That’s what the man said to me, his eyes suddenly clear and sharp as he regarded me over the table. I had met him two hours before when he offered to buy me a drink, and over that time I had grown to like him. He looked to be a few years older than me, but with the good preservation and polished sheen that you see on those that have the means to stay relaxed and well-groomed almost all of the time with minimal personal effort. Normally I would have found that off-putting, but this man didn’t seem soft or overly-pampered. Instead he was worldly and wise, with an endless fount of interesting stories that somehow didn’t seem like bragging coming from him, but rather just an expression of his intense desire for you to know him better.
In short, he was a really cool dude.
But that didn’t change the fact that I was taken aback by his request. I would have chalked it up to the alcohol, but he hadn’t seemed that drunk before and he certainly didn’t now. And I’ve seen enough to know you can never tell what’s going on with people. Not really. This guy looked like he was riding the world on a golden saddle, but that didn’t mean much if he wasn’t happy. And looking into his eyes now, he was clearly anything but.
“You are a good man. I can tell. And I believe you are smart enough to listen to what I have to tell you and believe what I will show you. I can only hope that after that you will be strong enough to do this for me.”
I pushed back from the table. I was drunk, but not that drunk. “Dude. I don’t know what this is, but let’s dial it down a notch, okay? It is way too late to start some…bullshit philosophical conversation or whatever this is, okay?”
He reached forward and gripped my arm. “I’m not kidding. I’m just asking for a few minutes of your time. Listen to what I have to say, let me show you proof of it, and then you can make your decision. Fair?”
I pulled my arm back. “No, man. Sorry, I just don’t…”
“Here’s roughly five thousand dollars. Take it, it’s yours. All I ask is that you hear me out.” I looked down from his feverish expression to the wad of cash he had taken out of his pocket. We were far from America, but those were U.S. dollars, and I had never seen that much money at once in my life. Swallowing, I grabbed the money and gave a nod. “Okay, I’ll listen, but I’m telling you it won’t make a difference. I’m not killing you.”
A look of relief spread across his face. “Thank you. Oh thank you. I will be brief.” He paused for a moment as though weighing how best to begin. Finally he looked up at me with a narrowed gaze. “How old do you think I am?”
I frowned. “Um, I don’t know man. Maybe like forty-five? Fifty?”
He smiled. “I appreciate the compliment, but I am over four hundred years old.”
I went to stand up again, but I remembered the bulge of new money in my front pocket. “Ohhh kay. So you’re four hundred. You must take a lot of vitamins.”
He shook his head and began.
I know it sounds insane, but please bear with me. I first came to this island as a sailor back in 1698. I was on an exploratory ship that sank in a storm. Unbeknownst to any of us, we were only three miles from this island at the time. Myself and the first mate—his name was Sullivan—were the only survivors, at least as far as I ever knew. For certain, we were the only ones the currents carried to this shore.
The first few days we had hope of being rescued in time. We weren’t that far off of an established trade route, and there were several expeditions to fully chart this area underway by different European powers. Our theory was that if we could just sustain ourselves, just survive a few weeks or months, we would be saved.
But this island was much different back then. There were no people or resorts obviously, but there was little to no animal life on the island either. The feral pigs and chickens you see on the tours? All imported in the 1800s. The snakes they warn you about in the jungles? Their ancestors were all accidently brought over in the landing gear compartments of the first planes that came to this place fifty years ago. When Sullivan and I searched this place, we quickly learned it was a lush wasteland. No insects under logs, no fish in the water. Even the handful of things that could be considered fruits or nuts were sparse and would make you sick to your stomach. We tried to subsist on bark and leaves, but that was a losing proposition from the start. By the end of the second week, we were wasting down to nothing.
This terrible wasting bred a kind of insanity in us. We became paranoid, and at some points, delusional. I began to suspect Sullivan was hiding food from me somehow, despite the fact he looked just as bad as I did. I took to following him everywhere, telling him I only wanted to help if he found us any food.
And then one day, he did. We were traveling under the jungle’s wide canopy when he suddenly fell upon something. I was only a few steps behind, but by the time I made it to him, he was already sucking in the last of a wriggling, black tail as he chewed with a mixture of guilt and triumph on his face. I was insane with anger then, and I struck him across the face. He was shook by the blow, but not shaken. He said he was sorry, but it was just a small worm and in his hunger he had been greedy. He would, he promised, help me find another.
But there was no other to be found. We searched for as long as the sun allowed, but there was no sign of any other creature aside from the two of us and the thing that lay inside Sullivan’s belly. It was that night, as I lay freezing on my bed of woven grass, trembling with hunger and rage, that I began to hate Sullivan and begin plans to kill him.
