Procession of the Dead

by Darren Shan

  She sighed and I knew it was bad news. “Your father died when you were eleven.” It should have been a huge blow, but since I could remember nothing of him, it meant little. “That was when you began taking tennis seriously.”

  “Tennis?” I said eagerly.

  “You were great. Your father taught you while he was alive. When he died, you threw yourself into it. He used to say you’d be bigger than Borg and you were determined to prove him right. You considered going pro but in the end you chose to concentrate on your studies. You didn’t want to bank on a career where the best peaked by their early twenties. You kept playing, but for fun. You won a lot of amateur contests over the years.”

  That explained my performance back in the city. “And my mother?” I asked.

  “She died when you were at college. During your second year. Her heart. She’d had problems for years. That’s one of the reasons we married so soon—you had a house for us to move into and you were all alone in the world. Can’t you remember any thing about them?”

  I shook my head. “Just names. Mother. Father. Ideas. Not people. So we moved in here and lived happily together?”

  “Yes. We’d argue sometimes, about the roof—it was thatched—and the stove and getting new windows and doors. It needed lots of work but you were reluctant to make changes. You were sentimental and wanted to keep everything the way it was.” She sipped at her tea. “I stayed here after you… went. At first because I didn’t want to be disloyal. Later because I grew to love the place. It grows on you. You told me it would, that one day I’d be as loath to alter things as you were. I scoffed but you were right.

  “We both worked in town,” she went on. “Walked most days, cycled if we were lazy. We didn’t have a car. Neither of us ever learned to drive. I always hated cars, and you… well, your father died in a car crash. I loved our walks, early in the morning, back again in the evening at the end of a busy day.”

  “What did we work at?” I asked.

  “I worked in a travel agent’s. You were a teacher.”

  I blinked slowly. From Mr. Chips to Al Capone? That was some trip. I could see now why I kept picturing loads of kids, but I had problems imagining myself as a teacher. Then again, I had been patient and understanding with Conchita. “What did I teach?” I asked.

  “Physical education. You could have taught at a university if you’d wanted, but you preferred younger pupils. Less stress, no campus politics. We remained like that for years, happy, not moving, not changing. We hoped for children of our own, barrels of them, but we weren’t in any rush. We’d married young and wanted some time by ourselves before we started a family. We were talking seriously about them when…” Her face clouded over and she coughed.

  “We were going to build an extension—this place is too small for more than three people. We’d started checking out contractors and were on the verge of… then you…” She’d been avoiding this part as long as she could. She’d shied away every time she’d come close, refusing to deal with it until the last possible moment. That time had arrived. There could be no more skipping over my disappearance. It was painful, obviously, but I had to know how The Cardinal had gotten his paws on me. “Do you really want me to go on?” she croaked.

  “Yes. I have to know, Dee. Everything.”

  “You can’t remember on your own?” She looked at me, pleading to be spared. “Think, Martin. You must be able to remember. Something this important…” I shook my head hopelessly. “Very well.” She sighed, resigned. “Like I say, we used to walk to town nearly every day. In the winter we’d wrap ourselves up in furs and walk in like a couple of Eskimos. It wasn’t winter that day but it was cold, so we wore light furs. Kissed goodbye when we parted, like we always did. I headed for my office and you went to school. You had a gymnastics class in the third period. You liked gym, especially the vaults…” Her voice cracked and tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. “Please, Martin, don’t make me go on.”

  “You must.” I squeezed her hands, trying to be a comforting husband. “You’ve come too far to stop. It’ll only be waiting for us if you do. Let’s get it out of the way, once and for all.”

  She took a breath, blew her nose, wiped the tears away and went on without a pause to the finale. “You liked to show off in the gym. At the end of most lessons you’d give the kids a display, go through your tumbling routines—you copied them from the silent comedies we loved to watch—and thrill them with your prowess on the bars and ropes. You’d always end on the vaulting horse. You’d take a long run, turn in the air, land on it with your hands and push yourself off. The kids always wanted to try but you wouldn’t let them—it was too dangerous.

