Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 108, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 661 & 662, September/October 1996

The Lazrus Gate by George C. Chesbro

© 1996 by George C. Chesbro

George Chesbro’s best-known creation is the dwarf private eye Mongo, a character whose adventures are larger than life and evoke, as William L. DeAndrea said in Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, the era of the pulps. Similarly larger than life, with an almost supernatural ability to intuit things, is ex C.I.A. op Veil, a character Mr. Chesbro gives the starring role in the following story.

Veil dreams.

Vivid dreaming is his gift and affliction, the lash of memory and a guide to justice, a mystery and sometimes the key to mystery, prod to violence and maker of peace, an invitation to madness and the fountainhead of his power as an artist.

The Lazarus Person standing under the streetlight on the sidewalk outside the former warehouse Veil Kendry owned was an attractive woman in her late thirties or early forties. From the vast loft on the fourth floor where he painted and lived, Veil watched her through the one-way glass of his window. Although her face was impassive and her expression distant, he sensed her discomfort. Despite the fact that this was New York City’s East Village, the woman was not in danger, for Veil had taken steps when he had first bought the building fifteen years before to make sure that the few blocks surrounding his building were crime-free; drug dealers and others who committed violent crimes in his immediate neighborhood invariably chose not to return a second time, and some disappeared altogether. There was no bus stop in the middle of the block, no apparent reason for her to be standing there for almost forty-five minutes, and the fact that she was a Lazarus Person made him doubly suspicious. If she somehow knew about him and wanted to talk, she had only to press the buzzer at the entrance on the ground floor.

When an hour had passed and the woman still had not moved, Veil went to the telephone and called Dr. Sharon Solow at home. She was not there, and her answering machine did not come on. When there was no answer at her office in the Sleep Research Laboratories at St. Vincent Hospital, he went down to his arsenal of weapons and equipment on the third floor. He took a pair of night-vision binoculars off a shelf, turned off the lights, and went to a window at the front. First he scanned the rooftops of the buildings across the street, but saw no one there. In the darkened doorway of a storefront directly across the way, however, he spotted a man standing by himself, and he was wearing headphones. Veil peered into the night on the other three sides of the building, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Satisfied that the watcher and listener in the doorway was alone, Veil left the building through a freight-delivery entrance at the rear, went to the end of the block, around the building, and crossed the street, then came up on the man as silently as a shadow within the shadows and hit him in the solar plexus. As the man doubled over and gasped for air, Veil grabbed the back of his coat collar and marched him across the street. The woman now looked sad, and she remained motionless, watching him as he approached.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said quietly as Veil dragged the man up over the curb and shoved him toward the entrance to his building. “The man in green said he would—”

“You don’t have to explain,” Veil interrupted. “I know you meant me no harm, and I know you didn’t agree to act as a lure out of concern for your personal safety. I promise you they won’t threaten your family again. You’re free to go. There’s a subway station a few blocks north of here, and you’ll be safe walking there.”

The woman nodded, then turned and disappeared into the night. Veil pulled the man through the doorway into his building, then shoved him hard against the doors of the freight elevator in the small foyer. He closed the entrance door behind him, then turned to the man, who had slumped to the floor and was still holding his stomach. The expression on his face was a mixture of fear and wonder. He had fiery red hair, green eyes, and thick fields of freckles on his cheeks and forehead. Veil estimated him to be in his mid twenties, although he could have passed as a teenager — a potentially dangerous teenager who, for some reason, was prying into some very dangerous secrets.

“My God!” the young man said excitedly, shaking his head and licking his lips. “It’s true! You recognized what she was! The two of you must be able to com—!”

“Stop jabbering, or I’ll smack you again,” Veil said curtly. “Who the hell are you?”

The young man with the red hair and green eyes swallowed hard, then removed his headphones, which hung askew around his neck. A single droplet of sweat had appeared in the center of his forehead. “I... won’t tell you anything. You can’t make me.”

Veil grunted. “Really? You look awfully young to be working in the field for the CIA, but when you reach middle age just about everybody starts looking young.”

“I said I wouldn’t—” The young man stopped speaking and cried out as Veil abruptly grabbed the lapels of his overcoat and yanked him to his feet, once again slamming him against the slatted elevator doors. “Are you going to torture me?”

