Стивен Бут - Drowned Lives

‘What are the police doing? Have they got any clues who it was?’

‘As far as I can gather, they seem to think I cracked my own skull, tried to set fire to myself and then nearly drowned, just to annoy them.’

‘Useless! I presume they’ve made the link with the break-in. It must have been the same man who broke into your house and attacked me. Well, mustn’t it?’

I groaned pitifully as her voice got louder and more piercing. ‘I really don’t know, Rachel.’

Then she saw the snowdrift of damp paper. ‘Good lord, what’s all this?’

‘From the writing, I think it’s more of Samuel’s manuscript.’

‘Wow. The missing section?’

‘Could be. Though whether it’s going to be legible, I don’t know.’

‘Whoever attacked you could have taken their chance to get the manuscript,’ said Rachel. ‘I wonder why they didn’t.’

‘Perhaps they didn’t know it was there. Or they took the easy way and decided to destroy it, along with anything else on board Kestrel .’

‘And you.’

I nodded. ‘The fire would have burnt the manuscript to a cinder, if I hadn’t grabbed it.’ I looked again at the soggy, faded mass of pulp. ‘As it is, they pretty much succeeded anyway. I don’t think they wanted the manuscript for themselves. They just didn’t want anyone else to have it.’

Rachel lifted a page from the edge of the table, and a pool of water ran from under it onto the floor. She screwed up her eyes to make out the writing, which was beginning to smudge and blur.

‘Be careful with it.’

‘This looks like page one,’ she said. ‘What’s it about?’

‘I haven’t attempted to read it yet.’

‘If you don’t read it soon, it’s going to disappear altogether.’

I looked over her shoulder. The black scrawl was fading in front of my eyes. ‘God, you’re right.’

‘It’s water-soluble ink. He never seemed to use a ballpoint pen, did he?’

A feeling close to hysteria took hold of me. The ordeal on board Kestrel and my enforced dip in the canal had only seemed tolerable as long as there was something worthwhile at the end of it. But if the manuscript became illegible, it would all have been for nothing. The pounding in my head was like the worst hangover I had ever suffered — except that when I had a hangover I knew that I’d already enjoyed my pleasure beforehand. This was different. My reward for what I’d suffered was about to be snatched away from me by the effects of a bit of canal water.

‘We’ll have to make a copy, quick.’

‘It’s too late,’ said Rachel. ‘There are barely any fragments still legible.’

‘Tell me it’s not true,’ I pleaded.

‘There is one name here I can make out,’ she said. ‘Not a Buckley though.’

‘Yes?’

‘Sounds a bit familiar. Lindley Simpson. Who’s he?’

It was about this time that I began sleeping badly. Fear and guilt are insidious, and they do strange things to your mind. Sometimes, in my dreams, I imagined myself responsible for the violent deaths of my ancestors — not only Samuel, but also his grandfather Josiah and even the distant William.

I saw myself rather like the central character in that old Ealing comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets , who bumps off his relatives one by one so that he can inherit the family title. In the film, all the relatives are played by Alec Guinness. And in my disordered mind, all my ancestors became a blur, too — they all had the face of Great-Uncle Samuel. Then I would awake from the dream and realise that it wasn’t me who’d been destroying my Buckley ancestors, but someone else. And I was a Buckley too. I would be next on their list.

At other times, there was a different dream. For weeks I’d been plagued by images of Great-Uncle Samuel dying in the road at Castle Dyke. But now there were other scenes mingled with it in a terrifying panorama of death.

First I seemed to see a horse, and to hear a man with a wheeze in his throat. I heard a whistling sound, like something passing through the air... Then it switched to Kestrel , and the impact of the windlass hitting my skull, the stench of diesel fuel in my nostrils and the sound of flames around me as I faced the prospect of my own death. But suddenly I was out of Kestrel and on the hatches of a strange boat, moored by a lock gate, watching the water boil in the darkness, seeing a spreading stain and a shape rising from the depths... And once more I was back to the day before, floundering helplessly in the cut, ready to go down to the muddy bottom for the second time as Kestrel burned above me.

They say that it’s possible to regress to an earlier life, and even to remember your own death. This dream was like dying three times over. Samuel, Josiah, William.

Was it just an over-active imagination? Or was it some kind of genetic memory? Great-Uncle Samuel had planted the idea in my mind, and my subconscious had taken over. Now I was living the deaths of my ancestors over and over.

The effect was peculiar. An attack on an ancestor felt like an attack on me, and it gave me a new outlook on the idea of vengeance. Few people can be presented with the opportunity of avenging their own death.

Pipehill, Lichfield, Staffordshire. Friday 17th Jan. 1800.

To Reuben Wheeldon Esq., Warner Street, Ellesmere, Cheshire.

My dear friend,

I confess I am utterly confounded. Every thing gives me additional disturbance. Yet I am loath to think myself of so much importance as to suppose every one in a plot against me. After all, I hope the best; but if this should turn out to be a plot, nothing, I fear, but a Miracle can save me. Can the heart of man be capable of such black deceit?

I have passed two days at Burton and in the Neighbourhood, during which I have had occasion to call on my brother. I fear he passes his time swallowing doses of oblivion, as I found him more full of blue ruin than good manners. And he said, in an indirect way, that I had no Business there.

As for my Friends in Lichfield, I am heartily sick of them, for they have deceived me sadly. Do we not see hypocrisy, selfishness, folly and impudence succeed while Merit is trodden underfoot? The web of human life unravels into threads of Meanness, Spite and Cowardice, want of feeling and of indifference towards others. I have been mistaken in my public and private hopes, always disappointed where I placed most reliance. I am a bitter bad judge of the characters of men.

The grievous affliction I am now suffering under is of the bitterest kind, because it is proceeding from a cause which no time can remove. Now my Enemies spread calumny about me. I have become the butt for paltry spite. If they take away a man’s Character, there is no degree of turpitude or injustice that they may not introduce into the measures and treatment which we consider as most fit for them.

My friend, this is a trying time. It is now the heart sickens, as I think what they are about and how short a time will determine my Fate. Mr P. has presumed too much on himself, but I haven’t done with him yet.

Your friend,

Although I had been out of work for only a matter of days, I’d already fallen into the habit of getting up late. The dreams I was having didn’t help. I spent the night tossing restlessly in my bed, tormented by formless anxieties, and occasionally waking up with a jolt of panic. The result was that I got up in the morning feeling sweaty and drained. Thanks to whoever had wielded that windlass so effectively, I now also had a constant thumping headache, and a churning nausea to go with it.

The sick feeling in my stomach made me feel as though I’d swallowed too much canal water. But in fact, it was caused by the memory of fear. It was a continuous, writhing terror in my guts that came every time I recalled how near to death I’d been, how somebody had coldly and deliberately attempted to cremate me on board Kestrel .