by M. J. Rose
“Isn’t he your god, too?”
“There’s a good chance he is. It’s just hard for me to settle on any one god or any one religion. I’ve spent my life studying different cultures, digging up burial sites, trying to understand the methods and rituals of how other civilizations honored their dead and helped them make the journey to the next life. Sometimes I think I’m a heathen according to modern-day standards and believe more deeply in some of the ancient gods I’ve come to know.”
“But you do believe?” It wasn’t like Josh to ask such an intimate question, but she didn’t seem bothered by it.
“In something that’s bigger than us, yes.”
Despite the warm temperature, when they got to the front door, Josh felt an icy-blue mist surround him and literally push him away. The opposite of the way that the darkness in the tunnel in the tomb had embraced him and pulled him forward.
A memory dart exploded and a burst of pain crossed his forehead and circled around and back. He was sure that before this church had been consecrated in the name of Jesus Christ, it had been a different kind of holy place.
Chapter 19
Julius and Sabina
Rome—391 A.D.
The soldier hit the marble altar with a rod made of wrought iron and smashed it. A shower of fragments hit the floor. One sailed through the air and came down on Julius’s foot, slicing it open. He didn’t notice. His eyes were riveted on the sacrificial stone.
What had stood for thousands of years stood no longer. For a few seconds no one moved. Not the seven soldiers who had charged this temple or the six priests who were now trying to defend it. Everyone was stunned. The nexus of prayer, for hundreds of centuries, was gone. Julius looked at Lucas, the most senior priest, and saw on his face the reality they all had to accept: no place was safe. This was the tenth temple that had been destroyed in the last six weeks.
Behind him, Julius heard loud and raucous laughter. He spun around and jumped the soldier, who, caught off guard, stumbled and fell backward. Another soldier saw what had happened and punched Julius in the face. He fell to his knees in pain so intense it made him vomit, right there in the most holy of places.
Around them shouts of anger rang out. Some men grunted, others groaned, bones broke and cartilage crumbled. Julius tried to clear his head and open his eyes, but he couldn’t. He put his hands up to his face.
His fingers came away wet. He couldn’t see but he knew its slickness, he recognized its sweet scent.
To his left someone screamed, “Get out. Get out now. Haven’t you done enough?”
Taunts from the other side. “Heathens. You will all go to hell.”
Julius tasted blood in his mouth. He rolled away, trying to get to the wall so he could use it to lean against and stand up.
“Where are the temple whores?” one of the soldiers cried out, laughing coarsely.
“The virgin whores. Bring us the virgin whores.”
“Never.”
Julius was surprised that the voice came from him. Surprised that he was on his feet. But despite the throbbing pain, he was. Two soldiers came at Julius at the same time. But he knew if he ducked their fists they would miss him and hit the stone.
They lunged.
Julius dropped to his knees. Above his head, he heard their bones crack and their screams. Taking advantage of the distraction, he charged another intruder from behind and pushed his fingers into his eyes.
Yelling, the soldier spun, finally falling against one of his own who also toppled over, hitting his head on one of the sharp edges of broken marble their mallets had destroyed. With four soldiers down, Julius and the other priests had a chance.
They fought fiercely and won, but when it was over, the floors were a sea of blood and bodies. There was no satisfaction, no sense of calm. There had only been seven of them today. Tomorrow others would come. And after that there would be more. The priests knew they would never win if they tried to fight them one on one. There were thousands on the emperor’s side but only hundreds of defenders.
An hour later, Sabina bathed and bandaged his wounds. This was allowed—for her to go to him and administer healing salves. What wasn’t was the secret that she still kept hidden under her robes. She had taken to wearing a cloak now all the time so no one noticed the small bulge, but how much longer would that work?
They’d met so infrequently in the woods, they’d been able to figure out that she was ten weeks pregnant now, and her fate tortured him. He had pledged himself to her and vowed he’d save her and their unborn child even if it meant dying in the process. The bandaging finished, Sabina gave Julius a brew of herbs to help relieve the pain.
“Maybe you should brew some for yourself,” he said suggestively as he handed her the empty cup. “It’s still early, they’re very effective at this stage, aren’t they?”
They both had been so careful. Like all women of Rome, Sabina knew how to avoid the times of the month when she was most fertile and conception most likely to occur. Plus there were the unguents and washes that she used right after they were together. But sometimes precautions failed. Then, for the wealthy who jealously guarded their estates, not always wanting to share holdings with too many offspring, or the poor who often simply couldn’t afford to feed too many mouths, or unhappily married women who wanted divorces, not children, there were alternatives: either a drink made from a distillation of herbs or surgery. Although Julius and Sabina lived in an era when termination of pregnancy was without stigma, not only allowed but in certain circumstances encouraged, she wouldn’t consider it.
“No. Our baby has to be born, Julius. Through her we’ll always be together.”