  “That day, one of the children played a joke. Nothing nasty or vicious. The kids liked you. They were always playing jokes. You never came down heavy on them. A boy called Steve Greer came up with the idea. He greased the top of the vault. He thought you’d slide off and land on your butt. He thought it would be a great laugh. You might have too, if things turned out differently.

  “You approached the horse in your usual manner, cocky and strutting, giving the kids a laugh. You bounced off the springboard, high in the air, twisting your body a hundred and eighty degrees, so your legs were pointing straight up. You put your hands on the wooden top, meaning to push away. Only this time your hands slipped out from under you and you crashed straight to the floor.

  “Your head hit the vaulting horse on the way. Your neck snapped. The kids said it sounded like a gunshot. They didn’t move your body—they’d seen enough episodes of ER —only covered you with a blanket and sent for the nurse. But it was too late.”

  She stopped rocking, stopped talking, almost stopped breathing. Her face was ashen. I held her cold, limp hands. “Is that where I went missing?” I asked. “In the hospital?”

  She stared at me as if I’d said something obscene. “What? ” Her voice was ice.

  “In the hospital. Was that where I disappeared?”

  She blinked as if coming out of a dream and seeing me for the first time. “The hospital?” she repeated. “You’re not listening, Martin.” She laughed, a sickening, chilling snicker. “You broke your neck. You didn’t disappear from anywhere.” She began rocking again. Turned her face toward the wall. “You died. You broke your neck and died.” She looked back, her mouth torn between a sneer and a cry, her eyes wide and crazy. “You’re dead, Martin,” she whispered.

  I stood by the window and gazed out. I was looking for snipers in the trees, spies behind the bushes, but the countryside was clear as far as the eye could see. If I’d been traced to Sonas, the search hadn’t stretched this far. Unless of course the cottage was bugged.

  I turned from the view and took my seat again. The room was icy cold, in spite of the heat from the stove. Dee’s face was distant, numb. “There must have been a mistake,” I said.

  She smiled crookedly. “How? You died. The doctors confirmed it. I saw your body myself. Hell, I wept over it long enough.”

  “They were wrong. I didn’t die. I was injured, that’s all.”

  “I saw you,” she insisted. “Your eyes were open, your neck bent. No heartbeat, no breathing, no movement. You broke your neck and you died. No mistake.”

  “There must have been!” I barked. “Look at me—I’m alive. They buried somebody else, or I was taken before the burial, or I got out afterward. Something bad happened. Something foul. But I didn’t die.”

  “Then what? What? ” Her face was pale, her lips tight. She sat waiting for my answer. I didn’t have any but I could tell she wouldn’t twitch until I came up with one, so I thought hard.

  “Can you bring me a mirror?”

  She tilted her head at the unusual request but fetched one without asking any questions. I examined my face. The bruising was gone and my nose was straight. No cuts or scabs. Pristine. “Does my face look all right to you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s not cut or bruised?”

 
; “Of course it isn’t.”

  “I was in a fight yesterday. I got the shit knocked out of me. I was a mess. Less than thirty-six hours later, I’m fine, like I’d never been touched.” I put the mirror down and stared at her. An idea was forming. “Regenerative powers,” I said, grasping at straws.

  “Come again?” She blinked.

  “Maybe I have healing powers. I broke my neck and was medically dead, but I put myself back together and healed on my own.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “I know. But I’m here. How else could it happen?” Now I was the one asking an unanswerable question and she struggled with it.

  “How did you get out of the grave?” she asked. “If you healed, why didn’t we discover it before we buried you? How did you escape? Did you claw through the coffin and tunnel upwards?”

