The Reincarnationist by M. J. Rose Read Free Book Online Page A

step up.
    Not ready to give up, Rudolfo took hold of the ladder’s wooden dowels and tried to shake the guard loose.
    Josh had two, maybe three yards to go.
    The guard stopped climbing—he was halfway up now, and he just stood there, staring down at Rudolfo, and then he pulled out his gun.
    The professor took a step up the ladder.
    The guard’s finger teased the trigger.
    Josh was almost at the entrance of the tunnel, and just as he screamed an agonized “no” in warning, the gun went off, causing an enormous explosion in the small tomb and drowning out his warning. Behind him, he heard a rumble and then the sound of heavy rain. No. Not rain. Rocks. Some parts of the tunnel’s walls were collapsing in on themselves. And in front of him, he saw the professor fall on his back on the hard, cold, ancient mosaic floor.

Chapter 7
    T he man sat in the leather chair, his hands resting on the arm pads, his fingers circling the smooth nail heads. Around and around the cold metal circles as if this one movement was enough to keep him occupied forever. His eyes were shut. The gold drapes were drawn, and the room’s rich decor was cloaked in darkness.
    He was satisfied to sit and do nothing but wait. Long pauses in the plan didn’t bother him. Not after all this time. From the moment he’d first heard the legend of the Memory Stones he knew that one day whatever power they held would be his. Needed to be his. No price was too high and no effort was too great to find out about the past.
    His past.
    His present.
    And so, too, his future.
    The idea that the stones might work, that they could, in fact, enable people to remember their previous lives, was unbearably pleasurable to him. He fantasized about the stones the way other men fantasized about women. His daydreams about what would happen once they were in his possession elevated his blood pressure, took awayhis breath and made him feel weak and strong at the same time in an utterly satisfying way. And because he’d been taught to be disciplined, he gave in to the temptation of dreaming about them only when he felt he deserved the indulgence.
    He deserved it now.
    Were they emeralds? Sapphires the color of the night skies? Lapis? Obsidian? Were they rough? Polished? What would they feel like? Small and smooth? Larger? Like glass? Would they be luminescent? Or dull, ordinary-looking things that didn’t begin to suggest their power?
    He didn’t mind waiting, but it seemed to him that he should have heard by now.
    He had an appointment he had to keep. No, it was premature to worry. He wouldn’t contemplate any kind of failure. He disliked that he’d involved other people in his plan. No one you hired, no matter how much you paid them, was entirely trustworthy. Regardless of how well he’d tried to plan for the mistakes that could happen along the way, he was certain to have overlooked at least a few. He felt a new wave of anxiety start to build deep in his chest and took several deep breaths.
    Relax. You ’ve reached this point . You’ll succeed.
    But so much is at stake.
    He picked up the well-worn book he’d been reading last night when his anticipation of what today would bring had kept him awake, Theosophy by the nineteenth-century philosopher Rudolf Steiner. There were always new books being published on the subject that mattered so much to him—he bought and read them all—but it was the thinkers of the past centuries whom he responded to and returned to so often: the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walt Whitman, Longfellow; the prose of Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Sand,Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and so many more who engaged, reassured and aided him in amending and revising his own ever-evolving theories. They were his touchstones, these great minds that he could only know through their words. So many brilliant men and women who had believed what he believed.
    He let the book