“Nah,” Veil replied evenly. “I hate torture. I don’t mind torturing torturers, but you don’t look like one of those. But I will show you a trick your chiropractor probably doesn’t even know.”

Veil jerked the other man around and cupped his chin with his left hand. He twisted the man’s neck at the same time as he pressed hard with the heel of his right hand against a precise point on the man’s spine. There were sharp popping sounds in the man’s neck and back, and he collapsed to the floor.

The man in the overcoat sat on the floor with his legs splayed and his weight balanced on his hands as he stared up into the glacial blue eyes of the rangy man with the shoulder-length, gray-streaked yellow hair who stood over him. What he saw there was death, or worse. He glanced down and began to cry when he saw the puddle of urine forming between his legs. “I’m peeing myself and I can’t even feel it,” he sobbed. “You’ve paralyzed me.”

“Incontinence is the least of your worries, sonny. Right now you’re at least a candidate for a wheelchair. If you don’t give simple, straight answers to my questions, you’re going to end up being wheeled around on a hospital gurney for the rest of your life. As you may have noticed, I don’t bluff, and I rarely even bother to threaten. Now, if you don’t want me to shut the rest of you down, stop slobbering and tell me your name.”

The young man cut off a sob, breathed, “Denny Whalen.”

“All right, Denny Whalen, you work for the CIA, of course. Ops?”

“Yes and no.”

“Give me the no part first.”

“We don’t do... nasty stuff. No covert operations. We’re organized under Operations, but we’re strictly research.”

“What’s your outfit called?”

“Department of Human Possibilities.”

“I make it my business to keep up with these things, and I’ve never heard of you. You need another spinal adjustment?”

“We used to be called the Bureau of Unusual Human Resources.”

“Ah yes,” Veil said, and sighed. “BUHR. The ‘chill shop.’ I thought the dwarf put you people out of business last year.”

“We’ve been... reorganized.”

“Right. Just what the world needs now: a reorganized ‘chill shop.’ If you’re not a field operative, what were you doing with eavesdropping equipment outside my building tonight?”

“It was an experiment. The woman was wired, and I would have heard anything you said to her. I had to see for myself if it was true that Lazarus People recognize each other and are capable of some degree of telepathic communication. I wanted to see if you’d come down — which you did. You two didn’t have a real conversation, but you did recognize what she was.”

“You’re a damn fool, Denny Whalen. How the hell did BUHR find out about Lazarus People? The Lazarus Project was a decade ago, and all the records were destroyed.”

“The Lazarus Project was mentioned in KGB files. A lot of their people are working for us now, and they brought a lot of their records with them.”

“If you’ve got reports on the Lazarus Project, then you should know it was a complete bust. You can’t get to where they wanted to go from here.”

“The files are incomplete and spotty. You killed the two KGB operatives who were at the institute and on the army base.”

“So I did. You’re holding Dr. Solow?”

Denny Whalen again swallowed hard, nodded.

“Kidnapping sounds like nasty business to me, Denny, and it was a very, very bad idea. Where have you got her?”

“A safe house on the Upper West Side. The address is—”

“I know where it is. Has she been harmed?”

“No.”

“How lucky for you. How is it that the director of Ops authorized a kidnapping by a bunch of research scientists?”

“Ops has given top priority to finding out exactly what happened with the Lazarus Project. You must have really rattled some cages in the past, because nobody wanted to mess with you. That’s why we approached Dr. Solow first. But she wouldn’t cooperate. We needed you. Then it was decided that the best way to get both of you to cooperate would be to take Dr. Solow into our... temporary custody. The director gave us a field operative for that, and I was given permission to run my experiment before we contacted you.”

“How many of you are there at the safe house?”

“Three. Two researchers and the field operative.”

“Where are you keeping Dr. Solow?”

“In a bedroom on the second floor, at the rear. We have an operations center set up in the basement. Look, why don’t you let me try to—?”

