The Reincarnationist
M. J. Rose
A bomb in Rome, a flash of bluish-white light, and photojournalist Josh Ryder's world exploded. From that instant nothing would ever be the same.As Josh recovers, his mind is increasingly invaded with thoughts that have the emotion, the intensity, the intimacy of memories. But they are not his memories. They are ancient– and violent. A battery of medical and psychological tests can't explain Josh's baffling symptoms.And the memories have an urgency he can't ignore– pulling him to save a woman named Sabina– and the treasures she is protecting. But who is Sabina? Desperate for answers, Josh turns to the world-renowned Phoenix Foundation– a research facility that scientifically documents cases of past life experiences.His findings there lead him to an archaeological dig and to Professor Gabriella Chase, who has discovered an ancient tomb– a tomb with a powerful secret that threatens to merge the past with the present. Here, the dead call out to the living, and murders of the past become murders of the present.
THE
Reincarnationist
“M.J. Rose delivers a tale that goes beyond chills and thrills.
It’s a delight of intrigue with a clever twist. Not a disappointing page.”
—Steve Berry, The Templar Legacy
“THE REINCARNATIONIST is a riveting thriller – smart, original, and so well written. Rose hooks you on the first pages of the book, where current-day murders pull the reader into ancient secrets and shocking revelations, and keeps you turning till the stunning denouement.”
—Linda Fairstein, Bad Blood
“A breakneck chase across the centuries.
Fascinating and fabulous.”
—David Morrell, Creepers
“Both unnerving and mesmerising, THE
REINCARNATIONIST by M.J. Rose will excite anyone who’s ever had the slightest curiosity about past lives.
The story is packed with unforgettable characters, breath-taking drama, and fascinating research, cementing M.J. Rose’s reputation as a master storyteller.”
—Gayle Lynds, The Last Assassin
“A triumph! A breathtaking, smart and inventive novel that dazzles while it thrills. THE REINCARNATIONIST
is one of the year’s best reads.”
—David J. Montgomery, Chicago Sun-Times & Philadelphia Inquirer
“I simply believe that some part of the human self or soul is not subject to the laws of space or time.”
—Carl Jung
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While The Reincarnationist is a work of fiction, whenever possible I relied on the facts of history and preexisting theories about the subject of reincarnation to construct the backbone of this tale.
Life in ancient Rome, paganism, early Christianity and ancient beliefs in reincarnation, as well as the Vestal Virgins, are as history recorded them. So are the descriptions of Vestals’ duties, domicile and temple, as well as the rules they lived by. Their vows of chastity were sacrosanct, and they were buried alive for breaking them.
I have taken liberties when discussing their involvement with the Memory Stones—which are wholly my own invention, as are the Memory Tools.
Many of the locations in this novel exist. The Riftstone Arch is in Central Park; the Church of the Capuchins is where I describe it in Rome. Several tombs of Vestals have been discovered in various locations around Rome, but Sabina’s was not found, as there is no record of a Vestal by that name.
The Phoenix Foundation does not, unfortunately, exist. And while Malachai and Dr. Talmage are entirely fictitious, I was inspired by the amazing Dr. Ian Stevenson, who has done past life regressions with over 2,500 children.
Josh, Natalie and Rachel experience past life regressions in ways that are similar to those of people I’ve met and read about, but their stories are entirely my invention.
My own reading and research into reincarnation theory has been an ongoing process, and what I described in these pages was culled from the tenets and writings of those who have studied and believed over thousands of years. Included at the end of this novel is a list of books for those of my readers who wish to delve further into this fascinating concept.
Please visit Reincarnationist.org for more information.
Also available byM.J. Rose
THE HALO EFFECT
THE DELILAH COMPLEX
THE VENUS FIX
The
Reincarnationist
M. J. Rose
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This book is dedicated to my remarkable editor,
Margaret O’Neil Marbury, who convinced me
I could climb this mountain.
&
To Lisa Tucker and Douglas Clegg, wonderful writers
and friends, who threw me a lifeline every
step of the way.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is my ninth published novel and the one I have been writing the longest, since before I even knew I wanted to be a writer, when my mother first introduced me to the idea of reincarnation. I missed her a little less while I was working on this book and I’m certain she would love it best of all.
There are so many people I’d like to thank, starting with Loretta Barrett, Nick Mullendore and Gabriel Davis of Loretta Barrett Books for all their hard work and excellent advice. Thanks to the whole team at MIRA Books—especially Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Alex Osusek, Laura Morris, Craig Swinwood, Heather Foy, Loriana Sacilotto, Katherine Orr, Marleah Stout, Stacy Widdrington, Pete McMahon, Gordy Goihl, Ken Foy, Fritz Servatius and Cheryl Stewart, Rebecca Soukis and Sarah Rundle. I am indeed blessed to have all of these amazing people in my corner and behind this book. It’s been a wonderful experience—thank you.
Thanks to Mayapryia Long, who gave me the right information at the right moment. For support, advice, information or just great conversation, thanks to Mara Nathan, Jenn Risko, Carol Fitzgerald, Judith Curr, Mark Dressler, Barry Eisler, Diane Vogt, Amanda’s father, Suzanne Beecher, David Hewson, Shelly King, Emily Kischell, Stan Pottinger, Elizabeth’s fiancé, Simon Lipskar, Katherine Neville, the Rome-Arch Listserv, Meryl Moss and all the International Thriller Writers.
My gratitude to each bookseller, librarian and every reader.
As always to my loving family: Gigi, Jay, Jordan, my father and Ellie.
And to Doug Scofield, for the calm in the storm, the eternal optimism and the music.
Chapter 1
They will come back, come back again,
As long as the red earth rolls.
He never wasted a leaf or a tree.
Do you think he would squander souls?
—Rudyard Kipling
Rome, Italy—sixteen months ago
Josh Ryder looked through the camera’s viewfinder, focusing on the security guard arguing with a young mother whose hair was dyed so red it looked like she was on fire. The search of the woman’s baby carriage was quickly becoming anything but routine, and Josh moved in closer for his next shot.
He’d just been keeping himself busy while awaiting the arrival of a delegation of peacekeepers from several superpowers who would be meeting with the pope that morning, but like several other members of the press and tourists who’d been ignoring the altercation or losing patience with it, he was becoming concerned. Although searches went on every hour, every day, around the world, the potential for danger hung over everyone’s lives, lingering like the smell of fire.
In the distance the sonorous sound of a bell ringing called the religious to prayer, its echo out of sync with the woman’s shrill voice as she continued to protest. Then, with a huge shove, she pushed the carriage against the guard’s legs, and just as Josh brought the image into that clarity he called “perfect vision,” the kind of image that the newspaper would want, the kind of conflict they loved captured on film, he heard the blast.
Then a flash of bluish white light.
The next moment, the world exploded.
In the protective shadows of the altar, Julius and his brother whispered, reviewing their plans for the last part of the rescue and recovery. Each of them kept a hand on his dagger, prepared in case one of the emperor’s soldiers sprang out of the darkness. In Rome, in the Year of their Lord 391, temples were no longer sanctuaries for pagan priests. Converting to Christianity was not a choice, but an official mandate. Resisting was a crime punishable by death. Blood spilled in the name of the Church was not a sin, it was the price of victory.
The two brothers strategized—Drago would stay in the temple for an hour longer and then rendezvous with Julius at the tomb by the city gates. As a diversion, that morning’s elaborate funeral had been a success, but they were still worried. Everything depended on this last part of their strategy going smoothly.
Julius drew his cape closed, touched his brother’s shoulder, bidding him goodbye and good luck, and skulked out of the basilica, keeping to the building’s edge in case anyone was watching. He heard approaching horses and the clatter of wheels. Flattening himself against the stone wall, Julius held his breath and didn’t move. The chariot passed without stopping.
He’d finally reached the edge of the porch when, behind him, like a sudden avalanche of rocks, he heard an angry shout split open the silence: “Show me where the treasury is!”
This was the disaster Julius and his brother had feared and discussed, but Drago had been clear—even if the temple was attacked, Julius was to continue on. Not turn back. Not try to help him. The treasure Julius needed to save was more important than any one life or any five lives or any fifty lives.
But then a razor-sharp cry of pain rang out, and ignoring the plan, he ran back through the shadows, into the temple and up to the altar.
His brother was not where he’d left him.
“Drago?”
No answer.
“Drago?”
Where was he?
Julius worked his way down one of the dark side aisles of the temple and up the next. When he found Drago, it wasn’t by sound or by sight—but by tripping over his brother’s supine body.
He pulled him closer to the flickering torches. Drago’s skin was already deathly pale, and his torn robe revealed a six-inch horizontal slash on his stomach crossing a vertical gash that cut him all the way down to his groin.
Julius gagged. He’d seen eviscerated carcasses of both man and beast before and had barely given them a passing glance. Sacrifices, felled soldiers or punished criminals were one thing. But this was Drago. This blood was his blood.
“You weren’t … supposed to come back,” Drago said, dragging every syllable out as if it was stuck in his throat. “I sent him … to look in the loculi … for the treasures. I thought … Stabbed me, anyway. But there’s time … for us to get out … now … now!” Drago struggled to raise himself up to a sitting position, spilling his insides as he moved.
Julius pushed him down.
“Now … we need … to go now.” Drago’s voice was weakening.
Trying to staunch the blood flow, Julius put pressure on the laceration, willing the intestines and nerves and veins and skin to rejoin and fuse back together, but all he accomplished was staining his hands in the hot, sticky mess.
“Where are the virgins?” The voice erupted like Vesuvius without warning and echoed through the interior nave. Raucous laughter followed.
How many soldiers were there?
“Let’s find the booty we came here for,” another voice chimed in.
“Not yet, first I want one of the virgins. Where are the virgin whores?”
“The treasury first, you lecherous bastard.”
More laughter.
So it wasn’t one man; a regiment had stormed the temple. Shouting, demanding, blood-lust coating their words. Let them pillage this place, let them waste their energy, they’d come too late: there were no pagans to convert, no treasure left to find and no women left to rape, they’d all already been killed or sent into hiding.
“We have to go …” Drago whispered as once again he fought to rise.
He’d stayed behind to make sure everyone else got out safely. Why him, why Drago?
“You can’t move, you’ve been hurt—”Julius broke off, not knowing how to tell his brother that half of his internal organs were no longer inside his body.
“Then leave me. You need to get to her … Save her and the treasures … . No one … no one but you …”
It wasn’t about the sacred objects anymore. It was about two people who both needed him desperately: the woman he loved and his brother, and the fates were demanding Julius sacrifice one of them for the other.
I can’t let her die and I can’t leave you to die.
No matter which one he chose, how would he live with the decision?
“Look what I found,” one of the soldiers shouted.
Screams of vengeance reverberated through the majestic hall. A shriek rang out above all the other noise. A woman’s cry.
Julius crawled out, hid behind a column and peered into the nave. He couldn’t see the woman’s upper body, but her pale legs were thrashing under the brute as the soldier pumped away so roughly that blood pooled under her. Who was the poor woman? Had she wandered in thinking she’d find a safe haven in the old temple, only to find she’d descended into hell? Could Julius help her? Take the men by surprise? No, there were too many of them. At least eight he could see. By now the rape had attracted more attention, drawing other men who forgot about their search to crowd around and cheer on their compatriot.
And what would happen to Drago if he left his side?
Then the question didn’t matter because beneath his hands, Julius felt his brother’s heart stop.
He felt his heart stop.
Julius beat Drago’s chest, pumping and trying, trying but failing to stimulate the beating. Bending down, he breathed into his brother’s mouth, forcing his own air down his throat, waiting for any sign of life.
Finally, his lips still on his brother’s lips, his arm around his brother’s neck, he wept, knowing he was wasting precious seconds but unable to stop. Now he didn’t have to choose between them—he could go to the woman who was waiting for him at the city gates.
He must go to her.
Trying not to attract attention, he abandoned Drago’s body, backed up, found the wall and started crawling. There was a break in the columns up ahead; if he could get to it undetected, he might make it out.
And then he heard a soldier shout for him to halt.
If he couldn’t save her, Julius would at least die trying, so, ignoring the order, he kept moving.
Outside, the air was thick with the black smoke that burned his lungs and stung his eyes. What were they incinerating now? No time to find out. Barely able to see what lay ahead of him, he kept running down the eerily quiet street. After the cacophony of the scene he’d just left, it was alarming to be able to hear his own footsteps. If someone was on the lookout the sound would give him away, but he needed to risk it.
Picturing her in the crypt, crouched in the weak light, counting the minutes, he worried that she would be anxious that he was late and torment herself that something had gone dangerously wrong. Her bravery had always been as steadfast as the stars; it was difficult even now to imagine her afraid. But this was a far different situation than anything she’d ever faced, and it was all his fault, all his shame. They’d risked too much for each other. He should have been stronger, should have resisted.
And now, because of him, everything they treasured, especially their lives, was at stake.
Tripping over the uneven, cracked surfaces, he stumbled. The muscles in his thighs and calves screamed, and every breath irritated his lungs so harshly he wanted to cry out. Tasting dirt and grit mixed with his salty sweat as it dripped down his face and wet his lips, he would have given anything for water—cold, sweet water from the spring, not this alkaline piss. His feet pounded the stones and more pain shot up through his legs, but still he ran.
Suddenly, raucous shouting and thundering footfalls filled the air. The ground reverberated, and from the intensity he knew the marauders were coming closer. He looked right, left. If he could find a sheltered alcove, he could flatten himself against the wall and pray they’d run past and miss him. As if that would help. He knew all about praying. He’d relied on it, believed in it. But the prayers he’d offered up might as well have been spit in the gutter for the good they’d done.
“The sodomite is getting away!”
“Scum of the earth.”
“Scared little pig.”
“Did you defecate yourself yet, little pig?”
They laughed, trying to outdo each other with slurs and accusations. Their chortles echoed in the hollow night, lingered on the hot wind, and then, mixed in with their jeers, another voice broke through.
“Josh?”
No, don’t listen. Keep going. Everything depends on getting to her in time.
A heavy fog was rolling in. He stumbled, then righted himself. He took the corner.
On both sides of him were identical colonnades with dozens of doors and recessed archways. He knew this place! He could hide here in plain sight and they would run by and—
“Josh?”
The voice sounded as if it was coming to him from a great blue-green distance, but he refused to stop for it.
She was waiting for him … to save her … to save their secrets … and treasures… .
“Josh?”
The voice was pulling him up, up through the murky, briny heaviness.
“Josh?”
Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and took in the room, the equipment and his own battered body. Beyond the heart rate, blood oxygen and blood pressure monitor flashing its LED numbers, the IV drip and the EKG machine, he saw a woman’s worried face watching him. But it was the wrong face.
This wasn’t the woman he’d been running to save.
“Josh? Oh, thank God, Josh. We thought …”
He couldn’t be here now. He needed to go back.
The taste of sweat was still on his lips; his lungs still burned. He could hear them coming for him under the steady beat of the machines, but all he could think about was that somewhere she was alone, in the encroaching darkness, and yes, she was afraid, and yes, she was going to suffocate to death if he didn’t reach her. He closed his eyes against the onslaught of anguish. If he didn’t reach her, he would fail her. And something else, too. The treasures? No. Something more important, something just beyond his consciousness, what was it—
“Josh?”
