Hellenic Immortal
Authors: Gene Doucette
First published by The Writer’s Coffee Shop, 2012
Copyright © Gene Doucette, 2012
The right of Gene Doucette to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the
Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Writer’s Coffee Shop
(Australia)
PO Box 2013 Hornsby Westfield NSW 1635
(USA)
PO Box 2116 Waxahachie TX 75168
Paperback ISBN- 978-1-61213-101-6
E-book ISBN- 978-1-61213-102-3
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the US Congress Library.
Cover image by: © Nuttakit/© Linas Lebeliunas/© Yur1956/© Sinisa Botas/© Edward Shtern/© angelo.gi/© iruhsa
Cover design by: Megan Dooley
www.thewriterscoffeeshop.com/gdoucette
In addition to ghost writing for an immortal man, Gene Doucette has been published as a humorist with
Beating Up Daddy: A Year in the Life of an Amateur Father
and
The
Other
Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: A Parody
. He is also a screenwriter and a playwright. This is his second novel. Gene lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife and two children.
Third Apparition: Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be, until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him.
Macbeth: That will never be. Who can impress the forest, bid the tree,
Unfix his earthbound root?
--from Macbeth, by William Shakespeare
Priest: . . . You are not one of the immortal gods, we know;
Yet we have come to you to make our prayer
As to the man surest in mortal ways
And wisest in the ways of god.
--from Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles
It was Liakhil who came for me.
I remember it being on a day where the woods seemed quieter than usual, but it’s possible I decided this after the fact to make myself feel better. I’m the same way with volcanoes and earthquakes—the signs were there, and I simply missed them.
This was neither volcano nor earthquake, which was either a good thing or a bad thing depending on whether one was in its path or not.
I’d known Liakhil since he was a stripling, so seeing him as an adult always made me catch my breath. This was partly because the passage of time, not easy for me under normal circumstances, was even harder to gauge when living by myself in a temperate zone. Also, Liakhil had grown into the largest satyr I could remember, yet I still saw the boy I first met beneath that hard, impassive, bearded face.
He appeared in the woods behind me, said my name, and nearly caused me to soil myself. I always hated his kind for being able to do that, as I pride myself on being the kind of guy that’s difficult to sneak up on.
“It’s coming,” was what he said, and when I asked him what he was talking about, he just shook his head. “Hurry.”
I’d have argued, but I try not to argue with satyrs, just as a rule. Also, Liakhil looked afraid, which was alarming because I didn’t know that was one of their available expressions. So we ran. Or rather, I ran as hard as I could while he sort of jogged. The destination was never really in question as their enclosure was ahead of us and I didn’t know any other place a satyr would have wanted to be.
Then came the noises. A tree makes a very distinctive groaning sound when it is bent that’s hard to describe, but impossible to mistake for something else. I’d first heard it in the middle of an elephant stampede. (Or, something approximating an elephant. A large land mammal, let’s just say. When you’re as old as I am, sometimes you’re just waiting for paleontologists to discover things and name them for you.) The ground shook in a manner similar to a stampede as well, except it wasn’t a constant
thing like it would have been with many land creatures trampling the landscape. It was the thud-thud-thud of a biped.
And while I knew it couldn’t have been, it felt like it was directly behind us. “What is it?” I shouted to Liakhil. He either didn’t hear me or didn’t feel like answering, but he did share my anxiety regarding our relative proximity to it.
Fortunately, we were nearly to the wall of the enclosure. Without breaking stride, he grabbed my arm, pulled me over his shoulders, and then jumped up into the canopy. This would have been a good time to see what was behind us, but my eyes were closed. I also may have been screaming.
We landed hard on the other side of the wall. “What was . . .” was all I could say before he had his hand over my mouth. He shook his head at me, and I nodded.
The ground thrummed. I realized the thriving satyr village I was used to seeing was silent and looked completely empty, something I’d never witnessed before. It occurred to me that Liakhil had taken an enormous risk by leaving them—they were hiding in their homes, I later learned—to bring me over the wall.
How enormous a risk was spelled out as soon as the thing on the other side hit the wall.
It nearly buckled. I had been on the planet for a very, very long time by then and I had never seen any being capable of that. And I have not since.
I held my breath, but there was no second blow. Instead, it marched off.
Once it was fairly distant, I turned to Liakhil and asked my question. “What was that?” I asked, invoking a few choice Minoan gods, plus a Sumerian deity or two.
“The Duh-ryadh,” he answered.
I had heard this word before, but not for anything I could have imagined to be real. In the tongue of the satyros, it meant evil personified. It meant the devil. And the devil wasn’t supposed to actually walk the earth, right?
“WAGERING IS FOR MEN WHO CAN NO LONGER HUNT,” SAID HE TO SILENUS. “AND IN HUNTING, IF YOUR PREY IS AS LIKELY TO SLAY YOU AS OTHERWISE, THE WISER PATH WOULD BE TO FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO KILL.”
From the archives of Silenus the Elder. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne
Someone was following me.
It was more than a little annoying, because I’d only just re-entered society at large after a couple of years away, and I was still getting used to the idea—again—that the world was overfilled with people.
Las Vegas was probably not the best city in which to make this adjustment. Even without the crowds to consider, it’s a terribly confusing place for someone my age. For instance, I was in Egypt when some of those pyramids you see on postcards were built, and I don’t care if the one on the strip is made of glass and has lights shooting out of the top, it’s still goddamn disorienting. And the togas at Caesar’s Palace give me fits.
If I’d been smart about it, I would have dropped myself into the middle of Montana and worked my way into a city or two gradually, like a one-man Visigoth horde. But I had drinking to do, and Montana didn’t seem like the place to do that. So instead I was drinking in Las Vegas and quietly wishing for a nice plague or two to make the planet a bit less crowded.
The woman following me was a longhaired brunette, and the first time I saw her she was dressed semi-formally in a knee length skirt and scoop-necked blouse, all just a bit too classy and clean for two in the morning. She had been standing in front of a slot machine, but when she shifted and sat down, her skirt rode up and showed off some leg. This is really what caught my eye, because I am a heterosexual male.
There are perhaps only one or two things on earth that will draw my attention more quickly than the flashing of a well-formed leg atop a three-inch heel—the flashing of a well-formed breast would do it, but that’s considerably less common—and so I noticed her. I then managed to get back to my poker game, but from that point on, I made sure I kept her in my peripheral vision.