The Reincarnationist

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.