Grief ripped through him like a knife slitting open his chest, exposing his heart to the raw, harsh reality of having lost her. This wasn’t possible. This wasn’t real. He’d been remembering the chase and the escape and the rescue as if they had happened to him. But they hadn’t. Of course they hadn’t.
He wasn’t Julius.
He was Josh Ryder. He was alive in the twenty-first century.
This scene belonged sixteen hundred years in the past.
Then why did he feel as if he’d lost everything that had ever mattered to him?
Chapter 2
Rome, Italy—the present Tuesday, 6:45 a.m.
Sixteen feet underground, the carbine lantern flickered, illuminating the ancient tomb’s south wall. Josh Ryder was astounded by what he saw. The flowers in the fresco were as fresh as if they’d been painted days before. Saffron, crimson, vermilion, orange, indigo, canary, violet and salmon blossoms all gathered in a bouquet, stunning against the Pompeii-red background. Beneath him, the floor shimmered with an elaborate mosaic maze done in silver, azure, green, turquoise and cobalt: a pool of watery tiles. Behind him, Professor Rudolfo continued explaining the importance of this late fourth-century tomb in his heavily accented English. At least seventy-five, he was still spry and energetic, with lively, coal-black eyes that sparkled with excitement as he talked about the excavation.
He’d been surprised to have a visitor at such an early hour, but when he heard Josh’s name, Rudolfo told the guard on duty that yes, it was fine, he was expecting Mr. Ryder later that morning with the other man from the Phoenix Foundation.
Josh had woken before dawn. He rarely slept well since his accident last year, but last night’s insomnia was more likely due to the time change—having just arrived in Rome that day from New York—or the excitement of being back in the city where so many of his memory lurches took place. Too restless to stay in the hotel, he grabbed his camera and went for a walk, not at all sure where he was going, But something happened while he was out.
Despite the darkness and his ignorance of the city’s layout, he proceeded as if the route had been mapped out for him. He knew the path, even if he had no idea of his final destination. Deserted avenues lined with expensive stores gave way to narrow streets and ancient buildings. The shadows became more sinister. But he kept going.
If he’d passed anyone else, he hadn’t noticed them. And even though it had seemed like a thirty-minute walk, it turned out to have taken more than two hours. Two hours spent in a semi-trance. He’d watched the night change from blue-gray to pale gray to a lemony-pink as the sun came up. He’d seen lush green hills develop the way the images in a photograph did in a chemical bath. From nothing to a shadow to a sense of a shape to a real form, but he didn’t know if he’d stopped to take any shots of the scenery. The whole episode was both disconcerting and astonishing when it turned out that, seemingly by chance, he’d stumbled onto the very site he and Malachai Samuels had been invited to view later that morning.
Or not by chance at all.
The professor didn’t ask why he was so early or question how he’d found the dig. “If it were me, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep, either. Come down, come down.”
Content to let the professor assume enthusiasm had brought him there at six-thirty in the morning, Josh breathed deeply and took a first tentative step down the ladder, refusing to allow his mind to dwell on the claustrophobia he’d suffered his whole life and which had intensified since the accident.
Strains of music from Madame Butterfly that had first caught Josh’s attention and then drawn him up this particular hill were louder now, and he concentrated on the heartbreaking aria as he descended into the dimly lit chamber.
The space was larger than he’d anticipated, and he exhaled, relieved. He’d be able to tolerate being there.
The professor shook his hand, introduced himself, then turned down the volume on the dusty black plastic CD player and began the tour.
“The crypt is—I will do this for you in feet, not meters—eight feet wide by seven feet long. Professor Chase—Gabriella—and I believe it was built in the very last years of the fourth century. Until we have the carbon dating back we can’t be positive. But from some of the artifacts here, we think it was 391 A.D., the same year the cult of the Vestal Virgins ended. Such decoration is atypical for this type of burial chamber, so we believe it must have been intended for someone else and then used for the Vestal when her inconstancy was discovered.”
Josh lifted his camera to his eye, but before he took a shot he asked if the professor minded. Nothing short of a bomb had ever stopped him from taking a photo when he was working for the Associate Press. Then six months ago he’d taken a leave of absence to work as a videographer and photographer of children who came to the Phoenix Foundation for help with their past-life regression memories. Since then, he’d gotten used to asking for permission before shooting. In return, he had access to the world’s largest and most private library on the subject of reincarnation as well as the chance to work with the foundation’s principals.
“It’s fine, yes, but would you clear it with either Gabriella or me before you show the pictures or release them to anyone? Everything here is still a secret we are trying to keep until we have additional information about exactly what we have discovered. We don’t want to create false excitement if we’re wrong about our find. Better to be safe, no?”
Josh nodded as he focused and clicked the shutter. “What did you mean by the Vestal’s inconstancy?”
“Maybe that is the wrong word, I’m sorry. I meant the breaking of her vows. That’s better, no?”
“What vows? Were the Vestals nuns?”
“Pagan nuns, yes. Upon entering the order they took a vow of chastity, and the punishment for breaking that vow was to be buried alive.”
Josh felt an oppressive wave of sadness. As if on autopilot, he depressed the shutter. “For falling in love?”
“You are a romantic. You will enjoy Rome.” He smiled. “Yes, for falling in love or for giving in to lust.”
“But why?”
“You need to understand that the religion of ancient Rome was based on a strict moral code that stressed truthfulness, honor and personal responsibility while demanding steadfastness and devotion to duty. They believed that every creature had a soul, but they were also very superstitious, worshipping gods and spirits who had influence over every aspect of their lives. If all the rituals and sacrifices were performed properly, the Romans believed the gods would be happy and help them. If they weren’t, they believed the gods would punish them. Contrary to public misinformation, the ancient religion was quite humane in general. Pagan priests could marry, and have children and …”
The faint scents of jasmine and sandalwood that usually accompanied his memory lurches teased Josh, and he fought to stay attuned to the lecture. He felt as if he’d always known about these painted walls and the maze beneath his feet but had forgotten them until this moment. The sensations that usually accompanied the waking nightmares he’d been experiencing since the accident were rocking him: the slow drift down, the undulating, the prickles of excitement running up his arms and his legs, the submergence into that atmosphere where the very air was thicker and heavier.
He ran in the rain. His soaked robe was heavy on his shoulders. Under his feet the ground was muddy. He could hear shouting. He stumbled. Struggled to get up.
Focus, Josh intoned in some other section of his brain where he remained in the present. Focus. He looked through the lens at the professor, who was still talking, using his hands to punctuate his words, causing the light beam to crisscross the tomb wildly, illuminating one corner and then another. As Josh followed with his camera, he felt the grip on his body relax and he let out a sigh of relief before he could stop himself.
“Are you all right?”
Josh heard Rudolfo as if he was on the other side of a glass door.
No. Of course he was not all right.
Sixteen months before, he’d been on assignment here in Rome, which turned out to be the wrong place at the wrong time. One minute he’d been photographing a dispute between a woman with a baby carriage and a guard, and the next a bomb was detonated. The suicide bomber, two bystanders and Adreas Carlucci—the security guard—were killed. Seventeen people were wounded. No motive had been discovered. No terrorist group had claimed the incident.
The doctors later told Josh they hadn’t expected him to live, and when he finally came to in the hospital forty-eight hours later, scattered bits of what seemed like memories started to float to the surface of his consciousness. But they were of people he’d never met, in places he’d never been, in centuries he’d never lived.
None of the doctors could explain what was happening to him. Neither could any of the psychiatrists or psychologists he saw once he was released. Yes, there was some depression, which was expected after an almost-fatal accident such as the one he’d suffered. And of course, post-traumatic stress syndrome could produce flashbacks, but not of the type he was suffering: images that burned into his brain so he had no choice but to revisit them over and over, torturing himself as he probed them for meaning, for reason. Nothing like dreams that fade with time until they’re all but forgotten, these were endlessly locked sequences that never changed, never developed, never revealed any of the layers that hid beneath their horrific surface.
These were blue-black-scarlet chimeras that came during the day when he was awake. They obsessed him to the point of becoming the final stress in an already-broken marriage and set him apart from an entire phalanx of friends who didn’t recognize the haunted man he’d become. All he cared about was finding an explanation for the episodes he’d experienced since the accident. Six full blown, dozens of others he managed to fight back and prevent.
As if they were made of fire, the hallucinations burned and singed and scorched his ability to be who he’d always been, to function, to sustain some semblance of normalcy. Too often, when he caught sight of himself in a mirror, he blanched. His smile didn’t work right anymore. The lines in his face had deepened seemingly overnight. The worst of it was in his eyes, as if someone else was in there with him waiting, waiting, to get out. He was haunted by the thoughts he couldn’t stop from coming, like a great rising flood.
He lived in fear of his own mind, which projected the fragmented kaleidoscopic images: of a young, troubled man in nineteenth-century New York City, of another in ancient Rome caught up in a violent struggle and of a woman who’d given up everything for their frightening passion. She shimmered in moonlight, glistening with opalescent drops of water, crying out to him, her arms open, offering him the same sanctuary he offered her. The cruelest joke was the intensity of his physical reaction to the visions. The lust. The rock-hard lust that turned his body into a single painful craving to smell her scent, to touch her skin, to see her eyes soaking him up, to feel her taking him into her, looking down at her face softened in pleasure, insanely, obscenely hiding nothing, knowing there was nothing he was holding back, either. They couldn’t hold back. That would be unworthy of their crime.
No, these were not posttraumatic stress flashbacks or psychotic episodes. These shook him to his core and interfered with his life. Tormented him, overpowered him, making it impossible for him to return to the world he’d known before the bombing, before the hospital, before his wife ultimately gave up on him.
There was a possibility, the last therapist said, that there was something neurological causing the hallucinations. So Josh visited a top neurologist, hoping—as bizarre as it was to hope such a thing—that the doctor would find some residual brain trauma as a result of the accident, which would explain the waking nightmares that plagued him. He was disconsolate when tests showed none.
Josh was out of choices—nothing was left but to explore the impossible and the irrational. The quest exhausted him, but he couldn’t give up; he needed to understand even if it meant accepting something that he couldn’t imagine or believe: either he was mad, or he’d developed the ability to revisit lives he’d lived before this one. The only way he would know was to find out if reincarnation was real, if it was truly possible.
That was what brought him to the Phoenix Foundation’s Drs. Beryl Talmage and Malachai Samuels, who, for the past twenty-five years, had recorded more than three thousand past-life regressions experienced by children under the age of twelve.
Josh took another photograph of the south corner of the tomb. The smooth, cold metal case felt good in his hands, and the sound of the shutter was reassuring. Recently he’d given up digital equipment and had been using his father’s old Leica. It was a connection to real memories, to sanity, to support, to logic. The way a camera worked was simple. Light exposed the image onto the emulsion. Developing the film was basic chemistry. Known elements interacted with paper treated with yet other known elements. A facsimile of an actual object became a new object—but a real one—a photograph. A mystery unless you understood the science. Knowledge. That was all he wanted. To know more—to know everything—about the two men he had been channeling since the accident. Damn, he hated that word and its association with New Age psychics and shamans. Josh’s black-and-white view of the world, his need to capture on film the harsh reality of the terror-filled times, did not jibe with someone who channeled anything.
“Are you all right?” the professor asked again. “You look haunted.”
Josh knew that, had seen it when he looked in the mirror; glimpsed the ghosts hiding in the shadows of his expression.
“I’m amazed, that’s all. The past is so close here. It’s incredible.” It was easy enough to say because it was the truth, but there was more he hadn’t said that was amazing. As Josh Ryder, he’d never before stood in that crypt sixteen feet under the earth. So then how did he know that behind him, in a dark corner of the tomb the professor hadn’t yet shown him or shone the light on, there were jugs, lamps and a funerary bed painted with real gold?
He tried to peer into the darkness.
“Ah, you are like all Americans.” The professor smiled.
“What do you mean?”
“Impertinent … no … impatient.” The professor smiled yet again. “So what it is it you are looking for?”
“There’s more back there, isn’t there?”
“Yes.”
“A funerary bed?” Josh asked, testing the memory. Or the guess. After all, they were in a tomb.
Rudolfo shined the light into the farthest corner, and Josh found himself staring at a wooden divan decorated with carved peacocks adorned with gold leaf and studded with pieces of malachite and lapis lazuli.
Something was wrong: he’d expected there to be a woman’s body lying on it. A woman’s body dressed in a white robe. He was both desperate to see her and dreading it at the same time.
“Where is she?” Josh was embarrassed by the plaintive despair in his voice and relieved when the professor anticipated his question and answered it.
“Over there, she’s hard to see in this light, no?” In a long slow move, the professor swept the lantern across the room until it illuminated the alcove in the far corner of the west wall.
She was crouched on the floor.
Slowly, as if he were in a funeral procession, walking down a hundred-foot aisle and not a seven-foot span, Josh made his way to her, knelt beside her and stared at what was left of her, gripped by a grief so intense he could barely breathe. How could a past-life memory, if that’s what it was—something he didn’t believe in, something he didn’t understand—make him sadder than he’d ever been in his life?
There, in a field, in the Roman countryside at 6:45 in the morning, inside a newly excavated tomb that dated back to the fourth-century A.D., was proof of his story at its end. Now, if he could only learn it from the beginning.
Chapter 3
I call her Bella because she is such a beautiful find for us,” Professor Rudolfo said, shining the lamp on the ancient skeleton. He was aware of Josh’s emotional reaction. “Each day, since Gabby and I discovered her, I spend this time in the morning alone with her. Communing with her dead bones, you might say.” He chuckled.
Taking a deep breath of the musty air, Josh held it in his chest and then concentrated on exhaling. Was this the woman he only knew as fractured fragments? A phantom from a past he didn’t believe in but couldn’t let go of?
His head ached. The information, present and past, crashed in waves of pain. He needed to focus on either then or now. Couldn’t afford a migraine.
He shut his eyes.
Connect to the present, connect to who you know you are.
Josh. Ryder. Josh. Ryder. Josh Ryder.
This was what Dr. Talmage taught him to do to stop an episode from overwhelming him. The pain began subsiding.
“She teases you with her secrets, no?”
Josh’s “yes” was barely audible.
The professor stared at him, trying to take his mental temperature. Thinking—Josh could see it in the man’s eyes—that he might be crazy, he resumed his lecturing. “We believe Bella was a Vestal Virgin. Holy and revered, they were both protected and privileged. Tending the fire and cleaning the hearth was a woman’s job in ancient times. Not all that different nowadays, no matter how hard women have tried to get us men to change.” The professor laughed. “In ancient Rome, that flame, which was entirely practical and necessary for the survival of society, eventually took on a spiritual significance.
“According to what is written, tending the state hearth required sprinkling it daily with the holy water of Egeria and making sure the fire didn’t go out, which would bring bad luck to the city—and was an unpardonable sin. That was the primary job of the Vestals, but …”
As the professor continued to explain, Josh felt as if he were racing ahead, knowing what he was going to say next, not as actual information, but as vague recollections.
“Each Virgin was chosen at a very young age—only six or seven—from among the finest of Rome’s families. We cannot imagine such a thing now, but it was a great honor then. Many girls were presented to the head priest, the Pontifex Maximus, by anxious fathers and mothers, each hoping their daughter would be picked. After the novitiate was chosen, the girl was escorted to the building where she would live for the next three decades: the large white marble villa directly behind the Temple of Vesta. Immediately, in a private ritual witnessed only by the other five Vestals, she’d be bathed, her hair would be arranged in the style brides wore, a white robe would be lowered over her head and then her education would begin.”