“You’re wrong. The baby will only ensure we’ll both be killed. What if we can’t convince the priests and nuns that the laws are outdated? I know we’ve all been talking about making changes, but what if no one is ready by the time we are? What if I can’t save you? Do you know what it will be like to suffocate, slowly, gasping for air? You can’t die. Not over a child that isn’t born yet.”
“There are other laws, too, that matter. Laws of nature.”
“You might be committing suicide by keeping this baby, Sabina,” he whispered, lest anyone outside hear them.
She shook her head and put her finger on his mouth, preventing him from saying anything else.
Chapter 20
Rome, Italy—Wednesday, 11:08 a.m.
Josh leaned against the giant bronze doors on the monumental porch facing inward to the rectangular colonnaded temple, staring at the familiar way the sun filtered down from the hemispherical dome. He’d been feeling Julius’s grief so deeply he could barely breathe. He was surprised that his physical reactions had crossed the divide.
The light shifted and sunbeams streamed through the unglazed oculus, creating patterns of illumination on the floors and walls of porphyry stone, granite and yellow marble. The opening also let in birds that were swooping down and then, not sure of where they were or how to escape, flying around wildly until they found a breeze and rode it out.
On the wall, Josh noticed a large plaque. The top paragraph was in Italian, but the one beneath it was in English. He read the brief history of the church.
The Pantheon of Agrippa was erected by the Roman Emperor Hadrian between 118 and 128 A.D., replacing a smaller temple built by the statesman Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa in 27 B.C.
In the early seventh century it was consecrated as a church, Santa Maria ad Martyres.
Had he—or the man he saw in his mind—defended this very temple sixteen hundred years ago? Was he remembering for him…remembering for the dead?
From where he stood, Josh could see Gabriella in front of the side altar, lighting a votive candle with a long stick. The flame sputtered and then held steady. The glass glowed red.
Bowing her head, she knelt and clasped her hands in front of her.
Josh fingered his camera, yearning to take her picture but sensing it would be a rude intrusion to photograph th
is woman he barely knew, in prayer. It even felt wrong to be watching such an intimate moment, but he was mesmerized by the scene. By the serenity that hovered just above the chaos. By the beauty of her body arched over, deep in prayer. By the halo effect of sunlight glinting around her head, echoing the Virgin’s halo in the painting that hung behind her in the alcove.
“You don’t like churches?” Gabriella asked when she found him there a few minutes later.
Josh couldn’t tell her that he’d just stood at the door to a church in Rome on a Sunday afternoon in the twenty-first century and watched what had happened in that same building nearly two millennia before, or how the horror of that past had stopped him from going inside.
In the past six months, other than Dr. Beryl Talmage and Malachai Samuels at the Phoenix Foundation, Professor Rudolfo had been the only one he’d told any of the tale to. Curious rather than judgmental, the professor seemed to accept what Josh had said without skepticism. Would Gabriella be as objective? Or would she look at him the way his ex-wife had, the way some of the doctors and therapists had, the way Josh still looked at himself in the mirror—as a freak.
Malachai had laughed when Josh told him that was how he’d felt.
“To me you are a marvel, a gift. A chance,” he’d said, “for us to take our understanding of reincarnation to another level.”
As they left the church, it occurred to Josh that he didn’t know where Malachai was, and asked her.
“He was at the American embassy most of yesterday, trying to get them to intercede on your behalf. We talked last night on the phone and he told me he wasn’t having any luck. There was some kind of summit meeting and everyone with authority was away. That’s when he asked me to help. He thought I’d have a better shot with the police since I speak fluently.”
“And since you’re so damn attractive.”
She was totally caught off guard by his compliment. So was he.
“That was fairly sexist. I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “No, it was nice.”
The tension between them lifted for a minute. They were just two people standing on a street in Rome, walking in the sunshine. A guy giving a woman a compliment that she was gracious enough to take in the spirit that it was intended.
They’d just gotten into her car and she’d turned on the ignition when her cell phone rang. While she talked, rapidly in Italian, Josh turned around and looked back at the church, watching a group of tourists go in. Lifting his camera to his eye, he studied the building from different angles and took several shots. Gabriella’s back was to him; she was facing out her window. He shifted in his seat so he could see the side of her face, watch her lips move and the way the sun brought out the honey in her hair. But what he was searching for wasn’t there.
After the accident he’d seen an aura around certain people’s heads when he photographed them, but the strange lights never showed up in the photographs themselves. The first time he’d thought it was a camera defect and had changed the camera body and then the lenses. When it appeared a second time, he told the doctors about it. Just like the memory lurches, the lights might have been proof of neurological problems. But they never found any.
When Josh went to work at the foundation, he continued seeing the lights hovering over several of the children he worked with. Impossible to discern with his naked eye, it was only something he picked up through the camera lens: white translucent streaks radiating around the upper portion of their bodies. As if a cartoonist were indicating speed. Was it speed? Time moving at the speed of light?
He had only seen it once before that.
When Josh was twenty, his father had been diagnosed with cancer. Whatever Ben sensed about Josh’s reaction, he didn’t say much at first. That was his style. He delivered the news to his son in his straightforward, black-and-white way and left him to absorb it.