“Shut up,” Veil said, then bent over the other man and searched through his pockets. He found a cellular phone, smashed it. Then he dragged the helpless man into a corner of the foyer before opening the doors of the freight elevator and stepping in. “Your paralysis will wear off in about forty-five minutes, Denny,” he continued. “If I were you, I’d just stay put and wait it out. If it does occur to you to try to crawl out of here and look for help so that you can phone ahead, remember the neighborhood you’re in. The vultures around here would like nothing better than to find a nice, well-dressed young fellow like you helpless on the sidewalk. How are you on double negatives?”

“What?”

“I will not not be left alone. And I will not allow anyone to bother Dr. Solow. Tell that to your superiors at Langley. The director of Ops will know just how serious I am.”

“Yes, sir.”

Veil returned to his arsenal on the third floor. He selected a .45 automatic, which he placed in a small duffel bag along with lock-picking tools and a length of light but strong nylon rope. Then he went out and took a cab to the CIA’s safe house on the Upper West Side. He disarmed the security system from a circuit box on the side of the brownstone, then picked the lock on the back door and went in. He found the field operative, a bald, burly man dressed in matching green slacks, shirt, and sport jacket, in a room on the ground floor watching television and drinking beer. The man leaped to his feet and grabbed for the gun in his shoulder holster when Veil entered, and Veil whipped the barrel of his .45 against the side of the man’s head, knocking him unconscious. Veil tied up the operative with the nylon cord, then left the room and bounded almost soundlessly up the stairs to the second floor. At the opposite end of a corridor an older man with a withered left arm, dressed in a brown tweed suit and smoking a pipe, was sitting in a chair outside a closed door. When the man looked up, he saw Veil stalking down the corridor toward him, gun raised and aimed at his head. The pipe dropped from the man’s clenched teeth and the color drained from his face as he leaped to his feet and thrust his hands in the air.

“Open it,” Veil said quietly, nodding toward the door.

“It’s not locked,” the man with the withered arm replied in a choked whisper.

Veil turned the knob and opened the door. Then he grabbed the front of the man’s shirt and shoved him hard into the room. The man in tweed stumbled, spun around, landed on the bed, bounced, and fell on the floor on the other side. Dr. Sharon Solow, her long, wheat-colored hair tied back in a ponytail, was sitting under a bright light in an easy chair across the room. She looked up from the book she was reading, and her eyes, almost as blue as his own, went wide when she saw him. She dropped her book, leaped to her feet, and rushed into his arms.

Veil held the woman he loved tightly in his arms, caressing her hair, brushing his lips against her forehead and cheek.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Sharon kissed him hard on the mouth, then stepped back and frowned. “Veil, somehow they found out about the Lazarus Project. They came to me, wanted me to fill them in on the details. I told them I didn’t know what they were talking about. There wasn’t anything I could tell them that wouldn’t involve you. I don’t understand how—”

“They already knew about my involvement. They got hold of some old KGB files that presumably mention the two of us and what you were trying to do in that little mountaintop hospice at Pilgrim’s Institute.”

“Oh God. They must know just enough to get somebody killed.”

“It appears that way. I wonder how many people the Russians killed trying to get somebody through the Lazarus Gate and back again.”

“How did you find me?”

“They decided to use some Lazarus Person they’d found to run a little experiment on me before calling me to tell me they had you. The experiment didn’t quite turn out the way they’d expected.”

“Veil, we have to talk to them!”

“Talk to them?” Veil paused, glanced at the man in the tweed suit, who had gotten to his knees and was peering at Veil over the top of the bed. “I’ve been giving some thought to killing everybody in this house.”

“No, my love! You mustn’t do that! They’re just scientists, and they’re terribly curious.”

“These terribly curious scientists work for a particularly ugly little department in the CIA that was supposed to have been shut down last year.”

“But these people mean no harm — except for the man in green.”

“He’s sleeping this one out.”

“It’s what they’re trying to do that’s so dangerous, my love. We have to talk to them, tell them what will happen if they try to repeat those experiments.”

“I’ll talk to them. You go home.”

“No. I want to be with you.”

Veil turned to the man in the tweed suit, who had finally risen to his feet and was holding tightly to his withered arm, as if it were a frail captive that might slip away. “It looks like you’re finally going to find out what you want to know. Take us to your leader.”

The man cleared his throat, drew himself up straighter. “I... uh, I’m the leader. I’m Dr. Schaefer. What have you done with Dr. Whalen?”