Josh nodded, almost seeing the scene play out in his mind, not quite sure why he was able to picture it so precisely: the young, anxious faces, the crowd’s excitement, the solemnity of the day. The professor’s question broke through the dreamscape and jolted Josh back to the present.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” Josh asked.
“I was requesting that you not discuss anything I am telling you or that you will see with the press. They were here all of yesterday trying to get us to reveal information we aren’t ready to. And not just the Italian press. Your press, too. Dozens of them, following us. Like hungry dogs, they are. One man especially, I can’t remember his name… . Oh, yes. Charlie Billings.”
Josh knew Charlie. They’d been on assignment together a few years before. He was a good reporter and they’d stayed friends. But if he was in Rome it wouldn’t be good for the dig: it was hard to keep a story away from Charlie.
“This Billings hounded me and Gabriella until she talked to him. What is that expression? On the record? So the story ran and the crowds came. Students of pagan religions, some academics, but mostly those who belong to modern-day cults devoted to resurrecting the ancient rituals and religion. They were very quiet and reverential. Behaving as if this was a still sacred site. They didn’t bother us. It was the traditional churchgoers who started the small riot and all the problems. Stomping around and protesting and shouting out silly things such as we are doing the devil’s work and that we would be punished for our sins. They misunderstand Gabby and me. We are scientists, no? Then, last night, I received a call from Cardinal Bironi in Vatican City who offered me an obscene amount of money to sell him what we’ve found here and not make it public. Based on what he offered, he—or the people who have put up the money—are very afraid of what we might have found. That’s what happens when the word pagan is whispered in the Holy City.”
“But why? They’re the ones with all the power.” “Bella could add to the existing controversy over the trivial role women now play in the church compared to ancient times. It is a very popular argument and a big problem that modern religion gives women less of a role than ancient religion.” The professor shook his head. “And then,” he said softly, “there is the other issue. Any artifact that doesn’t have a cross on it can be viewed as a threat. Especially if these artifacts have something to do with reincarnation, as Gabriella and your bosses believe.” “Why reincarnation? Because of the absolution problem?” “Yes, imagine if man believed he alone bore responsibility for his eternal rest, that it is within his own control to get to heaven. No Father, no Son, no Holy Ghost. What would happen to the power the Church holds over our souls? Imagine the worldwide confusion and rebellion and exodus from the Church if reincarnation were ever proved.”
Josh nodded. In the past few months, he’d heard variations on this theme from Dr. Talmage. His eyes returned to Bella. Even as a corpse, her intensity was like a strong wind on a beach—there was nowhere to go to escape its force. He took a step closer to her.
“Are you curious how we have certified Bella as a Vestal?” the professor asked.
“There’s no question she was a Vestal,” Josh answered too quickly, and then worried that Rudolfo had picked up on his slip.
From the professor’s curious glance, he had. “How do you know that?”
He must be more careful. “I misunderstood what you said, I’m sorry. Professor, please, how can you certify that she was a Vestal?”
Rudolfo grinned as if he had not just pleaded with Josh to ask this very question. His warm eyes twinkled and he launched into his explanation with gusto. “We have written records about the Vestals that describe certain details, each of which we see here. Although this tomb does not conform to the barren type of pressed-dirt enclosure most often used when Vestals were put to death, this woman was buried alive—the punishment reserved for those nuns who broke their vows—not to starve to death but to suffocate. That’s the reason for those jugs. One for water, the other for milk—” He pointed to the roughhewn earthenware. “The very presence of the bed confirms it. You don’t bury a dead man or woman with a bed. Or an oil lamp, for that matter.”
“Why do you think she was over there in the corner, though? Not sleeping on the cot? As the oxygen ran out it would have made her tired. Wouldn’t she have gone to sleep where it was comfortable?”
“Very good, that’s one of our questions, too. It’s also very confusing why sacred objects were buried with her, because ancient Romans weren’t like the Egyptians. Their dead were not outfitted for the afterlife. Other than the lamp and the water and the milk, we didn’t expect to find anything else here.”
Josh’s head pounded again. “What kind of objects did you find?”
The professor pointed to a wooden box in the mummy’s hands. “She has been holding on to that for sixteen hundred years. Exciting, no?”
Josh instantly recognized it. No, that was impossible. He must have seen a photograph of a similar box in a museum. Even more confusing, despite its familiarity, he had no idea what it was. “Have you opened it yet?”
The professor nodded. “To come across a fine carved fruit-wood box like that and not open it? I don’t know many archaeologists who could resist. It’s much older than Bella. Gabby and I think it dates back to before 2000 B. C., maybe as far back as 3000 B. C., and it doesn’t appear to be Roman at all, but Indian. We need to wait for the carbon dating.”
“And inside? What is inside?” Pinpricks of excitement ran up and down Josh’s arms.
“We can’t be certain until we do more work and take many tests, but we think they are the Memory Stones of the legendary Lost Memory Tools that your own Trevor Talmage wrote about.”
“What are you basing that on?”
“The words carved here and here.” He pointed to the border running around the perimeter of the box. “We believe these are the same lines found on an ancient Egyptian papyrus currently in the British Museum. The same lines Trevor Talmage translated in 1884. Do you know about that?”
Josh nodded. Talmage was the founder of the Phoenix Club—what was now the Phoenix Foundation. And Josh had read the entire “Lost Memory Tools” folder of original notes and translations that had been found behind a row of books in the library during the 1999 renovation at the Foundation.
He was given the gift of a great bird who rose from fire to show him the way to the stones so he could pray upon them with song and lo! All of his past would be shown unto him.
As Josh recited the words, a voice inside his head spoke them in another language that sounded alien and archaic.
“That’s the same translation that Wallace Neely used,” Rudolfo said.
“Who?” The name tickled Josh’s consciousness.
“Wallace Neely was an archeologist who worked here in Rome in the late 1800s. Several of his digs were financed by your Phoenix Club. He found the original text that Talmage was in the process of translating at the time of his death … .”
He continued talking as Josh recalled a flashback he’d had six months ago, on the first day he’d walked into the Phoenix Foundation.
Percy Talmage, home for the summer break from Yale, was in the dining room, listening to his uncle Davenport talk about protecting the club’s archeological investments in Rome. His uncle mentioned the archeologist they’d been financing. His name was Wallace Neely and he was searching for the Lost Memory Tools.
And now, here in this ancient tomb, sitting beside the professor, another memory surfaced, but not one that belonged to him; Josh was remembering for someone in the past. He was remembering for Percy.
Percy was just eight years old the first time he’d heard about the tools. His father had shown him the ancient manuscript he was translating. It had been written by a scribe who said the tools were not just a legend. They existed. The scribe had seen them and given a full description of each of the amulets, ornaments and stones.
“The tools are important,” Trevor said to his son, “because history is important. He who knows the past controls the future. If the tools exist and if they can help people rediscover their past lives, you, me—and every member of the Phoenix Club—need to ensure this power is used for the good of all men, not selfishly exploited.”
Percy didn’t understand just how important it was for years. And years.
Was it possible that Josh had traveled halfway around the world to come back to where he’d started? Like so many things, this couldn’t be a coincidence. He needed time to work out the connections, but that time wasn’t now; the professor was still talking.
“In the 1880s Neely purchased several sites in and around this area, a practice that was very common then,” the professor explained. “People bought the land they wanted to excavate so they could own the spoils outright. The club went into partnership with Neely and helped pay for the excavations, which could explain why the same inscription appears in both his journal and Talmage’s notes.”
Josh peered down at the intricately carved wooden box clasped in the mummy’s hand. In its center was a bird rising out of a fire, a sword in its talons. It was almost identical to the coat of arms carved into the Phoenix Foundation’s front door. In the border, around the perimeter, he saw the markings that Rudolfo had pointed out.
“Do you know what language this is?”
“Gabriella has plans to be in touch with experts in the field. She believes they could be an ancient form of Sanskrit.”
“I thought she was an expert?”
“She is. In ancient Greek and Latin. This is neither.”
Josh was confused about something. “You said this tomb was intact when you found it?”
“Yes.”
“So how could Neely have been here?”
“We don’t believe he—or anyone else—ever worked on this site. The pages we have from his journal indicate he excavated two sites nearby but found nothing. He’d gone to work on a third site, but we don’t know what happened there. His journal abruptly ended while he was in the middle of that dig.”
“Abruptly?”
“He was killed. There’s very little known about the circumstances.”
“But you have the journal?”
“We have some pages.”
“Where did you get them?”
“Ask Gabby. She brought them to me along with the grant to take up where Neely stopped.”
“And now you think you’ve found what he and the men who belonged to the Phoenix Club were looking for.”
The professor nodded. “We think so. At least some of it, but there are so many unknowns still.” He pointed to a slightly discolored area on the wall near where the mummy crouched. “That was hidden by a tapestry and we don’t know why. Or why we found a knife beside Bella, because typically Roman women were never buried with weapons. And why is the knife broken? What was she doing?”
Taking a long breath, Rudolfo looked down at the creature. “Oh, Bella. What secrets do you have?” The professor got down on his knees and leaned toward her.
“Talk to me, my Belladonna,” he whispered in an intimate voice.
Josh experienced a flash of a completely unfounded and unexpected emotion: a white-hot surge of jealousy unlike anything he’d ever felt for any lover he’d ever had. He wanted to rush over and pull Rudolfo away, to tell him he had no business leaning in so close, no right to get so near to her. Josh hadn’t known that this corpse even existed an hour before, but his recollections had taken over and in his mind he saw muscles appearing, then being covered by flesh, the flesh plumping out her face, neck, hands, breasts, hips, thighs and feet, all coming to life, her lips pinking, her eyes being colored a deep blue. The remnants of her coppery cotton robe turned white as they’d been years before. Only her long and wavy red hair remained the same—parted in the middle and braided into two ropes that hung past her shoulders.
She was a corpse now, skin like leather and brittle bones, but once … once … she’d been beautiful. A million images crashed inside his head. Centuries of words he’d never heard before. One louder than the rest. He snatched it out from the cacophony.
Sabina.
Her name.
Chapter 4
“I’m not sure you believe the story you just told me, but I believe it,” the professor said after Josh told an abbreviated version of what had happened to him in the past sixteen months and how he had come to be there so early that morning. “Every time you looked at her, I could tell there was something else you were seeing. I knew there was some connection more than just curiosity.” He seemed inordinately pleased with himself.
Yes, in the gloomy light, if Josh squinted, the mummy was almost a living woman crouched there in the corner, not a sixteen-hundred-year-old shell whose sleep had recently been disturbed.
A breeze from the opening to the tomb whooshed through the space, and a single wisp of a curl escaped from her braids.
She’d always been so proud of how she looked, of being well kept; how she’d hate that her hair had come undone. He could see her unbraiding it, turning it into a glorious jasmine-and-sandalwood-perfumed silk tent that covered them both as they kissed in the dark, in secret, under the trees. Her hair fell on his cheeks, his lips and twisted in and out of his fingers: it was the thread that wove them together, that would keep them from ever separating.
He didn’t think about what he was doing, it happened too fast, he simply reached out and grasped the curl and—
“No,” the professor shouted as he pulled Josh’s arm away. “She is fragile. That she is still intact is a miracle. If you touch her, she might break. Do you understand?”
The sensation of her hair on his fingers was almost more than Josh could bear. Turning away, rubbing his hands together, he found and then focused on the ancient oil lamp, blackened with soot on the ground. It looked as if she’d pushed it as close as she could get it to the alcove in the wall, at that discolored patch of earth.
The gates in his mind opened an inch wider. Josh’s head throbbed with the new rush of information. He needed to go deeper into the lurches instead of skimming them, but he could only be in one place at a time. Then or now. Not both.
Give in to it. Concentrate on what happened. Long ago. Long ago, right here. What happened here?
Josh, oblivious to the professor’s warnings that he might be defiling the dig, fell to his knees and clawed at the dirt wall with his bare hands. He had something to prove. To her. To himself. He didn’t know what it was—only that something that lay behind this partition would vindicate him.
“What are you doing?” the professor asked, horrified. “Stop!”
As if the dream had become reality and the reality had slipped away, Josh only vaguely heard the professor cautioning him to stop, barely felt the man’s hands trying to pull him back. The man’s protestations didn’t matter. Not anymore.
The dirt was packed tightly, but once he dug the first few handfuls out the rest was easier to break through. The wall, which was only four or five inches thick, three-and-a-half-feet tall and three feet wide, broke apart in chunks, revealing what appeared to be the opening of a tunnel. A piece of rock ripped the skin on his left palm, but he couldn’t stop, he was almost there.
A gush of cool, stale air rushed toward him.
Ancient air.
Sixteen-hundred-year-old molecules and particles filled his lungs, along with the scents of jasmine and sandalwood. He climbed in, despite the claustrophobia that reached out and grabbed hold of him and the out-of-control panic that threatened his progress. Sweating suddenly, now gasping for breath, he desperately wanted to turn around, but the pull of the tunnel was more powerful than the paranoia.
The space only accommodated him on all fours. So, on his hands and knees, he crawled forward, immediately engulfed in darkness, and sadness crushed him as if the air itself was weighted down with it. He struggled on slowly, going five yards in, ten yards in, then twenty and then twenty-five. The professor continued calling out for Josh to stop, but he couldn’t: there was an end point somewhere up ahead and he needed to reach it.
He navigated a turn, gulping for air, and froze, incapable of moving. It would be easier to die now than to go forward. Picturing the dirt that surrounded him, he saw it coming loose, breaking free, raining down on him. So real was the manifestation of his fear, he could taste the grit in his mouth, feel it in his nostrils, closing up his throat.
But something important waited for him up ahead. More important than anything else in the world.
“Stop, stop!” Rudolfo yelled, his voice coming from a far distance, distorted and echoing.
Oh, how he wanted to, but he managed another five yards.
The professor’s voice reached him, but more faintly now. “What if there is a drop and you can’t see it? What if you fall? I can’t get to you.”
No, and that was one of the fears that plagued him now. A sudden break, a hollow cave beneath this one, a descent into subterranean darkness.
He sensed the energy in the tunnel and let it pull him forward. Almost alive, it begged him to come, to come deeper into its shadows, to explore what was waiting, what had been waiting for so damn long.
“Come back at least and get a flashlight…. What you are doing is dangerous… .”
Of course, the professor was right. Josh had no idea what lay ahead, but he was too close now to turn back, not sure that if he did he would find the nerve to start over.
He moved forward another foot and then he felt it. Something long and hard under his fingers. Trying to identify it through touch, he examined its contours and its circumference.
A long stick? Some kind of weapon?
The surface was slightly pitted. It wasn’t wood. Or metal.
No. He knew through logic and through a primordial instinct.
It was bone.
Human bone.
Chapter 5
New York City—Tuesday, 2:00 a.m.
