Reviver: A Novel

by Seth Patrick

  When Daniel spoke to her parents, the situation seemed innocent enough. They were coy about what Eleanor Preston had actually done for them, but they assured him that Preston had taken no payment. Daniel’s interest waned, with the prospect of a meaty story – something he could actually sell – dwindling, but they had already arranged a meeting that Daniel felt obliged to accept.

  ‘I didn’t know what happened, the first time,’ Eleanor Preston told him. The two of them were sitting on a bench in a park five minutes from her home. The sun was low, the November air cold. Daniel was hoping to be gone before dusk fell.

  A little overweight and with a smile ingrained in her face, Preston was likeable. He felt sorry to be wasting her time.

  ‘This was just shy of a year ago,’ she continued. ‘Maggie. A lonely woman, seventy-three. What was left of her family had made sure she was comfortable in the hospice, but hardly came to see her. I was in the habit of spending any spare time I had talking to those who were left alone more than I thought right, and for a few weeks I spent that time with her. I was the only one would see her through to the end, and we both knew it. It would be another two or three weeks, I thought, but one morning between early rounds and breakfast she died. They let me sit with her once she’d been pronounced. Left me alone with her awhile. I took her hand and told her I was sorry I didn’t get to say good-bye. I didn’t understand what I did next. Still don’t, not really.’

  Daniel shifted on the bench, the cold working its way through him. He rubbed his hands to warm them. He noticed Eleanor Preston’s look, and tried to keep his impatience out of his voice when he spoke. ‘So until a year ago, you didn’t know you were a medium?’

  Eleanor smiled. ‘Oh, I’m no medium, Mr Harker. Quite honestly, I don’t know what I am. I’ve helped five families since then. I take no money. And I knew it was just a matter of time before it all came out. But I’m no medium.’

  Daniel asked what she meant, and Eleanor Preston told him every last ridiculous detail. The dead spoke to her, she explained. Physically spoke. Not a medium, Daniel thought. Not even a con-woman. Just crazy. The disbelief was written on his face, he knew, but Preston continued, watching him with a look of amused tolerance. She told him of another ‘session’ she would be doing the next night, one which the family was willing to let him observe and record.

  She believes this, Daniel thought. He wanted to understand how an apparently rational woman could have deluded herself so badly. Perhaps that could be his story.

  And so, thirty hours later, Daniel went to a funeral home with Eleanor Preston. In a small private room, a dead man lay on white sheets. The only others present were the man’s wife and daughter. They greeted Daniel with such warmth that he felt his cheeks burn, knowing they were as deluded as Preston.

  He was asked to take a seat, and he did. After fifteen minutes, he believed. Five days later, so did the rest of the world.

  * * *

  There was another knock on Daniel’s front door. Why the hell they were being so persistent he didn’t know, but he didn’t feel like speaking to anybody. He’d only been out of the house twice in the past five weeks, barely managing to overcome his desperate need for solitude, and for what? The man he’d gone to meet hadn’t even shown up the second time.

  Whoever it was at the door could leave a damn note and let him alone. He took his plate to the sink and washed up.

  Behind the sink, hung on the wall, were two framed covers that had transformed his life. First, the cover of Time, a modified reprint of the article he had written in a fugue twelve years before. ‘Speaking to the Dead,’ the title read, his name below it.

  Beside it, the cover of his first published book, the source of his wealth – his, and Eleanor’s too. It was in part an account of Eleanor’s life, but the main focus was the Revival Baseline Research Group, the research effort that had been established in a blaze of public interest to investigate this new phenomenon.

  He liked to look at those covers, because he was proud of what he’d written and the reaction his work had prompted – one of fascination, not fear.

  Standing in Eleanor Preston’s spare bedroom with a speaking corpse, Daniel had stared, frozen, trying to understand just how Eleanor could have faked such a thing. But the truth of it was undeniable, almost visceral; his cynicism was dispelled with each word that came from those dead lips. For a moment, he had been consumed with horror – knowing it was true, and terrified of what was to come. But as Eleanor Preston had spoken, prompting the dead man with gentle questions, Daniel’s fears vanished, the atmosphere calming and softening as the deceased spoke to his family.

  The exchanges were tender, personal. The man spoke of times he remembered, times he cherished; he made his wife and daughter promise to live their lives fully, and remember him with a smile. His family, in tears, repeated ‘I love you’ and ‘I miss you.’

  They said their good-byes, and were joyful.

  Daniel’s article had captured that moment.

  * * *

  The world reacted as it always does to the great truths. First, with ridicule; then, hostility; and finally, acceptance. The ridicule lasted for days after the story broke, but it faded faster than Daniel had expected. The footage he had taken retained much of the power he had felt that day, and accusations of forgery rang false to most of those who watched it. Those who declared it a hoax sounded more and more uncertain. When Eleanor Preston repeated the feat under close scrutiny, the world made up its mind. Revival was real.

  Anger and fear followed. It was denounced by many as an abomination. Some of that anger found its way to Daniel. The fact that he had broken the story gave him some authority, but also part of the blame. Threats came by letter, by email, by phone; it was a difficult time. Eleanor fared less well, and Daniel watched on, feeling for her as she was put in hiding for her safety, her home gutted by arson.