“He’s taking some time out to rethink his approach to this whole matter, and maybe consider other career options. Who else is in the house, besides the Jolly Green Giant?”

“Just Dr. Leeds. She’s downstairs.”

“Is she armed?”

“Of course not. What do you think we—?”

“Let’s go.”

Veil and Sharon followed the man in the tweed suit down two flights of stairs to the basement, which was spacious and had been cleared to make room for a wooden table, a desk, chairs, two hospital gurneys, and an array of medical equipment that was now pushed back against the wall at the opposite end of the room. Half of the wall to their left was covered with a large mural comprised of dozens of separate, framed panels and illuminated by spotlights recessed in the ceiling. A big-boned, white-haired woman who was standing at the table and making notes on a pad looked up and started with alarm as they entered the room.

“Just stay calm, Gail,” the man in the tweed suit said quickly, walking across the room and touching the woman’s hand. “Dr. Solow and Mr. Kendry have agreed to cooperate with us.”

“Veil,” Sharon said in a voice just above a whisper as she turned to look at the multi-paneled mural. “That’s—”

“It certainly is,” Veil replied drily as he stepped closer to the wall to examine his work.

The predominant color of the painting was a brilliant, electric blue surrounded on all sides by clouds of gold-specked black and gray. Brush techniques and alternating patches of thin and thick layers of pigment projected the illusion of movement, of flight toward a gray figure with outstretched arms silhouetted against a pool of brilliant, pure white light. In the space where the figure’s heart would be was an open rectangle where the brick wall behind the mural showed through. “I painted ‘The Lazarus Gate’ a long time ago,” Veil continued quietly, turning back to the two scientists. “The Company must have gone to considerable trouble and expense to find and put all these panels together. My work doesn’t come cheap.”

It was the white-haired woman who answered. “It took years. The individual panels were in museums, galleries, and private collections all over the world. But we never could find the last panel. Would you tell us what’s there?”

Veil’s response was to point to the strips of paper that were EKG printouts taped to the wall next to the mural. Each clearly showed the signature Lazarus Spike of someone who had been clinically dead and then brought back to life after having seen the Lazarus Gate. “Have you tried to send anybody there yet?”

“No,” the woman replied evenly. “We needed more information before we tried to conduct the experiment. That’s why we were so anxious to speak to you and Dr. Solow. Is it true that humans who approach the Lazarus Gate as they are dying become telepathic?”

“Where did you get these EKG printouts?”

“From the hospital records of Lazarus People, men and women who had a near-death experience naturally.”

“I assume you questioned all of them. What did they say when you asked them if they’d become telepathic when they were dying?”

The woman flushed slightly. “They just laughed. All of them.”

“Well, there you are.”

“But there is something there. You painted a picture of it.”

“Of course there’s something there. Death. That’s why we say that people who’ve seen it and survived have had a near-death experience. It’s not complicated, Doctor. For some people, all they have to do to get there is to die. Things are going to become complicated when you start sending living people off to find this place and they don’t come back.” Veil paused as Denny Whalen, looking thoroughly shaken, walked through the door. Then he turned to Sharon. “Now that everybody’s here, tell them what they want to know.”

Sharon nodded, said, “I’m a physician, as you know. What you may not know is that I’m a thanatologist — a specialist in death and the dying. For years it has been known that a small percentage of people who ‘die,’ as it were — that is, their hearts stop beating and they are clinically dead — revive and tell a story about being in a corridor and seeing at the end of it a blinding white light and a shadowy figure beckoning to them. At this moment they report feeling completely at peace, with no fear of death. Every single one of them reports desperately wanting to fly into the arms of this figure and be washed in the white light. Those who don’t, who turn back at the last moment from the cusp of death and revive, uniformly do so because of some compelling personal reason, a sense of unfinished business which can be anything from a belief their family can’t survive without them to an unpaid utility bill. The experience has been reported by people from all cultures in societies all over the world, by those who are religious and others who are atheists. The vision is seen by about two percent of the people who’ve had a near-death experience, and we refer to them as Lazarus People. All report feeling remarkably changed, and all had an identical reading on their EKGs a moment or two before they revived. That’s what we call the Lazarus Spike, and we say that they’ve been to the Lazarus Gate.”

