Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Reign of the Brown Magician

“Hairbrushes?” the lieutenant asked incredulously.

The stranger spotted his target, and picked up the pink plastic wastebasket from beside a bureau. He dropped the brushes into it and headed for the door.

The FBI man and the airman stepped quickly aside.

“Major, do you know what’s going on here?” the FBI man asked.

Johnston shook his head.

The stranger had to step carefully when he searched Rachel Brown’s room-the floor was strewn with toys. Johnston saw him hesitate at the sight of the plush alligator on the girl’s empty, unmade bed, the first time the man had acted like a human being, instead of a machine.

Or maybe he was just trying to figure out whether the alligator was a hairbrush.

But no, the child’s hairbrush was on her bureau, and a wastebasket was at the foot of her bed. The black-clad stranger collected both items and headed back for the stairs, a wastebasket in each hand, hairbrushes in each wastebasket.

“Stop him!” Johnston called to the airmen in the family room.

The pair blocked the foot of the stairs, and the pale stranger stopped and simply stood, as if waiting for them to step aside.

“You aren’t going to let him go, sir?” the lieutenant asked.

“I don’t think so,” Johnston said. “Not yet, anyway. He’s got what he came for, I’d say-but why does he want them?”

“Trash, sir?” one of the airmen at the foot of the stairs asked. “He just took the trash?”

“And hairbrushes,” the lieutenant said.

“What good would that be to anyone?” the airman who had accompanied the officers asked.

“Maybe he’s gonna use voodoo on someone,” the airman who hadn’t previously spoken suggested. “Get some hair and nail-parings for the voodoo doll, y’know?”

“God knows this guy looks like a zombie!” said the airman beside him.

The others smiled, but Johnston looked at the back of the stranger’s head and seriously considered it.

It was true, this guy did look like a walking corpse.

Jewell and Thorpe had said that there was a universe on the other side of the basement wall where magic, or something one hell of a lot like magic, really worked.

Maybe this fellow was a zombie. Maybe his master had sent him after hair and fingernail clippings.

He didn’t smell like a corpse; there was an odd, meaty, slightly sweet odor clinging to him, all right, but Johnston had smelled corpses, and this odor was definitely not the stink of a dead body.

Maybe, if he was a zombie, the odor had something to do with the magic that had brought him back from the dead.

“Put him back on the couch,” Johnston ordered.

The airmen grabbed the stranger by the arms and hauled him into the family room. He didn’t resist, didn’t protest, just went along as if it didn’t matter in the slightest what he did, or what happened to him.

The lieutenant’s theory that the man was autistic did seem to fit-but so did the idea that he was a zombie.

“Come on,” Johnston said. “I want to see the basement.”

* * * *

“So that dead woman we found on Beckett was Shadow, and an Earthman is running the show in her world now,” Albright said.

“If Hall is right about what she picked up from Thorpe, yes,” Bascombe replied.

“But Thorpe’s a renegade-we can’t trust anything she says,” Markham pointed out.

“She’s a telepath, and she was talking to another telepath,” Albright said. “I can’t lie to a telepath; can she?”

“And this doesn’t account for Thorpe’s brief appearance in normal space in an unnamed system a hundred light-years from Beckett,” Bascombe pointed out.

“That could have been anything,” Albright said, waving it away. “It had to be Shadow sending her through, for some reason, and Shadow’s dead, so what does it matter?”

“It might,” Bascombe said. “Somehow.”

“I doubt it,” Albright replied.

“Suppose we wait before we leap to conclusions,” Markham suggested. “Under-Secretary Bascombe has sent a scouting party into Shadow’s universe, after all; why don’t we wait and see whether this man Best can confirm Shadow’s demise?”

“And if Shadow is dead?” Albright asked. “What do we do about this Earthman who replaced her?”

“Why don’t we just wait until we hear from Best?” Markham answered.

* * * *

Johnston crossed the basement, ignoring the card table, radio, folding chairs, and video set-up-which, of course, had run out of tape at the crucial moment.

He stared at the bare concrete wall; it appeared perfectly ordinary in the light of the bare bulbs overhead. Johnston glanced up at the lights, then turned his attention back to the wall.

“There’s no opening now,” he said. “I wonder how he expected to get back?”

“I don’t know,” the lieutenant said. “I don’t know how the hell he got in here in the first place.”

“You didn’t see any opening here?” Johnston asked, gesturing at the blank wall.

“No, sir-not a thing.”

Johnston frowned. He put out a hand, not knowing what he was looking for, and attempted to tap the wall.

His hand vanished into seemingly-solid concrete; astonished, he staggered, thrown off-balance. Both hands went out, grabbing at concrete that wasn’t there, and he stumbled forward, through the wall.

He caught himself just short of going down on one knee and stared at the blaze of shimmering, shifting color before him. The cool, dusty air of the Browns’ basement was suddenly thin, sharp, clean, crackling with electricity and redolent of sweat and cold meat; he felt suddenly heavy, the way he sometimes felt the loss of buoyancy upon climbing out of a pool.

He couldn’t see anything but colors, as if he were trapped in some incredible light show.

None of them, Jewell and Thorpe and Deranian, had mentioned anything like this inside the portals; they’d said the transition was instantaneous. If he’d gone through a portal, shouldn’t he have come out somewhere?

“Hello?” he said.

* * * *

As he settled back on the dark wood of his throne, Pel had the uneasy feeling that there was something Susan was not telling him.

He didn’t know what it could be; he believed her when she said she didn’t remember being dead, and he believed her explanation of why she had tried to shoot Shadow, but he was sure there was something that she was not saying about her recent experiences.

Did she know something about why the fetch was taking so long? He didn’t see how she could; after all, he was the magician, not her. He was the one who could turn a dead body into a fetch, or bring it back to life entirely. He could sense everything that touched magic, through all the world, and she was just an ordinary human being-a lawyer.

What could she know that he didn’t?

He was trying to think of some way to ask her when a man stumbled out of the portal.

Startled, Pel let his partial suppression of the matrix’ visual manifestations slip. He could still see perfectly well, of course, but anyone else would be blinded by the barrage of light, color, and shadow.

He thought for a moment that the fetch had returned, and wondered why he had been startled, but then he got a better look at the new arrival.

It was a man of medium height, middle-aged, a few pounds overweight, and wearing the uniform of an officer in the United States Air Force.

He was unquestionably alive, and not a fetch. He was staring blindly into the matrix glare, eyes watering.

“Hello?” he said.

Pel was in no mood for new complications; for several seconds he considered magically shoving the stranger back through the portal, or even just flash-frying him-burning him to ash would actually be much easier, since it just meant unleashing a little wild energy, where pushing him meant directing controlled energy while maintaining the portal.