The Man Who Would Not Die Read online

  THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT DIE

  An Unusual Ghost Story

  THOMAS PAGE

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Dedication: To my father

  The Man Who Would Not Die by Thomas Page

  Originally published by Seaview Books in 1981

  First Valancourt Books edition 2019

  Copyright © 1981 by Thomas Page

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  In England, in the 1950s, Dr. G.N.M. Tyrell summarized several hundred case histories of ghost sightings. Based upon his work, he compiled a list of aspects that would define the perfect apparition. All his studies were authenticated as rigorously as humanly possible.

  If a normal individual were standing by a ghost, both figures would stand out in space and be equally solid, appearing with similar clarity in all lighting conditions, good or bad. An apparition can be seen from any perspective as vividly as a normal individual, will reflect from a mirror as a real person will, and if we close our eyes, will disappear from view like an ordinary person.

  An apparition appears clothed and may carry normal accessories such as a package or stick, or may be accompanied by a dog. The ghost’s breathing, the rustle of its clothes, and other normal noises it may make are all audible.

  An unusual sensation of coldness pervades the air when an apparition is present. Most ghosts cannot cause any physical effects such as opening doors or moving objects around the room, although it often appears as if they can.

  Since an apparition behaves as if aware of our presence, its touch feels like an ordinary human touch. However, if we try to grab hold of it, our hand will go through it without encountering any resistance. The ghost may even disappear if we attempt to corner it. It may speak and even answer a question but will not engage in any long conversation. The apparition will not remain more than half an hour. It may vanish through walls or floor or simply open the door and walk out.

  PROLOGUE

  In the latter part of the decade, a rumor crept through the American medical establishment that a certain defense contractor called Stendhal Holmes had made a “startling,” “breath­taking,” “colossal” advance in medical technology.

  Stendhal Holmes was a computer software corporation first and a manufacturer second. Their usual products were guidance systems for aircraft, satellites, and submarines. They had a hand in space probes, military command equipment, missile design, and other areas of expertise so lethal that the Federal government protected them with a blanket of secrecy. Now these creators of neutron bombs, fighter bombers, and rockets had turned their massive brainpower to helping the pained and despairing.

  Rumor had it that the company’s early ventures into the medical field were highly impressive. They’d reputedly devised a handheld X-ray camera, though a few bugs prevented it from being put on the market. They had also made a radically compact heart pacemaker. As soon as some minor design problems were rectified, it would be available. Their prosthetic flesh-tinted limbs were considered so sophisticated, it was said an amputee wearing one of their artificial legs broad-jumped over eight feet in a pair of jogging shorts and no one knew the difference. Production bottlenecks and quality-control problems delayed the marketing of these plastic arms, legs, and eyeballs.

  In point of fact, only one of Stendhal Holmes’s medical items ever appeared in public and it lived up to the company’s claims of having achieved technical miracles.

  The breakthrough was formally announced by Irwin Bickel, Senior Project Engineer, at a neurologists’ convention in Houston, Texas. Bickel proudly passed round photos of a black plastic tub shaped like a futuristic sarcophagus, the top half of which was a clear plexiglass canopy. The tub was bolted to the floor and fed by cables which led to two main consoles. One was similar to an airplane cockpit with computer terminals, the other was a smaller readout center for use at a nurse’s desk. “The Stendhal Holmes Life Support System,” Bickel intoned, “utilizes advanced sonic scanning techniques which imprint every organ, cell, and nerve in a given body. These scanners are connected to a feedback system run by a central computer that measures drug and fluid dosages to the exact molecule.”

  The doctors examined the specifications, raised their glasses over their eyes to study the photo of the computer bank, and murmured to each other.

  “We at Stendhal Holmes believe it will render every heart-lung and mechanical-assist device on earth outdated within hours. In essence, it is an entire hospital complete with nursing staff and diagnostic lab. It can perform coagulation-time tests within seconds as well as acid-base blood level and waste examinations without any human intervention, more accurately than any staff can.”

  One of the doctors said, “Every boondock meathouse in the country has its own life support system,” mentioning the Karen Anne Quinlan case in which a girl with hopeless brain damage had been kept alive by machines long after hope for recovery had been lost.

  Bickel pressed on: “Not like this one. There isn’t another machine in the world like the Stendhal Holmes capsule. It has programs refined by space hardware. Through the nerve synapses round the heart, it can detect an oncoming arrest twelve minutes before it happens and block the onset of spasms. It measures the precise amount of oxygen, copper, trace elements, and chemicals in the body. It monitors kidneys, brains, and lymph systems as well as the entire autonomic nervous system.”

  The doctors certainly admired the thing. But right then it sounded like the same old hardware, only more expensive.

  Bickel saved the best for last. “In one test, it successfully started a heart after twelve minutes of arrest.”

  A surprised murmur passed among the doctors. “Twelve minutes? Twelve minutes without oxygen?”

