Percy Talmage, home for the summer break from Yale, was in the dining room, listening to his uncle Davenport talk about protecting the club’s archeological investments in Rome. His uncle mentioned the archeologist they’d been financing. His name was Wallace Neely and he was searching for the Lost Memory Tools.
And now, here in this ancient tomb, sitting beside the professor, another memory surfaced, but not one that belonged to him; Josh was remembering for someone in the past. He was remembering for Percy.
Percy was just eight years old the first time he’d heard about the tools. His father had shown him the ancient manuscript he was translating. It had been written by a scribe who said the tools were not just a legend. They existed. The scribe had seen them and given a full description of each of the amulets, ornaments and stones.
“The tools are important,” Trevor said to his son, “because history is important. He who knows the past controls the future. If the tools exist and if they can help people rediscover their past lives, you, me-and every member of the Phoenix Club-need to ensure this power is used for the good of all men, not selfishly exploited.”
Percy didn’t understand just how important it was for years. And years.
Was it possible that Josh had traveled halfway around the world to come back to where he’d started? Like so many things, this couldn’t be a coincidence. He needed time to work out the connections, but that time wasn’t now; the professor was still talking.
“In the 1880s Neely purchased several sites in and around this area, a practice that was very common then,” the professor explained. “People bought the land they wanted to excavate so they could own the spoils outright. The club went into partnership with Neely and helped pay for the excavations, which could explain why the same inscription appears in both his journal and Talmage’s notes.”
Josh peered down at the intricately carved wooden box clasped in the mummy’s hand. In its center was a bird rising out of a fire, a sword in its talons. It was almost identical to the coat of arms carved into the Phoenix Foundation’s front door. In the border, around the perimeter, he saw the markings that Rudolfo had pointed out.
“Do you know what language this is?”
“Gabriella has plans to be in touch with experts in the field. She believes they could be an ancient form of Sanskrit.”
“I thought she was an expert?”
“She is. In ancient Greek and Latin. This is neither.”
Josh was confused about something. “You said this tomb was intact when you found it?”
“Yes.”
“So how could Neely have been here?”
“We don’t believe he-or anyone else-ever worked on this site. The pages we have from his journal indicate he excavated two sites nearby but found nothing. He’d gone to work on a third site, but we don’t know what happened there. His journal abruptly ended while he was in the middle of that dig.”
“Abruptly?”
“He was killed. There’s very little known about the circumstances.”
“But 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.