The name was unimportant, one of the few accidents of rebirth, but for this return it was Harold Taylor and he was a reincarnation. He also killed people.
Unlike others who believed themselves to have had previous lives, Taylor most definitely knew: doubly unique, he had total and perfect recall of each existence.
As Myron Nolan he’d taken Mafia tuition on New York’s mob-controlled waterfront to make millions as a US Army quartermaster sergeant during and after the Second World War.
He’d discovered the advantages of a military existence – the ability to steal and to kill with impunity – serving as Patrick Arnold in the British Army in the First World War, which had also given him his first experience of a court-martial and on that occasion a firing squad that had reduced that life to his shortest ever.
Until the public recognition had been so cruelly – wrongly – taken from him, his favourite had been as Maurice Barkworth, a name still listed in the medical reference books of the late nineteenth century, for almost twenty years of which he’d been fêted as one of London’s leading surgeons, specializing in the experimental treatment of the human eye.
He’d qualified as a doctor in America, where forty years previously, as Luke Thomas, he’d travelled West on an early settlers’ wagon train as far as the then Spanish-governed town of St Louis to establish the first of his several self-patronized brothels.
It had all begun as Paul Noakes, in the raucous, teeming St James’s streets of eighteenth-century London. There, in the temple of his beloved shaman mystic, he’d literally abandoned himself, body and soul. And in exchange been taught the mantras and the blood sacrifices necessary to return from the afterlife. He hadn’t, of course, believed it. Not then. Not until his death, when the flames in which his parents destroyed him had begun to melt his first body and he’d felt the agony and then the total, moment-of-death peace of meeting his mystic teacher on the threshold of the afterlife.
Do you want to live again?
Yes.
Water – cultivate – every existence with the blood of others.
That is my pledge.
And your guarantee of rebirth. Do not fail me and I will never fail you.
He enjoyed the killing, which he’d been encouraged to do. Offering the sacrifices, which the shaman, who called himself Tzu – ‘master’ – appointed him to perform: who’d taught him the ritual dismemberment, which none of the other reincarnation disciples could bring themselves to perform and who therefore respected him, because he could. It was almost as good as the sacrificial ceremonies themselves, having the respect of others.
He’d believed in reincarnation when he’d been reborn in America with the power of absolute recall, of course. And from that time the sacrifices continued, his victims always those who’d offended or harmed him in his previous existence.
This latest time was going to be different, Taylor determined. He’d always remembered and he’d always learned, certainly. But always from the past, never exploring the possibilities of the future.
This return he would. He felt – he was sure – he could transmogrify. Was even more curious to see if he could bodily transfer, possess the presence and mind and soul of another living being, which Tzu had preached was possible. He could return so much more quickly if, at the very moment of death, he immediately possessed another living being. Transmogrify and possess. Both would be wonderful. Exciting.
It was time to start. He was ready.