The man with the withered arm pointed to Veil’s mural. “That’s what they see? That’s the Lazarus Gate?”

“That’s it,” Veil replied curtly. “Go on, Sharon.”

“Years ago I was in Monterey doing secret research — the Lazarus Project — for an ex-astronaut named Jonathan Pilgrim who’d had a near-death experience and believed he’d found heaven; he was looking for a way to control the experience. I worked in a hospice that was separate from Jonathan’s main operation, where researchers studied individuals with highly developed talents or unusual traits. Veil had been invited to come there as a test subject, and he wound up with me at the hospice because—”

“That’s irrelevant,” Veil interrupted.

Denny Whalen shook his head impatiently, said, “But you said you’d tell us what we wanted to know!”

“There’s nothing of any value for you to learn from my experience. I ended up in Dr. Solow’s hospice by accident because of some funny business with a KGB operative who was monitoring the whole situation at Pilgrim’s Institute. My experience is irrelevant to your purposes because I wasn’t dying when I wound up in the hospice, and I’m not a Lazarus Person.”

The three researchers exchanged puzzled glances, then looked back at Veil. The white-haired woman said, “But there’s your painting...”

“How do you know I didn’t work from some Lazarus Person’s description of the experience?”

“Did you?”

“No. Listen up, folks, because I’m only going to go over this once — and I’m not going to answer any personal questions. Denny here will tell you just how jealously I guard my privacy. The problem is that you’ve already shoved your noses so far into my private business that I have to give you this information to push you back out. By definition, a Lazarus Person is a child or adult who has suffered a very particular near-death experience. A consciousness of the world and a sense of self had been formed in the individual, and it is this perception of the world and self that is so profoundly changed when a person sees the Lazarus Gate and then returns to life. That isn’t what happened to me. I almost died at birth, and a newborn infant has no sense of self or the world. I was born with a cawl, and my parents named me Veil as a kind of prayer. Obviously, I lived, but I suffered — suffer — brain damage. I was left a vivid dreamer, a condition that can best be described as a kind of rupturing of the protective membrane separating dreams from reality. I dream in technicolor and surround sound, and those dreams are every bit as coherent and vivid as what I experience when I’m awake. The condition can drive you insane, and not a few vivid dreamers die in their sleep of heart attacks; vivid dreamers not only get chased by ogres, sometimes they get eaten. Denny here may harbor suspicions that I’m a violent person. I became one because of my vivid dreaming, and I eventually learned to control both the violence and the dreams through painting. Now I can go virtually anywhere I like and do anything I want in my dreams — but I’m still just tucked in bed, dreaming. There’s no astral projection, no telepathy, no precognition, and none of those other wet dreams the Russians were having. Just dreams, with absolutely no practical application — unless you want to count my work as an application. It’s just imagination. That’s how I discovered the Lazarus Gate, which seems to be a kind of shared racial consciousness some people experience as they die. It probably has to do with endorphins and hard-wiring those people have in their brains. The point is that I got there through the back door, in a manner of speaking. I was able to go to the Lazarus Gate and return, literally without losing any sleep over it, because I wasn’t dead, just dreaming. I’d learned to control my vivid dreaming, so I just checked out the neighborhood, then turned around and went home. When I woke up, I started this mural. Anyone you try to send there by artificial means, with your machines and your drugs, isn’t going to be so fortunate. You can manipulate their brain waves to match that pattern, all right, but anybody you kill and try to send there is going to stay dead. That’s all the Lazarus Gate is — death. The drugs you need to use to artificially create that brain-wave pattern block the way back. Your test subjects aren’t going to be sending messages from submarines, or anywhere else, to other test subjects because they’ll very quickly become biologically as well as clinically dead. End of story.”

Again, the researchers exchanged glances. It was Denny Whalen who finally spoke. “What’s on the missing panel in the mural?”

“Jesus, Denny,” Veil said, then sighed and shook his head. “What a great question; it shows how impressed you are by what I just told you. My work is totally irrelevant. We’ve told you everything you need to know. You can interview all the Lazarus People you want about those crackpot KGB theories, and they’ll laugh at your questions like the others have done. You think they’re all involved in some conspiracy? They’ve all survived a similar, profoundly moving experience that has left them with mixed emotions about returning to life, and they’re looking forward to repeating the experience when the time comes. They’re not about to be bothered trying to describe the experience or explain themselves to a bunch of science wonks working for the CIA.”

