of underground lab somewhere, but Mike had copies of everything.
The first item of note was a lengthy treatise on the Dionysian Mysteries. It was a ten-page thing she’d probably pulled off some university site somewhere and about half of it was wrong, through no fault of anybody, since the original participants had sworn to keep everything that went on in the mystery cults a secret. Considering what I already knew about her, it was a curious find. Between the note she’d left in my room, and what I’d seen in her house, she already knew more about the Mysteries than anybody that isn’t me should expect to. So what was she doing with this essay on her desk?
There were a half-dozen other articles that pretty much parroted the same stuff the first article had said. I’d find an occasional note in a margin, but there was nothing to further illuminate the open question. Still, just seeing the Mysteries brought up in print made a few things come together for me. Mike had said she was connected to a terrorist organization. If this was it, either Mike was horribly misinformed, or I was, since the Cult I knew had ceased to exist long ago. And when it did exist, it certainly didn’t commit acts of terrorism, or whatever the ancient Greek version of a terrorist act might be.
Then came the articles on Peter Arnheit. I was right; it was a name I’d seen before, and it did involve a murder case. I spent a good half an hour reading through all the material she’d pulled down from various news sites until I realized that Peter Arnheit was the subject of the third file folder in Mike’s bag.
All I’d known about him was what I’d read in the news, and I’m not much for keeping up with current events so that wasn’t a lot. And a quick review of Mike’s file showed me that the papers knew far less than they realized.
* * *
Peter was one of the lucky ones in this life, insofar as he was fortunate enough to have a mother who attracted rich men on a semi-regular basis. She’d been married four times to four men who’d each made at least one appearance on the Fortune 500 list in their lifetime.
Although it wasn’t clearly stated in any of Mike’s documents, Peter had obviously fallen into the trap of the uncommonly privileged and became very bored with himself. I’ve seen this a lot, as you can probably imagine. Bored wealthy people can be fairly dangerous, like when they decide to start a war just because it’s something to do. In Peter’s case, he reached a certain level of ennui sometime in college—UCLA—and decided to take a year off to hike through the rainforest with his roommate, a kid named Lonnie Wicks.
That was a mistake. I’ve been to my fair share of tropical rainforests. They tend to be the sort of thing one tries very hard to get the hell out of, not actively hike into. Especially now. Back in the early days, we understood that damn near everything on the planet wanted to kill us for one reason or another and we were prepared for that, because it was the only way we knew. But in the twenty-first century, one can walk for weeks without coming across something that wants to eat you and has the means to do so. A city kid like Peter Arnheit should have known better. (As an aside, this is why I don’t understand most anybody involved in the environmental movement. These people probably think we used to pet panthers and sing to rhinos or something. It’s all Walt Disney’s fault.)
Peter and Lonnie were both well trained in survival techniques, as apparently it was a hobby of theirs. They also had access to the best gear money could buy, including a couple of satellite phones, something called a GPS, plenty of cash, and their health, which is always important. And then they disappeared into a South American rainforest.
Four months later, nobody had he
ard from them, and their families were worried. Peter’s mother had died of leukemia during his freshman year in college, but his biological father, a former senator from the state of New Mexico, was still very much alive. Lonnie’s parents were the owners of the largest retail chain of women’s footwear in the Western United States. With that kind of clout, it’s not surprising that the government was soon politely requesting assistance from four different South American countries in locating them. Unfortunately—and I could have told them this—political pressure doesn’t make a huge difference if someone is lost in a rainforest. Just about the only thing they could confirm was that the kids hadn’t been kidnapped. Or if they had, it was by some incredibly stupid kidnappers who didn’t understand that demanding a ransom is kind of important.
So everyone in the Arnheit and Wick households sort of just freaked out for a little while, up until one afternoon when, seven months after he’d last been heard from, Peter called home.
“I made it, Dad,” he had told the stunned Senator Arnheit, “but it got Lonnie.”
What followed was something of a minor scandal. The Wicks family had lost their only child, and the one person who knew exactly how and why, wasn’t making any sense at all.
Peter was half-starved and badly dehydrated when he emerged from the woods, and the last lucid thing he did for a good three months was place that call to his father. Hospitalized first in Colombia, before being flown gratis by the American government to a more up-to-date medical facility in Los Angeles, he was never conscious for more than a half hour at a time, and had to be resuscitated twice when his heart decided to give up and stop beating.
The problem was a severe infection. He had over a dozen unexplained wounds on his body, the two deepest and oldest of which had not healed well at all. The locations of the cuts—Mike had pictures—implied that he’d been attacked by a wild animal, and on more than one occasion. But the wounds themselves weren’t consistent with any indigenous animal, so the consensus was they were knife wounds caused by another person. The possibility that person had been Lonnie Wicks was floated.
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