Over the next few days, my plan was only estopped by my growing weakness and Sullivan’s growing strength. By the second day, he looked as well as when we landed. By the third, he looked stronger and more vital than I had ever seen him in ten years of sailing together. He stayed with me most of the time, but every day he would journey back out into the jungle, promising he would find me a worm of my own. While it was never spoken, it was clear he understood the miraculous nature of the changes he was undergoing, and this only deepened his guilt that he had denied me the same boon.
I say that now, with a rational man’s understanding. At the time, I was anything but rational. I was convinced that he had found a hidden trove of food and secreted it away for himself. That his “hunting trips” were nothing more than a thin lie to cover his daily visits to gorge himself while I lay there dying.
So I mustered my strength, a strength borne purely out of madness and ill will, and I followed him one day. He appeared to be hunting for food, but I decided it was just another sign of the lengths he was willing to go to in order to deceive me. He wanted to sit and laugh as I starved to death…me, the fool who believed his lies.
I caught him unawares with a rock and bashed his head in. He never had a chance to struggle or resist, and by the time I was done, his face was a bloody, broken ruin. I only stopped when I did because of the movement I saw from within that gory mess.
It was the worm. Fat and black and quite whole, it pushed its way out of the red meat at the top of Sullivan’s neck and seemed to regard me. What it might have done, I could not say, because I immediately picked it up and consumed it whole.
It was nearly two years later when a trade ship went off-course and found me on the island. I had not eaten anything for all that time, and yet I was more fit and strong than the men that rescued me. It was another ten years before I began to suspect I truly wasn’t aging. Ten more before I knew for certain that it must be true.
And in those twenty years, I had encountered two events that should have killed me. Instead, I was wholly unharmed. I didn’t get sick, I rarely even cut myself shaving, and if I did, the cut was healed before I had time to wash away the blood. I had become immortal.
I have spent hundreds of years sampling all this life has to offer. At first it was such a miracle, such a gift. But over time…I have lost so many friends and loved ones. I have seen so much pain and suffering. And I am so very, very weary. I understand how this sounds to one who has lived so short a time, but I need to die. To rest. To move on to whatever comes next. People are not meant to live like this. Endless time is endlessly cruel, you see. It strips away all that is good and leaves you with the repetition of countless losses and miseries.
But I cannot kill myself. Believe me I have tried, but nothing I do works. Yet it is in my failures that I think the answer lies. The one thing I haven’t tried, I cannot try, is to destroy the worm in my chest. I know that is where it lies, for it stops me if I try to do myself harm in the area of my heart. I have tried totally obliterating myself with explosives and heavy machinery, but the thing inside me can somehow cause such implements to fail if it senses its own impending doom.
But my hope is that another person, particularly back in this place, will be able to do what I cannot. End my miserable life and that of the thing inside me. Please. Help me find peace at last.
“Goddamn. That’s some next level b-movie shit right there, man. I like the pirate thing. Or whatever you were. You had me going at first. I was like…shit, this fucker is crazy.” I laughed nervously as I drained my glass. “But good gag, dude.” He just sat staring at me silently as I finished. “Look, it’s getting late and…”
I stopped as I saw the man had pulled a knife from his pocket. Recoiling, I stumbled away from the table as he brought it across his own neck and slit his throat wide open. I started to scream, and looked up to get help, but there was no one else left in the bar. Looking back down, I saw he was still staring at me. His neck, while bloody, had already healed.
“This is what I’m talking about. I cannot die by my own hand. Perhaps not by yours either, but I am desperate to try.”
“What the fuck...”
“I know this is all fantastic. But I assure you it is all very real and you are my best hope to finally be free. And as a reward, I will leave you fifty million dollars in my will, along with a certified affidavit that this was an assisted suicide done at my behest.”
“There’s no way…”
The man sighed as he wiped at his neck absently. “Mr. Ferry, I did not come upon you randomly. I have been planning this for years now. The paperwork, all the arrangements, have been in place for several months, just waiting for the right person. Just waiting for you, as it turned out. I already texted my attorney an hour ago. Your name has been added to my will and the aforementioned affidavit. It is all done except for the deed itself. And, of course, for you to live a long and wealthy life as a reward for freeing me from my own.”
I took another step back. “This…is all insane. I can’t do this.”
Rolling his eyes, he fished his phone out of a jacket pocket. “91 Caskill Lane. Does that sound familiar to you? How about Apartment 16B at Smithfield Apartments? Ah, you’re starting to understand.” The man stood up as he put his phone away. “I own this island now, at least in the legal sense of the word. You were on our radar as soon as you booked a room at one of my hotels. Utilizing various projected models of behavior, online spending and social media profiles, you were selected as one of three potential candidates on the island this week. You weren’t my people’s first choice, but I…well, I just had a good feeling about you.”
“What are you going to do to them?”
