Enthusiastick Blog

As the two men reached the top of the stairs one of them paused and reached into his coat. He was a head taller than his companion, who stepped forward, first knocking and then balling a fist to thump noisily against the door.

“Sage? It’s William. I know you’re in there. Look, we need your help–”

The taller man cut the shorter one off, pushing past him and stooping to apply picks to the door lock. The shorter man stood dumb as the tall one easily opened the lock and slipped into the apartment. A moment later he too crossed the threshold, stepping uninvited into the apartment at the top of the stairs.

He discovered his companion along with their quarry, a young woman no more than nineteen years old, in a cramped and cluttered office. The taller man stood with his hands in his pockets, grimly watching the woman. The woman sat slack-jawed in a reclining chair, her eyes unfocused, staring in the direction of a half dozen computer monitors. The screens flickered, casting different colors of light across the back wall of the room. Each seemed to be displaying information at random, and changing every few seconds: a photograph would blink out of existence to be replaced by an encyclopedia article, then a news clipping, then a photograph again, and so on ad infinitum.

“Sage?” the shorter man repeated, stepping forward to stand beside her. When she didn’t respond he passed his hand in front of her face, but her expression remained blank, unaware of his presence. Her breathing did not change, she did not even blink.

“She can’t hear you,” the taller man grunted, once again reaching into the inner pocket of his coat. The shorter man frowned.

“You said she could help us,” he said, the earnest tone in his voice giving way desperation. “You said you could make her help us!”

The taller man held up his hand, silencing his companion. His other hand reached into his coat and withdrew an aged paperback book, no more than 200 pages, tossing it so that it arced and fell into the lap of the catatonic woman. The Adventures of Tuxedo Cat, the shorter man read on the cover. He blinked and glanced hesitantly to his companion. The woman stirred, and for the first time since either man had entered her presence, she blinked. She blinked slowly, and so deliberately that the way her eyelids slid down to momentarily cover her eyeballs was practically audible. All at once she stood, plucking the book off her lap and stretching her back, rubbing at the weary circles under her eyes.

Five years ago the woman had been diagnosed with high grade astrocytoma and given a grim prognosis. An immediate surgery was scheduled, and purely by chance it happened to coincide with a celestial event: a meteor shower and a resulting power failure which brought her surgery to a premature halt. And after that she had never been quite the same. The tumor sat on her brain, like some bloated spider beneath the crown of her skull, legs wrapped tight around her gray matter.

They called her Sage now. This was not some fiction about human beings only using ten percent of their brains; she had merely become a statistical outlier. Her capacity for recall and her ability to collate information had both been increased beyond previously observed limits. It was not merely that she could recall in exquisite detail everything she had ever seen, read, heard, smelt, tasted or felt. It was her ability to cross-reference this knowledge, to draw connections between disparate pieces of information, that made her miraculous. Sage made the invisible plain, like a conjurer plucking scarves from thin air.

A brief while later the two men walked back down the stairs. Again it was the shorter man who spoke first.

“She’s getting worse, isn’t she?”

The taller man stopped and turned to look at the shorter man over his shoulder, his expression unreadable.

“It’s a cancer, Liam. She goes on living with it, but…” He shook his head and turned to resume descending the stairs. “There is no worse. There’s just dead.”

I don’t like the term “immortal”. Something about it just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe because it’s defining something in the negative. Telling you who I am by telling you what I’m not.

My name is Doriana Mudd. I was born on November 1st, 1851. I’m still alive, and I haven’t aged much past thirty-something. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t died. That’s happened, from time to time, but it never quite takes.

I don’t know what’s keeping me alive. I’ve had over a century to investigate my own mystery, to ponder the puzzle that I am. But to be honest I don’t have a clue, and never have. Every lead and every notion I’ve ever had has come to nothing.

I don’t know what makes me special. I know that I am alive today, and that it seems very likely I will be alive tomorrow. I know that I’ve been shot, stabbed, run over and in one case hung by the neck until dead.

And I know that I cannot leave the City. There wasn’t much of a city here, back when I was born. More of a fort in the woods. It’s the same now as it was then; If I get more than a few miles away from where the buildings stop, I pass out.

When I come to, I’m always back inside the city. Used to be that every so often I’d get angry, sick and tired of feeling like a caged animal. I’d make up my mind to start walking away, with every intention of never looking back.

These days I’m too scared for that. I don’t like waking up in strange places, for one thing, and I’m too old and too set in my ways. Too frightened to give up control. And maybe I worry.

Maybe I’m afraid that whatever keeps me alive, whatever keeps me eternally young, is caught up with this city somehow. Maybe it’s better not to tempt fate. Maybe if I keep trying to leave, one day it’ll actually let me go.

I don’t want to die, and fortunately for me, I can’t — not for very long, anyway. But don’t call me an immortal. Please.

It’s cloudy this morning, lending a sort of blueish quality to the light coming in through my bathroom window. It’s not quite bright enough for the task at hand, but my electricity’s been cut off again, so it will have to do.