Now there was a prolonged silence, which was finally broken by Sharon. “The Russians, of course, knew about Lazarus People, and they’d been conducting their own experiments, probably for years. Because of the well-known phenomenon of Lazarus People who are strangers instinctively recognizing what the other is, they theorized that some kind of crude telepathy was taking place, and that this telepathic power was greatest in the few moments before death — as certain people approach the Lazarus Gate. One of their many zany notions was to take two people in different parts of the world, stop their hearts, use drugs to get Lazarus Spikes on the subjects’ EKGs, have them exchange secrets at the Lazarus Gate, then revive them and recover the information. Voilà. An intelligence-gathering system that is instantaneous, and can’t be penetrated. This seems to be your Holy Grail as well. Forget it. As Mr. Kendry has explained, you can’t duplicate the experience in a lab and have the test subject or subjects survive. The KGB probably tried to do it many times, and kept losing people. That’s why they penetrated Jonathan Pilgrim’s operation when they found out I was doing similar research. But I was working with people who were already dying and who fit a profile predicting they might be candidates for experiencing the Lazarus Gate. We never tried the experiment you’re contemplating, because we’d already done computer simulations telling us it couldn’t be done successfully.”

“That doesn’t jibe with what’s in the KGB reports,” the white-haired woman said, her tone openly sceptical. “Those records indicate you were sent there, and you’ve obviously survived.”

Sharon shook her head impatiently. “Those files are inaccurate. It’s true they wanted to use me as a guinea pig, and they got as far as stopping my heart. But then Veil stopped them before they could try to induce a Lazarus Spike, and he revived me.”

“But you died and came back,” the woman insisted. “You’re a Lazarus Person.”

“No. I just died and was revived before the KGB could juice me up. I never shared the experience. I don’t remember a damn thing.”

“Let’s go,” Veil said to Sharon, taking her arm and leading her across the basement. He paused at the door, turned back toward the others. “Now you know it all,” he continued. “You’re wasting your time. Don’t waste mine, or Dr. Solow’s, again. You tell your Company bosses I will not tolerate anyone from your outfit invading our privacy again. Got it?”

Denny Whalen half raised his hand, said in a small voice, “Uh, Mr. Kendry?”

“What part of that statement didn’t you understand, Denny?”

“May I ask you just one more question?”

“Not about the missing panel.”

“It’s not about the mural, sir. It’s about you.”

Veil shrugged resignedly. “Let’s hear the question.”

“We learned about your being a CIA operative during the Vietnam War from the KGB files. There’s no mention of you in our own files, not anywhere. The only thing we could find was a note on your army record that you’d been dishonorably discharged on a Section Eight; just about everything else had been deleted. The KGB reports say that your CIA code name was Archangel. Why did the Company expunge your file?”

Veil smiled thinly, exchanged glances with Sharon, then replied, “For your own good, Denny, I’m not going to tell you. Don’t pursue it; don’t even think about it. You ask that question of the wrong person at Langley, and you’re going to end up dead. Good night.”

Veil dreams.

He senses something is wrong, and he flies to where he has not been in many years, the Lazarus Gate. He is pure blue flight, surrounded by a brilliant electric blue. He is the blue, and when he looks at his hands he can see through them. There are no fixed reference points, no sounds, only the sensation that he is traveling at great speed through no time and no space to a place that for others is death.

As he continues to stare at his right hand a pinpoint of white light suddenly appears in the blue beyond the palm. He puts his hand to his eyes and the light flashes through him, arcing down his spinal cord. He explodes into pieces and is reassembled, floating weightless in a gray void before a shadowy figure silhouetted against a shimmering white radiance that he knows is the Lazarus Gate. The man in green, naked now like everyone who comes here, is just completing his passage through the gate, disappearing from sight as a great chime sounds, and Veil can feel the booming echo in his head, heart, stomach, and groin.

