“A BODY? LIKE what? An Egyptian mummy?” Maybe somebody left me a valuable museum relic.
Fletcher takes a deep breath. “Bear with me,” he says. “I know that this will make me sound crazy.” He runs his hand through his hair again. “But I’m not.” He looks about to launch into some big monologue, then stops himself.
“Nope,” he says. “Enough talking. You need to see this.”
He walks toward a huge metal door on the other side of the room. In the center of the door is an enormous wheel, like the kind they use to turn off water ducts. He cranks the metal wheel and I hear the door give way with a little suction sound. The hinges are wider than my whole hand. The metal is about two feet thick.
The wispy little hairs on the back of my neck are tingling. My pulse is racing. The air from behind the door stings my nose, like vinegar or cleaning solution. Fletcher steps over the lower metal rim of the doorway.
“Let’s go,” he says.
I follow him into a small room with metal walls and a hatch on one side. Fletcher yanks a long lever and the hatch door drops down. He reaches in with both hands and pulls on a horizontal bar. He leans back for leverage. The bar is attached to a narrow table, with tubes and wires running in from one side.
I feel kind of sick and scared and excited at the same time. Because things have just officially gone from weird to insane. The table is all the way out now.
And lying in the middle of it is a dead guy in a tux.
“Holy mother of crap!” My heart feels like it’s going to explode through my clothes. I take a quick step back and feel the cold metal wall against my spine.
“What the hell is this?” I say. “Is that guy really dead?”
“Not exactly,” says Fletcher. “His bodily processes have just been massively decelerated.”
“Decelerated?”
“Slowed way down. Heartbeat. Circulation. Tissue growth. Everything has been happening in slow motion.”
I take a step closer to the almost-but-not-quite-corpse. There’s a thick IV tube running under a bandage sticking out above his sock, and there’s a low hum from some kind of coil under the table.
“Who the hell is this? And why is he dressed for a party?”
“It’s just what he happened to be wearing in 1937.”
“Nineteen thirty-seven?” I run the numbers in my head. You’re telling me that he’s been lying here for a hundred and fifty years?”
“That’s correct,” says Fletcher. “I know it’s hard to…”
“And what are you, some kind of zombie assistant?” I wasn’t trying to be funny. I was just trying to tie this situation to anything that made sense, and I wasn’t having much luck.
“I inherited his care,” says Fletcher. He’s nervous and excited. “This facility has been in my family for generations. I’ve been waiting for the right time to move him to the next stage.”
“What stage is that?”
“Revivification. Bringing him back. That’s what I’m here for.”
I take a deep breath. No way this is happening.
“You’re going to bring him back to life?”
“That’s the plan.”
“So why have you been waiting all this time?”
“Like I said—I’ve been waiting for you.”
I’ve got all kinds of questions running through my head. Big questions. Starting with Why me? But sometimes when the questions are too big, it helps to focus on details. At least that’s the way my brain works. So I focus on the guy on the table. Handsome. Maybe early forties. His face looks perfect, but there’s some kind of yellowish-whitish crust on the front of his tux and shirt, like he threw up at a wedding.
“What’s that mess all over him?”
“Poison residue,” says Fletcher. “He probably vomited after ingestion. A reflex reaction.”
“What the hell…!”
“Relax. We’re fine,” says Fletcher. “The compounds are inert. The potency dissipated with the deceleration process, which was the whole theory in the first place. That part worked. The poison didn’t kill him. Whether it damaged him internally, who knows? Whether I can actually bring his organs and consciousness back to anything close to full function, that’s the real challenge.”
I’ve never been the kind to get queasy at the sight of dead bodies.
But something about this situation is too bizarre. Too creepy. I’m done.
I start backing toward the door.
“No way I’m part of this!” I say. “This is nuts!”
Fletcher grabs my arm. “Stop. Wait,” he says. “Think about it. It’s not just me who’s been waiting for you.” He points to the guy on the table. “He’s been waiting for you! Him! He’s been waiting since before you were born!”
Fletcher is holding my upper arm like a vise. When I tug at him, he relaxes his grip.
“What makes me so special?” I ask. “Why not some superscientist or brain surgeon? Why not some big shot from the government?”
“I don’t know,” says Fletcher. “Maybe he can tell you. But he can’t tell you while he’s like this.”
I step back toward the table and look at the guy’s face again. In some ways, it looks like he just went to sleep, like the guy in that old story. Rip Van Whatever.
“So, who is he?” I ask. “Does he have a name?”
“He does,” says Fletcher. “His name is Lamont Cranston.”
“What did you say?”
Fletcher repeats it, pronouncing each syllable: “Lamont Cranston.”
Okay. Good joke. That’s obviously a fake name. Because I’m an expert on Lamont Cranston, aka the Shadow.
And there’s no way that’s a real person.