The Colour of Death by Michael Cordy

to be on this site.  Those weren’t predictions I wrote in the envelopes.  Quite the opposite.  They were records of historical events — deaths.  Nineteen years ago there was a fire in this hospital.  Most patients got out but Mary Lopez, the woman in room 302, perished.  Two years later, in midwinter, Bob Kesey, the bearded man in room 410, was attacked and killed by a psychotic patient with a knife.  He tried to escape by jumping out of the window but was dead before he hit the ground.”
    “But that’s impossible.”
    “That’s what I thought.”  He pointed to another entry.  “This is the record of Frank Bartlett’s death.  He was the man in the Bart Simpson T-shirt you saw committing suicide yesterday.  The description matches your hallucination exactly.  One of yesterday’s orderlies was there when Bartlett died and he said you included accurate details that weren’t even in the report.  What’s more, records show that decades earlier another man committed suicide in the same room.  He hanged himself exactly as you described.”
    She put her hands over her mouth.  “You’re saying that what I saw in those rooms actually happened?”
    “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”  He pulled out another folder.  “Your medical file records most of the hallucinations you had at Oregon State.  This is where I first noticed the pattern.  They all , without exception, involved death.”
    Numbness seeped through her as she tried to process what Fox was saying.  “Those happened too?”
    “Yep.  I found death records that matched the location and description of almost every recorded hallucination.”
    “What about the second room today?  Who was the man in bed you predicted?”
    “His name was Jack Lee and he died peacefully in his sleep from an aneurysm.”
    “Why didn’t I see him?”
    A shrug.  “I don’t know.”  He frowned, reached into his briefcase and pulled out a typed loose-leaf document.  “Jane, this is getting a little out of my area.  Unless you’re perpetrating the most elaborate and pointless hoax, something unprecedented is happening.  I can just about explain how your total synaesthesia unconsciously synchronizes all your five senses to create these vivid episodes of dying, but you’re not just creating them — you’re recreating them.  These people actually died exactly as you described and your synaesthesia can’t explain that.  Even if your memory was intact you couldn’t have known about all those deaths, especially in such detail.
    “What’s so bizarre is you have no memory of your own life but appear to have perfect recall of other people’s deaths.”  He leaned forward and, for the first time since she became Jane Doe, she looked into his intense eyes and didn’t feel alone.  “What we need to do is discover where these memories are coming from and how you’re accessing them.”  He opened the document.  It was peppered with yellow Post-it notes covered in scribbles.  “There’s a theory…”  He stopped suddenly, weighing his words.  “May I be totally frank?”
    “Please do.”
    “As I see it, we have two options here.  The conventional approach:  I treat this as purely a psychiatric problem and brief Professor Fullelove.  She’ll then brief other psychiatrists who’ll try and diagnose your psychosis and draw up a treatment plan.  The problem is, apart from your amnesia, I’m not sure the issue is purely psychiatric.  And I don’t want to turn you into a medical freak show.”
    She shuddered at the thought.  “I feel enough of a freak already.  What’s the other option?”
    “We assume this is more than a psychiatric issue and speak discreetly to someone with more relevant experience.”  He waved the document.  “The author of this has a theory which kind of fits what’s happening here.  Although, to be honest, it defies normal logic.”
    “So do my hallucinations.”
    “The point is,” Fox continued,