Denny Whalen, his eyes bulging with wonder and a huge grin on his face, is floating on his back, arms and legs spread out to his sides, down the gray corridor toward the beckoning figure. Veil speeds down the corridor, past the scientist, then stops in front of him, blocking the way.

Denny sees him and giggles hysterically, the sound of his laughter emerging from his mouth as a series of tiny bell sounds that cascade like rain all around them. “HEY, KENDRY! YOU DIDN’T TELL US WHAT IT FELT LIKE! WHAT A TRIP! ARE YOU REALLY HERE, OR IS THIS JUST A DREAM?!”

“Precisely,” Veil replies evenly.

“WHICH IS IT?!”

“This is a dream you’re not going to wake up from unless you do exactly as I say.”

“WHO WANTS TO WAKE UP?”

“You don’t have to shout. As you can see, there’s a great sound system here.”

“I’M SO HAPPY!”

“Denny, you’re really a glutton for punishment. You and your buddy who just went brain dead just couldn’t resist the temptation to try for the Lazarus Gate, could you?”

“BUDGET CUTBACKS!” Denny shouts, and again giggles hysterically. “EVERYBODY HAS TO PULL THEIR WEIGHT OR GET FIRED! I FIGURED THIS WAS A WAY TO GET AHEAD! WE COULDN’T JUST TAKE YOUR WORD FOR IT THAT THERE WAS NOTHING HERE! THE STAKES WERE TOO HIGH!”

“Stop shouting, Denny. Calm down.”

Denny, the fields of freckles on his face glowing purple, tries to somersault up and over Veil, but Veil blocks his way. “If you are really here, then it’s true,” Denny says, his voice dropping to a whisper. “We’re communicating telepathically. You and Dr. Solow lied.”

“So sue us.”

“Absolute, stone telepathy, complete with bells and whistles, a great light show, and all in living color.”

“Almost living, Denny. You seem to keep forgetting that little problem. What you are is not quite biologically dead, but you’re working on it.”

“This is what’s on the missing panel in the mural, isn’t it? You.”

“No. There is no missing panel, Denny. The mural is complete as it is. There’s nothing there at the heart of that figure. It’s biological death. There is no emptier space.”

“Who is he?”

“There’s nobody there, Denny. It’s a shadow. Superstition. Humans are apparently hard-wired for it. Superstition may have been a very useful survival skill for cave people in the Stone Age.”

“How do you know there’s nothing there?”

“Because I’ve been there, Denny. I’ve passed through the heart of that shadow many times.”

“You brought Dr. Solow back from beyond there, didn’t you?”

“Yes. But it took years, and a very special lifeline called love. Sharon is a unique survivor, because I’m apparently unique — no other vivid dreamer that I know of has learned to control dreaming as I do, or traveled here. In addition, to find others you need a personal connection. That’s why you don’t see anybody else around.”

Denny giggles again, but his laughter is becoming less hysterical. “You raise the dead.”

“I don’t make a habit of it, and I’m certainly not available for work as a kind of astral answering machine for the CIA or anyone else. You didn’t listen before when I warned you, Denny, but you’d better listen now. Apparently every person experiences some flow of endorphins just before the end; it’s life’s last gift to us. It’s why you feel so good, and why Lazarus People no longer fear death. It also changes the way they view things. Even if you could send intelligence operatives here to exchange messages without killing them, not much of the information they gave back to you would be very useful. Lazarus People make lousy spies, because spying doesn’t interest them any longer. Harming people doesn’t interest them, nor does lying and secrecy — unless it’s to protect life. But that issue’s moot. What’s happened, as I warned, is that the drug cocktail they gave you to induce the Lazarus Spike after they stopped your heart has resulted in a multifold increase in endorphins; right now your brain is flooded with feel-good juice. You don’t want the feeling to end; you can’t end it on your own, any more than you can suddenly stop an orgasm. Unless you do as I say, your brain will die before it can reabsorb the endorphins. Right now your people are no doubt frantically trying to restart your heart and wondering why they can’t. It’s because you don’t want the orgasm to end. You could say I’m here to squeeze your dork until the effect begins to wear off.”

“Wooaaaa.”

“Sorry. I know it’s a tacky analogy, but it’s the most accurate I can think of.”

