The devil snorted, pushed him away, turned away and walked away from the hall. He pretended not to notice how the magician hit the ground with his staff and fell into a glowing green portal.
– Lina, we will return to this world! – were his last words.
«Two less idiots,» the Devil grinned.
Chapter 1. Everyday life of a young resurrector
The caravel of the Spanish discoverer Columbus floated along the river, President Reagan filmed him, John Kennedy walked along the maple alley hugging Marilyn Monroe, and on the threshold of the hut, on the highest hill, Stalin and Ivan the Terrible were sitting on a log, smoking peace pipes. In the lowlands, near the river, Claude Monet painted a picture, and in a miniature pub, soldier Schweik told stories with Baron Munchausen and Vasily Tyorkin.
The young man looked at the resulting composition and smiled contentedly, rubbing his hands. At that moment he looked like Napoleon Bonaparte, who tells his entourage about the success in the Battle of Austerlitz, standing at the map.
The table top was huge, almost the size of a standard tennis table, only without a net. There was no empty space there: a hilly papier-mâché landscape, miniature compared to reality, stretched across the entire surface. The role of grass, no matter how trite, was played by ordinary green velvet, bought at the nearest Fabric store. And on this synthetic simulator of real nature the great people of the past walked, only reduced to five centimeters in height.
Here and there, mostly on the hills, there were small two-story houses. But… a miniature landscape is not at all surprising if no one lives in it. Any even more or less savvy architecture student can create the exact same terrain. But only those who are able to call upon the souls of once dead people are able to bring life into their micro-world.
The guy, the author of the miniature world, was in seventh heaven. And rightly so, he spent a whole six months creating his ingenious project: he skipped lectures at the school of necromancy, owed a lot of coursework and was simply overworked. Well, this man was not interested in summoning the souls of dead partridges: it’s all boring and hackneyed, but having your own little world, your own civilization on a separate table is a completely different matter! Orwell’s pig farm is resting! Why isn’t anyone doing similar experiments?