“There are places one can go, I suppose,” I said, my eyes wandering around the cafe. “But I like it here.”
I tried to force a smile, but it wouldn’t happen. The lovely girlish form sitting across from me pouted.
“Really,” she said with an exasperated huff. “What’s the point of living if you’re going to entomb yourself with all those books? Don’t you ever have any fun?”
“I tried having fun once,” I said, paraphrasing a half-remembered joke. “Didn’t like it.”
The reference was lost on her.
“How can you not like having fun?”
Now I did smile.
“I was joking, dear. I do have fun, just not the fun you have. If I followed your suit, I’d be very miserable indeed, and I have no doubt you’d recoil at the idea of spending a year locked away with some old, untranslatable manuscript from the middle east; but I suppose I did translate it, maybe. Maybe I’ve just gone insane.”
“I never know what you’re talking about,” she sighed.
“You were from the twenties, right?” I asked after a suitable pause.
At first she sat up, her eyes opening wide, then, slowly, a smile crept over her lips.
“How’d you know?”
“Accent, things you talk about now and again. Or maybe that’s an act. You’re cleverer than you like to let on, I know. Me, I’m from the nineties. So, technically, you’re older than I am, but I’m…”
“You’re old,” she said. “Grey. Thin on the top.”
“And you still look like you’re barely sixteen.”
“What do some seventy years mean when we deal in thousands?”
“I know, but the others are all young, like you. Me, I’ve always been old,” I mused. “I was born old, in a sense. You get to live an eternity in the flower of your youth, and I get to live in the perpetual winter of…” the word despair was on my lips. That was how I’d learned of my immortality, an attempt at an early death.
“Listen, that doesn’t matter. I’ve been wanting to see you.” She perked up at this. “Any of you,” I added, and she deflated. “I’ve found an old book, very old.” Her eyes rolled. “It’s about us, our kind.” Her eyes met mine.
“About me?” she asked.
“Older than that, dear. Maybe Frank would be old enough to know, but we’re talking fifteenth century, some dialect similar to Arabic. Maybe older. That’s just the copy I had. There were so many strange words in it, not Arabic, if I could tell.” Her head tilted in an adorable little way. I forced myself to remember her clawing the heart out of that young man and eating it. “I mean,” I continued, “that it was probably a translation from some other language and that the unfamiliar words were left in because they either couldn’t be translated or…”
“Or what?” she asked.
“Or it’s not just the words, not just their meaning, but their sounds. I think, you see—there’s these long passages of untranslatable gibberish with clean Arabic in the margins—I think the bits I can read are the notes. The body of the text, I think it’s trying to use the other language, as if there were power there in some of the words.”
“Power?” she bit her lip. “To do what?”
“To call up the dead,” I said, “to change fate, or to make a man immortal.” And, and I did not add this, I thought it might be the key to make an immortal mortal again.
She licked her lips.
“That would be…” she searched for the right words. “Lovely.”
Tale Told 