  It would have been so easy for the world to have turned against revival, but the rage subsided. In part, Daniel thought, it was due to the tone of his articles. Other journalists later focused on the macabre elements and played up the unease. Daniel always went the other way. Here was something new, he had said in that first article. Something that, in this case at least, was undeniably good.

  Yet he knew the main reason for the anger dissipating was simple, and very human. Revival was evidence of a life essence that survived death. Different faiths interpreted the effect in their own ways, but any hint of evidence of an afterlife was embraced.

  The angry rejections of revival were far outnumbered by those who wanted to know what it meant.

  * * *

  Eleanor Preston refused to deal with the media, except through Daniel. He would write her biography, and they would split the profits. She had plans for the money, she told him.

  The government set up an investigative group to examine Eleanor’s claims. She was wary; her only desire was to prove to the remaining sceptics that revival was real, and to get back to doing what she wanted to do – let the dead say good-bye and the living heal.

  She agreed to the investigation, but with restrictions. She would only conduct revivals for the grieving. Everything the researchers wanted would have to be tailored to that: nonintrusive, respectful.

  With agreement reached, the Revival Baseline Research Group was formed. It became known as Baseline. There was no shortage of scientists interested; funding was both American and international, governmental and private.

  It was quickly established, beyond doubt, that revival was a genuine phenomenon.

  Eleanor had always believed that revival was something new, and that more would have the same skill she had. She was proved right. People came forward; those who recognized part of themselves in Eleanor’s descriptions of how she felt; those who experienced the feeling of cold when they touched people, a feeling that revivers would soon label ‘chill.’ Finding other revivers, who would not be bound by Eleanor’s restrictions, was crucial to Baseline’s investigations. And while
most failed the ultimate test of an actual revival, some succeeded.

  Eleanor left Baseline in their hands. Three months after being revealed to the world, the first reviver went back to her calling. Later, after the overwhelming success of Daniel’s book, she used her money to set up the first private revival service, launching an industry that even became a common, if expensive, insurance option.

  The world, meanwhile, waited for news from Baseline. Waited to find the ultimate truths they sought. What was the nature of revival? Why had it started to happen? What did it mean?

  They would be disappointed.

  Some discoveries were made, of course.

  Eleanor’s revivals had not been representative of the true success rate; revival after death from natural causes was much easier than after one involving physical injury.

  It was not simply the brain being woken – severe head injuries made revival more difficult, yes, but not impossible, and the subjects were lucid, the damage to the brain irrelevant once revival was achieved.

  There seemed to be no electrical activity at all, either in the brain or in the muscles that moved the lungs and vocal cords. However, the source of the movement could not be identified.

  By the end of its first year Baseline had a stable of twelve revivers, and became focused more on the details of successful revival – how to make success more likely, how to extend its length – and less on what revival itself was.

  What hostility remained gradually coalesced into a protest group called the Afterlifers, well funded from an uneasy collaboration of disparate religious interests who saw revival as desecration, an unacceptable disturbance of the dead. But loud as they were, they found their calls for a moratorium ignored. Direct action from more extreme members brought public disapproval. Their message of outright objection to revival took a backseat, replaced by more successful calls for greater control, rights for the dead, and a system ensuring revivers were licensed.

  For many, Baseline was a failure. Even with its count of revivers increasing, with over one hundred revivers out of a worldwide tally of almost three hundred, it would get no closer to the mystery of where revival came from; find no smoking gun for anyone’s preferred God.

  Baseline would continue for another five years before being disbanded, public funding drying up as the certainty of discovery faded, transforming into an expectation that the truth would always be elusive. Many lines of research were discarded; some of the companies who had contributed brought teams back to their own facilities to continue, but it was the potential for profit in the burgeoning fields of both private and forensic revival that guided their work now, not the search for meaning.

  For Daniel, with financial security beyond anything he’d expected, it was a new beginning. He and Robin bought a perfect home; he began to write fiction again, insisting on a pseudonym for his crime novels to see if they had wings of their own. Later, as forensic revival became accepted, he started the Revival Casebook series under his own name, case histories from real revivals with sensationalism kept to a minimum. He even took an executive producer role on the inevitable TV series until they started to take too many liberties with the truth.

  He was busy. He was happy. For a time.

  * * *

  He heard a sound from the hall – a man calling his name from the front door, and another burst of knocking. For Christ’s sake, leave a card and go, he thought, sitting back down at the kitchen table. Then he cursed again, annoyed with himself and his annual withdrawal from the world, his difficulty in breaking it.

  Hanging on the wall to his left were two framed photographs. The larger of the two showed him and Robin, with a fifteen-year-old Annabel, on Myrtle Beach. He thought back to the camera, balanced precariously on a rock, himself running back to his family before the timer counted down. The image was his favourite of all their family pictures. Informal, a warm, natural smile on all three faces; taken two years after Preston’s discovery, as his second crime novel was released and well reviewed.

