The Shape Stealer (31 page)

Immediately.

I did so.

The box itself, which turned out to be empty, seemed inert while being opened and closed. I was nervous about the powers I could be coming into contact with and did these actions very quickly, but not so quickly that they were not discrete motions. As soon as the silver lid touched the silver frame again the entire concert hall suddenly went silent and pitch black. I saw from the corner of my eye Morrison’s mouth open in the primal scream at the end of “The End,” and that was the last I saw of him; he vanished into oblivion with the rest of the band, the stage, and all the people around me except for my own party.

Then I lurched forward violently in my seat as though I were starting to travel a considerable distance at a high speed—I closed my eyes against this force—though when the sensation of motion ceased and I opened my eyes again there was no sign I had moved even an inch. The interior of the Fillmore remained dark, but sunlight was filtering in from a few high windows and tiny breaks in the walls. The Doors concert had seemed to be at night but now it must have been 2:22 p.m. as the time stamp said, and a glance at a clock over an exit, visible in a sort of shadowy half light, confirmed that. The stage was empty. The others of my group looked all right—a little dazed and struggling to orient themselves in the new surroundings, as I was—but none the worse for wear.

We were all further dazed to see, in the orchestra space between the first row and the empty stage, a stick figure slowly taking shape in the dim air, his sticks quickly turning into limbs. The figure turned to face us with deliberate caution, assessing the scope and nature of his adversaries, then training an apparent weapon on us in one outstretched hand, a winged white rod that resembled the miniature of an ultra sleek plane. I throbbed with dread as I noted him aiming the weapon at me, more specifically at the box in the bag slung across my chest. But what older Will did at almost exactly that instant astonished me, no doubt all of us, even more than the sudden appearance of this Malefactor.

Will’s maneuver made his acrobatic window entry to Octavia’s dinner party look clumsy. Even as the Malefactor fine-tuned his aim at the box, I saw his eyes swivel away toward Will and heard his breath draw in sharply. His breathing was as angular in its sound as his physique was in its branches, so high-pitched it was almost a whistling. In a blur, Will somersaulted through the air from his seat, reaching a height of at least twenty feet, and then spun dervishlike down toward the Malefactor, who while watching seemed inert with fear. As Will descended, he managed to keep both legs extended scissors-like, menacing the Malefactor even as the rest of his body twirled. Transmigration, the thought occurred to me. His torso and legs were askew, so he might even have been reshaping his inner atomic structure as he went through the air. Magnificent. Full-strength vampire or not, he was like a martial arts savant—one who could lower his pulse to one beat per hour or breathe three times a day—in the realm of combat acrobatics.

The Malefactor was frozen with bewilderment, and then his expression turned panicky, if the creases folding across his ultra-thin, empty-eyed face could be called an expression. The more he exuded panic, the more his limbs began to dwindle. It seemed he was taking flight in time even before Will, who took an extraordinarily long moment to come down from the peak of his somersault, struck him with his perfectly aimed legs. The Malefactor’s weapon dropped to the floor with a clatter. He had partly left this dimension, but there was enough of him remaining that I could see a swirl of twigs and branches slide against the front of the stage like the remnants of a wind-cleaved tree. Those sad remains vanished as if tossed off by another gust of wind.

The rest of the Fillmore remained stone-still and quiet. But the light-show screen flickered briefly to life. It showed a poster for an exhibition at the San Francisco Botanical Garden a few miles away:

THE MALEFACTORS—POISONOUS PLANTS—ROGUES AND ASSASSINS

Despite the menace of the words and the nature of the exhibition, I felt a sense of relief, even confidence, flood through me. All my flesh and nerves tingled with anticipation. We had found the portal! I was sure of it.

38

A Dragonfly’s Genes

Because of our transmigration to 1967, we couldn’t go back to our rooms in order to safely store the box. But quick-eyed Jules spotted a small post office no more than a block south of the Fillmore. I bought heavy-duty packaging there and mailed the box back, registered and insured, to the address of my father’s gallery in New York. The gallery wouldn’t have been there yet, but my parents were already living at that location. I’d worry about the box’s disrupted time line afterward. I just hoped it didn’t put the airplane it was in, or the entire nation, through any time gyrations as it shipped east!

