The Returned Dead. Rafe Kronos

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СКАЧАТЬ did you get from those images to remembering you were – are -- Jack Rankin?” I asked.

      “One day my name -- Jack Rankin -- just came back to me. I was in the middle of eating breakfast. One second I didn’t know it, the next second I knew I was called Jack Rankin. In an instant I was quite certain about it; once the name was there, once it had popped into my mind, it just seemed completely obvious, incontestable. And after that, bit by bit, I began to remember lots of other things about my life as Jack Rankin. Not everything -- well, I don’t suppose any human can remember every single thing they ever did, can they? You only remember key things, the good and the bad, things that affect you most, don’t you?”

      Oh yes, I thought, yes, that’s exactly what you do and often the memory of the bad things is far stronger than the memory of the good ones. Bad memories can overpower the good; they can cripple a person for ever.

      “So after a bit I could recall my mother and father and growing up, school, working for my father in the holidays, being trained by Jimmy the foreman, marrying Fizzy,” he paused, “and her death, her death.” For a moment he looked deeply distressed.

      I thought it would be interesting to find out more about her death but it would have to wait. I decided to track sideways. I indicated the press cutting lying on my desk, “So how did you get this?”

      His face showed embarrassment, then defiance.

      “I got it from the local library. By about eight days ago I’d managed to remember a lot about where I use to live, my old house, the address, the road, our business, all that.”

      He paused and when he spoke again his voice was sombre. “Last week I decided to go back to my car dealership, our main premises, the place where my father started the business. Somebody else owns it now; our name’s gone from the front. It’s no longer Rankin Ford, it’s Beasley’s. I don’t know who the hell Beasley is.”

      “Seeing that name really annoyed me. My father and I built up the business, now someone else is running it, benefiting from all our efforts. A lot of money and a lot of damned hard work went into growing our business: now someone else is getting the profits from it.” He sounded bitter.

      “So you went in?”

      For an instant he looked shifty. “No, somehow I couldn’t face it.” He looked away and then said, “If you must know, I was too scared to go in.”

      I stared at him and in the silence he glanced back at me and then looked down, shamefaced.

      After a long moment he spoke. “I was afraid, terrified actually. What if I was wrong? What if I went in, met some of the old staff and nobody recognised me? What if that proved I was going mad?”

      He bit his lip. The front of his hair was dark with sweat, stuck down to his skull. “You must try and see it from my point of view. Please try to understand why I was so scared. I’d been very ill, I’d been in a coma for months and something had happened to my brain while I was unconscious. But I’d re-learned, been re-taught, my pre-coma life. I was Roddy Baxendale, I had everything I wanted. Right?”

      I nodded.

      “OK, that was the situation: me, Baxendale, happily married, beautiful wife, so rich I never need to work. OK? And then I start to think I am someone else. But how could I be two people at the same time? Perhaps my mind was giving way. Perhaps I was going mad. Perhaps I had a brain tumour and it was making me have these fantastic ideas. Perhaps the virus had messed up my brain far more than we knew. So when it came to the point, I was just too scared to get out of the car, walk into that place and try to get confirmation that I was Jack Rankin – or not. It was the possibility of the not that terrified me.”

      It was plausible -- just. “So what did you do?”

      He gave me an embarrassed look, “I took the easy way out. Instead of going in, having to meet people, facing them, finding out if they recognised me, I went back to check if our old house was the place I’d been seeing in my mind.”

      “And?”

      “And it was, it really was. Thank God, it was. It was just as I’d seen it when the image of it had floated into my mind. Even that bloody sycamore tree was there, bang in the middle of the front lawn. The place was exactly as I’d remembered it. That was when I knew that the ideas, images, memories, I was experiencing weren’t fantasies.” He relaxed once he had said this, slipping back in his chair.

      I sipped the last of my coffee and waited for him to continue.

      After a few seconds he seemed to gather up his strength and started speaking again. “Of course, some of the old house has changed but it’s still the place I was remembering, it’s still my old house, the Rankin house. The new owner has re-painted the outside woodwork and put a different light over the porch but it’s definitely the same place. Well, seeing the house gave me a bit more confidence that I wasn’t going mad.” He sighed, “But somehow the possibility was still there. I didn’t know what to do. Then I realised that if my business had been sold to this Beasley outfit, it must have been because I’d gone away or retired -- or died.” His voice stumbled over the last word. “And I eventually realised that if any of those things had happened then there would be a record of it somewhere.”

      At least he’d reasoned logically – or he was pretending he had.

      “So I decided to see what I could find. The public library was the obvious place to start digging. I went there and asked if I could look at their old newspaper files. I began working back from just before the date when I woke up and found Debby sitting by my hospital bed. It took a while but eventually I found a half-page advert put in by Beasley and Co. announcing they’d taken over my old business. That proved the business used to be called Rankin Motors – so I had remembered that correctly. That was another reassurance. Then I found this,” he pointed to the clipping on my desk. “It came from a few months before the announcement of the take-over by Beasleys. I was flicking through the pages and I found it. I found my own bloody death notice. How would you like to find that, eh, Mr Dawson? How would you feel if that happened to you?”

      I ignored the question. “So how did you get it?” It wasn’t hard to guess but I wanted to hear it from him.

      “Nobody was watching so I tore out that part of the page. I needed it; you must understand that. That’s me in the photo; you can see it is, there I am with my name and everything. I had to have it because it proved I wasn’t imagining all this. OK, I admit I stole it – but I desperately needed something to prove I wasn’t going mad. I needed something that showed I was Rankin. Do you understand?”

      I wasn’t going to report him for damaging library property so I dipped my head in agreement.

      We each sat in silence, thinking our own thoughts. Eventually he sighed and said, “OK, so that’s where I am now. That’s the basic story, however strange it seems -- and I admit it must sound strange. I’m here because I need your help. I want to hire you to find out what’s been happening to me. I want you to investigate for me. I suppose that what I really mean is that I want you to investigate me, the Jack Rankin me, and find out what has happened to me. I just want to know what’s been happening; I must know. So, will you do it? Please say you will. I’ll pay well, I really will, money’s not a problem.”

      Money might not be a problem but there СКАЧАТЬ