  “During arrest, the device automatically inflates and deflates the lungs while lowering body and blood temperature within seconds to a point where tissue damage is minimal.” By now the doctors were talking so excitedly, Bickel had to raise his voice. “The capsule searches the body for bacterial cultures and viral infections. It can direct antibiotics directly to the point of infection with molecular accuracy as well as monitor side effects. The machine prevents the onset of pneumonia, blood poisoning, gangrene, and decay. It measures the ionic and fluid level of the patient. It feeds fluids and nutrients into the patient. It diagnoses the patient’s condition and prints out the required medications for the physicians. It exposes the patient to ultraviolet light according to what the central computer decides is necessary. It is not just a life support system, gentlemen. Stendhal Holmes has gone beyond body preservation. The machine has revived comatose patients who had been given up for dead. Now I shall direct your attention to Mrs. Eleanor Cody of Phoenix, Arizona, the first patient on whom it was tested.”

  Mrs. Cody was a frail little woman in her sixties with blue-rinsed hair and thick glasses attached by a rhinestone chain round her neck. She wore a perpetually serene, lopsided smile caused by partial paralysis of the right side of her face. Stendhal Holmes had flown both her and her physician to Houston.

  While undergoing surgery for an intestinal obstruction, Mrs. Cody had suffered a stroke on the table. Since she had signed a waiver earlier, the doctors placed the unconscious woman into an LS capsule. She was in a total coma; her heart was fluttering like a canary
in a cage and blood clots were forming in her vessels like razor-edged little cinders. Shortly after the canopy closed over her, her heart stopped completely.

  Within seconds, the LS capsule had lowered her body temperature. The heart monitor and defibrillator had traced out the nerves supplying the heart muscle itself, measured the electrolytic balance of those nerves, and begun applying tiny, precise shocks directly to them. Damaged as it was, Mrs. Cody’s heart muscle began a series of gentle, then increasingly stronger contractions, and as it did so, the machine warmed the body up again, softening the thickened blood and feeding in precise amounts of anticoagulant. The heartbeat was kept deliberately slow to prevent further scarring. Meanwhile, fungus growths too small for the doctors to detect were destroyed by the LS’s antibiotic artillery, fired directly through the flesh to the lung, the liver, the gall bladder, wherever the machine’s heat detectors picked them up.

  Within half an hour, the clots were dissolved and Mrs. Cody was as free of bacteria as she had ever been. The heart pumped strongly though still slowly and her breathing was deep and regular. But she was still in a coma, despite the fact the machine informed them brain damage was minimal.

  She remained that way for three days. The machine steadily improved her acid-base blood levels, nurtured the muscles with protein injections, cleared the large bowel and lungs with suction attachments, and took over kidney functions until the nervous system could do it on its own.

  “All this time,” her physician explained, “you realize we weren’t­­­­ sure what the machine was doing. It would take over certain physical functions to enable other parts of the body to heal. We do know the computer traced out all the neural pathways comprising her brain and kept the electrolytic balance going. While it polarized the heart and temples, we just twiddled our thumbs and fed in whatever drugs, vitamins, or fluids the printouts told us to.”

  Bickel cut in excitedly. “Basically it was trying to bring her out of her coma. Nobody knew if that were possible but her brain waves continued in the theta state. She was unconscious but functioning.”

  “And we noticed an overall improvement,” the doctor continued. “In general, her muscle tone improved, blood levels were good to excellent, pressure was fine. There’s a helmet inside the capsule that monitors everything inside the skull. It even kept her eyeballs lubricated. . . .” The sheer technical wizardry, the magnificence of what this machine could do, dawned upon the silent doctors.

  On the twelfth day, the machine informed them, Mrs. Cody’s eyes were open. Brain waves revealed her to be awake. The machine printed out careful instructions about the sequence in which the heart, lung, helmet, IVs, and suction systems were to be removed. It took an hour to get her out of the LS system.

  Now Mrs. Eleanor Cody sat before the doctors, weak, brave, ineffably happy, when by all rights she should be six feet underground. Asked how she felt after that devastating stroke, she replied, “I feel good as anyone who has walked with Jesus and knows there is life after death can feel.”

  Her remarks embarrassed Bickel into an explanation. Apparently Mrs. Cody had experienced a life-after-life phenomenon while in the capsule. He asked her to describe it.

  Mrs. Cody told the doctors, “After the attack I could see myself in the machine. I knew everything that was happening to me. When my heart stopped I felt myself going down a long tunnel. Then I was in the ward up near the ceiling watching my doctors work on me. I could hear everything they were saying about me.”

  Mrs. Cody’s physician interjected. “Twelve days later, after she regained consciousness, Mrs. Cody quoted some of our remarks back to us. There is no way she could have heard us through the capsule. You can imagine!”

  The fascinated doctors heard the little old lady describe how she felt herself flying over the city of Phoenix like a bird and looking down at the little house where she had lived. “Then it wasn’t light anymore,” she told them. “It was dark. There were these columns of light floating around me. They were relatives who had died. Ahead of me I could see this huge beautiful light, different from the others, and I knew this light was Jesus.”

