Chapter 1: THE WRONG BODY
The ceiling was wrong.
Not because of the water stains or the hairline cracks spreading across old plaster. Wrong because David Webb had died in a hospital with fluorescent lights and acoustic tiles, not gas lamps and crown molding.
"—absolute miracle, I tell you. The amount of cocaine in his system should have killed three men."
A voice. Male. Clinical. The words entered my ears like they were traveling through cotton.
"His heart stopped twice, Doctor. I was there."
Female. Younger. The clipped efficiency of someone trained to handle emergencies without flinching.
My fingers twitched. Not the fingers I remembered—the ones with arthritis starting in the knuckles, the ones that had catalogued ten thousand artifacts over forty-five years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These fingers were smooth. Strong. Young.
"What the hell."
The thought came sharp and clear through the fog. I turned my head—heavier than it should be, neck stiff—and found a newspaper folded on the bedside table. The headline blurred, reformed, blurred again.
NOVEMBER 3, 1932
"Mr. Caldwell? Mr. Caldwell, can you hear me?"
The doctor leaned into view. White coat. Wire-rimmed spectacles. A face that belonged in a Norman Rockwell painting. His hand pressed against my wrist, taking my pulse the old-fashioned way.
"Welcome back to the land of the living, son. You gave your staff quite a scare."
Caldwell. The name meant nothing. I tried to say something—ask where I was, who I was, what year this actually was—but my throat felt lined with sandpaper.
"Water," the nurse said, already moving. "Just small sips."
Metal cup. Cool rim against cracked lips. The water tasted of rust and minerals. Nothing like the filtered stuff from my apartment in Brooklyn. My apartment that probably didn't exist yet because this was apparently nineteen thirty-two.
The thought should have sent me screaming. Instead, something cold and rational clicked into place behind my eyes. Panic later. Information now.
"Where..." My voice came out scraped and hollow.
"St. Vincent's Hospital. Manhattan." The doctor pulled a penlight from his pocket, shined it into my left eye, then my right. "You were brought in three days ago from a party at the Whitmore residence. Cocaine overdose. Your heart stopped twice on the table."
Three days. My tongue was thick, my thoughts sluggish, but the math was simple. November third. Subtract three. October thirty-first. Halloween.
Memories that weren't mine flickered at the edges—a woman in a sequined dress, laughter too loud, white powder on a silver tray.
"Your butler has been asking after you. Henderson, I believe?" The doctor made a note on his clipboard. "We informed him you'd likely wake today. The crisis has passed."
The nurse adjusted my pillow. Her starched cap and sensible shoes completed the picture of another era. No plastic ID badges. No electronic monitors. Just hands and eyes and hard-won skill.
"You're very lucky, Mr. Caldwell."
"Lucky."
The word sat wrong in my chest. David Webb had been sixty-three years old. Divorced. Childless. Senior curator of Ancient Near Eastern Art, working seventy-hour weeks to restore artifacts most people would never see. He'd collapsed in his office on a Tuesday afternoon—heart attack, the paramedics said—and the last thing he'd seen was the ceiling tiles of the ambulance.
Now he was—I was—in a body that wasn't his, in a decade that shouldn't exist, wearing a name that belonged to a dead stranger.
Lucky wasn't the word I'd choose.
The doctor finished his examination and tucked his clipboard under his arm.
"Complete rest for at least two weeks. No alcohol. No stimulants. Absolutely no excitement." He peered at me over his spectacles. "Your family's money won't buy you a third chance, young man. The heart has limits."
Family's money. The phrase snagged something.
After he left, I lay staring at the ceiling, waiting for my mind to catch up with my circumstances. Bits and pieces surfaced like debris from a shipwreck. Jameson Caldwell. Thirty-two years old. Heir to Caldwell Steel—one of Pittsburgh's smaller fortunes, but a fortune nonetheless. Parents dead. Siblings none. A reputation for parties, women, and spectacularly poor decisions.
The previous owner of this body had lived fast and died stupid, and somehow I'd ended up in the wreckage.
"Transmigration."
The word floated up from a lifetime of reading mythology and folklore. Souls transferred between bodies. Consciousness jumping across time. The kind of thing that happened in stories and fevered dreams, not to middle-aged museum curators who'd never believed in anything they couldn't carbon-date.