He raised an eyebrow. “To your mother and sister? Nothing if you do as I ask. If you don’t, then tomorrow I will send their names and addresses to a very skilled professional killer. And by the time you arrive back home, you will have two funerals to attend.”
“You son-of-a-bitch, you’re crazy.”
Shrugging, he walked over to the bar. “Perhaps, but how does that really change anything?” He gestured around the empty room. “Do you doubt I am who I say? Do you doubt that I’m in control?” Leaning over the bar, he pulled out a pump shotgun as a man in a dark suit entered the room. “This is Mr. Leipold, my attorney. He is happy to show you the will and affidavit before we begin.”
The man strode toward me with a dispassionate look on his face. “First, the will. If you look at the marked and highlighted portion of page twenty-four, you have been identified as the beneficiary of a lump sum payment of fifty million dollars U.S. currency, payable upon the death of my client.” I glanced at it, my hands shaking. I didn’t care about the money, not any more. But I needed to play along so he didn’t hurt my family.
“Next is the affidavit, signed and witnessed by two others. This specifies that you are killing my client at his behest and with his full permission, and that he is of sound mind and under no duress in making this request. As he may have mentioned, this island falls under the legal jurisdiction of a nation that has no criminal or civil penalty for suicide or assisted suicide. So there are no ramifications for you other than becoming a very wealthy man.” I looked over the affidavit, and they were right. It said everything they claimed and my name and date of birth were right there in it. When I handed the paper back to him, the attorney gave my host a small nod before leaving the bar without another word. I watched him go, and when I looked back at the supposed immortal, he was holding out the shotgun.
“Take it. Shoot me in the chest, right here.” He tapped the left side of his chest as I took the shotgun. “One shot should do it, but you’ve got five shells if you need them.” Pausing, he gave a laugh. “You do know how to use a gun don’t you? I never thought to ask.”
Gritting my teeth, I stuck it to his chest and pulled the trigger.
The sound was surprisingly muffled, but the effect was profound. The man flew back several feet before crumpling onto the floor, and when I rolled him over with my foot, I saw a large chunk of his chest was gone all the way through to his back. I sat there staring at the wound for what felt like several minutes, my mind skittering this way and that. Was what he said possible or was he just some rich nutjob? And if it was true, why didn’t he just hire an assassin to kill him instead of an innocent bystander? And how was he able to kill Sullivan without killing the worm?
Because I didn’t like Sullivan as much as I did him. Or you.
The voice thundered in my head as I saw something small and dark wriggling out of the ragged hole in the man’s chest. It was a fat black worm, and it was looking at me. Talking to me in my head.
So I ran.
I ran for help, but I couldn’t find anyone. It was as though everyone had vanished. I considered going to my room, but I hated the idea of being trapped there if that small and terrible thing came for me. So instead I went up to the main road. I was only a couple of miles from the airport, and I knew there was a police station there as well. Surely I could find someone to help me there.
I went up the road as fast as I could, the last of the alcohol burning away as I pounded my way up the midnight road. I rounded the last corner and saw lights burning at the police station. Almost crying with relief, I raced to the front door and beat on it until a sleepy and irritated officer opened it and asked me what was wrong. I told him that I needed help. That someone was after me.
Nodding, he asked me my name. When I told him, I saw a slight change in his expression before his gaze shifted to someone behind me. Then everything went black.
I woke up strapped to a gurney in the back room of the small island’s clinic. They had woken me up so I could see when they fed the worm to me. The creature was silent for the moment, but I could still feel its gaze on me as they pried open my mouth and began to stuff it inside. I gagged as it began pulling its bulk across my tongue and down my throat, and when the nurses let go of me, I tried chewing on the last of it, trying to kill it. It didn’t complain, and I felt sure it couldn’t really be hurt.
Just like me now.
That was three years ago. I was released the next morning, and by that afternoon I was on a plane back home with the necessary information to access my new bank account. I was now a millionaire many times over. True to his word, my family was never hurt, and I’ve never heard from any of the dead man’s people again. I suppose in many ways, he was honest with me.
But not in all of them.
Because what he omitted was the nature of the worm itself. How it talks to you. How it constantly, endlessly talks to you. Perhaps it knows its torturing me, or maybe it is only bored and lonely. But the only thing keeping me from going insane is that it won’t let me go insane. Instead I find myself trapped with another on the island of my mind, unable to leave or die or escape. And all the while, even now, it keeps telling me so many terrible, terrible things.
It tells me I’ll be like the man I killed one day. That I’ll do horrible things, and when I grow to hate myself enough, I’ll sacrifice what’s left of my soul just to be free of it. I used to argue with it. Then for awhile I would cry and beg. Now I just nod along with the incessant rhythm of its chatter. Not because I’ve grown accustomed to it, you understand.
No, it’s because with this, as with everything else it says, I know its telling me the truth.
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