  “Someone got me out. They knew about me. Somebody discovered my powers, waited, jumped in when the time was right.” The Cardinal would know things like that. His files in Party Central, his interest in the extraordinary. That dream he’d told me about, when he saw a man who couldn’t be injured, who walked through hails of bullets unscathed—maybe that wasn’t a dream at all, but a clue to test my memory. Maybe this explained why The Cardinal had taken an interest in me. “It’s the only answer,” I said, halfway convinced. “There are no alternatives.”

  “There are,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  She crossed her hands and studied them. “Do you want to get really crazy?”

  “Tell me what you’re thinking, Dee.”

  “OK.” She began rocking. “You could be a ghost.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I told you it was crazy.”

  “Dee, I’m… Feel me! Do I feel like a ghost?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe ghosts are solid, indistinguishable from other people. You could be a zombie, a ghoul, some kind of vampire.” I stared at her.

  “You believe that?” I asked incredulously.

  “No. I’m just giving you alternatives. You want more? I can goon.”

  “Please do.”

  “Aliens spirited you out of the grave and reanimated you. A mad doctor dug you up and performed his Frankenstein trick. A liquid seeped through and brought you back to life. You’re a clone—scientists took grafts of Martin Robinson and built a new one.”

  I began laughing but Dee didn’t join in. “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Aliens? Clones? Zombies? We’ve got to be sensible. I’m here, I’m real, I’m alive. We have to find out why and how. We need to examine this seriously. I’ve spent a year living as somebody else. I need to know how I became Capac Raimi.”

  “Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you imagined the last year.”

  “Dee…” I groaned.

  “I’m serious. I threw the other stuff at you to show how crazy your own notion was. But now I mean it. You spend a year suffering with amnesia, don’t even know you’ve forgotten your past, and nobody else notices, they don’t ask questions or wonder why you haven’t got any identification? This is real, Martin. Your life, your death, our marriage, your past. You were a teacher, a tennis amateur, a good man, a loving husband. That’s real. What were you in the city?”

  I paused, thought about lying, then confessed. “I was a gangster.”

  She laughed out loud and I flushed, face reddening. “You wouldn’t harm a fly! But you loved watching gangster movies like The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America and those old James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart films. How about this—you didn’t die, the doctors called it wrong and you revived. But you didn’t go to the city or become a gangster. That’s all a delusion. Your face is clear? That’s because you haven’t been in a fight. That was part of the dreamworld you built.

  “Where have you been this last year? I don’t know. Possibly wandering in a daze, slowly returning to your senses, mentally fighting your way through hordes of gangsters, subconsciously working through your confusion, trying to lead yourself back here. No big mystery if this is the truth, no superpowers, nothing supernatural, no conspiracies. You survived a lethal accident, lived in a fantasy fugue and came back when your brain repaired itself. Does your life as Capac Raimi seem real now? Were the people normal? Do things fit into place when you train the spotlight of reason on them?”

  I thought of the strange fall of rain. Uncle Theo’s death and how I was spared. Conchita’s conflicting body and face. Ama on the stairs, diving into sex with a stranger. The Cardinal building an empire out of guts and coincidences. Paucar Wami, coldly merciless in a way only a fictional character could be. People disappearing, vanishing like they’d never existed. Real? Normal? Feasible?

  Not even remotely.

  “But the grave,” I said, desperately clinging to the only reality I could clearly remember. If I let the last year be stripped from me, I’d have no real sense of a past at all. “How do you explain the grave? How did I get out?”

  “That’s a problem. I think…” She began to smile. “No, it’s not. You were on display in the coffin the night before the funeral. They closed the lid after the service but didn’t tighten the screws. You must have gotten out during the night, stumbled out of the chapel unseen, staggered away, confused, lost. I don’t know how you got out of town without being seen, how you walked with a broken neck, how you scraped by over the following months. But it explains things, Martin. It does.” Her eyes were shining. She was excited. She thought she’d cracked it, that she could truly welcome me back now and pick up where we left off. But I wasn’t convinced.