Four months after her aunt’s unexpected death from a heart attack, Rachel Palmer learned that a woman who lived in her building was assaulted on the stoop as she fished in her bag for her keys. Much to her chagrin, Rachel couldn’t shake how uncomfortable she felt in the brownstone after that: always looking over her shoulder when she opened the front door, rushing up the stairs, quickly throwing the bolt behind her and never sleeping through the night. When she mentioned that she was going to start looking for another place, her uncle Alex suggested she temporarily move into his palatial duplex at Sixty-Fifth and Lexington.
Even though he never said it or showed it, she knew he was lonely—Alex and her aunt Nancy had been inseparable the way certain childless couples can be—and even though he was only sixty-two-years old, Rachel sensed it was going to be a long time before he sought the companionship of another woman.
Rachel’s father had abandoned her mother when she was a child, and Alex had stepped in, becoming much more to her than an uncle. Now she was glad to keep him company and enjoy the inviolability the building’s doorman plus her uncle’s round-the-clock security system gave her.
Without realizing it, Rachel got used to the companionship, and in the past two days since Alex had left for a week-long business trip to London and Milan, she’d had trouble getting to sleep. Having given up for the night, she was in bed with the lights on, simultaneously watching an old movie on television, sipping a glass of white wine and reading the next morning’s news on her laptop.
Tomb Belongs to Vestal Virgin
By Charlie Billings
Rome, Italy
It was confirmed yesterday that the recent excavation outside of the city gates is believed to be the burial site of one of ancient Rome’s last Vestal Virgins.
“We were fairly certain that the tomb dated back to the late fourth century, specifically from 390 to 392 A.D. The pottery and other artifacts we’ve found further bears this out. Barring any more surprises, we believe the woman buried here was a Vestal,” said Gabriella Chase, professor of archeology at Yale University, a specialist in ancient religions and languages, who, along with Professor Aldo Rudolfo from the University of Rome La Sapienz, has been working at sites in this area for three years.
“What makes this particular excavation especially exciting is that the woman buried here may be one of the last six Vestals,” Chase said. “After more than a thousand years, the cult of the Vestals came to an end in 391 A.D., coincident with the rise of Christianity under the reign of Emperor Theodosius.”
The noise emanating from the television disappeared. The lights in the bedroom dimmed. Rachel tried to keep reading, tried to stay in bed, feel the sheets under her hands, pillows at her back, but deep inside of her, her heart fluttered, raced; the promise of understanding gave her a physical thrill. A whole world that she didn’t know anything about presented itself like an uncut diamond. All she needed to do was step forward and explore it.
Entering, she was bedazzled by a scene that glittered in hyper-realistic sunshine. Warmth surrounded her and held her, cosseting her like a summer wind. Comforted and excited at the same time. The radiance was inside her now, and she felt light, so light she was flying, moving faster and faster and at the same time aware of each sensation as if it was happening in very slow motion.
The sun burned her cheeks. The smell of the heat filled her nostrils. Her body hummed as if she were an instrument someone played. She heard music, but it didn’t have anything to do with tones or keys or chords or melody. It was pure rhythm. Her heart changed its beat to keep pace. Her breathing altered to the new timing.
Then it was cold. Shivering, she peered through a glass door, through a crack in the curtains, spying on two men, both hunched over a desk.
“This is what I came to Rome for. What I gave up hope I’d ever find,” said the one she knew well, though she couldn’t remember his name.
Then she saw the magic colored stones and their reflections. Flashes of blue and green lights filled her with a desperate pleasure. It was a drug. She wanted to stand there and try to understand how they melded into each other, creating a hundred new shades: a rainbow of emerald melting into peacock blue melting into cobalt melting into sea green melting into sage melting into teal, into red, burgundy and crimson.
“This is important, a real find.” The man’s voice was hard like the edges of the stones and she felt little cuts on her skin where his words touched her. She didn’t care if she bled. She wanted to be part of this moment and this pain and this excitement. It surpassed anything that had ever happened to her before.
And then it was over.
Dizzy, Rachel put her head back and stared up at the ceiling. Her skin was burning hot. How long had the episode lasted? A half hour?
She picked up her wine. No, the glass was still cold.
Only minutes?
Except it seemed so real, so much more real than any daydream she’d had before. It wasn’t just an image stuck in her head. She thought she’d been sucked through time and space and had been somewhere else for a moment, not seeing the scene played out but being part of it.
Leaving her bedroom, she walked down the sweeping staircase and headed toward the kitchen. She needed something stronger than wine. She wished her uncle was home so she could tell him what had happened; it was the kind of thing he’d be fascinated by. No, nothing had happened. She must have been tired, after all, fallen asleep without knowing it, dreamed the villa and the man and the colors.
After pouring a brandy, she took a few sips, the fiery liquid stinging her eyes and burning the back of her throat, and then, instead of going back to her bedroom, she went into her uncle’s den and sat down at his desk. She felt safer there, surrounded by all his books. That was when she noticed, tucked into his desk blotter so that it was hardly noticeable, a corner of newsprint.
She pulled it out.
Tomb Possibly Dates Back 1600 Years.
Rachel shivered as she read the dateline. This story had been filed two weeks ago, in Rome, by that same reporter. No, there was nothing portentous about Alex tearing out this article. He was a collector. Tombs yielded ancient artifacts. The house was filled with objets d’art. She was overreacting. It was just a coincidence.
Wasn’t it?
What else could it be?
Chapter 6
Rome, Italy—Tuesday, 7:45 a.m.
Josh felt a sharp, searing, twisting pain in his middle. Taking his breath away. Stunning him with its intensity. He broke out in a second cold sweat. The pain worsened. He needed to get out of the tunnel; his panic was making it almost impossible for him to breathe. If he hyperventilated now he might suffocate, and the professor was too old and too slow to get to him in time. He needed to get out now.
But he couldn’t turn around. The space was too narrow. How was that possible? He’d gotten here, hadn’t he?
He sat back on his haunches and reached out both of his hands, feeling for the walls on either side. His fingers hit dirt almost immediately. The tunnel must have narrowed as it continued without him being aware of it.
The reality of the darkness descended on him. He was fully conscious and present. The smell of the dank air nauseated him and he was suddenly, inexplicably sure he was going to die in this tunnel. Now. Any minute. In this small, narrow space that was not big enough for a man to turn around in.
A small rock came loose and pinged him on the shoulder. What if his presence caused an avalanche of stone, and he became trapped in this passageway to hell? His chest tightened and his breathing became increasingly labored. He tried a series of contortions but couldn’t manage to turn.
His panic heightened.
A few deep breaths.
A full minute of focusing on one fact: he’d gotten this far, that meant he would be able to get out.
Of course. Just go backward. Don’t try to turn now. Don’t turn until the space widens again.
The gripping frenzy broke, the anxiety vanished and Josh became aware of a very different pain. The tunnel was filled with rubble. Small pebbles and sharp stones ripped his palms, pressed down deep to the bone in his knees. He held his hands up to his face, forgetting for a minute that there was no light—he couldn’t see what he’d done to his flesh but could guess from the overpowering sweet smell of blood. Struggling out of his shirt, he banged his head on the tunnel’s roof. Ripping the fabric with his teeth, he used the strips to wrap around both of his bleeding palms. There was nothing he could do for his knees.
Crawling backward was awkward and slow going, and he’d only gone a few feet when he heard the voices: the professor and another man were speaking in loud, rapid Italian. Something about the cadence made him think they were arguing.
Moving steadily, doing his best to ignore the pain, he finally reached the point where he could turn around. After that he moved faster, and seconds later rounded a curve. Ahead was a straightaway at the end of which he could see the interior of the tomb.
The professor stood in pale yellow lantern light, fists by his sides, facing someone Josh couldn’t see but could hear. The stranger’s voice was cruel and demanding. The professor’s response was angry and defiant. No translation was necessary. The professor was in jeopardy.
Josh crawled forward another foot. Then another.
The stranger crossed in front of the tunnel opening and became somewhat visible. From his clothing, he looked like the man guarding the site whom Josh had encountered when he’d first arrived.
Nothing to worry about, then.
Except they continued to argue; hot words were flung back and forth so rapidly that even if Josh had spoken basic Italian, he wouldn’t have been able to understand.
The shouting escalated and the professor tried to push the guard away, but the man stepped back adroitly and Rudolfo lost his balance, falling to the ground. The guard put his foot on the professor’s chest.
It was almost impossible to crawl faster. There was too much debris in the tunnel, and despite the makeshift bandages, his wounds throbbed. But he must. This was tied to the past, a chance for Josh to right a wrong. It was inches from his reach, almost within his grasp.
A stone pierced the skin on his right knee. Involuntarily, Josh swore under his breath. Then he froze. The only chance he had to stop whatever was going on was to take the guard by surprise.
Then everything happened so quickly that he would have missed it if he’d glanced away for five seconds, but his eyes were riveted to the action. He just wasn’t fast enough to stop any of it. The entire tomb was in his sight now. Far away still, but visible.
The guard leaned down, bent over the ancient corpse and snatched the fruitwood box out of her arms.
“No, no …” The professor clawed at the guard, jumping on him like an angry monkey, grabbing at him, for the box.
As if the professor were a mere annoyance, the large man flung Rudolfo off. The professor landed on the ground, close to the mummy. Too close. His arm hit her and her head fell forward—she was in danger of coming apart. Rudolfo let out an agonized scream and rushed to her side. But before he could reach her, the guard kicked her with his heavy boot and her intact form splintered at the waist with a sickening crack.
While the professor kneeled at Sabina’s side, the guard opened the fruitwood box, pulled out what looked like a leather pouch, shook its contents into his hand, pocketed whatever he’d found and then hurled the box at the professor. It hit his shoulder and broke apart, the pieces flying into the air and then landing haphazardly.
Josh was only ten yards away, planning on how he was going jump out, take the man by surprise, tackle him and get back what he’d taken.
Hand forward.
Knee forward.
Hand forward.
Knee forward.
Rudolfo stood, dizzy, rocking back and forth. The guard hurried toward the ladder.
With only a few feet left to go, Josh inched steadily forward. The way the tunnel was angled he could see the whole scene, and he watched with growing dread as the professor rushed toward the opening of the tomb.
The guard had started up the ladder.
Rudolfo tried to grab hold of the man’s shirt, to pull him down, to stop him.
The guard pushed the professor’s hand away as if it were nothing more than an insect and took another step up.
Not ready to give up, Rudolfo took hold of the ladder’s wooden dowels and tried to shake the guard loose.
Josh had two, maybe three yards to go.
The guard stopped climbing—he was halfway up now, and he just stood there, staring down at Rudolfo, and then he pulled out his gun.
The professor took a step up the ladder.
The guard’s finger teased the trigger.
Josh was almost at the entrance of the tunnel, and just as he screamed an agonized “no” in warning, the gun went off, causing an enormous explosion in the small tomb and drowning out his warning. Behind him, he heard a rumble and then the sound of heavy rain. No. Not rain. Rocks. Some parts of the tunnel’s walls were collapsing in on themselves. And in front of him, he saw the professor fall on his back on the hard, cold, ancient mosaic floor.
Chapter 7
T he man sat in the leather chair, his hands resting on the arm pads, his fingers circling the smooth nail heads. Around and around the cold metal circles as if this one movement was enough to keep him occupied forever. His eyes were shut. The gold drapes were drawn, and the room’s rich decor was cloaked in darkness.
He was satisfied to sit and do nothing but wait. Long pauses in the plan didn’t bother him. Not after all this time. From the moment he’d first heard the legend of the Memory Stones he knew that one day whatever power they held would be his. Needed to be his. No price was too high and no effort was too great to find out about the past.
His past.
His present.
And so, too, his future.
The idea that the stones might work, that they could, in fact, enable people to remember their previous lives, was unbearably pleasurable to him. He fantasized about the stones the way other men fantasized about women. His daydreams about what would happen once they were in his possession elevated his blood pressure, took away his breath and made him feel weak and strong at the same time in an utterly satisfying way. And because he’d been taught to be disciplined, he gave in to the temptation of dreaming about them only when he felt he deserved the indulgence.
He deserved it now.
Were they emeralds? Sapphires the color of the night skies? Lapis? Obsidian? Were they rough? Polished? What would they feel like? Small and smooth? Larger? Like glass? Would they be luminescent? Or dull, ordinary-looking things that didn’t begin to suggest their power?
He didn’t mind waiting, but it seemed to him that he should have heard by now.
He had an appointment he had to keep. No, it was premature to worry. He wouldn’t contemplate any kind of failure. He disliked that he’d involved other people in his plan. No one you hired, no matter how much you paid them, was entirely trustworthy. Regardless of how well he’d tried to plan for the mistakes that could happen along the way, he was certain to have overlooked at least a few. He felt a new wave of anxiety start to build deep in his chest and took several deep breaths.
Relax. You’ve reached this point. You’ll succeed.
But so much is at stake.
He picked up the well-worn book he’d been reading last night when his anticipation of what today would bring had kept him awake, Theosophy by the nineteenth-century philosopher Rudolf Steiner. There were always new books being published on the subject that mattered so much to him—he bought and read them all—but it was the thinkers of the past centuries whom he responded to and returned to so often: the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walt Whitman, Longfellow; the prose of Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and so many more who engaged, reassured and aided him in amending and revising his own ever-evolving theories. They were his touchstones, these great minds that he could only know through their words. So many brilliant men and women who had believed what he believed.
He let the book fall open to the soft leather bookmark with his initials stamped on the cordovan in gold, at the beginning of a chapter titled “The Soul in the World of Souls after Death.” He’d underlined several paragraphs and he reread them now.
There follows after death a period for the human spirit in which the soul casts off its weakness for its physical existence in order then to behave in accordance with the laws of the world of the spirit and the soul alone, and to free the mind. It is to be expected that the longer the soul was bound to the physical the longer this period will last… .
His right hand returned to the brass buttons on the chair. The metal was cool to the touch. There was not much he’d ever lusted after the way he craved these stones. Once he had them, oh, the knowledge he would gain. The mysteries he would solve. The history he could learn. And more than that.
He read the next paragraph, in which Steiner described how great a pain the soul suffered through its loss of physical gratification and how that condition would continue until the soul had learned to stop longing for things that only a human body could experience.
What would it be like to reach the level of not longing? A pure level of thought, of experiencing the oneness of the universe? The ultimate goal of being reincarnated?
He looked up from the page and over at the phone, as if willing the call to come. It was a simple burglary: the professor was elderly. He would be there alone. It was just a matter of overpowering him and taking the box. A child could accomplish it. And if a child could do it, an expert could certainly do it. And he was only hiring experts at every step of the way. The most expensive experts money could buy. For a treasure, for this treasure, was any price too high?
There was no reason to worry. The call would come when the job was done. The round brass buttons were warm once more. He moved his fingers over to the next two, relieved by the cold metal on his skin, and returned to the book.
Having reached this highest degree of sympathy with the rest of the world of the soul, the soul will dissolve in it, will become one with it … .
If he had proof of past lives, actual reassurance of future lives, what would he do with the knowledge first? Not torture or punish; he had no desire to cause pain or sorrow. Find lost treasure? Discover truths that had been turned into lies through history? Yes, all that in time, but the first thing he would—
The sound startled him, although he was expecting it, and he jerked forward in the chair. As much as he wanted to, he didn’t pick up on the first ring. He put the bookmark back in the book and closed it. Listening to the second ring, he took a satisfying breath. He’d waited for this for so long.
Lifting the receiver, he held it up to his ear.
“Yes?”