  Ten years ago, probably the happiest time of his life. Four years before Robin died.

  He thought of the first time they met. He thought of her smile, the first thing he’d seen of her; of her accent, a soft English forged from a childhood first in Yorkshire in the north of England, and then Sussex in the south. It was an accent she would never lose.

  ‘You came to America to do English. What the hell for?’ he asked her. She was taking an English degree, but she’d chosen to come halfway around the world to do it. He hadn’t meant to be cruel, but her face had fallen.

  He’d sworn to himself to do what he could to make that smile return.

  They married three years later, and it was good. Even with the financial pressures, and Daniel’s frustration at his underwhelming career. Neither of them had close family; both were only children, with no surviving parents. It intensified what they meant to each other. When Annabel was born, despite money becoming even tighter, Daniel felt blessed. He also felt anxious, waiting for the bad luck that he seemed to have evaded since meeting his wife to finally track him down. When at last the money came, he thought his life was perfect.

  * * *

  Then one April, out of nowhere, Robin collapsed at work. She was dead by the time Daniel had reached the hospital. A brain hemorrhage.

  His heart had been torn out, and he had not recovered. She had been part of his core, part of what made him who he was, and she was gone. Now six years had passed, and his grief for Robin was as sharp-edged and barbed as it had been on the day of her death.

  Annabel had kept him alive. She was in her first year at university in England, and had returned immediately to find her father destroyed, barely able to talk. Robin had always planned for a private revival in the event of her death, but when the time came it proved too difficult for Daniel. He stayed away and left Annabel to attend alone. It was not something he ever expected Annabel to forgive him for, just as he would never forgive himself. Self-hatred swamped him over the following weeks; trapped in his despair, withdrawing from his life, from his own daughter.

  Robin had been stronger than him, always, and Annabel had her mother’s strength. Even though he was angry and uncommunicative, Annabel stayed with him for five months, putting her university studies on hold. When he eventually emerged from his despair, their relationship had changed; but damaged as it was, Annabel had not allowed it to wither, even as the pattern repeated.

  For Annabel, April would always be her mother’s death, but it was also the time her father grew dark and distant. He knew his behaviour made it so much worse for her, but every year – every April – Daniel found himself plummeting, whatever he tried to do to distract himself. Unable to work, drinking heavily, alienating his daughter once again. And yet, always coming back.

  She would be home soon. It was time, Daniel told himself, to once more call an end to the grieving. It was time to live up to Robin’s memory, rather than collapse under the weight of loss.

  It was a realization that came every year, but it was always hard-won. It marked the rebirth of his own life. Annabel – his little Annie – would be here soon enough, and he would smile and laugh with her, and repair what they had, and be happy again.

  There was another knock at the door. He glanced at his watch. Whoever it was had been trying for ten minutes now, while he’d been ignoring them. Hiding from them, as he’d hidden from life for the past few months. Enough hiding, he thought, and stood.

  Resolved to face the world, Daniel Harker walked to his front door and opened it. His body would be found twenty-five days later.

  3

  The Central East Coast office of the Forensic Revival Service was in an unremarkable three-storey building in the south of Richmond, Virginia, that was easy to overlook. Passers-by would come and go without glancing at it, or the muted nameplate for ‘FRS (CEC)’ on the wall by the door.

  However, those who lived in the area, and those who worked in the other buildings in the same industrial
estate, knew well what it was. Deep unease had accompanied its arrival. Protests from Afterlifer groups had focused on the building for the first year, until the Forensic Revival Service grew, and larger, higher profile offices opened across the country. Now, seven years later, it was regarded with a degree of pride.

  It was a bright Monday morning, just past eight-fifteen; another hot day looming. Jonah Miller swiped his pass at the main entrance and walked through the empty reception area, up one flight of stairs and into the open-plan office. On a typical day there would be thirty revivers and twenty-two support staff, but this early there were only a handful of people. He headed to his desk, smiling as best he could at those who said hi.

  He’d woken at six, restless and disjointed, and had set off for work intending to use the time to make a dent in the paperwork that had been building for weeks. But he was tired. Another bad night of fractured nightmares had left him with a head that felt full of gravel and dust.

  He stared out the window beside his desk and his eyes drifted up to the clouds. He watched them and let his thoughts wander. Watching the clouds had always been his respite from the world, losing himself in a gentle, changing sight that had nothing to do with people. To look down, and watch those scurrying from place to place, would bring unwelcome thoughts into his head – thoughts of who these people were and what lay ahead of them. And in the end, it was death, sure as anything.

  He smiled at his morbidity, but given his line of work it was hard not to think it. Most of the subjects he revived had been in the middle of just another day, when death stole up on them and pounced. The people heading into the bakery on the corner to collect their lunches; the cars nudging along in the heat of morning congestion. For every one of them, the day would come. Who would grieve them? A mother? A father? A wife? A child?

  And from that, to this: Who would grieve for him? His friends would mourn, but true grief – the complete desolation he had both witnessed and experienced – needed family, and he had no family now. He hadn’t even spoken to his stepfather in eight years.