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Authors: Lee Carroll

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BOOK: The Shape Stealer
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“How on earth do you know my plight?” Will asked, astonished.

The man allowed himself the smallest crease of a grin. “It’s not on earth that I know your plight. It’s in earth.”

“How so?”

“I have familiarity with subterranean circles where certain fey wander. Word travels there. I happen to be Paul Robin, descendent of the great royal botanist Jean Robin, who remains somewhat alive below ground in this very locale, amidst and part of the roots of the tree you see before you. Indeed, my great-great-etc. grandfather has heard of your arrival here from his sources, and he has sent me to help you.”

“Arrival at the church? Or arrival in 2009?”

Paul smiled. “Both. Sources tell me that there’s a certain bookstore along the banks of the Seine, Kepler and Dee’s, where—assuming you were to find it—if you browse along its shelves long enough, a time portal might open. At least, this is an experience some fey have had. It’s through a method called transmigration of atoms, though I have no idea what that is…”

But Will did. He had learned of it in London this past unforgettable summer in which he’d fallen in love with Marguerite, and he had some brief experience with it too. Hope flared at hearing the term again.

“Unfortunately I do not have the address of Kepler and Dee’s,” Paul Robin went on. “But I’m sure that if you walk along the Seine long enough, you will find it. I hope so, anyway.”

Paul Robin wheeled around like an egg spinning on its axis and walked swiftly away, without another word. Will was left staring after him, amidst the fading red and gold sunlight, the burgeoning shadows cast by the church and the trees in the park, wondering if he should take him seriously or not. But the man had known his name and his problem. It was worth a try. If he found the portal he’d not only solve his problem, but he’d prove to Garet James that he was not an idiot, as she had so rudely called him.

But after Will had been strolling along the banks of the Seine for nearly two hours, he still hadn’t found the store. He’d found a few bookstores, but none with a name like Kepler and Dee’s, and the one whose name had rung a bell, Shakespeare and Company, rang it in a somewhat inflammatory way. Nonetheless, he’d been moved to go inside and ask if the store had previously been named Kepler and Dee’s, but the clerk only shook a head for no and looked at him as if he were drunk. As had the half dozen people he’d stopped along the way to ask, in his best court French, if they knew the establishment.

Some had stared, a few had laughed. But on the other hand, they all seemed a very civilized bunch, nothing like the rough street crowds of Elizabethan London who could jostle you in the interests of pickpocketing, or out of meanness. Still, he was becoming tired—he’d like another cup of that excellent beverage Garet had procured for him earlier.

That had been kind of her. Even when she was angry—which he could hardly blame her for, after so keen a disappointment as she had suffered—she’d bought him breakfast. And she would have taken him back to her lodgings if he hadn’t wandered off. In truth, her coldness hadn’t been any more dismissive than Marguerite’s final walk away from him in Paris had been, when he’d revealed to her that he had become immortal, and she’d told him that she had simultaneously had herself turned into a mortal, under the cruel illusion that she and Will could now be together in harmony. How hopeful a situation was that?

The more he walked on, the more Garet came to mind. Maybe it was the irrepressible nature of youth, which needed someone to love close at hand. But a wave of feeling came over him, and, poet at the core that he was, he felt the urge to compose a sonnet. It could begin with a recitation of his lover’s quandary, but he wanted it to end with a fervent expression of his new feeling. He sat on a bench on the Pont Saint Michel and wrote feverishly, in a tumult, scarcely noticing the crowds or the waning daylight. When Will was done he stared down at the lines he had written as though startled by them, as if he had learned something about himself and his situation he couldn’t have learned otherwise, as if a hand other than his own had written the poem.

Love Garet?—Marguerite?—I’m so confused:

whichever way I turn, I seem to lose.

My true beloved’s buried in the past

and yet Time’s twin of hers perhaps could last

as my great love, if she would only see

that I can love her deeply, as truly

as sunlight loves a gnarled and ancient tree,

as wind’s enamored of the clouds that flee

its western onrush; wind pursues them for

as long as there is weather, and birds soar.

