“It can’t be,” I said. “You’re dead.”
I kept blinking, like that would make it so I wasn’t seeing who I was clearly seeing. It didn’t help.
He laughed.
“Did you see me die?” he asked.
“No, but—”
“But everybody dies, I know. All except you. Honestly…Adam, now is it? Honestly, Adam, on the subject of immortality, you’re the last man on the planet I thought would require convincing.”
“But how?”
I was having a lot of trouble with this, if that wasn’t obvious. My logical mind was trying to convince itself that this was a grandson, who just bore a striking resemblance, and also appeared to have all of the knowledge of his grandfather. And his laugh. And his eyes. And his gestures. It wasn’t working.
“How am I immortal?” he said. “How are you immortal? I never knew the answer, did you? We simply are. Honestly, it’s been a great deal of fun, watching you parade about the planet as if you were something unique. The arrogance! Well and the redhead, but we both know she’s a little different.”
Eve was not, to my understanding, all that different. Just older. She also had a trick that I hadn’t learned yet, but that was all. Maybe I knew her better than he did.
“I would have come across you before,” I said. “Before this. The world isn’t that large.”
“You’re right! And you did. We’ve been friends on more than one occasion, separated by many, many centuries. I always enjoyed seeing that flicker of recognition, before you decided I couldn’t possibly be the same person you were thinking of.”
“I would have figured it out.”
“And yet, you did not! Here, I’ll tell you the first time we became friends. It was in Susiana, and I was a priest using the name Shif. You were a farmhand who stubbornly refused to learn how to read. You remember?”
“I do. But, no, you looked different.”
“As did you.”
“Not this different.”
I thought back to the last time Shif, and Haltamti, were on my mind. It was after I saw the Elamite script written in blood on the wall of the island hotel. I had a dream about Shif right after, and the dream version of him told me I wasn’t paying attention. I took it as a portent of doom, which seemed to be borne out by the tsunami that hit the island the next day.
Clearly, that was the wrong interpretation. I hadn’t been paying attention all right, but over the course of centuries, not days.
“Susiana was when I realized you and I were the same,” he said. “I’d been high priest for fifty years, and took note that two others in the city also did not age: our red-haired priestess; and a lowly farmhand.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s say I accept what my eyes are telling me, and this isn’t some sort of trick.”
“What trick could it be?”
“You’re not here in person. You could be a simulation.”
“Why, I suppose that’s true! But someone would need to have digitally captured the entirety of Herman Mudgett, yes? In a time when such a thing was technologically impossible. On top of which, who else could possibly know all I know?”
“I agree. I’m only saying there is a theoretical explanation.”
“Very good. I always admired your adherence to the logical. I am unfortunately not going to be joining you in person today, which I expect would be the only evidence you’d find acceptable. Unless you were to then argue the existence of a lifelike robot.”
In the back of my mind, I could hear Han screaming that the police were already on their way, and I needed to get out of there. He was right, but I couldn’t get my legs to move toward the door. There was just too much I needed to know. The threat of long-term incarceration was about to become very real and I couldn’t move.
“You said we’ve known one another for centuries,” I said, “except nobody clued me in on our long-standing friendship. This wasn’t all about my failing to recognize you. I recognize you now.”
“Yes, because I’m allowing it. Do you know what a rakshasa is?”
“Of course I do. You’re not going to tell me you’re one of those, now, are you?”
Rakshasas are truly awful beings. They combine a taste for human flesh with an uncanny ability to disguise themselves, with the latter bordering on the supernatural. The only reason I don’t think it is magic is that magic isn’t real.
“No, but I studied under one,” he said. “This was not long after I parted ways with the temple in Susiana. I wandered…no, that isn’t accurate. I fled the city due to a minor religious disagreement concerning human sacrifice. Unimportant. I’d tell you to ask the redhead about it, as I’m certain she remembers, but you won’t have a chance. I fled, is the point, and I ended up in what’s now Northern India, where I came upon a family of rakshasas. They taught me everything they knew about deception, and in thanks for their hospitality, I murdered all of them.”
“That’s an odd way of saying thanks.”
“Well, I know, but they were rakshasas.” He shivered at the thought. “Can you blame me?”
I was kind of on-board with him on this one. I have learned to find something likable about very nearly every non-human species I’ve encountered. But not them.
“I thought of it as my final test,” he said. “I killed them one by one, each time impersonating another member of their own family. The only thing I didn’t do was eat any of them. Although I tried! Very gamey. Do you remember that animal…it was like a gigantic rabbit, only with claws?”
“I do. I think it’s extinct.”
It had been a good forty thousand years since I saw one, so this was a good bet. But what did I know? I couldn’t even spot another immortal man.
