Immortality
By Musuko

“Tell me, my dear friend,” said Archibald after a time, “in your considered opinion; do you believe that immortality exists?”
	“It would be a simple mind that could not envisage such a possibility,” I said, after a savoured sip of brandy to hide a precious moment of contemplation.
	“Continue,” he prodded.
	“Well,” I said. “There are many creatures on this fair Earth that are blessed with extraordinarily long lives. Various breeds of testudinidae, for example, and the great and venerable trees that outlive ancient empires. Is it not wise, then, to conclude that perhaps somewhere in the dense jungles, or in the dark depths of the ocean, or perhaps even on strange worlds spinning in the heavens, there are creatures whose lifespans are effectively unlimited?”
	Archibald smiled over his glass. “My friend, leaving aside the question of whether a tree can truly be considered to be alive in the same sense as we would understand it, for that is a question for another evening, I would like to clarify my original statement; do you believe that immortality is practically possible for our species today?”
	I considered for a moment, then laughed. “Ah, no sir, I do not believe it is. Were it possible, I feel we would have learned of such an astounding discovery. It would be the greatest accomplishment in all of scientific history.”
	Archibald stared into the fire. For a moment, the crimson light gave his face a ghoulish aspect. He turned back towards me, smiling, my old friend again.
	“A sound and logical approach to the question, I must say. Rather than wrestle with the riddle of the physical practicalities, you instead conclude that anything that can happen, must happen. And since it hasn't happened, your answer must simply be that it can't happen.”
	“As always, dear Archibald, you know my thoughts better than I do.” I drained the last of my glass. “Shall we take another ready to toast the new century?”
	Archibald set his glass down and stood, and I followed. “An excellent idea,” he said. “But not with this. I have something special for tonight. My friend, have I ever shown you my wine cellar?”

Archibald's manor sprawled in an untidy heap amidst many acres of sculpted gardens. A jumble of eras, none could be precisely sure how old the more venerable parts of the structure truly were. Each successive generation had added their own touch, in their own taste, in the style of the era.
	The cellar we descended into, I decided, must have been one of the more ancient parts of the house, perhaps even the very oldest. The light of our gas lamps flickered across cold, wet stone. Soon I felt we had descended into the bedrock itself.
	“Cover your eyes, dear friend. You may be startled by the brightness.”
	Archibald flipped a switch on the wall, and electric light flared, lighting a vast space unlike any wine cellar I had ever seen. This was not a cramped warren of dusty bottles on racks, but a room more akin to a dockside warehouse, stretching off to distant walls barely visible, filled with row upon row of neatly spaced objects of astounding variety; crates, cabinets, chests, and in the more distant areas I could swear I spied ancient sarcophagi, and stone crypts. I glanced to my companion, and laughed.
	“This is not a wine cellar,” I said.
	“So very perceptive,” he said, grinning wryly. “But it is a collection, of a different sort. I wished to show it to you tonight. What do you think?”
	I moved between the crates near the door. Further along, I passed a long, slightly curved, intricately carved, ceremonial boat, which I recognised from woodcuts produced by explorers to untamed parts of the world. The top, where one might expect a perch for its occupant, was closed over. Further along I saw plain boxes, stacked four high and two deep,  and their dimensions began to trouble me. I reached a sarcophagus, tall and proud and gleaming with undamaged gilt, yet appearing to me in some intangible way to be ancient and authentic, and not a recreation of some more modern time. I wheeled around to face Archibald.
	“These are all coffins!” I exclaimed. “Your collection is of the dead? Archibald, my friend, do tell me that I am not standing amidst corpses”
	Archibald laughed cheerfully, and I felt somewhat foolish for my outburst. “I can say, with utmost sincerity, that there is not a single dead soul within this room. Here, I would like you to see this. Come, come.”
	He lead me back towards the entrance, but turned off to the side before we reached it. Amidst the crates lay a gleaming steel cylinder, large enough to contain a man. Copper tubes protruded from one end, bending this way and that, terminating at a steel plate bolted into the stone floor.
	“Are you dabbling in brewing?” I said, my last words before I fell to the floor, my body suddenly limp. I felt the pain of impact as my elbows and my skull crashed to the stone beneath me. I cried out to Archibald for help, feeling that the brandy must have caught up with me. But my jaw did not move, and I could make no sound.
	Archibald leaned over into my view. “My friend,” he said. “Let me help you up.”
