The Reincarnationist Read Online Free

to his core and interfered with his life. Tormented him, overpowered him, making it impossible for him to return to the world he’d known before the bombing, before the hospital, before his wife ultimately gave up on him.
    There was a possibility, the last therapist said, that there was something neurological causing the hallucinations. SoJosh visited a top neurologist, hoping—as bizarre as it was to hope such a thing—that the doctor would find some residual brain trauma as a result of the accident, which would explain the waking nightmares that plagued him. He was disconsolate when tests showed none.
    Josh was out of choices—nothing was left but to explore the impossible and the irrational. The quest exhausted him, but he couldn’t give up; he needed to understand even if it meant accepting something that he couldn’t imagine or believe: either he was mad, or he’d developed the ability to revisit lives he’d lived before this one. The only way he would know was to find out if reincarnation was real, if it was truly possible.
    That was what brought him to the Phoenix Foundation’s Drs. Beryl Talmage and Malachai Samuels, who, for the past twenty-five years, had recorded more than three thousand past-life regressions experienced by children under the age of twelve.
    Josh took another photograph of the south corner of the tomb. The smooth, cold metal case felt good in his hands, and the sound of the shutter was reassuring. Recently he’d given up digital equipment and had been using his father’s old Leica. It was a connection to real memories, to sanity, to support, to logic. The way a camera worked was simple. Light exposed the image onto the emulsion. Developing the film was basic chemistry. Known elements interacted with paper treated with yet other known elements. A facsimile of an actual object became a new object—but a real one—a photograph. A mystery unless you understood the science. Knowledge. That was all he wanted. To know more—to know everything—about the two men he had been channeling since the accident. Damn, he hated that word and its association with New Age psychics and shamans. Josh’s black-and-white view of the world, his need to capture on film the harsh reality of the terror-filled times, did not jibe with someone who channeled anything.
    â€œAre you all right?” the professor asked again. “You look haunted.”
    Josh knew that, had seen it when he looked in the mirror; glimpsed the ghosts hiding in the shadows of his expression.
    â€œI’m amazed, that’s all. The past is so close here. It’s incredible.” It was easy enough to say because it was the truth, but there was more he hadn’t said that was amazing. As Josh Ryder, he’d never before stood in that crypt sixteen feet under the earth. So then how did he know that behind him, in a dark corner of the tomb the professor hadn’t yet shown him or shone the light on, there were jugs, lamps and a funerary bed painted with real gold?
    He tried to peer into the darkness.
    â€œAh, you are like all Americans.” The professor smiled.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œImpertinent…no…impatient.” The professor smiled yet again. “So what it is it you are looking for?”
    â€œThere’s more back there, isn’t there?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œA funerary bed?” Josh asked, testing the memory. Or the guess. After all, they were in a tomb.
    Rudolfo shined the light into the farthest corner, and Josh found himself staring at a wooden divan decorated with carved peacocks adorned with gold leaf and studded with pieces of malachite and lapis lazuli.
    Something was wrong: he’d expected there to be a woman’s body lying on it. A woman’s body dressed in a white robe. He was both desperate to see her and dreading it at the same time.
    â€œWhere is she?” Josh was embarrassed by the plaintive