“It’s done,” said the man in heavily accented Italian.
“You’ll proceed to the next step?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.”
He was ready to hang up, but the man spoke quickly. “There’s something I should tell you.”
He braced himself.
“We had a small accident, and—”
“No. Not on the phone. Report it through your contact.” He hung up and stood.
People were fools. He’d explained a dozen times how important it was that nothing revealing be discussed over the phone. Anyone could be listening. Besides, it didn’t matter if there’d been a small accident. Accidents happened, didn’t they? What mattered was that the stones were almost in his possession, at last.
Chapter 8
“Are you hurt?” Josh asked the professor.
“No, stunned, not hurt.”
He was on his back, lying on the mosaic floor, at the foot of the ladder.
“Here, let me help you. Are you sure he didn’t hit you?”
“It was so odd, looking up into the barrel of the gun, it was like looking into the night. Except a night as big as all the nights I’ve ever known. As big as all the nights Bella has slept all these sixteen hundred years.”
Rudolfo was having trouble straightening up; he was favoring one side of his body.
“Are you sure you are all right?”
He nodded. Concentrated. Frowned. And then looked down at his stomach.
The professor was wearing a dark blue shirt, and until that moment, in the low light inside the tomb, Josh had missed the spreading stain. But now they both saw it at the same time.
As carefully as he could, Josh pulled the professor’s shirt away from his body. The wound seeped blood. Snaking his fingers around Rudolfo’s back, he checked for an exit wound. He couldn’t find one. The bullet was still inside him.
Meanwhile, the professor kept talking. “Good timing for you,” he said. “If you hadn’t been in the tunnel you would be bleeding like a pig, too, eh?”
Except, Josh thought, if he’d been quicker, he might have prevented this. Hadn’t he thought this before?
“Bad timing for me,” the professor rambled. “I would have liked to have lived long enough to find out if what Gabriella and I have found … Find out if what Bella has been protecting all these years … is … is … as important as we think.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you.” Josh put his fingers on the man’s wrist, looked at his own watch and counted.
“If I’d had a daughter …” the professor said, “she’d be just like her … tough as nails … with that one soft streak. She’s too much alone, though … all the time alone… .”
“Bella?” Josh asked, only half listening. The professor was losing blood too quickly; his pulse was too slow.
Rudolfo tried to laugh but only managed a grimace. “No. Gabby. This find … Her find … Something no one believed existed. But she was as cool as … What is your expression … Cool as … What is it?”
“Cool as? Oh. Cool as a cucumber.”
Rudolfo smiled faintly; he was visibly failing.
“Professor, I need to call for help. Do you have a phone?”
“Now we know … dangerous … what we found … . You’ll tell her, dangerous… .”
“Professor, do you have a phone? I need to call for help.”
“Did he take … all of the box, too?”
“The box?” Josh looked around and saw the pieces of it on the ground. “No. It’s still here. Professor, can you hear me? Do you have a phone? I need to call for help. We need to get you to a hospital.”
“The box … is here?” The idea seemed to buoy him.
“Yes. Professor, do you have a phone?”
“Jacket. Pocket.”
Finding the phone, Josh checked for a signal and then dialed 911. Nothing. He stared at the LED panel. 911? Why did he think the number would be the same in Italy?
He hit zero and was connected in seconds with an operator.
“Medical emergency,” he shouted as soon as he heard another human voice, hoping the words were similar enough in Italian for her to understand. They must have been because the woman said sì and switched him over. While he waited he wondered what he would do if the next operator didn’t speak English. But that turned out to be the least of his problems.
“Yes, I understand. An ambulance. Where is your location?” the next operator asked.
An address. A simple thing, really. Except Josh had no idea where he was. He looked down; the professor’s eyes were shut.
“Professor Rudolfo? Can you hear me? I need to tell them where we are. An address. Can you hear me?”
No response.
Josh explained what was going on to the sympathetic woman on the other end of the phone. “He’s not responsive. I’m afraid he’s dying. And I don’t know where we are.”
“Are there any landmarks?”
“I’m sixteen feet under the ground!”
“Go outside, look for something, some sign, a name, a building. Anything.”
“I’ll have to leave him.”
“Yes, but you have no choice.”
He leaned down to the professor. “I’m going outside for a minute.”
Rudolfo opened his eyes and Josh thought he’d heard the question and was going to tell him where they were, but he wasn’t focused on Josh. Searching the room frantically, his eyes settled on the body of the woman who had died here so many years ago. Then he slipped back into unconsciousness.
Josh looked over at her, too. “Keep him safe,” he whispered, oblivious of how strange a thing that was for him to do.
Even though he climbed up the ladder as quickly as he could, he didn’t think he was moving fast enough. Reaching the surface, he scanned the area.
“I’m in a damn field. I see … there are cypress trees … oak trees …” He turned. “A hill behind me. About five hundred yards away there’s a piece of a gate or a building, very old… .”
“That doesn’t help. No signs?”
“If there was a sign, goddamn it—” His voice was strained and loud.
“There is probably a road, sir. Find the road if you can,” she interrupted.
“Right. Stay with me. I’ll find something.”
Josh jogged down the slight hill. Looked left, right. It was just a stretch of two-lane highway. To his right there was a bend blocking the view. To the left, more of the same vista: cypress tress, lush verdant fields with terracotta rooftops far in the background. Nothing specific to help him tell her where they were.
Someone must know where the hell this place was. Someone other than the man who lay dying in the crypt.
“Tell me your name,” Josh said to the woman on the phone. “There’s someone I can call to get the address. I’ll call you right back.”
“My name is Rosa Montanari, but I can stay on the line and connect you. Give me the number, sir.”
Ninety seconds later, Malachai Samuels answered his cell phone on the second ring. “Hello?”
“I don’t have any time to explain this to you, but quick, I need you to find Gabriella Chase and get me the exact address of the dig.”
“I just this minute sat down with Gabriella Chase. For breakfast. Aren’t you coming?”
“Put her on the phone.”
“Why don’t you tell me what—”
“I can’t now,” he interrupted. “This is an emergency.”
There was a brief pause during which Josh heard Malachai repeating what he’d said. Then he heard a woman’s voice, deep, silvery and anxious.
“Hello, this is Gabriella Chase. Is something wrong?”
Josh stayed on the line while Gabriella dictated the address and then while the operator ordered the ambulance. He didn’t understand what was being said, but it was reassuring to know that help was on its way.
When she finished talking to the paramedics, Rosa told Josh she’d stay on the phone with him until they got there and suggested he check on the professor so she could keep the ambulance drivers updated.
Rudolfo’s breathing was even shallower and he had less color than minutes before.
“Professor Rudolfo? Professor?”
His lips parted and he whispered a few unintelligible syllables.
“Mr. Ryder? Are you there?”
Josh almost forgot he was still holding the phone to his ear. “Yes?”
“How is the professore?” Rosa asked.
“Very bad. He’s unconscious.”
“The ambulance should arrive in eight to ten minutes.”
“I don’t know if he can make it that long. He’s still bleeding. I thought it had stopped. Is there anything I can do until they get here?”
“I have a doctor standing by.”
This wondrous woman had an emergency room doctor on another line, and for the next interminable few minutes, with Rosa translating, Dr. Fallachi helped Josh keep the professor alive and stop the blood loss. It would take approximately twenty minutes for someone to bleed out and die from a wound like the one the professor sustained, the doctor said. Josh judged ten to twelve minutes had already passed. It was going to be close.
From the corner, Sabina, because now that was how he thought of her, looked over at them with her sightless eyes, and under her ghostly gaze he felt the full force of his failure. If this man died, it was his fault. If he hadn’t been in the tunnel, he would have been able to help Rudolfo. Instead, he’d been deep in the earth, bathed in sweat, almost paralyzed with anxiety, crawling toward some long-forgotten remembrance or some insane man’s delirium.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. But only the bones heard him. Sabina’s bones.
Chapter 9
One minute, Josh was cradling the professor, waiting for the ambulance. The next, the scent of jasmine and sandalwood blew past him, and he braced himself for the first stirrings of exhalation that preceded an episode. At the same time that Josh desperately wanted to stop the lurch, he also ached for it. An addict, this was his drug. It was that exhilarating. It was that horrific.
Josh had always thought that occasional sense of recognition people experience when they meet someone for the first time and feel an instant connection was nothing to pay attention to. You laugh and say, I’d swear I already know you. Or when you go on vacation to a town you’ve never been to but feel like you have been there before. It’s disturbing, but you shake it off. Or it’s amusing, and you mention it to a friend or spouse.
It’s just déjà vu, you say, not thinking twice.
Maybe when it used to happen.
But not now.
Malachai and Dr. Talmage had educated him beyond that. That fleeting sense was a gift, a moment of unforgetting, signifying that there was a connection between you and the person you’d just met or the place you’d just visited. Nothing is an accident, nothing is a coincidence, according to theories of rebirth that go back through history, through the centuries, circling through cultures, changing and developing, but only attracting so much controversy in the West after the fourth century A.D. In the East, being skeptical about reincarnation would have been as unusual as questioning the wetness of water.
While he waited for what seemed much too long, trying to will the professor to live, Josh was certain he’d tasted death in that place before. He didn’t know what had happened here in the past, only that he now felt he was on some unimaginable journey of repetition that was out of his power to stop.
Sitting on the ground, feeling the professor’s pulse slow, he trained his eyes out the opening, up toward the sky. This way, as soon as the paramedics arrived, he’d see them.
The air undulated around him, and shivers of anticipation shot up and down his arms and legs. Even while he sat perfectly still in one dimension, he was being sucked down into a vortex where the atmosphere was heavier and thicker, where he floated like a ghost rather than walking like a man, and where he felt pleasure more purely and pain more acutely.
It began like every episode. The scene developed slowly, the way photographs appear, as if by magic, on pristine sheets of paper, swimming up out of a swirl of liquid. He was the stranger outside looking in as the scene opened before him. He saw the players and the stage. And then, in a matter of seconds, he became the person he was observing. Saw now through another’s eyes, spoke in the other’s voice. Was not himself. Had lost himself. Did not know there was another self.
Chapter 10
Julius and Sabina Rome—386 A.D.
The screams alerted him as the wind blew the smell of the acrid smoke into his bedchamber. They all lived in fear of it, and most of them had been witness to some form of it at some point in their lives. Fire was their most sacred possession, and fire was their fiercest enemy.
The story of the great conflagration that burned two-thirds of the city down more than three hundred years before was still told as a cautionary tale. During the night of July 18, a blaze started in the merchants’ area. There were too many structures, all made of wood, squeezed too close together. Hot summer winds fanned the flames until one by one, the stores and dwellings, some five-, six-stories high, caught on fire. For six days and seven nights, the inferno raged, and then for several days afterward, it smoldered.
The city was left in ruins.
The historian Tacitus wrote an account describing how terrified men and women, the helpless old and the helpless young, fugitives and lingerers alike, tried to escape all at once, which only added to the confusion.
Some, it was said, those who’d lost too much, or who were consumed with guilt at not having been able to save their loved ones, chose not to run, but freely gave themselves to the fire and died in the blaze. To make it worse, many who might have helped had been afraid to fight, since menacing gangs were attacking those who tried. That’s where the rumors came from that Nero had ordered the fire to persecute early Christians. After all, Nero had been tormenting them for years, using them as human torches, crucifying and sacrificing them. But would the emperor destroy his own city, his own treasures?
Others blamed that great inferno on angry gods and ill luck. Still others believed the early Christians themselves started the fire to destroy the pagan city they despised. For weeks before that fated July night, in the streets of the poorest neighborhoods, early radical upstarts were passing out leaflets prophesying the burning destruction of Rome and stirring up public opinion against the old order.
Now, three centuries later, as Julius ran toward the temple, nostrils burning, feeling the heat on his face intensifying, he worried that this blaze was politically motivated. He and many of the other high priests held that these were the last days of the Roman Empire, as they’d known it. The emperor and the Bishop of Milan were seeing to that. The ideological fight between the all-encompassing pagan order and the thousands of Romans who believed in the teachings of the Jewish prophet Jesus, or who paid lip service to it in order to curry favor with their emperor, was becoming an ugly battle between two ways of life, between many gods and one god.
Paganism was a mosaic, like the designs on the temple floors. It was made up of dozens of sects, faiths and cults it had absorbed over the years. As a result, religious freedom reigned in Rome for centuries. Why must an old faith be destroyed to make room for a new one?
Using the gray, billowing clouds as a map toward the site, Julius could tell that the fire was close to the Atrium Vestae, the house where the Vestals lived, just behind the circular Temple of Vesta at the eastern edge of the Roman Forum. The eighty-four-room palace built around an elegant courtyard had burned to the ground several times in the past. Ironic that the Goddess Vesta was the greatest threat to those who kept her safe.
As the strong orange blaze reached higher into the blackened sky, one by one they came: priests and citizens, breathing in the fumes, choking on them, but determined to save the house and ensure the fire didn’t encroach on the temple. It wasn’t only buildings at risk, but legendary treasures that were said to be hidden in a secret substructure under the holy hearth.
By the time Julius arrived there were two dozen firefighters, men from every walk of life who volunteered and were trained to race to the fire site and fight the blaze as soon as it was reported. One small fire—because of all the wooden buildings—could turn into an inferno in no time.
Much to his horror, Julius realized that one of the firefighters wasn’t a man—but a woman who hadn’t stayed back with her sisters. She shouldn’t be there, it was too dangerous. But the men were too busy to try and pull her away or warn her to be careful. Even if they’d tried, he knew it wouldn’t have made any difference: she would have been right back on the front line two minutes later.
Defiance was typical of Sabina, who’d been a constant challenge to the sisters who’d trained her. Although they marveled at her clairvoyance, they complained that her tenacity and willfulness weren’t suited to being a priestess.
Neither was her contempt for him.
In front of others, she showed him the minimum of respect required to keep out of trouble. But when no one else was around, if their paths crossed, she let her feelings show. There were days it made him want to laugh that she looked at him with so much antagonism; others when he wanted to punish her for her impudence. It disturbed him because there was no reason for her reactions. And even less reason that despite her antagonism to him, he felt drawn to her. Admired her. Cheered her on.
As the head priestess, she proved exemplary. But unlike the other Vestals, Sabina possessed a stubborn streak, a refusal to give up all of her personality to the group, which propelled her to become one the most educated of all the nuns in recent years, studying medicine and learning how to be a healer, although it added extra responsibility to her already full life. When tired customs didn’t make sense to her, she questioned them, changed them and breathed life into the old order. Even when it alienated her from the older sisters and conservative priests, she fought back bravely, passionately. Recently, the most traditional among them were applauding her efforts.
A section of the house collapsed with a loud crash. The fire was winning the battle. Sabina worked as hard as Julius did to smother the flames; she was as valiant a fighter as any man there. When their eyes met for a brief second, Julius looked away, chilled, despite the fire’s heat, by the look she flashed at him. She was determined to live, which meant the fire had to die. But either she’d inhaled too much smoke or she was just too exhausted, because suddenly she fell to the ground.
Angry blisters marred her cheeks. Her robe was ripped up the side and across the front, exposing her long legs and breasts, all blackened with soot.
None of the other men seemed to have noticed. If she wasn’t dead, one of them was bound to trample her to death. Julius couldn’t let that happen. Leaving his post, he ran to her, picked her up and carried her lifeless body out of the way, the heat at his back becoming less and less intense until he wasn’t aware of it anymore.