“Oh, very much so! I don’t think archeology has even discovered it yet. Just as well. Do you remember how the meat tasted?”
“We always hunted those as a last resort,” I said. “We would go after something twice as deadly first.”
“Yes! Take that flavor, only the meat’s spoiled. That’s what rakshasa tastes like. It’s no wonder they never tried cannibalism.”
“How old are you?”
“No idea! Old enough to remember that rabbit thing. Who can even count that high? But this is nice, is it not? Talking like this, after all our time on Earth? I bet you never expected to meet another man who even remembered that beast.”
“I didn’t, no. But, why did you wait so long to tell me? You could have done it at any time.”
“For the same reason I’m not there in person right now. I’m afraid we’re irreconcilable, my old friend. Not that I haven’t tried. But your perspective on things is simply impossible.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“It was right there, in Susiana. I aspired to a position of power. The redhead fashioned herself a goddess. You were a farmer. And you were content! It continues to boggle the mind. Don’t you understand that we are gods to these temporary things? We are forever. They’re flickering lights—mayflies, dead by the sundown. That you can bring yourself to care about even one of them is, well, it’s disappointing.”
“Is that why you’re trying to kill all of them?”
He laughed.
“You’ve figured it out, have you?”
“The merman in the tank down the hall. You’re not trying to cure him, right? Even though that’s what this company is supposed to be doing. The merman is where you got the strain of the disease.”
“I came across my first merman twelve thousand years ago, after a shipwreck that left most of my crew dead. The creatures came ashore to take our deceased. They like meat from the land, when they can get it, but are really quite gentle if you don’t bother one of their queens. I befriended them, and while I was stranded on that island, they kept me alive by bringing fish.”
“You befriended them how, exactly?”
“Very good! You know me better than you realize. I traded fish meat for human meat, and when I ran out of drowned shipmates, I started murdering them. Anyway, I learned some of their language, and further learned of the wasting disease. When the day came, I sought out a live sample. It took twenty years to capture the one you saw in the tank.”
“And then you modified the disease so that it could jump species,” I said. “You turned it into a weapon.”
“I wouldn’t call it a weapon. We manufactured our own plague is all.”
“That’s really the definition of a weapon.”
He waved his hand in the air, as if to say, never mind that. It was such an arrestingly familiar gesture, I couldn’t possibly deny that this was really him.
“It was released in small doses,” he said, “just enough to initiate a panic. In another year, Holitix will provide a cure, and for an exorbitant fee, mass inoculation will begin. The exorbitant fee is what sold the board on it.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It’s smart. We own the entire market, why not take advantage? And these species value secrecy above everything, including survival, which is frankly their own damn fault. Of course, there is no cure. The inoculations will kill all of them. That’s the part the board doesn’t know about.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Why NOT! My lord, you are so infuriating! What does it matter? They’re ants! Microbes! Don’t you see how weak your irrational concern makes you? I honestly think I would have an easier time explaining this to the other one.”
“Eve.”
He laughed.
“Is that what you’re calling her? How quaintly biblical of you. Yes, her. She was here too, you know. Not in this room; three floors up. She is far deadlier, and twice as ruthless. Made such a mess we just burned down the whole building rather than try cleaning it up. Bravo, on all the work you did in the hallway, incidentally. It was good to see the killer come out again. I wish you embraced him more often.”
“Come visit in person, and I will,” I said. I was a little annoyed that he thought she was more deadly, and yes, I know how dumb that sounds.
“Oh, I know. That’s precisely why I’m not there in person.”
“There’s time. I’ll find you, and figure out a way to stop what you’re doing.”
“Well. That’s your other weakness, isn’t it? Misplaced bravado. Ill-advised derring-do. An overactive sense of heroism. I can’t imagine you’re surprised to find that it has ended up being your undoing.”
I would never describe myself as a hero. Maybe once a century, I do something modestly selfless, but that’s all. I think the number of times I’ve headed away from danger far exceeded the number of times I turned towards it. But, if he’d been around me for as long as he claimed, the heroic moments probably stuck out.
“I’m still here,” I said. “I don’t know where you are, but I’ll find out.”
He was sitting before an annoyingly pedestrian background, behind a desk, with no windows in view. There was nothing on the wall behind him, and in fact it might have just been a sheet or something, since it was utterly featureless. Also, there was nothing on the desk. The chair was leather, and squeaked when he moved, but that wasn’t helpful.
He smiled at the suggestion that I could hunt him down.
“I could go on about how the police are right now surrounding the property,” he said, “or how ten minutes ago the door to the stairwell was unlocked remotely for them. Knowing you, you’ll murder your way out and come up with some absurd justification for your actions, like always. But none of that is going to matter, because you’re not leaving the room. The door locked behind you, and the walls are steel.”
