The Returned Dead. Rafe Kronos

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СКАЧАТЬ stopped and then said very quietly, “I began to wonder if I was going mad. It was only later that I began to accept that they were actual memories, memories that had been buried deep inside me for years, memories that were finally coming to the surface from somewhere deep, deep down in my mind.”

      I stared at him, very obviously not saying anything.

      He said defiantly, “It does happen you know, Mr Dawson. I mean people do forget important things, they bury them deep in their minds and then years later they start to come back to them.”

      I knew a lot about memories and how they can return when you least expect them. I kept my face blank and waited for him to say more.

      “It does happen, it does,” he insisted. “People do remember things from far back in their past, things that are buried deep down in their minds. You read accounts in the papers about people who suddenly remember how they were sexually abused when they were kids, decades before. They suppress memories of all the terrible things that happened to them; they push them down so deep that it takes years for them to re-surface. But they do eventually surface, they do.”

      I gave a little shake of my head. “Yes, sure, I agree it happens. But not everything those people claim they remember turns out to be true. A fair number of those supposed memories never happened. They’re imaginary, they prove to be fantasies. The shrinks have a fancy term for it: false recovered memory syndrome, something like it.”

      “Don’t even think that’s what happened in my case, just don’t. I’m not imagining my past, this is real. For God’s sake, you’ve seen that photo,” he pointed to the press cutting, “that’s me, Jack Rankin. That photo proves it. For God’s sake, I’m here because I want you to find out why I’m dead. I need to know why I’m both Baxendale and Rankin. I can remember being Rankin, then there was a gap when I was – am – Baxendale and now I’m back, back as Rankin and as Baxendale.”

      “So according to you it sounds as if Rankin was off stage for a while but recently he popped back for a curtain call,” I said, still trying to nettle him as I struggled to make sense of what he was telling me.

      He gave me a look I could not interpret: surprise? Anger? His face flushed. “Look, just try to understand this, I desperately need to know what’s happened to me. Why else would I be here? Why?”

      He certainly sounded sincere but that didn’t mean I could believe him. But since he was a potential client – a potential rich client -- I said, “I do understand how difficult this is for you. Please go on.”

      He gave a quick glance towards his briefcase before looking back at me.

      Now why should he do that? My immediate thought was that he was recording what we were saying. If so, then it would mean both of us were. But if he was recording our conversation, why? And for whom? Was this something from my past catching up with me? A chill surged down my spine and all my muscles tensed.

      “Well, after those first incidents, those first memories, things started to slip back into my consciousness. Gradually I got a growing feeling that there was a sort of closed off place inside me, deep inside my Baxendale mind. I could sense something big, important, in there but however hard I tried I just couldn’t get at it. That feeling was terrible, frightening.”

      He gave a quick grimace like a man feeling a sudden stab of pain. “I know I’m not explaining this very well but it’s hard to put into words. After all I’m not a writer, I run, ran, car dealerships.” He gave a bark of unamused laughter and gulped a large swallow of coffee as if to dilute his anguish.

      “You’re doing fine,” I told him. “Just take it easy and tell it as best as you can. Please go on.”

      “Well, at first I wondered if the things that kept popping into my head were bits of my Baxendale memory, things that had happened before I’d fallen into the coma, things too small or unimportant for Debby to have known about or told me about.”

      I noticed how his voice softened when he mentioned his wife.

      “OK, I knew the bloody coma had destroyed my memories of everything that mattered: my childhood, my marriage to her, buying the estate in Scotland, starting to rebuild the house in Umbria, everything.” He paused. “But I still couldn’t see how it could explain why I’d reacted instinctively to the name Jack or why I was getting these images in my head. I began to wonder if maybe I’d been nicknamed Jack when I was a kid, when I was a kid as Baxendale I mean, and that was why I’d instinctively reacted to the name – but somehow it just didn’t fit, it didn’t feel right.”

      It wasn’t the only thing that didn’t feel right, nothing about his story felt right. Still, it might earn me the money I needed to make the next payment. I wrenched my attention back to him.

      “So, well, after that more and more bits of my life, my Rankin life, began to come back to me. I’ll tell you what it was like, Mr Dawson. You know when you see newsreel footage of an aircraft that’s crashed into the sea and little bits start to float up to the surface? Bits of the wing, tail plane, seats, luggage, all that sort of thing?”

      And bodies, mutilated bodies, I thought, don’t forget the bodies. There’d been one body already: his wife Felicity, killed by a hit and run driver. Were more bodies going to come to the surface?

      “It was like that; things were sort of floating up from deep down in my memory, but they were just scraps. Do you understand, just scraps?”

      “I think so, yes,” I assured him.

      “Right. I kept getting these pictures inside my head. I suppose they were like single frames that had been cut from a long strip of film. They kept popping into my mind at odd moments. For example, one picture, image, whatever you want to call them, was a car, a blue MG B, a soft top, and behind it a hedge, a hawthorn hedge, covered with white blossom. The following day I saw – call it remembered if you like -- a set of coffee cups on a table. Then I remembered being in a hotel dining room, looking at the menu. Another time I saw a tie, black with light blue dots, hanging over the back of a chair, and next day I recalled the inside of a café, one of those olde worlde tea-shoppe places. I still couldn’t understand what these things meant but I began to feel they must be things I’d actually experienced; they weren’t hallucinations they were actual memories – though I have to admit the possibility that they could be hallucinations worried the hell out of me.”

      He looked at me to see if I sympathised with his situation so I nodded gravely and said, “Please go on.”

      I was being careful not to call him Mr Baxendale or even Mr Rankin; at this point it seemed best not to make a commitment one way or another.

      “Right, the basic problem was that they were just scraps, scraps unconnected with anything else; there was no thread joining them, nothing that linked them together. It was like I was being given single words or sentences torn out of a book but without being given the rest of the book there was no way I could understand how they all fitted together. It was as though I lacked the story that tied everything together. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

      “Sure.” I thought he was expressing himself pretty well for someone who wasn’t a writer; that interested me.

      I wondered about the recurrence of blue: Felicity’s dress, the MG, the dots on the tie. Was it significant? СКАЧАТЬ