Sabina was heavy in his arms, and he felt the full burden of her: of her position as head of the nuns, of her complicated response to him, of her power and vitality. Finally far enough away from the fire, he laid her down on a patch of grass, allowing himself to focus on her and give in to his curiosity and his obsession—because if he was honest with himself, despite his best efforts and for no rational reason he knew, that was what she’d become.
Putting his ear to her breast, he listened for her life sounds. All he heard was his own nervous heart beating so loudly in his ears. But from her chest—silence.
No, it wasn’t possible that the fire had beaten her.
Not Sabina.
He didn’t realize he was shouting until the wind threw his own howl back at him.
No. Not Sabina.
She had too much energy, too much resolve.
He wanted to pray, but the grief crowded out all the words. He shut his eyes. The smell of jasmine and sandalwood emanated from her skin—mixed in with the bitter smell of the smoke—whispering to him, hinting of something he’d never had and now would never know.
By the time the other priests were his age they’d married and fathered children. They teased him about his unmarried state, not understanding it. Marriages allowed for every taste and predilection, they chided—even for men who preferred sex with other men. Why can’t you find a wife?
Only to himself, only now, could he admit that he’d found a woman he wanted to wed, but of all the women in all of Rome she was one of a very select few he couldn’t have.
He had been a young priest when she became a Vestal. And from the very beginning she had stood out. She was bright and curious as a young girl, then feisty and determined as an adolescent. His admiration had turned to attraction when her slim body had started to curve, when her breasts and hips teased him from under her robes.
For the past twelve years, Sabina had taunted him, then challenged him. Now, in death, she would haunt him.
Her hatred of him should have cooled his ardor. Instead, it seemed to inflame it. Alone in his own rooms, when thoughts of her would come, he’d find a prostitute. But not the lewdest, the lustiest, nor the most comely chased away the images of the virgin. Julius prayed to the gods to take away his desire. When they didn’t, he ignored and surmounted his feelings … He needed to … His attention could doom her. Any congress they might have shared could be her death sentence. And his.
Her eyes were shut. Her lovely red hair was singed and blackened. Julius sat beside her on the grass, unable to get up, although the fire was still raging and he knew the men needed him. Her sisters would come and get her body later and prepare it for burial, but he couldn’t leave her yet. Helplessly, he reached out and pushed a lock of hair off of her forehead. It was the first time he’d touched her. Tears coursed down his cheeks, surprising him with their velocity. Julius couldn’t remember the last time he’d wept.
“Sabina.” Again, a cry, not a word, still not a prayer.
And then it seemed as if the wind answered him, softly whispering his name in response. He looked down.
Her eyes were open. And upon him. And there was no anger in them anymore, but another expression: a mixture of defeat and desire.
Sabina had not perished in the fire after all.
He heard a sound that didn’t fit the picture. Loud. Shrieking. Not human. No. It was the ambulance coming to him from a great blue-green distance.
She looked at him, longing and pain in her eyes.
But the siren was pulling him up, up through the murky, briny heaviness into some fresh hell.
Chapter 11
Rome, Italy—Tuesday, 8:12 a.m.
There were three paramedics. Too many people in a suddenly claustrophobic space. As much as Josh wanted to get out of the tomb, which now reeked of blood, he couldn’t. Backing up, he flattened himself against the wall and watched the team go into action.
The female medic wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around the professor’s arm. One of the men swabbed his other arm and stuck a needle in his vein, readying him for an IV. The third asked Josh questions in broken English.
How long ago did this happen?
When had the professor become unconscious?
Did he know the professor’s family?
Did he have any phone numbers for them?
Fifteen minutes.
Five minutes.
No.
No.
He didn’t know.
They worked with choreographed precision, totally focused, not seeming to notice where they were or that there was a mummified woman broken apart in the corner. But Josh kept glancing at her, checking on her.
From where he stood, he could see the professor’s face, colorless and motionless. But his eyes were open and his mouth was forming words. Josh couldn’t hear the words, so he moved as close as he could without getting in anyone’s way. Which, in that tiny space, meant taking only two steps forward.
The professor continued whispering in Italian: the same few words over and over.
“What is he saying?” he asked one of the medics.
“Aspetta. Wait for her. He’s repeating it over and over.”
They worked on him for a few more minutes and then the woman counted—uno, due, tre—and together they lifted him off the ground, onto a stretcher, strapped him in, and then, in a complicated series of maneuvers, hoisted him out.
Josh followed after them.
Moving quickly, but also being careful not to jostle him, they wheeled him toward the ambulance. In the distance, the roar of a car engine grew louder. A navy blue Fiat raced up the road, dust flying in its wake. A few seconds later, it pulled to a screeching halt and a tall woman jumped out on the driver’s side. She moved in a blur—pure energy—rushing toward the gurney. Josh got a flash of sunburned skin, high, wide cheekbones and windswept, wild, honey-colored hair. Her voice was a combination of authority and fear as she called out her questions to the medics. Even under stress there was a lyrical cadence to her words. As focused on her as he was, Josh didn’t notice Malachai until he called out to him.
As always, Malachai was wearing a suit, despite the heat. He was so meticulous even his shoes were newly shined. That wouldn’t last long now that he was on site.
“Are you all right?” Malachai questioned.
“Fine. I’m fine. But I need to talk to Gabriella Chase.” Josh pointed to the woman who’d gotten out of the car. “Is that her?”
“Yes, but first—”
“The professor made me promise I’d tell her what happened, and—”
He put his hand on Josh’s arm to stop him. “She’s with the medics. So tell me, what happened?”
Briefly, Josh explained about the shooting.
“Were you alone with him?”
“Yes.”
“You were the only witness?”
“Yes. No one else was down there. Now I need—”
“Did you see the man who shot Rudolfo?”
“Yes. Yes, I saw him… .” Josh pictured the scene again as if his mind had filmed it. The man grabbing the box, opening it, pulling out the dark leather pouch, throwing the box on the ground, the professor’s moan, the scuffle, the shot. He stopped the pictures.
“The guard took the Memory Stones, if that’s what was in the box. Shot the professor and took the stones.”
“Did you get a photograph of him?”
“I was rushing to help and then it was too late.”
Malachai stood shaking his head back and forth, trying to absorb the loss. They’d both desperately wanted to see the stones, to talk to Rudolfo and Chase about them, discover if they did indeed have the legendary power assigned to them. Now it appeared they’d never have that chance.
“Did you see them before they were stolen?”
“No.”
“So you don’t know for sure they were in the box? They could have been somewhere else in the tomb?” A faint expression of hope.
“I don’t know for sure … but from the way the professor reacted I’m fairly certain—”
“I don’t think you should mention the stones to the police when they get here. Don’t conjecture about what was in the box.”
Malachai must have read the confusion in Josh’s eyes because he didn’t wait for his question before answering it. “If it appears that you know too much it will make you a more likely suspect.”
“But I’m not a suspect, and shouldn’t they know what they are looking for? Don’t they need to?”
“If they know, word will get out, it’s inevitable, and the very last thing Beryl or I—or, I’m sure, Gabriella, once she knows what happened—want is for the world to know of the existence of those stones. Especially if they’ve been stolen.”
“I don’t know. You’re asking me to lie to the police.”
“About something that isn’t going to help the investigation and that you didn’t actually see.”
“So what do I say—that I saw the guard and that I can describe him—but that I have no idea what he took? That I was too busy having flashbacks to the fourth century, where I was hanging out with the flesh-and-blood version of the corpse that’s buried here?”
Malachai was astonished. “If that’s true, you’d be instrumental to our understanding of what the stones are and how they work. You’d be vital to the solution.”
“Well, there are no coincidences, right? That’s what you and Beryl have been telling me for the past four months, and it looks like you’re dead on. The memories I’ve been having—” He held his arms out to include the tomb, the woods, the hills and beyond. “All of this … it’s what I’ve been seeing for the past year. All of this and more …”
Malachai began studying Josh, taking in his shirtless chest, dirt- and-blood-streaked face. “Are you sure you are all right? Your hands are bleeding.”
“It’s nothing but scratches. The professor is the one who’s been hurt, who might not make it.”
Usually, Malachai was compassionate, but from a distance. As a hobby, and to relax the children he and his aunt worked with at the Phoenix Foundation, Malachai performed magic tricks. One of them seemed to be how he suppressed his own feelings, except for a hidden, sorrowful look in Malachai’s eyes that Josh could see sometimes in just the right light, as if he had been hurt badly once and never quite healed. Josh often wondered whether, if he photographed the man, the melancholy would show through. But now, for the first time, he was overwrought and distressed. “This is a tragedy. A real tragedy.”
And for a brief moment, before Josh realized how absurd the thought was, he wondered if Malachai was referring to the professor’s shooting or the theft of the stones.
Chapter 12
As Josh looked for Gabriella, to give her the professor’s message, the crowd of bystanders grew larger. Josh remembered what Rudolfo had said about the dig becoming a tourist attraction. He looked at his watch. It was 9:00 a.m. Right on cue. The crime scene was going to be contaminated if these people trampled on it. The police still weren’t there to stop them. Shouldn’t they have arrived on the heels of the ambulance? Someone needed to keep the crowds back.
Scanning the gathering, he noticed a trio of nuns, two priests, a group of teenage Goth girls and a tall man holding a pad and pencil talking to one of the nuns. He had thick hair that fell into his eyes, and he brushed it away in a gesture that Josh recognized. Charlie Billings always expressed his impatience like that. Josh was glad to see him—not just because he’d always liked the reporter, but because, having been on assignment with him here in Rome, he knew Charlie spoke fluent Italian.
As Josh made his way over to the reporter, pushing through the crowd, Malachai followed him as if he needed to keep him in sight to keep him safe.
They exchanged greetings, and then Charlie, assuming that Josh was there on assignment, asked who he was covering the story for.
“I’m not here as press, I was here as a guest of the professor. But listen, I need you to—”
“Wait a minute. Do you mean you were here during the shooting?”
Josh nodded, annoyed that he’d inadvertently made himself part of the story.
“Did you see who did this? Did you get a shot of him?” Charlie glanced at the ever-present camera around Josh’s neck.
“I’ll give you all that later, but first you need to help me. This is urgent. This crowd could make it impossible for the police to collect evidence if they get any closer to the area around the tomb. They could be trampling evidence now. I can’t speak Italian, you can. Would you talk to them and ask them to stay back?”
“How ‘bout I trade you. I’ll talk to them and you tell me something I can use. What happened down there?”
“C’mon Charlie—” Josh pointed “—look.” The Goth girls were starting to cross the field.
“Okay, but when I’m done, I’m going to find you.” He started off. “You owe me now,” he called out over his shoulder.
Malachai had stepped away while Josh was talking to Charlie, but now he came forward again. “Bastard.” He indicated the reporter. “But I suppose it’s inevitable the press would be here.”
“He’s okay. I know him from way back. If I play it straight with him, he won’t screw us. Listen, I still—”
Loud wailing interrupted as three police cars arrived and officers jumped out.
“The press is the least of our problems now,” Malachai said. “After they figure out who’s who, the police are going to want to question us. We need to work out what we’re going to say about being here. This is going to be an explosive story, and I don’t want the foundation to be part of it.”
Yet another siren sounded as the ambulance readied to take the professor to the hospital. Josh glanced over. Something was holding them up. Now Josh saw Gabriella, fighting to get into the ambulance with the stretcher. The female medic blocked her and then, when Gabriella didn’t back off, physically pushed her away. Gabriella stumbled backward, tripped and fell to the ground. Without looking back, the medic hurried into the ambulance and slammed the door as it took off.
“She needs help,” Josh said, and ran toward her.
Once he reached her side he knelt down next to her. “Are you hurt?” he asked.
“They wouldn’t let me go with them.” She sat on the grass, eyes peeled on the vehicle as it disappeared.
“They didn’t have room.”
“But he’s alone,” she said, sounding dazed.
“He’s going to get the best care they can give him.” It was like talking to a child.
“Is he going to be all right?” She turned to Josh for the first time. As a photographer, he’d looked into thousands of anguished faces, but her pained expression ripped at him in an intensely personal way, which he couldn’t understand.
“I hope so,” he said. “Are you sure you’re okay, though? That was a tough fall.”
She didn’t seem to understand his question.
“You fell.”
She looked around, noticing where she was as if for the first time. Then, brushing off her hands, she stood up.
“I’m okay,” she said to Josh.
“You sure? You seemed pretty out of it there.” He handed her the knapsack she’d left on the ground, forgotten.
“I’m okay. I am. I just need to find out—”
By now, Charlie Billings had made his way over. “Gabriella?” He reached out and touched her arm. “What happened here?”
“Not yet, Charlie,” she said.
Josh was surprised that she knew him, then he remembered that Rudolfo had said she’d been talking to the press.
“Not for the record, then?”
“I don’t think she’s up to it. Give her some time,” Josh said.
“You’re really racking up those favors, you know?”
Josh offered his old colleague a nod.
“Can you tell me how the professor is?” Charlie asked Gabriella, still trying to get something for his story.
“He’s in critical condition, that’s all I know.”
Charlie scribbled something on his pad, and Josh took advantage of the moment to take Gabriella by the elbow and steer her away from the edge of the road and the reporter to her car. As Josh helped her into the backseat, Malachai, who was behind the wheel, said, “Josh, hurry up and get in. I think it would be wise to leave now and avoid the circus while we still can. Gabriella, do you have the keys?”
Focused on Josh, she didn’t answer.
“I just realized who you are. You’re Josh Ryder, aren’t you?”
He nodded.
“You were here the whole time?”
“I was. I’m sorry.”
“Where did all this happen?”
“We were in the tomb when—”
“You were in the tomb with him?” she interrupted. “This happened inside the tomb?”
“Yes.”
“I want to go down to the site … I need to see it.” Pushing past Josh she got out of the car. Both Josh and Malachai got out and followed her. Catching up to her before she got too far, Malachai put his arm around her shoulder and stopped her. “It’s better to leave all this to the police. We’ll take you to the hospital. Come back to the car with me.”
“Not yet. I need to see the site first,” she said, shaking free.
“Let me go with you, then,” Josh said, concerned that she not be alone when she saw the blood, the broken artifacts and the state Sabina was in.
Not answering, or waiting, she took off, but before she had gone five feet, two policemen intercepted her.
The conversation appeared to go smoothly for the first three or four questions, until one of them must have asked something that agitated her, because she gestured wildly to the road, then turned, pointing back toward her car, inadvertently including Josh and Malachai in her gesture.
The policemen followed her glance.
Thirty seconds later, the two carabinieri approached Josh and Malachai.
“Mr. Ryder?” the younger one asked, looking at Malachai.
“No. I’m Josh Ryder.”
He asked him something in Italian.
Josh shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t understand.”
It seemed as if he’d said that to a dozen people already that morning. The language barrier was frustrating. He wanted to tell the policeman not to waste time with him when there was a man out there somewhere who had a gun and an ancient treasure and who was getting farther and farther away, but there was no way he could communicate that.
While this was going on, the carabinieri had their back to Gabriella and so they didn’t notice when she broke away. There were other police on the scene, busily interviewing people in the crowds, but, curiously, none of them were paying attention to the real scene of the crime—Gabriella’s destination, the tomb.