Annick consulted a map and we caught a streetcar. At first I was too distracted by the argument my friends were having—Kepler felt we should try to reason with the Malefactors, both Wills thought they should be killed on sight, and Annick and Jules thought they should be captured for interrogation—to pay attention to the details of 1967 San Francisco, but when we reached Haight Street the differences became apparent. The streets were full of flower children in tie-dyed clothing and long hair. When we got off to change streetcars, a barefoot girl in a long flowered dress gave me a flower and asked for “some bread.” I gave her a dollar bill, and she gave me a beatific smile and a peace sign.

We rode down Haight Street and then walked the last few blocks to the Golden Gate Park entrance at Eleventh Avenue and Lincoln Way. From there we walked alongside an interior road to the arboretum, a botanical garden somewhat like the Jardin des Plantes, except it had an even more labyrinthine quality to its winding and circling paths. A variety of flowers and trees from all over the world lined the paths, their identities described on small black placards standing on spindly sticks. The exhibits had more of a botanical than geographical continuity, Argentina adjacent to Italy, Australia bordering India, all thriving in the damp and misty Mediterranean climate of San Francisco.

The fog that shrouded many of the paths we walked along worried me: it was the middle of the afternoon—shouldn’t the fog have burned off by now? It seemed to grow thicker the further we walked into the garden. I thought of what Kepler had said about the fog coming through cracks in time. Might we wander into other time periods as easily as we wandered through these disparate geographical planting zones? What if we got lost in time here? Or separated from one another and found ourselves in different time lines? I looked up anxiously and did a head count. Annick and Jules, sensitive to possibilities for an ambush, were peering into the thick shrubbery and luxuriantly leaved groves of trees. My two Wills stood sentinel on either side of me, glaring at the surrounding foliage as if they thought the rhododendron bushes might attack at any moment. Kepler had strayed the furthest, wandering toward a small ornamental pond that was ringed with purple and white iridescent flowers. He knelt beside it, studying its surface. Wondering what he saw in the water’s reflection, I joined him. When I knelt down beside him I saw that he was following the flight of dragonflies.

“What is it?” I asked. “Do you see something?”

“Did you know that genetically these creatures are hundreds of millions of years old? I was just thinking that they too are time travelers—in a genetic sense. Perhaps not as dramatic as the kind of time travel performed by the
chronologistes
or the Malefactors, but also not as warlike. Compared to the few centuries I have traversed, their hundreds of millions of years of genetic passage are godlike. Yet I could no more explain their situation to them than I could explain electricity to a bolt of lightning, or molecular structure to water. And look! Their flight describes a distinctive pattern! At first I was concerned that it could be my imagination, as I’ve long been fascinated by six-cornered polygons, ever since I wrote ‘On the Six-Cornered Snowflake’ for my friend Johannes Matthäus Wackher von Wackenfels. But I tested predictions of location from this on-the-spot theory, and they work. Their flight is based on the number six. They’re tracing hexagons in the air. It may seem unlikely—entomologists would say dragonflies don’t even have enough awareness to know who their parents are, so how can they etch complicated geometry? But atoms don’t give lectures on physics, either. And recent studies have shown that pigeons, with their ‘bird brains,’ can do math! My idol, the ancient Greek thinker Pythagoras, believed in animal intelligence. I feel as if they are showing us
something
.”

I stared at the flitting dragonflies, but all I noticed was the jewellike quality of their wings. Perhaps we all saw the world through the lens of our own interests and inclinations. I was a jeweler, and so I saw the design for a brooch. Kepler was obsessed with numbers and geometric forms, and so he saw a hexagonal pattern in the dragonflies’ flight. Neither observation seemed to have gotten us any closer to finding the entrance to the institute. Perhaps the sign for the Malefactors exhibit had been a false clue and the institute wasn’t even in the garden. And if we couldn’t find the institute, we might well be stuck in 1967 forever.

“Come on,” I said to Kepler, “the others have gone on without us…” But as I spoke, I suddenly saw what he saw. The dragonflies
were
sketching hexagons in the air. The pattern they sketched in the air was drawn on the surface of the water—a hexagonal jigsaw puzzle that suddenly cracked open, revealing a flight of stairs leading down into the earth.

