The Reincarnationist Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 sonear 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
    â€œI’ 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 andtwisted 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—
    â€œNo,” 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.
    â€œWhat 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.