Of course not, Josh realized. None of them knew that the shooting had happened underground.
The policeman, who was still trying to talk to Josh, noticed him glance away and looked to see why. When he saw Gabriella, he called out to her.
She turned. There was fierce determination in her eyes, tear marks and dirt smeared on her face, dust on her clothes. She yelled back something Josh couldn’t understand and then descended into the tomb she had been responsible for discovering.
Josh’s heart lurched as she disappeared. He was desperately worried for her. There was no time to wonder why he was reacting so strongly to a stranger because, at that moment, two things happened almost simultaneously: the group of onlookers broke free from the sawhorses, and all the police took off to contain them.
Josh took advantage of the distraction to race toward the crypt.
“Stop, Josh. Let’s get out of here. Don’t—” Malachai shouted.
“She shouldn’t be down there alone,” he yelled back. He kept going, not knowing if the police were behind him or not. Not caring.
He was only a foot away when he heard Gabriella’s scream coming up from the ground. It was sharp and ragged, and so pained it sounded as if she were being tortured.
Chapter 13
She was on her knees in the corner of the crypt, kneeling beside Sabina’s broken body, emitting a low, keening cry of grief. It took Josh a few seconds to understand that Gabriella was saying the word no over and over; it sounded like a prayer.
He knew he was looking right at her, but he was seeing the tomb on another day.
A flash of a white robe.
Red hair.
Dark green eyes, filled with tears.
Sabina.
He wanted to reach out into the darkness, grab the specter and make her tell him what was happening here.
Gabriella’s voice, insistent, dark, brought him instantly to the present moment. “Kick the ladder out. Kick it hard and break it,” she said.
“What?”
“Quick! The ladder, pull it away from the wall.”
Still under the spell of his memory lurch, Josh did what she asked but didn’t understand why he was doing it.
“Now snap off the rungs. Use this—” She threw him a shovel. “Please, help me, buy me some time.”
Attacking the wooden ladder with a vengeance, he’d broken the top six rungs by the time the police arrived at the opening. He didn’t need to understand the language this time to know they wanted access to the tomb.
“Show them the broken ladder,” Gabriella said.
He wanted to smile at her clever, quick thinking, but he refrained. The man who had questioned him earlier looked from the ladder to Gabriella and then at Josh. Then he said something that caused the other officer to laugh and made Gabriella curse under her breath, “Pigs.”
Josh didn’t need to know what they’d said.
“You said you were down here when it happened?” she asked Josh as soon as the carabinieri were gone.
“The whole time. It happened too quickly for me to do any thing … to stop him… .”
She wasn’t looking at Josh anymore, but beyond him, examining the state of the tomb. It was the first time he’d really had a chance to study her with a photographer’s eyes; he noted the long neck, shoulder-length, wavy hair, full mouth and strong bones. It was her nose, aquiline with a hint of a bump, that turned a woman who would otherwise have been typically pretty into someone intriguing. She was wearing jeans and a white shirt with the top two buttons open, and Josh was shocked, in the middle of all this madness, to find himself wishing she’d left the third unbuttoned, as well.
“You said you saw who shot the professor? Who was it?”
“A security guard. Or at least he was dressed like one.”
“Did you take a picture of him?”
“No, it happened too fast. I was trying to get to the professor … I wish I had.”
She seemed baffled for a moment. “Why didn’t he shoot you, too?”
“I was in there.” Josh pointed at the tunnel, and a rush of images assaulted him: moving slowly through the space, the feeling of the dirt under his hands, the panic of the narrow space, the sense that something was terribly wrong and the urgency to get quickly to the other end.
For a second he was confused. Were these fresh images of what had happened an hour before or were they part of the mind movies?
Gabriella walked over to where he had pointed and noticed the tunnel for the first time. “What the hell is this?” She peered into the darkness. “Who dug this out?”
“I did.”
“Rudolfo allowed you to do this to our site?”
“He tried to stop me but … that’s why I couldn’t help the professor—I was pretty far back in there.”
“I don’t understand. Why would Rudolfo let you do this?”
“Listen, I couldn’t understand anything anyone was saying up there. I’ll tell you everything that happened, but first, tell me, what did the medics say about the professor? How bad is it?”
“They won’t know until they get him to the hospital. But the bleeding had stopped and that’s a good sign. They said if he lives, that you’re the one who—” She stopped talking, reached down and picked up something off the mosaic floor.
“Why is this broken?” Her voice shook and so did the hand that held the piece of shattered fruitwood box. “Where is the rest of this?” She was back on her knees, frantic again.
“Gabriella.” Josh knelt down beside her and put his hand on her shoulder, to stop her, to comfort her, to prepare her for what he was going to tell her. Her skin felt warm through the shirt. “The security guard took what was in the box with him. That must have been what he came for. I’m guessing what that means is that he took what you and the professor think might be the Memory Stones.”
Her face distorted into two expressions at the same time, something Josh wasn’t sure he’d ever seen before: her eyes showed utter devastation, but her mouth set in a line of cold fury. She stared down at the pieces of wood she still held. Two seconds went by. Five. Ten. Finally she lifted her head up. All the vibrant rage and deep sadness had left her face. Only a look of resolution remained. He was surprised at her resilience.
“There’s no time to talk about this now,” she said. “Too much to do. The police are going to figure out another way to get down here and are going to want to know what happened.” She looked back at the broken body and the wood fragments and splinters. “I need to get to the hospital. They wouldn’t let me go with them in the ambulance. I’m not family, they said.” She shook her head as if she was clearing her thoughts, and her curls danced. Josh thought of Sabina’s curl, escaping from her braid during the robbery.
“Before I leave I need to make sure I get rid of anything that might make them ask too many questions about this area… .”
She peered into the tunnel’s blackness. “Do you have any idea how you’ve corrupted this site?” She took a deep breath, then turned to him. “What made you start digging there, anyway?”
Her eyes bored into him. There was no way he could explain it all to her now, even if he wanted to—and he didn’t know if he did. “I saw the discoloration on the wall and there was something about the size and shape of it that suggested there was something beyond it.”
Josh wasn’t sure she believed him, but she didn’t press him. “Will you help me close up the tunnel? I don’t want them traipsing through here. Who knows what they might disturb.”
They worked side by side as quickly as they could, shoveling dirt back into the opening, packing it down, piling on another layer. Between digging this out the first time and then crawling in the tunnel, the skin on Josh’s palms was shredded.
“I don’t care about anything now except that when the police talk to you about what happened down here, you lie, make up something, say anything you want, but don’t tell them about this tunnel. No one can go in there who isn’t connected to the dig before we get in there ourselves. When they come down, somehow we have to make sure they get their samples and photos and get out. I need to seal off the site until … If you say anything, if you suggest there’s a passageway here, they’ll insist on examining it. No one has been in that tunnel since this tomb was closed. Anything we might find in there will be priceless. A totally unique find. Can you do this, please?” Her voice was huskier as she elicited her promise, as if even voicing it had to be done in secret.
“Since the tunnel won’t help them find out who did this, no, I won’t tell them.”
“You promise?” She was still concerned. “Where will you say you were during the shooting?”
“I’ll say I was outside. Heard the gunshot, saw the guard running away and came down here to help.”
She nodded and went back to work.
Now both Malachai and Gabriella had asked him to lie to the police. He wasn’t eager to become involved with the investigation either, but not because he was trying to hide anything.
He wasn’t as sure about either of them.
“Josh, hurry. Please. We can’t have much time left.”
Despite his lacerated hands he went back to scooping up the dirt, packing it down and then piling on another layer, wondering if the woman who had been buried had known there was an escape route so very close by. He breathed in some of the dirt—coughed—thought about how amazing it was that no one had discovered the tomb or the tunnel for sixteen hundred years, and wondered how many secrets were buried here alongside Sabina’s heartbreaking form.
Chapter 14
The scraping sound emanated from the opening. They both looked up in time to see an aluminum ladder descending. One black loafer on the top rung. And then another as the man appeared from the bottom up.
“I’m Detective Alexander Tatti with the NTPA,” he called down in better English than any of the other policemen had used. “And we have a new ladder, as you can see,” he added as he proceeded to climb the rest of the way down.
“The Nucleo per la Tutela del Patrimonio Artistico protects Italy’s art, finds and retrieves stolen works,” Gabriella explained to Josh as she moved away from the freshly refilled alcove and got down on her knees by the mummy.
“Thank goodness you’ve come,” she said to the detective in a voice dusted with sugar. “Thank you for bringing the ladder. I’ve been going crazy stuck down here for the past forty-five minutes. I need to go to the hospital. Do you know how the professor is? Do you have news?”
Tatti finished his climb with surprising agility for a man who appeared, from the lines in his face, to be near retirement age. “He’s in intensive care. They won’t let you in yet. So you might as well stay and help me out on this end. All right?”
She nodded.
Unexpectedly, he didn’t barrage either of them with questions. Not right away. Instead, he made a slow and careful examination of his surroundings with an expression of reverence on his face. Josh liked him right then, for noticing where he was, for paying it some sort of tribute before he proceeded to defile it further.
After he had made a 360-degree circle, his glance returned to Sabina. He took six steps to her side and crouched down so he was on her level.
“How old is she, would you say?”
“We estimate she was buried here in 400 A.D.,” Gabriella answered. “Or do you mean how old was she when she died?”
“I mean when she was buried and when she died. Both.”
“There’s little wear on the few joints that we were able to see. We’re guessing about twenty-two.”
“Was she disturbed during this morning’s incident?”
“Yes, very badly.”
“Yes? How?”
“She was completely intact when we found her. Last night when I left … it was extraordinary … Now …” Gabriella looked at Sabina. “Now she’s broken apart, here and here … .” She pointed to the mummy’s waist, her neck and her right hand. “She had been holding on to that box. Or what’s left of it.”
“What box?”
Josh could see Gabriella flinch. She hadn’t meant to draw the detective’s attention to the broken receptacle. But now she was trapped. She pointed across the room to the splintered wood.
“What was in it?”
She shrugged. “It was sealed. We hadn’t opened it yet,” she lied. “Now you know everything I know. Can I go to the hospital?”
“As I said, the professor is in intensive care. His wife is with him. As soon as there is news, they will call me and I will tell you. Or if we are done sooner than that, you can go over then. In the meantime—” his accent was pleasant, giving a lilt to the English words “—you expect me to believe that you found this mummy holding on to a box and you didn’t open it?”
“Yes. We have protocols. We go slowly. Everything was a surprise. One more could wait. We wanted to examine the seal before we destroyed it.”
He turned around to Josh, flinging questions so fast there was no time to duck. “You are?”
“Josh Ryder.”
“The man who called the ambulance?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Ryder, what was in the box?”
“I have absolutely no idea.” Josh’s turn to lie.
“What were you doing down here?”
“I had just met the professor, he was telling me about the find.” Damn, had he screwed up? Had he just admitted he was in the tomb?
“What time did you get here?”
“Around six-thirty this morning.”
“Why so early?”
“I don’t need much sleep.”
“I talked to Dr. Samuels while I waited for the ladder. He told me that you are from New York, that the two of you had an appointment to meet Professor Chase at the hotel at eight o’clock but that you didn’t show up.”
“No, I was here.”
“That’s what is so confusing. Why would you come here a few hours before you were going to be brought here by Professor Chase? Was there something here that couldn’t wait?”
Gabriella listened just as intently as Tatti; after all, she didn’t know what had happened, either.
“I couldn’t sleep. Jet lag. Too much coffee. I don’t know. I took a walk.”
“You took a walk. Fine. You could have walked anywhere. Why here? Why didn’t you wait? Why did you come here alone without your associate and without Professor Chase?”
“I told you. I was restless.”
“How did you get here? There is no car for you.”
“No. I said I walked.”
“You walked? Walked from where?”
What was it about Tatti that seemed so familiar?
“From the hotel. The Eden. We’re staying there.”
“I really need to go to the hospital,” Gabriella interrupted.
“Professor Chase, please. As I have said, the doctors are going to call me as soon as they know anything. This is the scene of a murder attempt, and you know the man who was attacked. You might also know who attacked him. There are also, potentially, priceless artifacts here. You are the only one who knows what they are, where everything was, what has been moved, what might have been taken if something was taken. You will do me more good here than you will do him there. At least for now.”
Turning his attention back to Josh, he picked up where he’d left off.
“So. Yes. You said you walked here from the Eden?”
“Yes.”
“You evidently like to walk.”
It wasn’t a question, and Josh didn’t answer it. He was still trying to figure out what was so familiar about Tatti. When he realized it he almost laughed. It wasn’t some memory lurch. Every one of the detective’s mannerisms seemed borrowed from one of two Hollywood stereotypes, either Inspector Clouseau or Detective Columbo.
“Now, Mr. Ryder. Please.” He let his exasperation show. “Tell me what the truth is about what really happened.” He was a movie star playing the part of a real-life detective.
“I did tell you. I slept badly. I woke up, I took a walk.”
“It’s ten kilometers from the Eden, Mr. Ryder. Exactly what time did you leave the hotel?”
“I’m not sure, I wasn’t paying attention. It was still dark.”
“Professor Chase, did Mr. Ryder or Dr. Samuels know the address of this site?”
“No. We didn’t tell them. But despite all our efforts it has been in the press.”
“Yes, it has.” Tatti nodded. “Is that how you found it, Mr. Ryder? From the newspapers? From a taxi driver?”
“No. No one told me. I didn’t know where I was walking. Ask the emergency operator. I didn’t know where I was when I called.”
“She told us that you had to call someone on the phone to find out the address. But that might be a very convenient ploy, no? You pretend you don’t know where you are so as not to look suspicious.”
Again, it wasn’t a question, so Josh didn’t give him an answer.
“Let’s assume you are telling me one truth. How can you explain that truth? How can you make sense out of leaving your hotel at, say, five o’clock in the morning, and finding your way here?”
“I can’t.”
“What do you take me for, Mr. Ryder, a fool? What were you doing here?”
All Josh could think of was the explanation Malachai gave to the children he worked with: the five-, six-, seven- and eight-year-olds who were frightened by the power of the stories in their heads. “You are unforgetting the past, that’s all. It might seem scary but it’s really quite wonderful,” he would tell them.
That might have been what Josh was doing there, but it was the last explanation he was going to give.
Gabriella interrupted the detective and begged him to conduct the rest of the interview outside of the tomb. “This is an ancient site that we’ve just begun to work on. I need to protect it and close it down as soon as possible.”
Tatti promised her they would work as quickly and carefully as possible and leave as soon as they could, but not quite yet. He turned back to Sabina, and his eyes rested on her. For a few seconds, it was totally silent in the tomb. And then he asked Gabriella, once more, what she thought had been taken.
She was losing her patience. “We’ve been over this, haven’t we?”
“We have. But I’m still not satisfied that you and the professor found this tomb, excavated it, started to catalog its contents and yet never looked inside the box. Weren’t you curious?”
“Of course. But there is a protocol. To us, every inch of this tomb is as exciting as what might be in the box. The very fact that the woman buried here was comparatively incorruptible was of greater archaeological and scientific importance—even religious significance—than some trinket inside a box.”
“So it was a trinket?”
