The Reincarnationist. M. Rose J.
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