The Best of Galaxy’s Edge 2013-2014 (20 page)

“I was about to
demand
that very thing, Dean!” the Professor replied, sounding a little indignant. “As you are aware, I have not had a mathemagician to tutor in far too long, and I certainly am
not
going to permit you to expel the first ones to come along in the last five years!”

“Hrrm.” To Vickie’s relief, the Dean sounded more amused than anything else. “We’ll make the arrangements, Professor. Miss Nagy, with me. The rest of you—” she swept the group with a stern gaze. “Disperse, if you please.”

* * *

Paul was already in the Dean’s office when they arrived, and the Dean put them both through a fierce interrogation. Frankly, Vickie had seen FBI interrogators who weren’t that skilled. Paul obviously began the interview with no intention of revealing that he’d been being bullied, much less over what. He ended it spilling everything. Vickie’s role, evidently, was just to corroborate what he said, and reiterate that the magic had been all her idea, though the two of them had worked it out and implemented it together.

Finally, the Dean sat back in her chair and steepled her fingers. “You manage, Miss Nagy, to have neatly skated past every single rule applicable without actually breaking it,” she said dryly. “I will candidly admit that I do appreciate your handiwork, and I will be having it applied to every room on this campus, which should put paid to some of the mischief we’ve had over the years here.”

Vickie blushed and ducked her head. “Thank you, Dean,” she said looking at her hands, and heaving a sigh of relief.

“There is no room at St. Rhiannon’s for prejudice,” the Dean continued. “Mister Hunter, your tormentors will be … watched. They will either genuinely mend their ways, or learn to feign it. In either case, they will no longer trouble you. And to ensure their good behavior, Professor Elba will not be allowed any further contact with them.” The Dean’s tone suggested that something more was likely to occur regarding Professor Elba, but what that would be, Vickie could only guess.

“As for you two, I’ll be rearranging your class schedules so that you will have Special Studies with Professor Higgins daily. I’m sure I can find something you’ve been sleepwalking through that can be eliminated. There will be no coasting with Professor Higgins, I will warn you in advance. You might just consider this your punishment for unauthorized experiments in magic.” The Dean was not joking, Vickie suspected.
I’d rather sweat than coast, so there.

“Remain here, while I arrange that,” the Dean concluded. “We’ll allow the rest of the school to assume you are in here being lectured.” She got up and departed through a door in the rear of her office, leaving the two of them alone.

Vickie looked at Paul. He looked back at her. And for the first time since she had met him, he was grinning.

“Fag hag,” he said, fondly.

“Homo,” she retorted, with a wink.

They fist-bumped. It was going to be a beautiful year.

Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 10
Copyright
©
2014 by Mercedes Lackey. All rights reserved.

T
he mausoleum was silent as I waited quietly at the end of the east corridor. Sodium lamps on the street outside cast a ghastly light through the stained glass windows that ringed the corridor, just above the crypts. I smelled flowers and floor wax, plus a hint of decades-old cigarette smoke. It had been six hours since I’d wheeled myself to my current spot. Nobody on the mortuary staff had thought to check before locking the doors. I was alone, and not quite believing what I was doing.

Until I heard the scrape of marble on marble.

The air suddenly came alive. A sickening stench of formaldehyde and ethanol, mixed with ozone.

My hands shook, but I gripped the arms of my chair tightly and waited, breathing deeply and slowly, not moving an inch.

Footsteps. The sound of someone taking a seat.

More marble scraping on marble.

I almost screamed when I saw the woman trudge past the open end of the corridor. She walked as if compelled from without. Halting, pained steps. Joints and tissue which hadn’t moved in years made an indescribable sound as the woman went up the central hall. She never even looked in my direction.

There was muffled talk—whispery and hollow.

When it became apparent the conversation would be lengthy, I set myself into motion. Gently, with practiced tension, I rotated the wheels on my chair and began a slow, noiseless progression toward the central hall. It took minutes, during which I listened intently, but couldn’t quite make out the words. Each yard drew me closer to the source of the stench, and the air was almost alive with static.

