The Shape Stealer (20 page)

He smiled, grimly. “It’s as I say. Once a killer, always a killer. Even when still half ape, hanging from tree branches. That’s how we got here, killing off the competing hominid species. That’s why you still get news of killings, every day. Evolutionary heritage. Some might say, original sin.”

It was an answer, a philosophical one, but not to Garet’s underlying question. She didn’t mean to be rude, but she had to find out more. “Did
you
being here, in this room tonight, have anything to do with his changes?”

He smiled again, more broadly. “I have my sphere of influence, yes. But only because of the history I’ve observed.”

“
Observed
?”

“Dear me,” Adele said fussily, as Octavia darted a disapproving look at Dr. Lichtenstein. “You all really do need to go downstairs to meet the car, which will be here any second now. So late at night, you don’t want to lose a moment.”

As everyone else rose from their chair, Garet settled for the thought that perhaps
chronologistes
and Malefactors did not possess the exclusive license to travel through eons of time.

26

January 13, 1967

Following the guidelines of Pui Ying Wong’s poem, we went first to Jim Morrison’s grave. But moonlight revealed it to be cordoned off by yellow rope. The guard standing nearby told us the grave was closed until further notice because of recent disturbances by fans, though I couldn’t see any damage to the gravesite.

We had no real information that a portal had to be in the vicinity of the grave, so for a few minutes we milled about aimlessly, uncertain of where to go next. The silence in the cemetery was deep, almost startling, so heavy it was like a presence of its own. Here and there were small stands of trees. I became distracted by the way darkness was pooling in one of them, a darkness seemingly blacker than the night. For a moment I thought I could see shadows flitting within the black pool, then figures, gaunt faceless things with amorphous boundaries between their limbs and the air. I guessed I was imagining them—I could not believe they were spirits, unlocked from graves by nightfall—but then they grew more skeletal, more dervishlike in their motions, the longer I watched. Fear crept up my spine like chill fingertips. Finally I reached out and touched young Will, who had been somberly waiting to rejoin us at the cemetery entrance, on the arm.

“Look at that.” I pointed at the grove. At almost the same instant, Jules grumbled, “Are we just going to stand around here all night?” And either because he broke the mood of my revery or because some tenuous connection between me and whatever world those figures moved in had been snapped, they vanished. I observed Will continuing to stare hard where I had pointed, but then he turned back to me with a quizzical expression. “They went away,” I mumbled. He didn’t answer me.

“Why don’t we explore more?” Annick suggested. “The clue may not have been Jim’s grave. I don’t see anything. The clue may have just been the cemetery.”

“Great,” Jules complained. “We could be here for years if that’s the case.”

As he spoke I saw something else as odd as the shadow figures, about two hundred feet off to my right. A large reddish brown bird, something white in its talons, flew down from the branches of a tall tree, illumined by moonlight. It fluttered its wings to slow its descent to a glide and then fixed me in its gaze. The long bony head reminded me more of pterodactyls than of any modern bird. It moved so carefully that I could see exactly where it alighted: a plain white marker up on a hill, with a marble statue of a woman in front of it. It dropped the white object from its talons onto the marker; the object was something oblong like an egg. Or a stone. Whatever it was, it started to glow with a luminescence that took my breath away. Then the bird fluttered aloft again and vanished, suddenly, as if immersing itself in some other layer of reality that hovered above the cemetery. I felt an urge to examine the object more closely. “I think I may have seen a clue,” I declared, “follow me.”

The others looked at me, but no one asked what the clue was. No doubt they were relieved to turn our aimlessness purposeful, even if for only a few moments. I led the group about fifty yards to my right, to what turned out to be the composer Chopin’s grave. He had a simple memorial with a stunning sculpture of the muse of music adjacent to it. Her marble skin glowed in the moonlight.

The object I had observed turned out to be an oblong crystal with hieroglyphs on it, holding a small gray envelope in place under it. I couldn’t decipher the hieroglyphs, but I read aloud what was printed on the outside of the envelope:
THE DOORS THEN, A DOORWAY NOW. SIX TICKETS.

