The Reincarnationist Read Free

wasn’t real. He’d been remembering the chase and the escape and the rescue as if they had happened to him. But they hadn’t. Of course they hadn’t.
    He wasn’t Julius.
    He was Josh Ryder. He was alive in the twenty-first century.
    This scene belonged sixteen hundred years in the past.
    Then why did he feel as if he’d lost everything that had ever mattered to him?

Chapter 2
    Rome, Italy—the present
Tuesday, 6:45 a.m .
    S ixteen feet underground, the carbine lantern flickered, illuminating the ancient tomb’s south wall. Josh Ryder was astounded by what he saw. The flowers in the fresco were as fresh as if they’d been painted days before. Saffron, crimson, vermilion, orange, indigo, canary, violet and salmon blossoms all gathered in a bouquet, stunning against the Pompeii-red background. Beneath him, the floor shimmered with an elaborate mosaic maze done in silver, azure, green, turquoise and cobalt: a pool of watery tiles. Behind him, Professor Rudolfo continued explaining the importance of this late fourth-century tomb in his heavily accented English. At least seventy-five, he was still spry and energetic, with lively, coal-black eyes that sparkled with excitement as he talked about the excavation.
    He’d been surprised to have a visitor at such an early hour, but when he heard Josh’s name, Rudolfo told the guard on duty that yes, it was fine, he was expecting Mr.Ryder later that morning with the other man from the Phoenix Foundation.
    Josh had woken before dawn. He rarely slept well since his accident last year, but last night’s insomnia was more likely due to the time change—having just arrived in Rome that day from New York—or the excitement of being back in the city where so many of his memory lurches took place. Too restless to stay in the hotel, he grabbed his camera and went for a walk, not at all sure where he was going. But something happened while he was out.
    Despite the darkness and his ignorance of the city’s layout, he proceeded as if the route had been mapped out for him. He knew the path, even if he had no idea of his final destination. Deserted avenues lined with expensive stores gave way to narrow streets and ancient buildings. The shadows became more sinister. But he kept going.
    If he’d passed anyone else, he hadn’t noticed them. And even though it had seemed like a thirty-minute walk, it turned out to have taken more than two hours. Two hours spent in a semitrance. He’d watched the night change from blue-gray to pale gray to a lemony-pink as the sun came up. He’d seen lush green hills develop the way the images in a photograph did in a chemical bath. From nothing to a shadow to a sense of a shape to a real form, but he didn’t know if he’d stopped to take any shots of the scenery. The whole episode was both disconcerting and astonishing when it turned out that, seemingly by chance, he’d stumbled onto the very site he and Malachai Samuels had been invited to view later that morning.
    Or not by chance at all.
    The professor didn’t ask why he was so early or question how he’d found the dig. “If it were me, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep, either. Come down, come down.”
    Content to let the professor assume enthusiasm had brought him there at six-thirty in the morning, Josh breathed deeply and took a first tentative step down the ladder, refusing to allow his mind to dwell on the claustrophobia he’d suffered his whole life and which had intensified since the accident.
    Strains of music from Madame Butterfly that had first caught Josh’s attention and then drawn him up this particular hill were louder now, and he concentrated on the heartbreaking aria as he descended into the dimly lit chamber.
    The space was larger than he’d anticipated, and he exhaled, relieved. He’d be able to tolerate being there.
    The professor shook his hand, introduced himself, then