Darren Shan - Procession of the dead

"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?