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to help them, to do what no one’s been able to do—to give them peace.”
    The thought of being stuck in limbo, as some ghosts inevitably were, sent a chill down my spine. I looked around me at the posters on the wall advertising the university’s attempts to rescue lost and stolen artifacts, at the shattered pottery lining the hallway and ancient artwork adorning the walls. These were some of the few remaining pieces left from an entire civilization, thousands of people gone from this world. How many are stuck in between, not living but not quite dead either? And this is just one culture. It dawned on me how few people I’d helped in the grand scheme of the world. There were many more people out there, searching for a way to the other side. I wasn’t sure what existed beyond our world, but if ghosts were real, which I knew to be true from previous encounters, then there had to be something. Heaven, Hell, the Duat; whatever it was had to be better than limbo. “How long will this take?”
    Dr. Mayna smiled. “How long does it take to have a vision?”
    “Seconds, minutes, I don’t even know if I’ll get one. I can’t promise anything, you understand?”
    She nodded. “I do. It’s worth a try though.”
    “Fine, let’s give it a shot.”
    Dr. Kamal watched with a curious expression. “You Americans are never boring.”
    “Tell me about it,” I replied, following the GW professor down the hall and past Jessie, who joined Dr. Kamal and me.
    “What’s going on?” my old friend asked.
    “ Quid pro quo . We’re gonna try and see if I can die again today.”
    “They bought it?” he asked.
    Dr. Kamal’s eyebrows rose.
    “There’s nothing to buy,” I answered.
    “I know,” Jessie replied. “I know it’s real, but what you can do most people view the way the Puritans saw witchcraft.”
    “Let’s just be glad we don’t burn people at the stake anymore.” My thoughts went to the fourteen victims. “Well, most of us at least.”
     

A LIFE OF DEATH: 10
    BY
    WESTON KINCADE
     
    - BOOKS of the DEAD -
     

Nine
    Ancient Memories
    September 16, 2011
     
    We passed from the hallway into a gallery filled with artifacts. I slipped my hands into my coat pockets and made sure to keep a moderate distance from each display. Although they were enclosed and protected, I didn’t want to take chances. After walking through a few rooms, we finally entered a door marked Authorized Personnel Only . Inside the long room were rows of stainless-steel counters and tabletops, with short boxes containing all sorts of jagged pottery shards, bones, casts, and other assorted historic discoveries. Researchers, young interns, and a few adults I assumed to be other professors worked at the different stations with brushes or sat huddled over well-lit boxes trying to piece together the remains of hundreds of years of history as though it were a jigsaw puzzle. Windows lined the walls above the tables, but instead of looking outside, through them other, similarly designed rooms could be seen. We followed Dr. Mayna through two sets of swinging doors, past more people dressed in white lab coats, and entered a room with larger, occupied, stainless-steel tables. It was like an L-shaped morgue, but without the frosty chill. Instead, dust seemed to permeate the air from the remains, and a sterile, haunted feeling crept up the back of my neck.
    Dr. Mayna took a lab coat off a coat hook behind the door and slipped it over her other clothes. It dwarfed her slim figure, but seemed to belong there. “Meet Jack and Jill,” Dr. Mayna said after shooing the few researchers present out of the room. She motioned toward the two complete skeletons filling the short-walled, body-length boxes on two tables. On a third, parallel table was yet another skeleton. “And this is Curly. We have other names, as you can see by the tags, but our interns spend so much time with them that they always name them.” Other skeletons lay about the room in varying