The Reincarnationist

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?”