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    Immortal and the Madman
    Immortal and the Madman
    Immortal and the Madman
    Ebook95 pages1 hour

    Immortal and the Madman

    By Gene Doucette

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    “I’m sorry I startled you last evening,” he said. “I get confused. It’s worse at the end of the day.”

    “That’s all right,” I said. He was reacting to my words before they came out of my mouth, nodding affirmation. I decided to stick to simple declarative sentences for the moment. “Confused how? You see the future?”

    He shifted in his chair. “I experience the future.”

    That was different. “Whose future? You can predict? Like a prophet?”

    “All futures within my senses. I see them all at once, and I can’t stop it. Your words, my words, they echo forward. Everything happens and will happen and is happening.”

    On a nice quiet trip to the English countryside to cope with the likelihood that he has gone a little insane, Adam meets a man who definitely has. The madman’s name is John Corrigan, and he is convinced he’s going to die soon.

    He may be right. Because there’s trouble coming, and unless Adam can get his own head together in time, they may die together.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGene Doucette
    Release dateMar 19, 2015
    ISBN9781310419089
    Immortal and the Madman
    Author

    Gene Doucette

    GENE DOUCETTE is the author of more than twenty sci-fi and fantasy titles, including The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens, the Immortal series, Fixer and Fixer Redux, Unfiction, and the Tandemstar books. Gene lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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      Book preview

      Immortal and the Madman - Gene Doucette

      Immortal and the Madman

      Immortal and the Madman

      The Immortal Chronicles Volume 3

      Gene Doucette

      Contents

      Copyright

      Epigraph

      Immortal and the Madman

      Afterword

      Also by Gene Doucette

      About the Author

      Immortal and the Madman

      By Gene Doucette

      GeneDoucette.me

      Copyright © 2014 Gene Doucette

      All rights reserved

      Cover by Kim Killion, Hot Damn Designs

      This book may not be reproduced by any means including but not limited to photocopy, digital, auditory, and/or in print.

      The Immortal Chronicles is an ongoing series of novellas written by Adam, the immortal narrator of Immortal, Hellenic Immortal and Immortal at the Edge of the World.

      More information on all books by Gene Doucette can be found at the end of this volume.

      Immortal and the Madman

      Igo mad every now and again.

      That’s probably an outmoded way of describing what I’m talking about. I appreciate that there are truly insane people in the world who are suffering greatly because of some version of insanity, and I have never been that kind of mad.

      I will explain.

      Nowadays there’s a thing called psychoanalysis, and whole sections of the medical world devoted to understanding and treating insanity, and it’s all done rather respectfully and humanely, and that’s fantastic. But for most of history we basically had functionally crazy or batshit insane and that was about all. There was no shortage of possible causes, from demonic possession—a personal favorite—to a huge range of supposed mental deficiencies that could be summarized as being an outspoken woman.

      There were different kinds of crazy is my larger point. Some kinds of madness resulted in the sufferer being unable to function within society at all, and other kinds were less obvious, and could even be described as a species of uncontrollable creativity.

      Losing control of my mind is a real problem, because I already live in a reality that’s difficult to grasp for humans with ordinary lifespans. (That sentence by itself, written today while I am in full command of my faculties, could be enough to get me committed in the right circles.) Having lived a life that sounds like the rants of a lunatic is a real problem if I start to actually rant is what I’m saying. Losing my grip on things puts me in a great deal of danger.

      The problem is, lucidity can be an act of will, and sometimes I lack that will.

      I’ve always assumed that aside from a few quirks—I don’t age, I don’t get sick—I’m basically as much of an ordinary human as there is, and if that’s true I’m working with the same kind of brain as everyone else. But since I don’t die (or rather, since I haven’t yet) that brain is sometimes working very hard to just keep everything straight.

      To give a simple example, let’s talk about pattern recognition. Seeing something and recognizing it as something you’ve seen before is a survival skill. For instance: I see a leopard. Last week, I saw a different leopard kill my friend, so even though this leopard is not the same one, I know not to pet it.

      That the mind can compare a new object or animal or person to one from prior experience is a good thing. It jump-starts the fight-or-flight instinct, and it works exceptionally well for people who are drawing from ten or twenty years of experience on the planet. But then there’s me, with the same kind of brain and the same kind of instincts, only I’m pulling from sixty thousand years of information.

      If I’m not careful, I’ll overreact to things that aren’t important and miss something I should be paying attention to. I basically have to be on very good terms with that part of my brain, all the time.

      There are times when I lose the capacity to do that.

      I usually recognize when it’s about to happen, and thank goodness. I have to self-monitor, because I don’t often surround myself with people I can trust with my life and also with my secrets, so if I start to babble I’m generally on my own.

      The first indication that something is amiss is when my heart starts racing, more or less randomly. It’s what the body does in response to an apparent threat, and it’s great when there actually is one, but when you’re in a situation without any apparent danger it’s scary as hell. As my heart rate increases and I start to sweat, I begin looking around for things that I can use as weapons and for weapons that are about to be used on me, in case I’m wrong about the danger thing and my instinct is accurate. Sometimes it is, and this is just worse because it means I can’t ignore every instance.

      Here’s an example. I was in this tavern one evening in what I think was probably the mid fifteen-hundreds. It was winter, and there was ale, and a fireplace, and it was probably in the Austro-Germanic region or thereabouts. I’m pretty sure I was alone, but I’m not positive because around that period I traveled with a vampire named Eloise. Her reliability when it came to drinking alcohol and frequenting inns wasn’t all that great, though, so she probably wasn’t there.

      Anyway, I was drinking—which is really one of the only two or three good reasons to be in a tavern—and in mid-conversation with someone when my heart rate sped up. It was sudden enough that I wondered if I was having an actual heart attack. I looked around the room expecting to find… something. Anything. A large cat, a python, a small army of Huns maybe. But there were only humans in there with me, and none of them looked particularly antagonistic or tribal or mob-like. And no Huns.

      But it kept happening. I’d look around and calm down and get my bearings and remind myself I was among my own tribe in a safe enclosure and whatever instincts were telling me to defend myself were invalid, but I just couldn’t stay relaxed.

      After probably an hour of this I realized what was causing it was a combination of sound and shadows. A barmaid on the other side of the room had a high laugh, and there was a large man sitting near the fire casting a shadow on the wall to my right, and whenever the man moved and the maiden laughed in something like unison it brought me back to a time some fifty thousand years earlier, when there was a bird that made the same noise. It flew in from the direction of the sun to attack, and when you saw its shadow and heard its cry you knew to throw yourself onto the ground immediately, as this was the only defense in a time before we had things like arrows.

      The bird no longer exists, so this isn’t any kind of useful survival mechanism, but I’m sort of stuck with it now.

      That panic attack in the tavern was the first sign I was heading for trouble. And it got worse. A couple of nights later I saw a man I mistook for an old friend. I greeted him

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