I pledge that I am yours forevermore,

fixated like Othello, jealous Moor,

yet tender like a rose embracing spring.

Please understand my plight! Let love take wing!

After reading the poem over, Will went to the nearby railing and stared down at the Seine as if he pondered his own fate there, inside a mirror of water tinged with the red light of the setting sun. And it was Garet’s face he saw in the mirror, not Marguerite’s. They were similar faces but now, for Will, they were so very different. He recited the poem aloud to himself one more time, and then decided it should be entitled “Tender like a Rose.”

Yes, he could … perchance he already did … love Garet! He’d go find her and show her the poem … but find her where? When he’d left her standing in front of the bookstore he hadn’t stopped to wonder where they would meet again. Now he rushed back to the store, but of course Garet wasn’t there. And he didn’t know the name or address of her lodgings. He turned in a circle twice, searching the crowds for her face, but now that night was approaching, the cafés and streets were even more packed. These crowds might be more polite than the 1602 mobs he was familiar with, but they were larger than any he had ever seen. The wall of people seemed to go on and on … forever. He turned around and around again … and found himself facing a man who was staring at him curiously.

“Are you the man who has been asking everyone for Kepler and Dee’s Bookshop?” the man asked.

“Yes!” Will exclaimed. “Do you know where it is?”

“I ought to,” the man replied. “I am Johannes Kepler.”

 

3

The Hall of Time

I searched the streets and cafés for Will and then, thinking he might have been drawn to the familiar name of his former tutor, the bookstore. At first I was angry that he’d caused me this delay in going to Monsieur Durant, but slowly I became worried. He was such a hapless innocent! What would become of him wandering twenty-first-century Paris? Then I became regretful that I’d been so hard on him. He was right that the situation wasn’t his fault. It had been his older self who’d made the decision to stay in 1602—a decision I should have seen coming. Older Will had habitually expressed regret about his past conduct and professed a romantic idealization of his younger self. I’d tried to reassure him that it was
him
that I wanted, but maybe I hadn’t tried hard enough. Now I’d lost both of them. I could only hope that young Will would eventually come back here to the store because it was the last place we’d been together. I’d leave a note.

Recalling that there was a manual typewriter where lingering expats typed notes—and poems and unfinished novels, for all I knew—to each other, I climbed the stairs to the second story and slid into the snug alcove that housed the typewriter. I grabbed a piece of paper, but then glanced at the pages thumbtacked to the walls of the cubby.
Michele, je t’aime, Nicole. Zeke, meet me at the Musee D’Orsay beside our favorite Cezanne. You know the one. Yours evermore, Twink. Elsa, we’ll always have Paris. Rick.
And then,
Garet, go to the Institut Chronologique, 193½
rue Saint-Jacques. All your questions will be answered there.

I yanked the page off the wall and studied it for a signature, but there was none. Could Will have left it for me? But I wasn’t sure how he would know about an Institut Chronologique in Paris.

And what the hell
was
the Institut Chronologique? I’d never heard of it. But if it had to do with time, then it was probably a good place to start.

I rolled the paper into the typewriter and typed a reply beneath the enigmatic note:
I’m on my way, Garet.

*   *   *

The northern end of the rue Saint-Jacques was right around the corner from Shakespeare and Company. Checking my notebook, I saw that the Institut Océanographique, where just a few days ago I’d met Madame La Pieuvre, was at 195 rue Saint-Jacques. I didn’t recall an Institut Chronologique on that block, but I must have missed it.

As I walked south past the great marble façades of the Sorbonne I wondered where Octavia La Pieuvre was now. She had traveled with me to the Val sans Retour in Brittany to find passage to the mythical forest of Brocéliande, there to ask to be made a mortal so she could live out a mortal life with her beloved, Adele Weiss. She had told me about the curse of the Val sans Retour, which condemned all faithless lovers to wander there forever. Part sea creature that she was, Madame La Pieuvre had been dehydrated by the hike. When I’d left her to find shade she’d been reminiscing about a past lover. Did that make her unfaithful? I’d lost her during my own trials in the Val, but eventually I’d found Will and together we’d found our way out—albeit that way had led through 1602. Had Octavia la Pieuvre found her own way out? I would have to find Adele Weiss (she was the concierge at my hotel, so that shouldn’t be hard) and, if Octavia was still missing, tell her what had happened. I didn’t look forward to
that
conversation. Far better to follow an anonymous note to an unknown institute … which I should be arriving at soon.

