Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Reign of the Brown Magician

This wasn’t cloning, he reminded himself, this was magic-the laws were different here. Here he really could bring back the dead.

Or at least, he could create a simulacrum…

He forced that thought away. He would bring Nancy herself back from wherever she was, from wherever her soul had gone. He would have an exact duplicate of her body, grown from her own tissue-wouldn’t that be enough?

He hadn’t gotten the first simulacrum right, but that was different; that time he’d been trying to recreate her from memory.

This time it would work.

It had to.

* * * *

“Mr. Blaisdell,” the man in the gray suit said, “I’m with the government. It appears that we were, ah…a bit hasty in sending you home.”

Oram Blaisdell stared at the stranger for a moment. He looked over the blue government sedan parked on the gravel by the road, and around at the surrounding hills. Smoke was rising from the Ballard place down the valley, but he couldn’t see any of the neighbors watching.

Then he glanced at his son Henry, standing by the door of the house, looking confused and a bit scared.

“What the devil are you talkin’ about?” he asked at last.

“I’m talking about your communication with…well, you thought they were angels.”

“You sayin’ they ain’t? What the hell do you know about it?” He reached a hand down toward the splitting maul he’d been using, but didn’t touch it. He was getting too old to be splitting the damn firewood anyway.

“Mr. Blaisdell, we’ve learned the truth about those angels,” the man in the suit said. “They’re quite real, you were right, but they aren’t quite what you thought they were.”

Oram considered this, threw Henry another glance, then asked, “You humorin’ me, so you can get me to some doctor Henry called, or you serious?”

“I swear, Pa,” Henry said, “I din’t call nobody. He’s got a badge ‘n’ all.”

“Rose called, maybe?”

Henry shook his head. “I don’t think so, Pa; she din’t tell me a thing ’bout it if she did.”

Oram studied his boy’s face, then looked back at the government man.

“I can understand your doubts, sir,” the government man said. “I’m sure you’ve had some people who thought you were imagining the whole thing, and you think your children might have been worried about you and tried to fool you for your own good, but I promise you, that’s not the case. I’m really with the government.” He flipped open a brown leather case and displayed a badge and document; Blaisdell didn’t care to admit he couldn’t read the damned thing without his glasses, and wasn’t too sure he’d get it all then.

“We need your help,” the man in gray said. “If you agree, we’ll be driving you directly to Knoxville and putting you on a plane to Washington-a chartered plane. We’ll provide accommodations at the other end, give you an expense account for meals; you’ll be free to move about, to use the phone, call anyone you want, but we need to know if the…if these ‘angels’ contact you again.”

“You think they will?”

The government man didn’t answer that.

“You mind tellin’ me what they are, if they ain’t angels?”

“To be honest, sir, they didn’t tell me that.”

Blaisdell eyed him carefully. That sounded authentic and true, somehow.

Then he looked around, at the wood he’d been splitting, and at the house it was meant to heat.

“C’n I bring Henry, here? Or Rose?”

“I was told you could bring your family, yes, sir.”

“How ’bout a lawyer?”

“If you want, yes-or you can call one locally after you reach Washington.”

“C’n I bring a gun?”

“Yes, sir. You aren’t under arrest; you can bring whatever you like.”

That convinced him. “Gimme an hour to pack,” he said.

An hour later he was in the back of the dark blue sedan, on his way to Knoxville, with his old leather suitcase in the trunk and a .357 Magnum in his lap.

* * * *

At first Ray Aldridge thought he was being sued; it had happened before. Then he thought he was being arrested for fortune-telling; that had happened to a friend of his back in Massachusetts once.

Finally, though, he realized what was happening.

He was being called in as a consultant. A psychic consultant.

He almost babbled with joy as he ran down the steps from his apartment to the waiting car. He was being hired as a psychic consultant to the FBI!

This was it. Even if he couldn’t help, couldn’t come up with a thing, just being called would be enough.

His career was made!

* * * *

Margaret Thompson climbed aboard the plane with her head awhirl in confusion. Angela’s invisible playmate was real? Her own little girl was getting mental messages from somewhere real? That silly made-up name, Basurpathork, was real?

Well, not quite-Angie had garbled it. Proserpine Thorpe-what kind of a name was that?

She looked down at her daughter.

Angie was staring wide-eyed at the interior of the plane. “We’re really gonna fly, Mommy? Up in the air?”

Margaret smiled, despite her confusion. “That’s right, Angie, we’ll fly right up into the air. All the way to Washington.”

* * * *

“If you guys are I.R.S., I swear I’ll sue. It’s unconstitutional,” Carleton Miletti said, for the hundredth time.

“Yessir. We’re not from the I.R.S., sir.”

“You better not be.” He sank back in the seat and watched the streets of Washington sliding past the car windows on either side.

He didn’t understand this. He hadn’t received any messages from anyone, didn’t know what the hell these people were talking about. He didn’t remember anything special this past spring-but then, he’d been busy.

Still, he thought he’d remember any mysterious messages, and he didn’t.

It had to be a coincidence, or just his imagination, that that odd feeling of being watched was back.

It was Nancy.

At least, Pel thought the woman he had created from hairs and nail clippings was truly Nancy.

She lay there, nude and lifeless, and Pel stared at her, looked over every inch of her, looking for any flaw, any sign that he had failed to perfectly recreate his wife’s body in every detail.

Of course, he had only his memory to go on, and he was dismayed by how untrustworthy that was. The curl of the hair was right, the curve of the hip, but was that mole on her thigh in exactly the right spot? Had it maybe been a quarter-inch lower before?

He couldn’t be sure.

There were photos back in the house, and he could send a fetch for them, but those wouldn’t help-those were portraits and ordinary snapshots, no full-length nudes, nothing that could show him every single feature.

He couldn’t be absolutely sure-but as far as he could see, this was Nancy, recreated and intact, just as she had been. Even the smell was right.

But she wasn’t alive. Not yet.

He touched her, carefully.

Her skin was cold and dry, her eyes blank; he drew back, shuddering.

This was really creepy, he realized. He had been so intent on it that he hadn’t really thought about what he was doing. This was like something out of a Stephen King novel, trying to bring back the dead-or really, maybe it was more like something from “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers,” since this wasn’t really Nancy’s body at all. This was a copy, grown from tiny discarded bits, and the real Nancy was still lying dead and mutilated somewhere in the Galactic Empire.

He was back in Storyland, only this time it wasn’t some great heroic adventure, it was a horror story. Something terrible was going to happen, he was meddling in things Man was not meant to know…