The Reincarnationist

by M. J. Rose

  “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 h
ands: 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.