I peer at my own face in the mirror, half-covered in a beard of white foam. I run the safety razor under the water and then lift it up under my chin, holding my breath as it glides against my skin. My stubble is just a little too coarse for this two-bladed piece of crap, and it leaves behind an invisible but irksome residue of bristle, even when I shave against the grain. I could shave my whole face twice and cut my skin to ribbons, or leave behind enough growth to have a 5 o’clock shadow before lunchtime. I read somewhere that you can soften facial hair by using conditioner on it before you shave, but I’ve never tried it.

I’m contemplating all of this when I abruptly fall to my knees. Simultaneously my head dips forward, cracking against the edge of the sink, and I topple half-shaven onto the tiles of the bathroom floor.

Clairvoyant narcolepsy, that’s the simplest way of putting it. I perceive things in my dreams that I have no rational way of knowing, visions of other times and places, of the future and the past. But only the dreams I have when dozing, nodding off from the waking world and peering into another.

In this particular vision I’m someone else, and I’m standing on the ledge of a roof overlooking some squalid neighborhood south of the city center. I can feel a tingling in my fingertips, and I flex my digits, sensing currents of potential in the air, like the moment before a static-electric discharge. If I had a mirror, I could see who I am, and maybe make some sense of this vision when I wake up. But the mirror I’ve got is back in my bathroom.

Back in my bathroom, where I am concussed and quite possibly bleeding. Oh Hell.

I dream of rising up onto the balls of my feet, trusting the rubber tread on my sneakers to grip against the marble of the ledge. Am I going to jump? Apparently yes. Tensing my legs and springing, flinging my form inhumanly far, across the void of the gap between tenements to the ledge of the next building. Whoever I am, I’m not your average guy, but that’s hardly surprising. I don’t have visions of everyday events.

Speaking of which, is this the future or the past? There’s no immediate clues. I have a vague sense that it’s the present, or the immediate future, but by now I know better than to trust the leaps of intuition made by my sleeping brain. You ever know something in a dream, just know it out of nowhere but for dead certain? Even though it doesn’t make sense? Better to second-guess myself than to make faulty assumptions.

My vision swims a moment, bobbing as I walk across the roof and flip down onto a fire escape without using my hands. Something’s off about my hands; I’m nervous about accidentally touching the railing of the fire escape, fingers hovering a foot above the metal. I should be wearing gloves.

In the gap between my outstretched hands I can see down into the alley below. My eyes adjust from near focus to far, and it’s a moment before I make out the figure lying flat on the pavement. A female form in a house dress, on her back in the shadow of a dumpster. Not sprawled, just laid out peacefully. Her hair is splayed like a halo, half in the puddle of water beneath her head.

The muscles in my face twitch. Cognitive dissonance. Whoever’s eyes I’m seeing through, he doesn’t recognize the unconscious woman on the ground. But I do.

Time to wake up.

Deep in thought, I loitered a moment, trailing slightly behind the end of the queue to board the subway. I was brought up short by the doors closing in my face, having waited half a heartbeat too long to follow the man in front of me onto the train. Stirred from my reverie, I peered through the dirty safety glass at the train conductor. He grimaced back at me and, with a squeak of metal, the train began to pull away from the platform.

“Hey!” I shouted, blinking and trotting to keep up with it. My hand slapping at the closed door. “Oh, c’mon, you’ve got to be kidding me!” As the train began to accelerate I saw the corners of the train conductor’s mouth twitch, and something inside of me gave way. The hand I had been using to pound on the safety glass twisted, traced a sigil in the air. It was practically effortless; a gesture, and the brake went down, bringing the train to an abrupt halt. Another, and the doors wrenched open with a shuddering groan.

My boots pounded kick plate as I stomped onto the train, glowering at the stupefied civil servant who was now leaning back in his seat, lazily cowering from me. “What,” I said flatly, the neutrality of my tone surprising me, “the fuck.” When he didn’t reply for a few seconds I turned to stomp down the aisle of the mostly empty train car.

“Hey,” his high-pitched voice came from behind me. “Hey, mister, you didn’t pay your fare! Hey, come back here!” Rising anger in his voice correlated directly to an increasing calm overtaking me. The world around us grew quiet, the silence between us palpable. I turned back to face him slowly, forcing myself to be so cool that my voice was shaking.

“You’re going to give me a free ride,” I said without aggression or malice. I didn’t append any of the string of obscenities or insults that crossed my mind back when I was on the platform, watching him smile and drive off. For a moment I thought it was over; I could see the sweat trickling from the conductor’s bald pate onto the lines in his forehead. Then he spoke up again.

“I’m not taking you anywhere, freak. Off the train, now!”

The next sound I remember was the dull thump of his body hitting the platform, his lips curling back into a howl of anguish that wouldn’t quit until he went hoarse. I had peered into his eyes, and now the poor bastard was going to spend the rest of his life in an imagined torment of immolation. If he was lucky, he would die from cardiac arrest in short order.

“Shit,” I muttered wearily, reaching into my pocket for the last of my cigarettes. Stepping over his writhing form and ascending the stairs towards the street, I began trying in vain to dredge bus routes from the depths of my memory. I was going to be late.