The Reviver (2 page)

‘There’s nothing coming, Alice. You can rest now. It’s over. You can sleep.’

‘Something’s coming … please, let me go!’

‘Alice, it’s OK, it’s OK. You’re safe.’

‘I can’t see it! I can’t see it!’ Her lips barely moved, her voice fading, but to Jonah she was screaming.

‘Alice, you’re safe. Please, you’re—’

‘It’s below me!’ The fear surged, sudden and total. He was frozen now, bewildered and infected by her level of terror. He had an image of darkness beneath him, stalking, circling. ‘Please, please, let me go!
Please,
it’s…’

Jonah released her hand and lurched away from her. He scrambled back, staring, appalled that his inaction had led to such distress. She had simply been confused; her words were meaningless. He should have let her go at once.

And yet. It hadn’t just been a desire to reassure her that had made him delay. He had felt something. He turned to a camera.

‘Did you get any of that?’ he asked, but there was no response. Nobody was watching. Then the red light on the camera faded and died. Jonah looked at it, puzzled, and saw movement reflected in the blank lens. Movement behind him. He turned back to the corpse. Alice’s head, which had been lolled to one side for the duration of the revival, now twitched and rose. The eyes moved to look at him.

It wasn’t Alice. Jonah had no idea what this thing was, staring back at him. It spoke.

‘
We see you,
’ it said, and then it was gone.

2

The knock on Daniel Harker’s door came just after half past one.

The afternoon was hot and muggy. Daniel had been out of bed for only an hour, and wasn’t in the mood for visitors. He’d heard the car tyres crunching on the gravel out front, and the footsteps approach his door. When the knock came he’d already decided what to do. He ignored it.

He sat alone in his kitchen, curtains still closed, eating a bland lunch of dry toast and tomato soup. It was all he could stomach. He looked at the two empty wine bottles on his sink drainer and vowed not to drink for several days. Or until evening, at least.

He knew he was drinking too much, but it was an annual pattern. Each year, the hated month of April would arrive. Each year, he would become withdrawn and uncommunicative, sinking into a depression that would have a tight hold until the end of June.

June was more than half gone now, and his daughter Annabel was coming home for the Fourth of July; home from her own career as a journalist in England.

He needed a week to straighten himself and the house out, make it presentable and welcoming. She knew about his dark times, certainly. She had as much of a share in them as he did, but she was young. She had her own way of dealing with things.

Her annual visit marked the end of Daniel’s grief, at least until the following year. It gave him a deadline, something he always needed to focus his mind. Without her coming, he suspected he would rough it indefinitely. He knew his daughter thought the same. And every year, she gave him just long enough, and no more. Every year since her mother’s death.

He missed Robin. God, he missed his wife.

She had been an elementary school teacher and had loved what she did, continuing to work even after Daniel’s wealth and success had arrived.

‘We’re rich,’ he told her time and again. ‘We should be living it up, making the most of it.’ Robin’s answer was simple, and it shut Daniel’s mouth at once. She would give up her job, if he gave up writing. And
that
wasn’t something he would consider.

But it had not been his novels that had brought their wealth.

After leaving university with a degree in English literature, he had drifted, taking a year-long journalism course both to delay the need to find real work, and to give him a career he could use as backup while he toiled away on his novel.

Yet that book died, and he began another. He found work, meandering from newspaper to magazine, and earned a reasonable wage with a competence and dedication that made him a respected underachiever.

His pieces were well-crafted and punctual, but he lacked the luck and judgment of some of his peers. He lacked something else as well – the ability to spin, to distort, to
lie,
and expand the smallest nugget of truth into something bigger. So he broke underwhelming stories while his novel writing stuttered and failed.

But then, twelve years ago, he discovered Eleanor Preston. He found the first reviver.

*   *   *

A friend had passed a possible lead his way: a claim of a fraudulent medium, stealing from the bereaved.

Sixty-year-old Eleanor Preston had worked as an administrator in a hospice for twenty years, until Trudy Brewer’s interference got her fired. Brewer’s uncle had died at the hospice; Eleanor Preston had then, according to Brewer, offered her services to Brewer’s parents for a significant payment. Daniel’s first impressions of Trudy Brewer weren’t positive. Her real concern seemed to be financial: her uncle and parents were relatively well off, and Daniel could see that any payment to Eleanor Preston would be coming out of Trudy Brewer’s inheritance.

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.