“The institute! You found—”

But before I could finish my sentence, it was interrupted by a scream.

39

Many-Handed Tree

It was Annick who had screamed. She was standing about twenty feet away, pointing at a tree. I’d noticed the unusual-looking tree on the way to the pond and recalled its plaque now: “the many-handed tree of Myanmar.” It was about forty feet high, pitch black in color, with exceptionally slender branches and leaves of a pale green. Now Annick was pointing at one of its highest branches and reaching into her handbag for a weapon.

One branch was narrower than the others, so thin that it looked like a line through the air. But it started to expand as I watched, thickening until it became a black-clad torso extended horizontally from the trunk, growing limbs, then a head, and dropping upright to the ground, a silver rod in its right hand. Malefactor. The body language was not that of consultation or negotiation, but of attack. Annick had not fired her weapon yet; perhaps she was too stunned. But the new arrival felt no such hesitation. He or she fired the thin filament of a laser beam at her. I heard her shriek as she toppled to the ground. She lay still, enveloped in a film of blue glaze. Whether she was seriously harmed or merely incapacitated, I couldn’t tell.

Jules fired back with a weapon that appeared to be made of black steel, resembling but different from a gun, launching a bolt of red flame at the aggressor. With a loud crackling noise, the bolt immolated him or her in an instant, leaving nothing but a pile of ashes on the needle-strewn ground. Brutal: but justified, I had no doubt. Next came a few seconds of ominous stillness, during which nobody moved, not even to help Annick. Jules maintained a vigilant pose, scrutinizing the tree where the Malefactor had appeared. I snapped out of my revery and moved to help Annick, and then Jules, who was closer to her, did too. But Will seemed befuddled.

As I approached Annick I noted to my horror that several more of the tree’s branches, perhaps a dozen, were beginning to writhe, tremble, and expand. Two or three fully formed into Malefactors, all with a silver rod in their hands, and they dropped to the ground just as Jules and I reached Annick. The “many-handed tree” might have been a real species, but it also appeared to be a demon. We were being ambushed.

The blue film covering Annick was intense ice to the touch, so cold it burned, and neither I nor Jules could comfort her, let alone help her. We formed a four-cornered cordon around her to protect her from further harm and fired away. Jules had removed more weapons from his backpack and tossed them to both Wills and Kepler. I waved away his offer of a weapon. Instead, I rubbed my fingers together, concentrating on the heat in my own skin. I’d only used the firestarting trick that Oberon had taught me a year ago for light, but I thought it might work as a weapon. I was angry enough, certainly, to generate heat. I saw one of the Malefactors aiming at young Will, and I thrust my arm in its direction. A bolt of flame rushed out of my fingertips and struck the Malefactor before he could fire. With an eerie high-pitched shriek, he went up in flames like a Roman candle. Another one took its place and aimed directly at me. I thrust my hand at it, and the creature was instantly engulfed in flames. No fewer than twenty Malefactors had dropped from the tree now; nearly half its branches had turned out to be the insidious creatures! I tried firing flame at the tree itself a couple of times, with the intention of burning it entirely, but it seemed resistant to fire.

The other Malefactors scrambled toward cover everywhere they could find it: behind bushes, boulders, benches, other trees, firing at us as they went. One scored a direct hit on the bench we had vacated, enveloping it in the same blue gloss that shrouded Annick. Once the eye adjusted to the speed of the filaments, it was possible to dodge them to a degree.

The Malefactors nicked us and got near us with some shots but failed to immobilize us as they had Annick. Both Wills wielded their silver rods like swords, against Malefactors who left their cover and tried to approach them, thrusting and parrying like Errol Flynn in
Captain Blood
. Kepler turned out to be an excellent marksman. And Jules, who remained crouched beside Annick, was relentless in his fury, firing away at any Malefactors who dared to menace her.

Still, I was not sure if we would have been able to stave them off if we hadn’t had reinforcements.
Chronologistes
came pouring out of the pond—or where the pond had been: a small army equipped with the same silver rods Jules had given out to us. They fanned out in the clearing, forming a cordon around us and the entrance to the institute. Since my fire-throwing skills were clearly no longer needed, I knelt down beside Annick. Jules was beside her, chafing her cold lifeless hands, tears streaming down his face.