“What doors?” Kepler asked.

“They were a late-1960s progressive rock group,” Jules explained, as Annick took the crystal from me and scrutinized the inscriptions. “Named after a book by Aldous Huxley,
Doors of Perception
.”

“That’s right,” I said, opening the envelope. “They’re my friend Jay’s favorite group. He’s played me their music—oh my goodness,” I interrupted myself. I held in my hand six tickets, looking brand new, with that gloss they have when first printed. But they were to a January 13, 1967, concert at the Fillmore West in San Francisco featuring the Doors, the Young Rascals, and Sopwith Camel.

I passed them around.

“Of course!” Annick exclaimed. “There is another institute of the Knights Temporal in San Francisco. This must be a sign that we should go there.”

“So the institute is at the Fillmore?” I asked, confused.

“Probably not,” Annick replied. “After the attack on the Paris institute, all the other institutes of the Knights Temporal would have gone into hiding to avoid detection from the Malefactors.”

“That’s the protocol,” Jules agreed.

“How does an institute hide?” I asked.

“Within the time stream,” Jules and Annick replied together. They exchanged a surprised glance at their unusual agreement, and then Annick, at a gesture from Jules, continued. “The institute is still in San Francisco, but it cannot be reached unless you travel through a series of time portals. In order to alert other
chronologistes
to the new location, clues are sent out. They’re usually relics of the past, like these tickets. This concert hall will be the first step in the time trail that should hopefully lead us to the new location of the institute … and hopefully my grandfather and the other
chronologistes
. I guess we’d better get ourselves plane tickets,” Annick said. “Unless anyone has any other more reliable, and I emphasize,
more reliable
, ideas.” I thought her gaze lingered more on Kepler than the rest of us. He was shaking his head no, he had no ideas.

“At the moment, I can’t even find my own bookstore,” he said.

“And you all think this is authoritative?” I asked, though I was fine with the adventure of going and was already thinking about offering the sixth ticket to Jay. Back in high school, Jay, Becky and I would play a game we called If You Could Go Back in Time, in which we each had to choose the moment in time we’d most like to visit and then defend the choice to the others. Becky always picked political events of significance—the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the passage of the Women’s Suffrage Amendment. I always chose an artist’s studio at the moment of creation—Van Gogh painting
Starry Night
, or Leonardo da Vinci painting the
Mona Lisa
. But Jay always chose historic concerts—Woodstock or the Beatles’ first US appearance or Simon and Garfunkel in Central Park. I thought that an early Doors concert might have been on his list. Just thinking about Jay and Becky gave me a sharp pang of homesickness. Perhaps I could have a quick layover in New York …

“What do you mean?” Annick startled me out of my thoughts.

“This envelope seems to come from some other world.” I tried to explain myself as we strolled away from Chopin’s grave, toward the cemetery exit. It seemed that we had our directions and wouldn’t be receiving any further ones. But I remained a little tentative. “I saw the most distinctive of birds bring it to the grave, one that was dinosaur-like. Talk about time travel! But does that necessarily mean it comes to us from a good world? Could it be evil misdirection?”

Jules held up the oblong crystal that Annick had handed him. “Your concern is a thoughtful one. But the language etched on this crystal is an ancestor tongue of the
chronologistes’
language, comparable to Latin’s relationship to French, and though neither Annick nor I seem able to totally translate it, it is in our tradition. And we happen to also have an office in San Francisco, which occasionally opens a portal there. Finally, the poet Pui Ying Wong’s work is known in San Francisco. I can’t explain why we have been communicated with this way. But the message seems genuine. As leader of this mission, I declare that it’s imperative we now travel to San Francisco.”

Annick immediately objected to Jules’s high-handed approach. “You can’t just keep ordering everyone around, Jules. We have to work together.”

“Mission protocol demands strong leadership,” he countered. The two of them had stopped and were bickering over a tombstone adorned with a weeping angel, whose posture of head buried in hands seemed an agonized response to the argument of the two
chronologistes
.