  One of the doctors wanted to know if Jesus spoke to her.

  “No,” Mrs. Cody’s crippled face scowled. “But the other lights did. They told me it was not time for me to die. Soon, but not now. I didn’t want to come back, I didn’t want to live anymore. It was time for me to die but the lights said no. I was all packed and ready to go.” Her little witticism caused a titter of uncomfortable laughter.

  One of the doctors said such experiences were common and naturally all could be explained psychologically. However, Mrs. Cody firmly insisted the machine brought her back against her will. Her will, though strong, was subservient to God’s will, so in that sense the whole experience, machine and all, did fit her scheme of things. It was catty-cornered but it did fit.

  Bickel informed the doctors the LS system was being shipped out to three different locales, picked for their demographics, to be further tested in a day-to-day mode. If these tests were successful, then the machine should be on the market within the year.

  It wasn’t. Within three months, Stendhal Holmes cryptically announced the LS system was discontinued. The technology utilized in it would be transferred to other medical equipment. A terse Bickel explained, without giving any details, “The device simply has not lived up to the expectations of its designers.” A medical miracle had fizzled.

  “Bury me if you can catch me.”

  —Socrates’ reply to his friend’s question as to what should be done with him after he drank the hemlock

  CHAPTER 1

  Daniel Forrester first noticed the girl as they boarded the Los Angeles flight to Denver. She sat three seats up and across the aisle from him. Although a small girl, she was not frail and she had a heart-shaped face with dusty hair that curled in tendrils and gleamed with the transparent light it caught from the window. Her body was slight, her neck long, and from what he could see her skin was smooth and stainless as porcelain.

  After the plane took off and they’d been served drinks, the girl reached under her seat for a book and Daniel Forrester realized she was not exactly a girl. She was easily past thirty-five, which was a state he found more and more attractive the older he got himself. Maybe he was mellowing. Maybe women mellowed. At any rate, men and women with a few years on them had softer edges and greetings between them seemed to carry more feeling. By the way she turned the book’s pages with a small hand, he could tell she was graceful.

  When the plane landed in Denver, Forrester was delighted to see she and a group of ski vacationers would be on the connecting flight with him to Clayton, Colorado. She was not with anyone in the phalanx of skiers standing amid the poles and luggage in the terminal. She wandered away from them. Perhaps they, like all traveling groups, were a bit too noisy, too overbearing for her. He saw her sit down in the coffee shop at the counter and order a sandwich. Daniel Forrester decided he liked her and therefore he would kick off a few moves which with luck and patience might get them together. He would approach her as he would a sales prospect. He would circle her in a friendly fashion, casting little gossamer strands of himself like raccoon traps, then ever so gently tighten these strands, drawing her closer to him. He ambled into the coffee shop as she was pouring sugar from a dispenser into her coffee. A skier sat on one side and Forrester took the seat on the other side of her.

  At the last instant he decided to change tactics. This close she did not look flaky or saddled with that laid-back cool that people affect when challenged. She looked straight at him, very direct, very blunt, very relaxed. Not much delicacy would be required, so he decided on a direct approach.

  “Hello,” said Daniel Forrester. “I was wondering if you’d be interested in a Stendhal Holmes Life Support System with microrelayed CAT scanning and defibrillation capacities.”

  The girl smiled and stirred her coffee.


  Forrester continued, “Is anybody in your family in traction? No? Any diabetics or people on kidney machines? Cripples, nephritis victims, or bleeders? No? How about your friends, any tachycardia, blood disorders, or wasting, withering diseases? Scrofula? Leprosy? Jungle rot?”

  Smiling ever wider, the girl shook her head.

  “Well, the Stendhal Holmes Life Support System is a whiz-bang machine.”

  The girl rested her chin on her hand and spoke at last. “Do you have one on you?”

  “No, but I have pictures and schematic drawings as well as tech sheets. Doesn’t it sound great? We at Stendhal Holmes are also working on a pacemaker for the mouth. For people who overindulge in pregnant silences.”

  The girl laughed.

  “What I do for a living is save lives.”

  “Good for you,” said the girl, smoothing down a stray tendril of hair.

  “My name is Daniel Forrester. Could I interest you in a drink and some deep-fried onion rings sometime?”

  “Certainly,” she replied promptly.

  A loudspeaker squealed, then announced the departure of the flight to Clayton. In the terminal, the ski patrol gathered their suitcases, poles, and bags with a clatter of fiberglass and a collective groan of relief.

  The girl finished her coffee, giving Forrester a chance to mournfully observe she wore a wedding band. He popped his last piece of Danish in his mouth, spilling a few crumbs on his coat.

  Well, what the hell, thought Daniel Forrester, nobody raped her into saying yes. “Like maybe tonight at seven-thirty on the sundeck?”

  The girl smiled after setting change on the counter and snapping her handbag shut. She did not say anything more, she just walked toward the plane leaving Forrester to figure out if the smile meant yes, no, or stick it where the sun don’t shine. Forrester hoped her husband wasn’t one of the skiers; they were all armed with poles.