The Excalation (i)

It's only new money that makes requests like this, but I'm old. Old, not old money. I need money. I'll take the assignment.

"This is the picture. I want it to look like this again," he says.

I study it. Black and white, faded; it was blurry on the day it was taken. I take a deep breath. "You have to understand, it's just one view of one room. The rest of the room will be an extrapolation. The other rooms, doubly so."

"Just make it look like that," he says. "Please."

"As for colours..."

"Can I choose?"

"Since it's not in the image, it can be implied in the visualization," I tell him.

"Red," he says. "Rich, like velvet. And gold. Oranges, yellows."

"Autumn colours," I suggest.

"Yes. Exactly. And the wood in brown," he sums up, needlessly. I nod. He says, "How long will it take?"

I look around, pretending to gauge the time. Vastly overestimating, I say, "Five to six hours, probably."

"Wow," he says. He doesn't say if he's impressed by how quick that seems, or how long. I don't care, as long as I don't see him till sunset. "Can you... show me?"

"I need to be alone," I snap. "To concentrate. Distractions will mar the results."

He fidgets. Apparently he had hoped, expected, to direct. Which is exactly what I want to preclude. If I let him linger around here, editing every lamp, examining every bauble, having sudden inspirations, this really will take five or six hours. "Is it alright if I come back after a couple of hours? See how things are going?"

"Mr. Michaels, there really is no point. The restoration will be as it must be, as implied by the template," I lie, tapping the photograph. "What appears will be what appears. But the finished quality will suffer if I'm not allowed to focus myself sufficiently on the task."

He sighs and nods. "I'll come back about four, then," he says. "Will it be okay to bring my wife?"

"It's your surprise to her," I remind him. "When you choose to present it is up to you. Though I imagine you'd want to do it when you two are alone, and the work is thoroughly done."

Straited again, he makes a face and heads down the stairs. I hear the front door close. His car start, drive off down the abandoned country lane that will soon be his driveway.

And I am alone.

He's paying well. Paying me nearly what he paid to buy the place, though after sitting empty all these years that's not all that it might once have been. I feel the resonance, the faded vibrations of the last couple to inhabit this place, trailing off in the 1970s... first him, then her. Concluding, in tandem, a pair passing on, hardly a year between them. As it should be, I suppose. And since then, emptiness. The core sorrowfulness of a place of life reduced to a shell. Well, it will be what it was, again. In more ways than one. A young family filling its rooms, and its rooms full of all that it was circa 1885.

Or at least, my best guess. It's not like there's anyone around to second guess me. Not with authority, anyway.

I sit, cross-legged on the floor, and bring the calm. Partly, I'm listening to make sure my patron has not returned, creeping around like a little boy trying to catch Santa in the act... you'd be surprised how often that happens to visualizers. And when the centre is still, cool, frosted to the touch, the branches of my mind hung with icicles and my spirit a wet sheet in a winter wind, it's the time to summon it. And I draw it up, onward, into me from wherever it is it comes from. And then I release it, and things around me change. Waves roll over the room from every angle, making what was, what is. I fall back, arms spread, supine on the floor. The worn wood beneath me is now smooth and varnished under my fingers; I can even smell the newness of it. It took just seconds to do this; I could easily render a house this size in an hour, but it will take something out of me. The trick with people like Mr. Michaels is to do a room every half hour or so, so that if he does return—

"Who are you?"

Startled, I yelp and scramble to my feet.

She is coming out of a box that was not here a minute before. Into the room of red velvet and golden braid, she is sitting up in a wooden box. A coffin.

My God.

"Who are you?" she asks, frightened. She is pretty, perhaps twenty or not quite, dressed in white to her throat. Her cheeks are rouged, and heavily so; her lips a sticky red. The make-up of a corpse. She seems suddenly aware of her circumstances, her gloved hands riding the edges of her strange confinement. "Is this... is this a coffin?" she gasps in horror.

I look at the photo. Yes, there, at the edge; the foot of the coffin. My God. It was taken at her wake. I've heard of this. Rumours circulate in our community but I'd never quite credited them. But here we are.

"Please," I say, palms up and wide spread in a gesture meant to comfort. "Please, don't distress yourself. You've been ill," I say.