“Come,” Will said to me, “those two would argue over the color of the sky.”

“It’s because they like each other but are both too stubborn to admit it,” I said, turning to walk with Will.

“Really?” Will asked, intrigued. “You think Annick cares for Jules? She often acts as if she thinks he’s an idiot.”

“Well, that’s because he
does act
like an idiot most of the time. But he’s acting that way because he’s insecure and wants to impress her—and she knows that, so even while she’s exasperated with him, she still likes him.”

Will furrowed his brow and looked confused, but then brightened. “Ah, so a lady might feign annoyance with a suitor but in truth be in love with him?”

Damn
. Self-absorbed as he was, I should have known he’d apply my words to our case. Now I’d have to explain that my annoyance with him was not a covert proclamation of love. Before I could embark on this correction, though, we were interrupted by a strange sound. In another grove of trees like the one near Morrison’s grave, I spied a second black pool, the outlines of gaunt skeletal figures dancing around each other within it. They sharpened slightly into more explicit skeletons as I gazed, and I observed with revulsion that some strands of decaying flesh still clung to a few moon-white bones. Somehow, they seemed to be moving closer to me. I heard the grim cackle of laughter floating toward me—the sound that had caught my attention.

A skeletal hand suddenly reached out of the black pool for my throat, materializing out of the night air as if the line between the living and the dead were much thinner here. The touch of bone-sharp fingertips was remarkably cold, and the pain was excruciating as soon as they began to squeeze. My vision blurred, then doubled. I saw two Wills through the murk. One fell to the ground, but the other drew a sword and swept it through my ghostly assailants.

I heard the sound of bones splintering, of joints cracking in the moon-latticed air. The hand at my throat slipped away, and the other hands vanished.

Even as I continued to gasp for air, and my body shook with convulsive sobs, Will was taking me in his arms and caressing me. I knew instantly it was my Will, newly armed. As my vision began to clear from my tears and I regained enough composure to glance beyond Will’s powerful shoulders, I saw young Will stretched on the ground. I freed myself from Will’s—
my
Will’s—embrace and ran to his younger self. He lay still and pale in the moonlight, as lifeless as the marble statues that stood sentinel on the tombs around us.

“Will!” I cried, shaking him.

“I’m afraid my younger self has more courage than sense,” I heard my Will say from behind me. “He threw himself into the fray without a weapon. I believe he loves you very much, Garet. Ah, look, he awakes … aroused by his lover’s touch.”

Indeed, young Will was beginning to stir. Reassured he was still alive, I turned toward the other Will. “Cut that out…” I began, but I spoke to shadows. My Will had vanished again. I turned back to his younger self and vented my anger at him and his newly absent twin. “You’re both idiots!” I told him.

He only smiled. “Whatever you say, my lady. Your anger is balm to my ears…”

I didn’t wait to hear the rest of his tribute. I stalked off, planning my escape from these romantic complications. I was beginning to think that battling shadows was an easier task.

27

Complications

Back at Madame La Pieuvre’s, I was able to convince Annick, Jules, and Kepler to travel on to San Francisco without me while I made a stop in New York, but young Will insisted on accompanying me.

“Someone has to protect you,” he informed me solemnly. “If I hadn’t been with you at Père Lachaise, those ghouls might have devoured you.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it had been his older self who had rescued me—or to send him away. He could barely tolerate sunlight anymore. Although he had not professed a desire for blood, he seemed uninterested in any other food. His weakening had seemed to increase after his encounters with his older self. I had consulted Annick about my concerns, and she admitted to noticing the same phenomenon.

“It is never advisable for two versions of the same person to inhabit the same time line,” she told me. “It is strictly against the law of the Knights Temporal to travel back in time within one’s own time span. No one knows exactly why, but those who have usually sicken and fade into nothingness. Indeed, some believe that the Malefactors were originally
chronologistes
who traveled back to change their own pasts, but who found they only created worse fates for themselves. They would travel back again—and again—trying to get it right, until they created so many versions of themselves that they went insane.
Chronopersonality disorder
is the technical term for it.”