I had come to the Institut de Géographie with its twin globes above its doors, and I could see beyond it the square tower of the Institut Océanographique. The Institut de Géographie was number 191. So the Institut Chronologique must be next door … but the next building appeared to be the Oceanography Institute. I checked the numbers again. 191, 195. No 193, let alone a 193½. Had my anonymous note writer gotten the number wrong? Or was it simply a ploy to send me wandering aimlessly around Paris? After all, there were half a dozen things I should be doing—finding Monsieur Durant, looking for Marduk, telling Adele Weiss about Octavia … the list grew as I paced between the two buildings under the baleful glare of the cast-iron octopus above the door of the Institut Océanographique. I was so tired and overwrought I could hear a humming in my head and something ticking …

I paused directly in between the two institutes and, peering down the alley between them, recalled something that Octavia La Pieuvre had said to me on the drive to Brittany.

“The mythical forest of Brocéliande is not a place of this world. It can’t be found on a map of France. You can’t reach it on the E50 or take a TGV from Montparnasse and expect to find the door open to Brocéliande.”

Perhaps the Institut Chronologique was not on the map of Paris. Perhaps to find it one had to look hard, or listen …

The ticking was coming from the depths of the narrow alley between the two buildings, which ended in a wall covered with vines and ivy. As I stared down the alley, a breeze wafted through it and disturbed the greenery, revealing a marble caryatid flanking a doorway. In the brief glimpse I had of the statue I thought she might be holding an hourglass.

As I walked down the alley the ticking became louder. When I reached the door the breeze stirred the ivy, revealing a huge clock above the doorway, half-hidden by vines—a huge and complicated-looking clock made of three revolving disks filled with celestial symbols, which were transversed by four sweeping hands. The whole contraption was encircled by a dragon biting its own tail, and every inch was inlaid with gleaming enamel.

I immediately wanted to make a reproduction of it for the line of watches I’d been thinking of launching. I took out my sketchbook and began to draw it, losing myself in the myriad details of the complicated mechanism. I hadn’t drawn like this since the week before I’d left Paris, when I’d given up on finding Will and thrown myself into sketching in the museums. On this very page I was drawing on were the sketches I’d made in the Musée des Arts et Métiers of timepieces and astrolabes. From them I’d come up with the timepiece I was wearing now. On the night that I’d finished making the timepiece I’d gone to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre to say my final good-bye to Will and my quest for him. But as I’d sat outside in the Square Viviani, the bells of Notre Dame had chimed midnight and the oldest tree in Paris had split open to admit me into the earth where I’d met Jean Robin, my first guide toward finding Will. Would this door lead me into another adventure? Would it help me find Will again? I looked down for a knob … but there wasn’t one. Nor was there a door knocker or … when I searched through the vines at either side of the door … a doorbell. I’d come to a closed door at the end of a narrow dead-end alley where an extraordinarily complicated clock ticked away the seconds. Was this the beginning of an adventure, or the end? As I pondered that question the gears of the clock moved and three of the hands met at the top. Bells began to chime. One … two … seven … eight … twelve … thirteen …

Thirteen?

Two little windows flanking the clock slid open. I waited to see what sort of mechanical figures would pop out, but instead an elderly man’s face framed with white fluffy hair appeared in one of them.

“Ah, Garet James,” Horatio Durant said. “It’s about time.”

*   *   *

From its half-hidden door and narrow alleyway entrance I expected a tiny atelier similar to Monsieur Durant’s watch shop in the Marais; instead, I walked into a lofty atrium at the center of which was suspended a gigantic pendulum swinging above a black granite basin filled with sand. As the pendulum swung, it described arcs in the sand. Looking up, I saw that the roof soared so high above us I could barely make it out.

BOOK: The Shape Stealer
3.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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