The Memorist

Chapter 103

Thursday, May 1^st-8:39 p.m.

The street was illuminated with old-fashioned lamps and Lucian Glass had no trouble seeing Malachai and Meer as they emerged from the concert hall’s front doors. Paparazzi, originally there to cover the concert, jostled each other for position, shooting the horrific expressions on the exiting concertgoers’ faces. The continuous explosion of flashes lit up the street so that for seconds at a time it seemed as bright as daylight.

Lucian was still haunted by what had happened inside the concert hall when the music turned into human cries. Suddenly there was no air and no space and no time and it didn’t matter that he couldn’t breathe because breathing wasn’t necessary. He was smoke, floating, no longer seeing what was in front of him but visualizing another time and place in some eternal, intuitive way.

He’d been watching Meer make her way up on the stage when she transformed into a different woman with longer, darker hair, wearing a torn and tattered blue robe…she held a flute…and was crying…no…it wasn’t a flute. Not yet. It was just a small bone, broken off at one end, and she was handing it to him, telling him she’d stolen it from the burial site. While she spoke she continued crying and her face was filthy except where streaks from her tears had made tracks.

Lucian didn’t know who the woman was. He’d never seen her before but he felt as if he’d never not seen her. None of this made sense but it didn’t matter. He’d been emotionally and physically mesmerized by the vision.

Watching through an expanse of space that seemed to have no connection to distance as he knew it, he saw a man he was part of and who was part of him take the bone out of the woman’s hand. Then in quick moving images illustrating different scenes of the same story, he saw the man-he saw himself-carving seven holes in the bone and turning it into a flute while the woman slept nearby, close to a fire in the workshop he used to share with his brother, Devadas.

When the symphony came to its abrupt stop, Lucian was sucked back into the present with violent force, watching Meer in her black jeans and leather jacket, Meer with her auburn hair and shocking green eyes, not Ohana, not the robed woman.

Now as his eyes followed her through the hysterical crowd, Ohana hovered, ghostlike, beside her. Was it possible to exist in two states of being? Could he be Lucian Glass, FBI agent working a case that was breaking open around him and also be alive and aware in another time?

It looked as if Meer was clutching something to her chest and although he was too far away to tell what it was, he didn’t doubt it was the memory flute he’d seen her take out of Sebastian’s hands. Then, as more of the crowd gushed out of the auditorium like blood from a wound, he lost sight of Meer. Around him painful screams mixed with shrieking ambulances and police sirens arriving at the location.

Finally spotting Meer and Malachai again, he also noticed an older man with thick white hair who was moving, catlike, through the melee toward them. It was Fremont Brecht, the head of the Memorist Society. More robust than his age or size suggested; his only sign of infirmity was a slight limp but it didn’t seem to be doing anything to slow him down.

Lucian had been with the agency long enough to trust his instincts when he sensed danger. He would have screamed out to Meer and Malachai to warn them if there was any chance they would have heard him but he was too far away. He was cut off by a wall of terror-stricken people. These were the men and women who created foolproof security firewalls in cyberspace, GPR systems, tracking devices, mantraps, and machines to test the air for traces of explosive. Their alarm was exacerbated because they knew too much, understood how impossible it really was to protect anyone and that no lockdown procedure was ever completely secure. Certainly, none of them had any idea that the violent dreamlike images they’d just experienced were their own past life memories. More likely they believed they’d been the victims of a mass hypnotic trance induced by some kind of chemical warfare. But Lucian didn’t. He guessed that what Malachai had spent his life trying to verify might very possibly have been proved tonight, triggered not by a sophisticated biological agent but by a handful of notes: a memory song.

And then the crowd broke and in the crazy flashing paparazzi light Lucian saw Brecht pull a gun.

“Meer! Watch out!” The multitude swallowed his scream.

Suddenly Malachai doubled over. Clutching his stomach, he dropped out of sight and Meer disappeared along with him. The crush of people was too thick. Brecht must be after the flute, too. That meant that when he realized Malachai didn’t have it, the Memorist would go after Meer. Damn the crush of people. Lucian started shoving his way through.

A heavyset woman was in his way. Swaying on her feet, she was obviously disoriented. Lucian yelled at her to get out of the way but instead of moving, Gerta Osborne froze, panic on her face. And as the opera singer fainted, Lucian had no choice but to dive and try to catch her.