"Mamma? Papa?" she calls, looking past me into the dark, empty hall. On the wall, a clock that was not there moments early now cheerily chimes the quarter hour.

"They're not here just now," I say. "You must be still. Please, what is the last thing you remember?"

"Who are you?" she demands.

"Please, your condition..."

"This is a coffin," she hisses at me, her sensibilities cutting right through her alarm. Yes, it's not a sickbed, and she's not in her nightclothes. It's a coffin, and she is wearing the last thing she will ever wear. Or at least, that was the idea in 1885 or so.

"There's been a mistake."

"Mamma! Kale, Bill, anyone!"

I come forward, slowly, gently. "Here, let me help you out."

She looks at me, wearily, but balanced precariously as she is, she offers me her white-gloved hand. "Who... are you... are you a doctor? You don't..."

"I'm an assistant," I tell her, taking her hand, helping her sit up. "You've been... ill for some time now, I'm told. Try to remember, please. Do you remember your name?"

"Of course... of course I do; Alexandra Kent."

"And what was the date, the last day you can remember. Think clearly."

She kneels up, confused. "Why is it so cold?" It's cold because it's winter. "My Lord, this is a coffin!"

"Calm yourself, calm yourself, please, Miss Kent."

"Mrs. Kent," she frowns.

"Forgive me. But the date..."

"It was... it was May... the 9th, I believe."

I prompt her, trying not to be obvious. "Eighteen...?"

"Eighteen-Eighty-Two," she responds.

"Good, very good," I soothe, as if congratulating her on the completeness of her memory after her long 'illness'.

"What is today?" she asks.

There's no denying the room is cool; it's a drafty house that hasn't been heated in a generation, and it certainly isn't May. "Let me get you a chair," I say, and hurry for one of the new (old) oaken seats, with padded corduroy and armrests. Taking her hand again, I guide the dead girl out of her coffin and back into the world of the living. I help her to the chair, where she sits. Her eyes fall on the table behind me, and I glance back to see it as she does, covered with food, flowers, black ribbon. "This is a wake," she quavers, horrified again.

I kneel. "Yes," I admit, softly, studying her eyes. Finally they drop to meet mine. She tells me, "You're not a doctor's assistant. You're an undertaker's. They think... they think I'm dead." Tears spill instantly from her eyes.

"No," I say. "I'm a visualizer. Have you heard of that?"

She thinks, blinking rapidly. Nods softly. "I thought they were a fairy story."

"There aren't many of us. But I was asked here to restore this house."

"Restore? Where are my mother and father? Where is my husband? My sister? I want to see them at once. I'm not dead!"

"No, but I think you were," I tell her. I show her the photo. "There was a wake here. It was yours, I think. And when I restored the room, I think you came back with it."

She takes the photos in her hands and studies it, weeping, her face contorting in confusion and disbelief. "How long... when did it...?"

"Mrs. Kent... it's been a very long time." I draw a deep breath, as if to prepare her for something momentous. "Well over a century."

She slaps me. She can't think of anything else to do. She bolts from the chair, wailing for anyone, anything familiar to rescue her from this nightmare as she clamples into the hallway, holding her skirts up. I rise, hurrying after her, and find her standing in a hall lit up by the snows of winter outside the dormer window at the end, all at once familiar in shape but strange in appointments. I have not yet altered this part of the house. She stands surrounded by electrical outlets, wall sockets with light bulbs and switches, a run-down plastic clock that looks like a black cat with gigantic eyes, and a photograph, on the wall, faded but in full colour, of large family that is not hers. She is panting, as if the breath is being beaten out of her. Suddenly she is aware of me again, and she turns to me and backs away.

"My name is Raymond," I tell her. "Raymond Darie."

She falls to her hip on the floor, unladylike but forgivably so under the circumstances. "They're dead," she wails. "They're all gone."

What can I say? Be happy, you're alive again? She didn't ask for this. Some consolation prize. Yes, she is alive, but suddenly in a world without a single person she knows and loves, displaced in time and custom. She has her language and her country left; nothing more. History has skipped a beat for her and dropped her here.

"I have some coffee," I tell her. Lame. But you have to start somewhere. I help her to her feet, and lead her by the arm back into the room of her rebirth.