I’d left the door to the room open, but he was right; it had since closed up behind me. I hadn’t even noticed.
“The screen isn’t steel,” I said.
“No, it’s glass, but the wall behind it is also steel.”
“Then I’ll knock until someone opens the door from the other side. As you said, someone’s already on the way.”
“You still don’t understand. This is goodbye, Adam. I wouldn’t have told you all of that if I expected to ever see you again; this isn’t a spy film. You’re standing in a kiln right now.”
“You’re joking,” I said, even as I tallied up the facts in support of this: the heavy door; the steel walls; the apparent lack of function. Even the wood furniture made sense in this context.
“I’m really not. Had it built after that mess the redhead left behind, as a better way to dispose of things. It’s also just plain fun.”
Something in the ceiling began to whirr. There were thin vents at the edge of the walls, and those vents had just opened. Hot air was pouring through.
“I picked this up from Henry, incidentally,” Herman said. “He was a flawed man, but also brilliant in his way. Body disposal was his finest feature. He built his own crematorium, and not only disposed of his dead in it, sometimes he actually put them in while still alive. He liked to hear their screams.”
“Is that what you’re going to be doing? Listening for my screams?”
“And watching. But, this screen is quite expensive, so I am afraid this is the last time you’ll be seeing me. Or anyone else. Goodbye, Adam.”
The screen went dead, and then retracted into the ceiling.
As advertised, the wall behind it was the same metal as the rest of the room.
I tried the exit, as one does. It was locked, which was disappointing, but not surprising. I couldn’t even see the locking mechanism in the seal between the doors, and the hinges were unexposed. There was no handle or knob. If I hadn’t already known a doorway was there, I might have mistaken it for another wall. Which, I guess, is the point when one wants to create an oven that someone will voluntarily walk into.
I considered trying the shotgun on the door, but steel that thick wouldn’t respond well; I’d just blow myself up.
“Herman?” I shouted. “I know you can still hear me. We can work something out. You don’t have to do this.”
Silence.
The air was already becoming difficult to breathe. I decided for my own safety to relocate the guns to the other side of the room, before the gunpowder ignited. I had no idea what temperature that might happen at, or whether or not it was a higher temperature than that at which I could still survive, but it still seemed like a solid decision anyway.
A minute later, I was adding the knife and sword to the other side of the room. The metal was conducting the heat better than I was; the sword nearly burned a hole in my back.
None of this mattered. If someone didn’t open that door soon, the next thing to happen would be the wood of the table catching fire, and then maybe my clothes, and then me.
Maybe if I was lucky, I’d suffocate first.
Another thirty seconds, and I was down on my knees gasping for air. If I thought I could speak, I’d tell him to hurry up with it already. It wouldn’t have mattered—probably—because he was clearly interested in my suffering.
Then the table burst into flames.
Strangely, when that happened, it felt like I could breathe a little easier.
The chair went next, and then one of the guns fired off a round. It looked like Herman had answered my silent wish that he speed up the process, because the walls were glowing white and the air was wavy with the oppressive heat…and I was fine. The air I was breathing was cooler than it should have been, and I wasn’t on fire.
Then I realized why I wasn’t currently dead or dying. I wasn’t entirely in the room anymore. I stood in the middle of it, but I wasn’t really there. It was like I was witnessing a particularly impressive interactive movie from the other side of the screen.
There was a hand on my shoulder. When I noticed this I nearly pulled away in surprise, which would have surely been a lethal decision. If memory served, doing that would drop me right out of the veil.
It was Eve. Somehow. I couldn’t believe she was not only there, but actively rescuing me, and I would have asked her why, but then I saw the strain on her face.
She took my hand.
“Don’t let go,” she said.
I got to my feet, and then she walked us through the doors and into the hallway.
It all felt really strange: passing through the solid door; standing in the hall and feeling like I was taller than I should have been; the continued sensation that I was on the other side of a screen, the same way Herman had been a few minutes earlier.
Then Eve let go of my hand, and we both fell back to Earth.
I ended up on the floor, gasping, as if my lungs had been taking in all of the hot air of Herman’s kiln that whole time.
Eve lay on the ground next to me, on her back. I noticed she was wearing a hospital gown, which was the same thing she had on the last time I saw her.
“You came straight from the island,” I said.
She nodded.
“How did you know to come here?”
“I know the man,” she said. “I knew he would lead you here, as he led me here.”
“But you want me dead at least as much as he does. Don’t you?”
She smiled that ridiculous smile of hers and sat up, then leaned against the wall when sitting up completely on her own proved too challenging.
“It’s possible I have changed my opinion on that point, Urr,” she said.
“Well, that’s nice.”