	He inserted his hands under my arms and lifted me with the ease of strength I did not know he had. My body hung limp, and I could do nothing to support myself. Terror gripped me; was I paralysed? Had I suffered some sudden and horrible affliction that would leave me bed-bound for the rest of my days? I did not even realise that I could not feel my chest moving with breath, nor that my eyes were stiff and unmoving, unblinking, until Archibald had opened up the steel cylinder and laid me flat on my back on the padded interior.
	He held my chin and steered my gaze to face him. In the corner of my eye I glimpsed a knife. As he talked, I felt him cutting at my sleeve, slicing away my clothes. “I confess to a minor fabrication,” he said, as amiable as he had been upstairs, as if he weren't this instant sliding his knife through my shirt and pulling it away, exposing my naked abdomen. He continued on to my lower garments, and I was powerless to protest the violation of my modesty as he stripped me bare. “You asked if my collection is of the dead, and I replied to you with a question you had not asked. Were I to be more truthful, I would say yes; my collection is of the dead, and this is a room full of corpses. But my other answer is also truthful; there is not a single dead soul here. Every one of them is still very much alive, bound forever to the decaying vessel of their earthly body.”
	I tried with every fibre of my being to wrench my body away from this madman whom I had once thought my friend, but my muscles would not respond to my commands. I could still feel, though. My stripped body could feel the movement of air as he worked the knife down my legs. I could feel the touch of the cushions beneath me. I could feel the deathly chill of the grave as the heat of my body faded away. I felt the need to shiver, yet I could not. I felt the need to cry for help, yet I could not. The scream stayed caged inside my head. And still he smiled that damned smile.
	“I have had trouble, in the past,” he said, “fighting the decay. Past attempts have been partially successful. I developed the techniques that the local peoples later adopted, the ones that we now call mummification. Sadly, the process did not fully preserve the sensory abilities of the skin, and those specimens are rather woefully disconnected from the torment that, I am relieved to say, you will not be spared. I have honed my craft over the centuries. Careful dessication worked well, for a time. Later, embalming became the most effective tool, and I added many thousands to my collection.”
	He paused for a moment and closed his eyes. “I can feel them now,” he said, “and I know that their bodies are still feeling. Touch, pain, heat, cold, every sense that they had in life, now with them in their never-ending death.”
	He opened his eyes again and looked down at me with a devilish fire that would have frozen me in place if I were not already. “But I can already tell that you will be different,” he said. He leaned close enough for me to feel the warmth of his breath on my ice-cold nose. “I have discovered a mix of chemicals that will preserve you more perfectly than formaldehyde. They will keep every nerve fibre in your body working, better even than when you were alive. You will feel everything around you with an intensity that you have never even imagined. My friend, your agony will be brighter than all of the many thousands of dim embers in my collection combined together. Thank you, my friend.”
	He closed the lid over me, and that was the last I saw of him, and of everything else except the blackness of the steel a few inches from my nose. I heard a soft hissing, and felt the flow of moving gas around my feet. Even though my lungs could no-longer draw breath, the gas worked its way into my nose and mouth and assaulted me with an acrid stench that made me want to wretch. My skin tingled, and that tingling grew in intensity. In moments, I was racked with screaming pain, yet forced to lay silent and still. I felt heat like my body lay inside a furnace. I felt cold as if I were encased in ice. I felt the prick of needles over every inch of my body, and the crushing pressure of a vice, and the maddening tickling of a million feathers, and the itching of a mosquito bite covering my entire surface. All combined together, with a power that no living body could withstand, it was unbearable and painful enough. But there was pain too, added into the storm of sensations; every pain known to exist, and more besides. No surgeon's scalpel could replicate the sharpness, nor no blow could make me feel this same deep, aching distress. No fire could cause burning like this. No Earthly science could ever hope to come close to mixing these horrors together into the sensations I felt. I cried for mercy with no sound. I wept with no tears. I howled in rage at Archibald for doing this to me. But I never slept. I never experienced any respite from this agony. I could not move a single muscle to escape it. For all I knew, the lid above me was unlocked, and a gentle push would open it. Just a touch of a finger. Yet I could not do it. I strained against the lifelessness of my body, willing it to move, cursing it with every word I knew.
	And all the while I felt the yawning void of eternity laid before me, without the comfort of the sleep of death to rescue me, nor the hope of my flesh rotting to save me from this torture, not while Archibald still lived to feed that despicable gas into my tomb. In my worst hours I imagined him above me, sitting by the fire in his grand study, perhaps looking across at some new companion, and asking them the same question of immortality, and I hope, and I pray, and I wish, with despairing futility, that I could do something to warn them.