The taxi crossed Central Park at Eighty-sixth and paused at the stoplight on Fifth Avenue. Jennifer glanced out the window at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The lights were on in the Sackler Wing, and she could see part of the Temple of Dendur. The ancient Egyptian temple glowed in the soft yellow light, casting shadows the length of the immense wing.
Jennifer remembered how she had gone once to the museum when she was a teenager. It had been a junior-high class trip and she had got upset, wanted only to get out of the museum. Jennifer tried to remember what it was about, why she had been so upset by the Egyptian wing. It had been new then, built to house the Temple of Dendur, the small temple that had been saved in Egypt when the Aswan Dam was built. The temple had been removed from lower Nubia in Egypt, stone by stone, and rebuilt in the Metropolitan Museum. There was a pool of water in front of the temple, and a wall of windows overlooking Central Park.
It was a beautiful setting, Jennifer recalled, but when she had first come into the wing it had frightened her, upsetting her for some unknown reason.
Of course, Jennifer thought. Of course!
She leaned forward at once and tapped the glass partition of the taxi, telling the driver that she had changed her mind. She wasn’t going to the airport. She was stopping first at the Metropolitan Museum. She was going back into the Temple of Dendur to learn what secret of her past was locked away in her memory. She was going to let the ancient stone tell her what had happened to her on the banks of the Nile.
The new wing was at the rear of the huge Metropolitan, behind long galleries of Egyptian art and artifacts. Jennifer didn’t rush herself through the exhibition. She moved slowly, waiting for her memory to be triggered by the objects, waiting for some connection to her life in Egypt, to the earliest time of her existence. The Ouija board had told her she was the first human. Was this what it meant? Did all of her troubles begin here, in one of the great dynasties?
Jennifer kept moving slowly through the rooms, from the time of the New Kingdoms, back into the Middle Kingdoms and the Archaic Period. She glanced from object to object, scanned the artifacts that the Metropolitan had in its vast collection. She waited for some memory. It had happened to her at the Museum of Natural History. When she had seen the primitive hut, she knew that she had once lived in that prehistoric hut, slept under those mammoth bones and animal skins.
Jennifer pushed the door and went into a room of glass cases and burial objects. There were mummies sealed behind the cases, shelves of ancient linens and small Canopic jars.
She reached out and pressed her fingers against the cases holding the mummies. No sensation touched her. She felt only the cool glass. There were no memories of her past life here, she understood.
She kept moving through the deserted rooms. It was late, she realized. The museum would be closing soon. She glanced at her watch to see how much time she had left, then opened another door and stepped into the vast Sackler Wing with the reconstructed Temple of Dendur.
Now she felt something. Her attention was alerted. It was as if some memory was trying to reach her from her early lifetime on earth. She was suddenly not frightened. The recollection was comforting, as if she had finally solved her problem, found the missing piece in the puzzle of her life.
She moved forward, closer to the temple itself, keeping her eyes now on the huge stone structure.
There were few other people in the wing. A tour guide was speaking to a group of women sitting on a stone bench. She was aware, too, of two guides standing together by the windows, but she concentrated on the temple, focusing her attention and waiting for more memories to flood her mind.
She stepped up onto the level of the temple, walked around the small pool of water, and approached the front of the reconstructed temple. In the foreground was an archway, and behind that, the temple walls. The spirit called Pharaoh had told Phoebe that Kathy Dart, as Tamil, had killed her when she was Roudidit and married to Amenhotep. It was the days of Ramses, and Kirk had been Amenhotep, her husband.
Jennifer paused on her approach to the temple. If this was the first incarnation and she had been murdered, she thought, then why now, after all the other lives she had lived, would Kathy Dart still be seeking revenge? It was her spirit, not Kathy Dart’s, that had been violated!
It couldn’t be her first life on earth, Jennifer thought next. She remembered the images she had seen of herself when Kathy Dart had pierced her third eye. She had been a wild creature then, living in a jungle world. But what had the Ouija board planchette spelled out? That she was the first human.
Jennifer shook her head. No, Phoebe was wrong. Phoebe was hiding information. She had swept the planchette off the board. She hadn’t wanted Jennifer to know. But to know what?
Jennifer stepped closer to the interior of the temple and closed her eyes, concentrating on the temple, on her stone surroundings. When she opened her eyes again, she saw the temple women who sang and shook the sistra and crotals during services. They lived in the innermost sanctuaries of the temple and were called God’s handmaids. All of these virgins were daughters of the wealthy families, of kings and queens, and she was among the selected few.
Jennifer stood perfectly still watching herself, the other young women of the temple. They wore shifts under transparent white pleated robes that were gathered over their left breasts. Their right shoulder was uncovered. She watched herself as she moved in procession. She was wearing rings of solid gold and strings of gold beads. A black curled wig fell over her back and onto her shoulders. She had a tiara of turquoise and gold tied at the back with two tassel cords, and her head was crowned with a scented pomade.
She was a beautiful young woman in this lifetime, Jennifer saw, and she wondered how she knew it was even her. Yet she knew. And she saw, too, as she searched the faces of the other virgins that Phoebe Fisher was with her, another of the young women. She scanned the corps of singers. Kathy Dart’s spirit was not part of this divine harem.
The scene faded from her sight. She reached out, as if to pull back the ancient memory, but saw only her hand reaching into the vast wing of the museum. Behind her she heard the museum guard make a point to the tourists, heard a child’s happy voice echo off the high ceiling. She glanced around and saw that she was being watched by a museum guard. To mask her confusion and hide her bewilderment at what she had seen, she walked to the edge of the wall and sat down.
Her legs were weak and she was out of breath. She leaned over and dropped her head between her legs. She would faint, Jennifer realized, if she wasn’t careful.
“Are you okay, lady?” the guard asked, stepping over to her.
Jennifer sat up and tossed her hair back off her shoulder. She forced a smile. “Yes, thank you. I just felt a little funny.” The man’s face was swimming in her eyesight.
The man nodded and moved away, saying as he did, “Well, you looked a little odd there.”
“I’m fine now, thank you.” Jennifer took a tissue from her purse and wiped her eyes. She waited until the man had gone back to his post before she looked again at the temple. The gray stones of the small building looked the same. There were no young virgins, no divine harem. She had imagined it all, she thought. It was nothing more than a psychic episode.