The Returned Dead. Rafe Kronos
that came later, much later. No, all I knew at that point was that something big had just occurred to me, something very important -- though I couldn’t understand what it was.” He leaned forward, “You know, I once read that when people are stabbed with a very sharp blade, something so sharp it just slides into them, they sense that something has happened to them but they don’t realise they’ve got a stab wound. I suppose I felt a bit like that.”
Stabbed people soon find out, I thought. They soon start vomiting blood or they collapse in a bloody mess of their own making. Still, the violent imagery he’d used was interesting.
He was speaking again, “So I went home, still feeling, well, sort of baffled and sick, sick in my guts and later, just as I was thinking of going to bed, I sort of began to half see things.”
I said nothing. Perhaps he was mad. I’ve known people who started to see things and they usually ended up in the psychiatric ward.
He took a tentative sip of coffee and seemed to be putting his thoughts in order. “It’s hard to explain what that was like but I’ll try. Imagine you’re inside a house at dusk. You’re looking out through a window and there’s a light on in the room where you’re standing. Outside it’s a bit darker because it’s dusk, right?”
I nodded.
“So, you can still see everything outside fairly well, there’s still enough light for that, but at the same time there’s also a reflection on the window between you and the outside world, a reflection of things in the room. That’s a bit like what I was getting. I started to get these faint pictures in my head as if they were appearing between me and the world around me.”
He paused to check if I was following so I nodded again.
“The first picture, image, whatever you want to call it, I got was of a house. I mean another house, not one of my own houses, not a Baxendale house. Then there was this image of a tree, then a woman. She was wearing a blue dress and she was standing with her back to me. Somehow she seemed totally familiar but I didn’t know who she was. I felt I ought to know her name and who she was, but it evaded me.”
He stopped and took a quick gulp of coffee.
“These flashbacks, mental images, they came and went very quickly. Anyway, those were the first three things I saw.”
“And one of them was a tree? Really? A Tree? A house or a woman I could understand. But a tree?” I made no attempt to keep the scepticism from my voice.
He laughed briefly, a sharp, rattling sound like hailstones hitting a window.
“A sycamore tree. It turns out it’s in my old garden, Jack Rankin’s garden, in front of the house. That was the house I’d half recalled, the first image that came back to me. I saw the tree the other day, it’s still there.” He leant forward confidentially, “You know, I still can’t think why that bloody tree was one of the first things I remembered; I never liked the damn thing. It was always dropping seeds, you know, those spinning things, and they sprouted all over the lawn and in the flower beds.”
He might be lying but, if so, he was good. Putting an irrelevant thing like a tree into his narrative made it seem less likely to be fiction. But, I told myself, that’s just what a really good liar would do. It was one of the techniques I’d had hammered into me in the past. My mind swerved away from thinking about those days. I made myself concentrate on asking questions.
“And the woman in blue, who was she? Was she your wife, your Rankin wife?”
“Yes, Fizzy, Fidelity, that’s right. It was her favourite dress. I remembered that later.” His mouth tightened.
“OK, so you were starting to remember you’d had another life, your Rankin life.”
“No, not immediately. No, at that point I was just aware that something strange was happening to me. I tell you, it was frightening. I was scared: those images, whenever they popped into my head, they scared me.”
He 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