Eventually I reached the intersection, and was able to lean forward just enough to peek around the corner, my chair snug against the wall.

The Nechronomator was hideous. His flesh hung limply on his tallish skeleton, sagging and gray. He sat cross-legged on a marble bench that sat at the top of the cross-shaped mausoleum. Liver spots had darkened to black and his mouth looked dry as he moved it. The woman stood before him, motionless in her Sunday finest. The only breaths either of them took were the ones they used to move air across stale vocal chords.

I still couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Suddenly the Nechronomator stood—a surprisingly swift movement for someone who’d been dead for three years—and slapped the base of his palm on the woman’s forehead. She spasmed and gave a quick, hoarse cry, then flashed into nothingness—like the bulb of a camera had gone off, erasing her from existence.

I reflexively sat back in my chair, teeth clenched. What had I just seen?

One thought—
impossible
—returned again and again to my mind. But I was a scientist, fully in command of my faculties, even if my body was succumbing to age. There were explanations to everything that was occurring. Rational explanations. I would have them.

I wheeled myself boldly into the intersection and spun to confront the Nechronomator. The undead. A monster.

My friend.

“Christopher,” I said loudly, hoping to cover my fear with bravado.

He remained standing, arm still outstretched and palm forward, exactly where he had touched the woman.

Slowly, his arm dropped back to his side.

“You should not have come, Matthew.”

His voice was like a bellows.

“If you remember anything about me, then you know I would have come eventually. I was here when they sealed you away, after all. I gave the eulogy. I never expected I’d be seeing you again.”

“Nor I. What do you want?”

I paused for a moment, then said, “I want to know if it’s true.”

The Nechronomator laughed. A hard, coughing sound.

“I
told
you it was possible. We used to argue about it after hours, in the staff room. I couldn’t ever make it work in the lab, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t feasible. Now, I have the power.”

“Power derived from what?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

“From God?”

“You never believed in Him.”

“Neither did
you
. I still have the photo I took of you shaking hands with Dawkins.”

“Dawkins was wrong. We were
all
wrong.”

“So, God sent you back?”

“No, I am here by my own choice. God’s got nothing to do with it.”

I was sweating profusely under my topcoat and scarf. The moisture was beginning to cloud my glasses, but my hand would be shaking so badly I didn’t dare reach to take them off. To cover my instinctual fear of the unreal creature before me, I held fast to my belief that this could be pursued as an intellectual problem.

“How does the math work out? On the other side, I mean.”

“The math was never the issue,” said the Nechronomator. “I always had the math right. It was the energy source that was the problem. Trying to do everything with mere electricity. Even the big colliders can’t touch what’s available in the After.”

“So you can do it?”

“I just did.”

“The woman?”

“That was it.”

“Show me,” I said.

My old, dead friend seemed to consider me for a long moment.

“Not just yet, Matthew. First things first.”

He walked almost as I remember him walking, during the final years of his natural life. Like the woman, his joints and tissues made an indescribable sound as he moved past me, the air becoming choked with chemical fumes and the overpowering crackle of an unreleased charge. Had he touched me, I fear I’d have been electrocuted. Or worse. I remembered the woman vanishing with a pop.

The Nechronomator proceeded down the central hall until he reached a crypt which had had its seal removed and discarded on the floor. I spun my chair slowly so as to always keep him in my sight.

“Janice Kawcak,” he said. “She was only forty-seven when the lymphoma got her. Left five kids and a husband. Husband turned to drinking. The kids to drugs. Two of them are in jail now, and the husband’s got liver issues. Janice begged me to help.”

“Begged you,” I said. “How?”

“After. It was all in the After. They came looking for me, almost as soon as I arrived. I guess word travels when they know someone is coming up. I don’t think it was supposed to happen that way. They were doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. But they didn’t care. They just wanted me to help.”

“I don’t understand,” I admitted. “But you of all people should understand that the timeline is changing. Not in big ways. Not yet. But I remember how it used to be, and that’s not the way it is
now.
”

“Of course it’s not,” he said as he picked the seal up from where it lay on the floor, then carefully replaced it over the empty crypt.