  “Wouldn’t the bearers have noticed the difference in the weight?”

  “It was a heavy coffin,” Dee said. “The bearers were young, your friends. Only one of them had ever carried a coffin before. They wouldn’t have known about weights.” Dee grew more confident with every word and I was beginning to think she was right. A dreamworld, a fantasy…

  “The cemetery,” I said. “Is it far from here?”

  “A couple of miles.”

  “I want to go.”

  “To dig up the coffin?” She frowned. “I don’t think we should dothat.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s desecration. We could end up in prison. Besides, it’s your grave. I don’t think I could dig up—”

  “But it’s not.” I clutched her hands. “If you’re right, Dee—and I think you must be—that coffin’s empty. We won’t be doing anything wrong, digging up an empty grave.”

  “I’m not sure…” She was repulsed by the idea.

  “It’s the only way to be certain,” I said. “When we prove that it’s empty, we can deal with this. It’ll have to be brought to the surface eventually—if we don’t do it now, the police will when they find out I’m still alive. Let’s beat them to the punch and use this time to prepare ourselves. Maybe I’ll be able to trace my steps from there. It might jog my memory some more.”

  She hesitated before finally, reluctantly, nodding her head. “You’re right. We have to.” She looked out the window. “But we’d better wait till night. These things are easier when it’s dark.” As if she’d been grave-robbing all her life.

  The more we discussed it, the more I warmed to Dee’s theory. I’d lost control of my senses and dreamed my year in the city. Like that silly season of Dallas years ago, when they wrote off an entire season as a dream. But it had seemed so real. If I’d been prey to sporadic fits, slipping in and out of my constructed reality, like a schizophrenic coming apart at the seams…

  But I could account for every day, every character, every meeting. It was a weird world, granted, and I’d acted strangely, but it had been as real as this one. No reality breakdowns. Not until today when the marks of my fight with The Cardinal faded.

  I studied Dee, turning the theory on its head. Was she real? Maybe this place was the dream, a trick of the mind. Maybe The Cardinal had hit me harder than I’d thought. I could be lying on his carpet, playing out this scene in my mind as the Tr
oops carted me away to finish the job. That’s the trouble with picking at the threads of reality—the fabric tends to unravel and leave you floundering in a den of infinite threads, not one of which you can trust or cling to.

  We spent the day exploring our past. Dee pulled out old photos of a young boy with my face, my parents, us as teenagers, my friends, shots of me in school as both student and teacher. I found touching helped me more than hearing and seeing. When I felt objects—sets of keys, trophies, diplomas, books—I remembered events and feelings associated with them. They reinforced the physical reality of this town, this house, this person—Martin Robinson.

  “What if the coffin’s not empty?” I asked.

  “Don’t think about it,” Dee replied.

  “I have to. What if it’s occupied?”

  She stopped sorting through albums. “It has to be empty,” she said. “You can’t be in two places at the same time. I don’t buy any of that ghost or clone crap I was spouting earlier. You didn’t die and weren’t buried.”

  Her logic was faultless. “But if there—”

  “Martin!” She slammed an album shut and glared. “Don’t talk about it. It won’t happen. Things are tense enough as they are. You’ll drive us both mad if you keep this up. There’ll be no body.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I muttered.

  “Martin,” she said firmly, “I can’t be wrong.”

  We left for the graveyard at ten. The walk to the cemetery was nerve-wracking. The night was black as my memory. We walked apart at first, awkward around each other, not wanting to touch. But after half a mile we closed the gap, drawing warmth from the union. The shovels were heavy, growing heavier with each step. Our breath rose above us and mingled in the air, trailing in our wake. Owls hooted and small creatures scurried to the sides of the road.

  We encountered no other people. We didn’t expect to, not at this time of night, so close to the discotheque of the dead. Kids were in bed, parents were dozing in front of televisions, lovers were making the darkness their romantic own. Only vampires, werewolves and grave robbers were at large on a night like this.