A few days later, they were working in the darkroom together, both of them lit by the single red light.
“I’ve a favor to ask,” Ben said, and while they continued to develop that afternoon’s shoot, he told Josh he wanted him to chronicle his illness photographically.
At the time, Josh didn’t question the request. It seemed so natural. The father, a photographer, asking the son, a photographer, to capture this last event of his life. Only years later did he realize what a great gift his father had given him. A way for them to share as much time as they could together. A way for Ben to pass on every last bit of teaching about their shared craft. For them to be joined even in their unjoining.
Josh chronicled everything in those last few weeks. The slow fading. The light that disappeared in his father’s eyes, lumen by lumen until there was nothing left but pain and dulled emotion. He looked through the lens and searched for the potent man he had known and loved for all of his life, but he couldn’t find him in the shell made of bones and sickly flesh.
Toward the end, Josh moved back home and slept on a cot in his father’s sickroom. One midnight, Josh had fallen asleep when the nurse woke him to tell him that from the sound of his father’s breathing, she thought this was the end.
Josh asked her to leave them alone.
He sat in the dark by Ben Ryder’s side, holding his father’s hand. It hurt just listening to his raspy breathing. And then Ben woke up. Just lay still on the bed, looking up at his son and whispered, “More shots.”
“Morphine?” Josh asked. Although Ben was on a drip, he assumed his father had forgotten he was no longer getting injections and needed additional painkillers.
“No.” He gave Josh a weak smile. “Photographs. Of this.”
A son dreams of the secret of life being revealed by a father on his deathbed. Josh was asked to pick up his camera and go to work. But it was what they did, and so Josh stood over his father and kept photographing him, not knowing if he was getting anything because his eyes were so blurred with tears.
And that was when he noticed the opalescent nimbus, like a ring of light around Ben’s head and shoulders.
It was his hand shaking, it was a reflection from the bathroom light, it was something in the lens or the camera itself, it was his tears. It was nothing. It was not worth questioning.
Over the ensuing days and weeks of grief, Josh forgot about the light, and when he eventually developed the photographs, it wasn’t there and he never thought about it again.
Until twenty years later when he went to work at the Phoenix Foundation and started seeing the mother-of-pearl arc of light that appeared almost like wings behind his subjects’ heads and around their shoulders.
Over lunch one day, he mentioned it to Beryl and Malachai.
“That, too?” Malachai had said wistfully.
“What do you mean?” Josh asked.
“Not many people can see it. I can’t.”
Beryl didn’t suffer her nephew’s plaintive longing when it crept into his conversation. She shook her head as if he were a little boy she was displeased with, and addressed the issue without any emotion.
“We think it’s a marker identifying some people as old souls.”
“Have you ever seen it?” Josh asked.
“Yes.”
“Through a camera?”
“No. You only see it through the camera lens?”
Josh said yes and asked her why, but she couldn’t think of a reason. He asked why she hadn’t written about the phenomenon in any of her papers.
“The hallmark of scientific research is reproducibility. I can put out an auger dish and grow a banana fish in it and present that as my research, but my career as a scientist would be over unless the next person who tried to do it, following my methods, could duplicate my results.”
“Then I’ll find a way to prove it so that if someone else follows my methods and takes a picture of the same subject it will be there for him, too.”
“I don’t think it can be done,” Beryl said.
“I need to try. I need one absolute shred of proof. At least this has to do
with something I know about—cameras, light, exposure.”
Long after that lunch, Josh still wondered if the light he’d first seen years before had been his father’s intact soul lifting up and leaving his tired, diseased body, starting the journey to find a new, healthy one and begin anew.
Ben Ryder hadn’t been religious, and neither had Sarah, Josh’s mother. Under their influence, he wasn’t, either. Ben had left instructions that he wasn’t to be buried but cremated and that he wanted his ashes thrown away. Like garbage. That was his wish, and Josh honored it. He knew Ben wasn’t in those ashes. He was in his son’s remembrances of him.
He was in his photographs.
“You just do the best you can and make the most of the life you have. Heaven,” he’d once told Josh during that last year, “is just a comfortable concept to make people feel better about death.”
So Josh had watched his father’s energy and vitality leave and each day recorded what was left of him, but it wasn’t until his work for the foundation that he wondered where his father’s spirit had gone. Until then he’d never wondered if it had indeed existed as an entity that could pick up and move. Never wondered if it was in limbo waiting to be reconstituted in someone else. Certainly never wondered if he’d be the person to capture it with his camera and try to prove that it was real.
But since going to that lunch with Beryl, he did.
“I’m going back to the hospital,” Gabriella said after she hung up. “The professor is worse. He might be…” She swallowed, fought for control but didn’t finish the sentence.
“You said he survived the surgery.”
“He did. Now he has an infection. You saved him for the surgeons, and they saved him for this to kill him.”
“Let me go with you,” he said.
She didn’t put up an argument, and so they set off for the hospital together.