“But you’re absolutely right. I don’t want to go back. There’s nothing back there that interests me any longer.”

“See the problem? Count sheep, Denny.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

Denny giggles again. “That’s very funny.”

“Count sheep — big, fat, ugly sheep. You have to try to distract yourself from the ecstasy long enough for your brain and other organs to reabsorb the drugs. There can’t be much time left, because we’re drifting closer to the Lazarus Gate. I know we’re close, because I can feel the pressure of the light on my back. I won’t go through there with you, because you’ll be beyond my help. Now close your eyes and count sheep. I’m going to come closer. If you can feel my presence entering yours, wrap your arms and legs around me and hold tight.”

“I’m not sure we know each other that well.”

“This is about life, Denny. Shared humanity. If you can become one with me, I may be able to take you back. Do it. Quickly.”

Denny Whalen continues to grin inanely, but he closes his eyes, and his lips move as he begins to count. Veil moves even closer, entering the mist that is the other man’s body. When he feels Denny’s presence, he wills himself into flight back down the corridor, slowly at first and then accelerating. Denny, still counting, comes with him. When they reach the field of electric blue, Veil rolls away from the other man and returns to his own darkness.

Denny Whalen stood outside on the sidewalk beneath the streetlight where the first Lazarus Person had been, looking up at his window. Veil did not have to check the streets surrounding the building to know the man had come alone. He selected a bottle of wine, then took two glasses from a cabinet and went downstairs. “Welcome back,” he said, walking over to the red-haired man and handing him a glass. “I’d invite you up, but I’ve been working, and I don’t like people to see my works-in-progress.”

Denny held out his glass as Veil poured wine for both of them. “It really happened, then, didn’t it?” he asked quietly.

“I suppose that depends on one’s definition of reality. Are you still interested in sending secret messages from submarines?”

“I came to thank you.”

Veil shrugged. “No need. I’m glad you made it back.”

“You brought me back. They were just about ready to give up trying to revive me. Another couple of seconds and I would have been dead.”

“You were dead.”

“I’d have been permanently dead.”

“Indeed.”

They sat down together on the curb, shoulder to shoulder, and sipped their wine in silence. Finally Denny said, “I lied to them. I told them I didn’t remember everything. I told them it didn’t work.”

“That part isn’t a lie. It doesn’t work.”

“God, dying is so private.”

“Indeed.”

“I know so much about you now, Veil.”

“No, you don’t, Denny. You just feel very close to me. There’s a difference. This is what you’ll feel with every other Lazarus Person you meet for the rest of your life.”

“No. I know you. I know the goodness in you. And I know that somehow the Company hurt you terribly.”

“They didn’t hurt me at all. I owe everything I am and have to the Company.”

“They hurt you.”

“You’re getting maudlin on me, Denny. Now drop it. That’s as private to me as dying.”

Denny sighed, nodded. “With the corpse of one field operative and a researcher who says he experienced nothing to explain, I don’t think they’ll be trying that experiment again.”

“Let’s hope not.”

“I’m quitting the agency.”

“Why?” Veil asked in a mild tone.

“I thought you’d understand.”

“Tell me.”

“You were right about how returning from the Lazarus Gate changes people. Now so much of what the Company does seems just... silly. I want to do something else with my life. I want to do what you do.”

“Paint?”

“No. Something that’s deeply satisfying to me personally. Maybe helping people.”

“While you’re trying to figure out what to do with the rest of your life, consider the possibility that you could help people by staying right where you are now. There are lots of bad guys in the world who need spying on, Denny. Leave them to their own devices, unchecked, and they’ll eat innocent people alive.”

“I assumed you hated the Company.”

“I hate the bad guys in the Company — and there’s a whole passel of them. They’re the ones who tried to hurt me. I don’t object to the CIA’s mission — just the way they go about it. Now, I happen to think having a Lazarus Person in there is a hoot. I also think it’s a great idea. You should work hard for promotion, maybe devote your life to becoming Director. A Lazarus Person would make the perfect mole, a kind of ultimate weapon against the bad guys.”

“I won’t be a weapon for anybody, Veil.”

“Exactly my point, Denny.” Veil smiled as he raised his glass. “Here’s to a long and illustrious career in the CIA, Denny. Cheers.”