“Even now, Janice is working to undo things. I sent her back a few years before the diagnosis. She’s doubtless visited herself and tried to convince herself to go to the doctor. The cancer would be barely detectable, but it’s there. And treatable. Unlike before, when she was stage four.”

“You sent her back as a
corpse
?”

“More or less.”

“That’s hideous.”

“I can’t resurrect anyone,” he said, laughing again. “I don’t have the knowledge. Only He can do that. But I can give them temporary control of their bodies, and a power source. And I can send them back.”

“Then what the hell
are
you?”

“Same as them. Think of me as a remotely-operated vehicle.”

I pondered the implications, before I spoke again.

“And Janice Kawcak is about to come face to face with her dead self, controlled from beyond by her dead self?”

“What better way to convince people? I bet Janice showed herself the scars from surgery and everything. Very compelling.”

“Bullshit.”

“Tell you what, Matt. You go see. Go look up Janice tomorrow in the phone directory and give her a call. Then come back tomorrow night.”

I looked at the Nechronomator. He looked at me.

The unspoken message between us seemed to be this: when seeking to confirm a theory, first examine the proof.

* * *

It took some time to research Janice on the internet at the retirement home. Thankfully she hadn’t lived too far out of town, and I only had to pay the home’s driver a modest bribe to take me out without the nursing staff knowing my intentions. So far as they knew I was being driven to the beach. Instead we wound up in the suburbs, in an older development that looked like it had gone up in the mid-eighties.

Janice Kawcak didn’t know me from Adam, and I wasn’t quite sure what I’d say when she answered the door. If she answered the door. Part of me still wasn’t convinced.

Until the door swung open, and there she stood. Living and breathing.

“Yes,” she said, “Can I help you?”

“So sorry to trouble you, Mrs. Kawcak. My name is Doctor Clayburn. I used to be with the university. Could you come out and speak with me for a moment? It’s very important.”

She looked at me, then at the driver next to the retirement home’s van, then up and down the street.

“What’s this about?”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Kawcak. About someone who visited you perhaps a couple or more years ago.”

“You’re a physician?”

“No, a physicist. But I’m … doing some post-retirement research as part of a program they’re starting at the university cancer center. Do you mind?”

“
Honey
?
”

A man’s voice, from within the house.

She turned and shouted back, “I’ve got it, John. Just a survey. Be back with you in a minute.”

She closed the door quietly, her eyes suddenly wide and worried. She leaned over, bent at the waist so that she could be eye-level with me in my wheelchair.

“How did you know about my … the … the visitor?”

“I’m not able to discuss that, exactly,” I said. “I simply need to confirm whether or not you were, in fact, visited by someone claiming to be yourself.”

Janice stood up and took a second glance up and down the street, making sure there were no neighbors in any yards, then leaned back down and said, “Yes.”

“She claimed to be you?”

“Yes, she did.”

“Did you believe her?”

“She … She looked like me, only … God, it was so
gross.
”

“Like a corpse,” I said.

“But she walked and she talked and she … showed me things.”

“She wanted you to go see an oncologist, right?”

“Yes!”

“Did you?”

“I didn’t want to. But like I said, she showed me …
things
. I had to run back in the house and throw up.”

“She confronted you here? On your porch?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone else see her?”

“No. She said she knew exactly what time of day to come, when the kids would be at school and John would be at work. She didn’t want anyone else to know.”

“And did you do what she told you to do?”

Janice Kawcak looked like she almost couldn’t hear me. She had stuffed her hands in the pockets of her capris and her arms quivered slightly, as if shivering.

I could feel myself blushing at the temerity of my intrusion.

“I’m so sorry, ma’am. I have to know.
Did you do what the dead woman told you to do
?
”

“Yes. I went to my doctor the next day, and he referred me. I was in treatment by the end of the month. I thought the night sweats were just menopause or something. But she was right. It was a lot worse than that.”

I looked at her full head of hair. Not a wig.

“Remission, then?”

“I’m in year two. They tell me I’ll be in the clear if I hit year five.”

“And the dead woman who claimed to be you?”