The next day we were back to the port, heading back to the United States. Logan and I didn’t exchange a single word since that night. It was the end; that’s what I thought; I had lost him for good. Each day during our travel back I prayed for a miracle, for the silence to be broken, but the miracle never came.
Back to Boston, a man was waiting for us when we descended the ship. Apparently someone from London told him everything about our arrival and he proposed us to follow him to a nearby hotel; he apparently had information to share. The man seemed to be able to afford a room in the most expensive place in town. He was distinguished and refined and spoke with a kind of foreign accent that I couldn’t place though. His face seemed to lighten up literally when he took sight of Logan. Sitting at the hotel’s restaurant at a remote table, the man took a closer look at us. Then he spoke almost as out of a daze.
“So you survived, didn’t you?”
Logan looked at him quizzically, trying to wrap his mind around the whole situation.
“He killed you, all of you; he didn’t want any witness of his doing. Yet you survived, how is it possible?”
I looked at him too, panic now rising bile in my stomach.
“What are you talking about?” Logan’s voice barely hid his own fears.
“You don’t remember anything, do you? Your name, the experiences, the machine…You forgot everything. Or maybe you never knew.”
“Who are you? What is this all about?”
“I can’t tell you my name if you don’t remember it, it would only mean troubles to you, but your name is Angier; you are Angier, or one of him.”
“Angier is dead!” I almost cried out in the half empty restaurant.
“Yes, indeed, but who told you there was only one Angier?”
“What…?”
“The machine I created for him had the capacity to duplicate animate and inanimate things, persons too. Angier duplicated himself for what had to be his ultimate trick as an illusionist: “the transported man”. He made the spectators believe that he could teleport himself from one place to the other, but in reality, it was another him, each time who appeared at the other end of the theater. And each time he killed them so that nobody could find his secret.”
I felt the hair at the back of my neck stand as the man kept on telling his story. I looked at Logan’s disgusted expression all the while. What was he thinking? Was it the truth? This couldn’t be true. Machines that duplicate people couldn’t exist, that was impossible.
“You doubt me, don’t you? I can show you where it all began. It was in Colorado Springs that it all started. A man with a walking stick, just like you, came to my property; he had a special request, he needed my invention. He said he would pay, and he did. He was ready to sacrifice everything for my machine, and he did; he even lost his life to it.”
“How can we trust you?” Logan said through greeted teeth.
“The next train for Colorado Springs leaves in thirty minutes; come with me and I will show you everything you need to see, I will tell you everything you need to know.”
“Anyway, how did you know about us?”
“Let’s say that a common friend warned me of your return and of your quest.”
“You’d better not trick us, ‘my friend’.” Logan added with a merely disguised disdain snort. The other man smiled slightly at the threat and leaned back in his chair sipping at his now cold cup of tea.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
“He killed you, all of you; he didn’t want any witness of his doing. Yet you survived, how is it possible?”