But the water tasted real. The sheets scratched real. The ache in my chest—where a heart that wasn't mine had stopped twice—that was real too.
I reached for the newspaper. My hands trembled. I ignored them.
ROOSEVELT LEADS IN POLLS AS ELECTION NEARS
GERMANY: NAZI PARTY GAINS STRENGTH IN REICHSTAG
DEPRESSION DEEPENS: UNEMPLOYMENT REACHES 24%
The dates matched. The headlines matched. Everything matched what a museum curator who'd specialized in twentieth-century history would expect from November 1932.
Hitler's rise. The Depression. The gathering storm that would consume fifty million lives before it was done.
I knew what came next. I knew all of it—Kristallnacht, Poland, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima. The broad strokes were burned into my memory from a lifetime of academic study.
But there was more.
My specialty had been artifacts. Ancient relics. Objects that carried the weight of human belief across millennia. I'd catalogued hundreds of them, researched thousands more, written papers on the intersection of mythology and archaeology.
And I'd watched movies. Everyone watched movies.
Indiana Jones fighting Nazis for the Ark of the Covenant. The Temple of Doom. The Holy Grail. Adventure serials that I'd loved as a kid and appreciated differently as an adult—appreciating the research, the attention to period detail, the way Spielberg had captured the aesthetics of 1930s pulp adventure.
"What if they weren't just movies?"
The thought was absurd. Ridiculous. The Ark of the Covenant was a biblical myth, not a real object. The Holy Grail was medieval legend. The supernatural elements of those films were fiction, pure entertainment.
But I was currently lying in a hospital bed in 1932, wearing a body that wasn't mine, because apparently transmigration was real.
The rules had changed.
I set down the newspaper and stared at the ceiling again, running calculations. If this was the Indiana Jones timeline—if the supernatural was actually real—then the Ark existed. The Grail existed. And the Nazis would hunt them both.
Raiders of the Lost Ark was set in 1936. Four years from now.
Temple of Doom was 1935. Three years.
I had time. Not much. But time.
First, though, I needed proof. I needed to confirm that this world operated by different rules than the one I'd left. I needed to find an artifact—any artifact—that demonstrated supernatural properties.
And I needed to figure out what resources Jameson Caldwell had left me to work with.
The nurse returned with a tray. Broth in a ceramic bowl. A slice of dry toast. A glass of water.
"Doctor's orders," she said. "Nothing heavy until your stomach settles."
I sat up slowly, every muscle protesting. The broth was lukewarm and tasted like salted dishwater. I drank every drop anyway. My first meal in a body that wasn't dying.
My hands shook. I hid them under the blanket.
"Thank you," I said. The voice still didn't sound like mine—younger, smoother, with a hint of prep school elocution David Webb had never possessed.
"Just doing my job, Mr. Caldwell." She collected the empty bowl. "Shall I send word to your man Henderson? He's called every day."
Henderson. The butler the doctor had mentioned. Another piece of a life I didn't know yet.
"Yes," I said. "Please."
After she left, I reached up and touched my face. Different bone structure. Different skin. My fingers found a small scar on my chin that David Webb had never earned. Jameson Caldwell's scar. Jameson Caldwell's hands. Jameson Caldwell's second chance, squandered in a pile of cocaine on a ballroom floor.
The thought should have broken me. Instead, I felt something else entirely—something that might have been purpose, or might have been desperation, or might have been the first spark of a plan forming in a mind that had spent forty-five years cataloguing the past.
I couldn't save David Webb. He was gone, buried in a future that no longer existed for me. But maybe I could do something with the time I'd been given. Maybe I could make this borrowed life mean something.
Four years until Raiders. Three until Temple of Doom.
If any of it was real, I had time.
I picked up the newspaper again. Stared at the date until my eyes burned.
Tomorrow, I'd discharge myself. Find out what assets Caldwell left behind. Start searching for evidence that the supernatural existed.
Tonight, I memorized the front page. Let the reality of it sink into bones that didn't belong to me.
November 1932. The world on the edge of catastrophe. A dead man walking in a stranger's skin.
Time to get to work.
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