She flew into a rage at that and spoke to him rapidly in Italian. Surprisingly, he seemed to be agreeing with what she said and nodded along with her tirade. When she was done, he climbed up the ladder and stayed perched there, half in and half out, as he called over the two policemen who had first arrived at the scene and had spoken to them.
Gabriella waited by the bottom of the ladder, watching him, listening to what he was saying. Beneath her anger, she was still extremely anxious. Twice, she glanced at her watch. Several times she looked over at Sabina with a curious, questioning expression in her eyes. And although Josh didn’t know Gabriella yet, he knew she was wishing that the mummy could communicate, that Sabina could tell them what she’d seen, who had come down here and invaded this sacred space.
For the next few minutes, while the detective continued his discussion with the two officers, Josh struggled not to lose touch with reality and give in to where his mind wanted to go. Tried not to think. But the images were crowding in, demanding attention, refusing to go away. He held his camera up to his face and focused on Gabriella while she listened to the detective talk with his minions. From behind the lens he examined her face—the broad forehead, the high cheekbones. The intelligent eyes.
He remembered a sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a head entitled The Muse, by Brancusi, made of highly polished bronze: golden, spare, cerebral. Wide almond eyes, perfect oval face.
She could have modeled for it.
Using her expressions as clues, he tried to decode the discussion the detective was having with the policemen. Several times she almost interrupted but stopped herself. Without thinking, Josh took a shot of her. The flash went off. She looked up and over at him, annoyed. Josh lowered the camera.
Finally the detective climbed back down.
“Professor Chase, I don’t want to corrupt your site any more than you do. After all, my job is protecting Italian treasures. I know something about archeology, and from the look of this tomb and its location, this woman might be an early Christian martyr. She might be a saint. As we can see, she’s barely corrupted.” He gestured to Sabina with a flourish, trying to impress her with his knowledge. “The police understand. They will come down now and work both quickly and carefully. Luckily, this is a very small space and it will not be complicated. Then you can shut down the site until this ugly matter is dealt with. As long as you agree to give us access if we need it again.”
She said, “Of course,” and bowed her head for a second as if a prayer was being answered.
Then he turned to Josh. “Mr. Ryder, I need you to come with me, please. I still have additional questions for you, but we can take care of them up there.”
Out of the tomb, the detective led Josh away from the clearing and closer to the line of oak trees that stood like sentinels at the edge of what seemed to be a forest. Leaning against one of these massive trees that probably had been standing since the tomb was built, since Sabina had been buried there, Tatti made Josh repeat what had happened since he’d left his hotel.
“I simply don’t believe your story, Mr. Ryder,” he said when Josh finished. “You walk all the way here before dawn when you already have an appointment in the morning? Why?”
“I was restless.”
“But how did you know where to come?”
“I didn’t.”
“And you expect me to believe a coincidence like this? You think I’m stupid, Mr. Ryder?”
Josh knew how preposterous it sounded. But the truth would have sounded more like a lie.
I felt propelled here, even though I didn’t know where I was going.
“If you were me, what would you do if you heard this crazy recital? Would you believe a word of it?”
What should he tell him? What could he tell him? And then he realized the truth in this case might work. “No. Probably not. But honestly, there’s just nothing else I can tell you.”
Tatti threw up his hands. He’d had enough for at least the time being. Grasping Josh by the arm, with greater pressure than was necessary, he escorted him over to an unmarked sedan, opened the back door, waited for him to get in and then shut the door and locked it after him.
“I won’t be long. Make yourself, how do you say it? Oh, yes, at home.”
Despite the open window, the detective’s car was hot and smelled of strong cigarettes and stale coffee. He watched Tatti interrogate Gabriella, watched how she glanced over in Josh’s direction. Again. And again. As if she was putting the blame on him, or as if she was asking him to come to her rescue and save her from any more questions.
As if she was asking him to save her.
How familiar that thought seemed.
Had someone else once asked him to save her here in this grove?
Was that his imagination? Or was it his madness?
Chapter 15
While Josh waited, he lifted the camera to his eye and looked through the viewfinder. As he snapped shots of the woods bordering the site to the right and the landscape off to the left, the sound of the shutter reverberated in his ears, like an old friend’s greeting.
Right now he preferred the world framed in this oblong box, all peripheral excess and activities cut out. Reframing the image, Josh went for an even wider shot and saw a break in the line of trees that suggested an opening into the forest.
As if he were standing there, not sitting in the car, he could smell the pine sap—fresh and sharp—and feel the green-blue shadowed space undulating around him. No. He didn’t want to leave this present, not now.
Struggling, Josh brought himself back, to the car, to the metal camera case in his hands. To the smell of the stale cigarette smoke.
Rome and its environs were triggering more episodes than he’d ever had before in one time period. What was happening?
He knew what Malachai would say. Josh was experiencing past-life regressions. But despite these multiple memory lurches, Josh remained skeptical. It made more sense that reincarnation was a panacea, a comforting concept that explained the existential dilemma of why we’re on earth and why bad things can happen—even to good people. It was easier to believe reincarnation was a soothing myth than it was to accept the mystical belief that some essential part of a living being—the soul or the spirit—survives death to be reborn in a new body. To literally be made flesh again and return to earth in order to fulfill its karma. To do this time what you had failed to do the last.
And yet how else to explain the memory lurches?
Josh had read that even past-life experiences that seemed spontaneous were precipitated or triggered by encountering a person, a situation, a sensory experience such as a particular smell or sound or taste that had some connection to a previous incarnation.
He hadn’t seen a single movie in the past five months, but he’d devoured more than fifty books on this single subject.
Something the Dalai Lama—who had been chosen as a child from dozens of other children because it was believed he was the incarnation of a previous Dalai Lama—had written in one of those books had stuck in Josh’s mind.
It was a simple explanation for a complex concept, one of the few things he’d read that made Josh feel that if what was happening was related to reincarnation, then perhaps it wasn’t a curse, but an enviable gift.
Reincarnation, the Dalai Lama explained, was not exclusively an ancient Egyptian, Hindu or a Buddhist concept, but an enriching one intrinsically intertwined in the fabric of the history of human origin—proof, he wrote, of the mind stream’s capacity to retain knowledge of physical and mental activities. A fact tied to the law of cause and effect.
A meaningful answer to complicated questions.
Something was happening to him, here in Rome. Time was twisting in on itself in amazing detail, and the pull to give in and explore it was stronger than it had ever been. Josh put the camera down. He stared out at the break in the tree line. He could keep fighting the memory lurches or he could open his mind and see where they took him. Maybe he would come out on the other side of this labyrinth understanding why he’d had to travel its path.
Chapter 16
Julius and Sabina Rome—391 A.D.
He left the city early that morning while the sky was still dark and sunrise wasn’t yet aglow on the horizon. No one was in the streets, except a few stray cats that ignored him.
She always teased him that he was early for everything, but it was urgent now that they be careful. It was better for him to leave with the cloak of nightfall to protect him, to arrive at the grove before daybreak.
As he passed the emperor’s palace, he glanced, as he always did, at the elaborate calendar etched on the wall. The passing of time had taken on a new and frightening significance lately. How many more days, weeks and months would they have until everything around them had changed so much so that it was unrecognizable? How much longer would he be able to perform the sacrifices and rituals that were his responsibility? How much longer would any of them be able to celebrate and participate in the ancient ceremonies passed down to them by their forefathers?
In the past two years he’d doubled up on his duties as fewer men entered the colleges, and now, in addition to overseeing the Vestals, he’d taken on the additional job of the Flamen Furinalis, the priest who oversaw the cult of Furrina and tended to the grove that belonged to her.
Not to the emperor.
Not to the power-hungry bishops in Milan.
But to the goddess.
Past the palace, he turned onto the road leading out of the city. A man, probably overcome with too much wine, had fallen asleep sitting up against the side of a four-story dwelling. His head was lowered on his chest, his arms by his sides and his palms open, as if he were begging. Someone had dropped food into his cupped hands. There were always poor fools on the street at night, homeless or drunk, and others who always took care of them.
Except something was wrong with this man.
Julius knew it intuitively before he understood it. Maybe it was the crooked angle of the man’s head, or the utter stillness of his body. He reached down and lifted up the man’s face and, at the same time, noticed how his robe was slit up the front and torn open. On his chest were the dreaded crisscrossing lines, one vertical, one horizontal, the flayed skin exposing guts oozing, blood still dripping and staining the ground beneath him a deep scarlet.
Now he could see the man’s features. This was no homeless drunk; this was Claudius, one of the young priests from the college. And his eyes had been gouged out in a final ritualistic indignity.
Julius realized what Claudius was holding in his hands: not food, but the poor soul’s own eyes.
How much suffering had been inflicted on this man, and why? Julius stumbled backward. The emperor’s endless thirst for power? What made it worse was that the people doing the man’s bidding didn’t realize he was using them and that no god was speaking through him.
“Get away. Go now,” a voice whispered.
It took several seconds for Julius to find the old woman hiding in the shadows, staring at him, the whites of her eyes gleaming, a sick smile on her lips.
“I’ve been telling you. All of you. But no one listens,” she said in a scratchy voice that sounded as if it had been rubbed raw. “Now it starts. And this—” she pointed a long arthritic finger toward the direction Julius had just come from “—is just the beginning.”
It was one of the old crones who foretold the future and begged for coins in the Circus Maximus. For as long he could remember she had been a fixture there. But she wasn’t offering a prediction now. This was no mystical divination. She knew. He did, too. The worst that they had feared was upon them.
Julius threw her a coin, gave Claudius a last look and took off.
Not until he passed through the city’s gates an hour and a half later did his breathing relax. He straightened up, not aware till that minute that he’d been hunched over, half in hiding. Always half in hiding now.
Throughout history, men fought about whose religion was the right one. But hadn’t many civilizations prospered and thrived side by side while each obeyed entirely different entities? Hadn’t his own religion operated like that for more than a thousand years? Their beliefs in and worship of multiple gods and goddesses and of nature itself didn’t preclude the belief in an all-powerful deity. Nor did they expect everyone else to believe as they did. But the emperor did.
The more Julius studied history the more it became clear to him that what they were facing was one man using good men with good beliefs to enhance his own authority and wealth. What had been proclaimed in Nicaea almost seventy-five years ago—that all men were to convert to Christianity and believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth—had never been enforced as brutally as it was being enforced here now. The killings were bloody warnings that everyone must conform or risk annihilation.
Julius and his colleagues weren’t under any delusions. If they intended to survive they needed to abandon their beliefs or at least pretend to do so. And if they were going to continue into the future they needed to relax some of their laws and adapt. But right now they had worse problems. Emperor Theodosius was no holy man; this was not about one god or many gods, not about rites or saviors. How clever Theodosius and his intolerant bishop were! Conspiring to make men believe that unless they adopted the current revised creed, they would not only suffer here in this life but would suffer worse in the next life. The danger to every priest, every cult, everyone who held fast to the old ways, increased daily. The priest he’d seen in the gutter that morning was yet another warning to the rest of the flamen.
Citizens everywhere were taking up the emperor’s call to enforce the new laws, publicly declaring their conversion. But behind closed doors, other conversations took place. The men and women who had prayed to the old gods and goddesses for all of their lives still hoped for a reprieve from the new religious mandate. Yes, in public, they would protect themselves and prove their fealty to their emperor, but as modern as Rome was, it was also a superstitious city. As afraid as the average citizens were of the emperor, they were more afraid of the harm that might befall them if they broke trust with the familiar sacred rituals. So while there was outward acquiescence, even energy for a religious revolution, much of it was false piety.
But for how much longer?
The old ways would die a little more with every priest who was murdered and with every temple that was looted and destroyed until there was nothing left and no one to remember.
The trunks of the lofty trees were gnarled and scratched, the boughs heavy with leaves. The forest was so thick the light only broke through in narrow shafts, illuminating a single branch of glossy emerald leaves here and a patch of moss-covered ground there.
There were myrtle trees, cypress and luxuriant laurels, but it was the oaks that made this a sacred grove, an ancient place apart from the everyday world where the priests could perform their rituals and pray to their goddess.
He sat down on a mossy rock to wait for Sabina. There, miles outside of the city gates, he couldn’t hear the sounds of soldiers training or citizens arguing or chariots rolling by. He couldn’t smell the fear or see the sadness in people’s eyes—ordinary people who didn’t understand politics and were frightened. In the grove there was only birdsong and the splashing of water that fell from between the cracks in the rocks into the pool below. The consecrated area stretched deep into the woods, and no matter how often Julius went there, he never felt as if he saw it all or understood the mysteries that it contained. Nothing there was commonplace. Every tree was a sculptural arrangement of boughs branching off into more boughs, with more leaves than any man could count, all shimmering in a light that was always softer and gentler here than anywhere else in Rome. Every patch of ground offered a bounty of sprouting grasses, moss, shade plants and flowers.
When he was a boy, his teachers told the story of how this grove was where Diana, the goddess of fertility, assisted by her priest, had performed her duties. The King and Queen of the Wood, they were called. Bound together in a marriage, they made spring buds give way to summer flowers and then to fall fruits.
The boys snickered, glancing at each other, making up stories about what else they did up there, all alone in the woods. Joking about the bacchanals that must have gone on in the grove—sacred or not—because they all knew what men did with other men and with women. It was not secret, it was not profane.
Only the Vestal Virgins were sacred. Vestals promised a vow of chastity during their term of service and in exchange were ranked above all other Roman women and many men. Powerful, on their own, free in so many ways, they were not bound by the shackles of motherhood or the rules of men.
In exchange for that power and importance, each woman gave up her chance of a physical life with a man until after she had served for thirty years: the first decade learning, the second serving as a high priestess and the third teaching the next generation. Some thought it was a lot to ask of a woman; others didn’t agree. From the time she was six, or eight or ten, until the time she was thirty-six or thirty-eight or forty, she remained chaste. Never to feel a man’s hand on her skin or suffer the pressure between her legs that was natural and good. Never give in to the hot eyes of the men who came to her as a priestess but saw through the veils to the woman. Because if she did give in, if she lost her fight with virtue, there was no leniency. The punishment was grave and unrelenting. She was buried alive. It was harsh. But the Vestals were sacrosanct. And only a small percentage broke her vows.
Occasionally a nobleman did get away with seducing a Vestal. Hadrian had stolen one and made her his wife, and nothing had happened to either of them, but throughout history, as of that day in the grove, of the twenty-one Vestals who had been with a man, seventeen had been buried alive and fifteen of the men they had been with had also been put to death. The rules did not bend easily.
Although it was blasphemy and he only let himself think it for a moment, Julius thought that if they adopted the emperor’s new religion, he and Sabina would be allowed to live together openly and without fear. But could they give up everything they believed?
“Julius?”
He heard her before he saw her, and then she stepped into the path of a sunbeam. Red hair almost on fire. White robes glowing. He walked to her, smiling, forgetting for just those few minutes the massacred priest he’d seen that morning and what it portended for their future. Sabina stopped a foot away and they stood apart, looking at each other, drinking each other in.
At last.
“The news in the atrium is bad. Did you know Claudius was killed?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, but didn’t want to bring the full horror of what he’d seen into the grove.
“What does this mean? Another priest killed?” She shook her head. “No, let’s not talk about this. Not now. There’s time for this conversation later.”
“Yes, there is.”
“How many times have we met here? Fifteen? Twenty?” she asked.
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