We were both ignoring the copious amount of blood and guts just out of reach down the hall. Maybe it was just me, but it seemed like the only time we really got to talk was around corpses.
“You may also be the only one capable of stopping him. Perhaps I’m keeping you alive so that I might kill you later.”
I laughed, and she joined in.
I’d never heard her laugh before. I liked it.
“Sounds like a deal,” I said.
There was a banging on the stairwell door at the other end of the hall.
“That was fast,” I said. “He must have sent the police right down to the bottom floor. Can you…”
I was going to ask her about maybe pulling the same trick that got me out of the kiln, to get us good and far from the police, but the question would have been posed to empty space.
Eve had disappeared on me again.
“Hey come on,” I said. “That isn’t funny. Get me out of here.”
Silence. If not for the part where I’d been walked through a solid steel door, I’d have suggested she was never there at all.
At least, I reflected, as the stairwell door flew open, she was being historically consistent.
Three armed men with CPD on their bulletproof vests poured through the doorway with their guns out.
“Don’t move, don’t fucking move!” the first one barked.
I was unarmed—my guns were undoubtedly slag at this point—and covered in blood that mostly didn’t belong to me. So, I didn’t move other than to raise my hands.
“Jesus, look at this,” the second guy said. It was the kind of scene that puts a person off of solid food for a while. “Is that him? Is that him?”
He seemed fully prepared to shoot me right there.
“I’m not armed,” I said. I remained on my knees, my hands up, palms empty. Then I waited for one of them to wade through the bodies to get to me.
If any one of these three was actually here to collect on the bounty, this was going to go very badly, very quickly.
“Command, we have him,” the first guy said in to his radio.
Guy number three lowered his gun and pulled out a pair of cuffs. Number two still looked like he was going to shoot me.
“Repeat, we have Adam. We’re bringing him up.”
He nodded at the one with the handcuffs, who started walking.
“You’re under arrest,” number one said.
Then he began to read me my rights.
I didn’t do a head-count, but by my conservative estimate, I was being take into custody by every police officer in Illinois. I was marched up from the bottom level by the three officers who found me, and then it took the assembled forces a half an hour to figure out how to get me up out of the hole, since I couldn’t climb a ladder while my hands were cuffed behind my back.
Once that was resolved, I was perp-walked past all the television crews in the Midwest—thankfully all were kept at a moderate distance so nobody could Jack Ruby me along the way—and into a squad car.
I was joined in the back seat by the arresting officer—the first guy through the door, whose name was Stanton—a driver who looked like a regular patrolman, and a captain who introduced himself as Dunwitty.
Dunwitty did two things, as soon as I got into the car: he had Stanton change it so my wrists were handcuffed in front instead of behind me (so I could sit comfortably); and he provided me with a bottle of water, which was really nice.
“Were you advised of your rights, Adam?” Dunwitty asked. He was going to try to come off as my very best friend on the ride back downtown. I wondered how strong his case was.
“Yes, I was,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Is any of that blood yours?”
“Some of it. I have a wound on my side. Nothing too deep.”
Dunwitty glared at Stanton.
“I’m sorry about that, Adam,” the captain said. “We should have had a paramedic take a look at that.”
“It’s okay, I heal fast.”
“Which one of those bodies down there did that to you, you reckon?”
Here was where he tried to get me to admit to killing at least the six in the basement. Which was interesting, because I was pretty sure that crime scene wasn’t in his jurisdiction; the laboratory was outside the city limits.
“Probably the one next to the bow and arrow,” I said. “Hey, how many bodies do you have me down for? Ten, fifteen?”
“Sixteen. Right?”
“Yes sir, sixteen,” Stanton said.
“You’re going to pin all of those on me?” I asked.
“That’s not up to us,” Dunwitty said. “But you are the only one still standing. If there’s something else going on, now’s the time to start talking.”
“Why’s that?”
“So we can go round up the folks responsible. Just put us on the trail, Adam. We’ll do what we can.”
I thought back to when I fled England, and why. Now here I was, well over a century later, still getting arrested for murder thanks to Herman. Even though he didn’t get to kill me in his oven, he still got what he wanted.
Just like in Whitechapel, and at the World’s Fair, he outsmarted me before I could stop him, before I was even aware I was in the middle of a battle of wits.
This time, he was committing mass genocide—for fun—and I might not even make it to the sunrise. There was still a contract on my life, and thanks to the media attention, the entire Western hemisphere was going to know where to find me before we even made it into the police station.
With all that in mind, I started laughing. I couldn’t help it.
“What’s so funny?” Dunwitty asked. He looked over at Stanton, who shrugged.
“Captain,” I said, “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. May as well get it recorded somewhere. But I can guarantee you’re not going to believe a word of it.”