The Shape Stealer (26 page)

Marduk licked his lips with passion, even though he realized Mack was a meal he was unlikely to have in the immediate future. But best to play along with Dee here. The main thing was to be swift and precise when the moment came. He couldn’t afford to make errors, or let his concentration slip, when the stakes were so high and the opportunity so fleeting. Marduk trembled with the imminent temptation, the orgasmic salvation of it. Play along, he told himself. Another question or two. “Who will be Renoir’s equivalent?” he asked Dee. “Don’t we need an inside man here, as we did in France?”

Enthusiasm seemed to show on Dee’s features now, as if he thought he was, truly, getting through to his pet beast. He reached out and tapped Marduk on the shoulder. “It’s America, remember. The grand old US of A. All we’ve got to do is wave a wad of campaign cash in the air, and we’ll have our pick of the government. Everyone’s available. Can’t get reelected without
c
for cash, can you?”

“Hmm.” Marduk pretended to be reflecting. “You know what, sounds interesting. But shouldn’t we both move back to the present, by which I refer to 2009, right about now? So we can get down to some truly serious talking, put all the cards on the table? I mean, nothing to be done in 1912 or whenever we are, huh? No hedge funds or billions to run for office in 1912, right?”

Dee looked reluctantly at his wand on the table, as if he was enjoying the conversation now and didn’t want to disrupt it. But then he muttered that Marduk had a point. He picked up the wand gently and went through a sequence of complex, circular motions with it, several inches above the table in a flat plane. The air immediately around them began to shimmer again, waver, as if it were trembling. Tiny, silvery ridges began to appear, and Marduk felt a sense of relief. He saw how he could start to grab onto the ridges and most likely ride them back to 2009, if Dee had calculated it all correctly. And Dee had gotten here from 2009, hadn’t he? But there was no time for dawdling, Marduk reprimanded himself. Work to be done. He glanced at Dee, who seemed oblivious to him, carefully observing the strengthening fissures in the air around them. Now!

Marduk picked up the knife from the silverware laid out on the table, masking his right-handed motion with a left hand raised to obscure it, then reached out with the left to grab the back of Dee’s head. His massively strong hand took a grip like a man palming a miniature basketball. He jerked the startled Dee’s head farther back and slit his throat from ear to ear.

There might have been a hint of terror, and even of regret alongside terror, in those rolling eyes before the man lost consciousness. Dee’s body slumped onto the floor, and Marduk took an easy stride over to where the air seemed to be opening the most, between two cracks illumined like slow bolts of silver lightning. He jumped between the cracks, felt a strong electric charge surge through him—no deft touch from that dolt, Dee—and then all went black.

When his vision cleared and he felt alert enough to focus on his surroundings, he found himself sitting once again at exactly the same table. But the song playing in the background in the restaurant—one with the phrase “Roman cavalry choirs are singing” running through it—was one he had heard in both Paris and New York in 2009. In a far corner, a staff person tidying up wore attire he also recognized from 2009.

He was back! And no sign of the recently deceased Dee. He touched his forehead, then glanced at his fingertip. Nothing. No trace of the dust that had smeared Dee. Marduk smiled a self-satisfied grin. He was better at stock trading than Will Hughes, better at time travel than John Dee. It was all in the nature of his genius.

He was the best!

Still, on further reflection, he recognized that it would be prudent to quickly find a new hotel in a different part of town. His short killing list of two was half completed, but a most significant target—Will Hughes—remained. The Malefactors seemed to be onto him here at the Edgemont, there could be a remnant of the time portal they’d opened floating around somehow, and who knew what hotel housekeeping and the police had made of the mayhem in his room, a century ago
or
now.

Or both.

Better safe than sorry.

He got up from the table and walked out of the hotel, leaving his bags behind in Room 508.

32

Mother and Child Reunion

Marduk’s new residence was the Palace Motor Inn, a motel he’d found online after leaving the Edgemont. It was on Lombard Street near Steiner, named after the nearby Palace of Fine Arts, an elegant temple to creativity built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which the motel resembled not in the least. But right now Marduk didn’t care much what motel or hotel or even what city he was in: he was hungry.

It was two a.m., Marduk’s normal hunting hour. Earlier that night he’d paid a visit to the San Francisco black pools location Dee had grudgingly given him the address of while they were both still in Paris. Though at the time he’d screamed at Dee and threatened him in order to get the address, once he was actually walking over to them, the black pools seemed a matter of little importance. He’d already proved his trading superiority to Hughes.

He had then found himself standing in front of a pastel-colored three-story apartment building on Beach Street between Divisadero and Broderick, a setting that contrasted dramatically with the rundown one in Paris. The stucco exterior was beautifully painted, polished windows glimmering in the moonlight. Lights had been on on all three floors, and he had heard a clamor coming from all of them, especially the top floor. Yet when he walked up the front steps he found a note on yellow lined paper, attached to the glass door:
NO ACTIVITY TONIGHT DUE TO CRISIS IN GOLD.

Marduk didn’t like lies, and he had been tempted to kick the door to shards and shrapnel—he could
hear
activity, damn it!—but he had calmed himself down and strolled away. Instead, he had walked on along the shoreline west of Marina Green, a scouting expedition that was necessary for the upcoming ambush.

And now it was several hours later, and he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since a luncheon of salmon and roasted potatoes a little past four o’clock in the afternoon, in the excellent Italian restaurant Pepe’s on Chestnut Street near the Moscone Center. Any satisfying effect of subhuman flesh like a fish’s never lasted long: such fare wasn’t quite nutritious enough for him, physically or psychologically, though he had still enjoyed the novelty of dining in sunlight.

The occasional headlights of a passing car threw bright reflections across the dark ceiling and walls of Marduk’s third-floor room. Marduk surveyed the ordinary-looking bed, lackluster lamps, and stained beige carpet and wondered if he could stand being in the place any longer. It wasn’t fit for royalty like him. Not at all. But it was the first place he’d found online with at least three stars, and he had been in a hurry to get away from the Edgemont to a different neighborhood. It wasn’t worth moving again now.

Marduk went to his “city view” window to distract himself and gazed out at the long streets, Steiner and Pierce, Fillmore and Webster, that rose gently to the south for several blocks, then suddenly became steep hills. Lights in the apartment buildings that lined them were mostly out; the silence he listened to on raising the window for air seemed oppressive. And the misty, salty tang of the air was effete. He needed real nourishment. He made a final effort to distract himself, flicking a light switch and reading the poem on a poster that was hanging near the door, next to an impressionist still life of five golden apples in a silver bowl:

S. F. Bref
by Katherine Hastings

Sea fog, come through my gates of cabled gold

where nets once hung to catch any man who

flew. (They formed a club called Halfway to Hell!)

Cover me coldly with your blue-born breast.

My thousand eyes will greet you as fairies

do—many-colored and feathered. The bell

on the Bay will sway over shadowed waves,

announce your entrance with crystalline breath.

I am your queen waiting with skyward curves.

My body arcs up for you over old

treasure chests buried under black paved bones.

I have been loved before, sometimes to death.

Are my hills too high? My valleys too bold?

Climb me, fill me sea fog, where others fail.

Marduk liked the reference to flying. He had considered the use of a plane in tomorrow’s operation, but he had decided on another mode of transportation instead. It would do just fine. As for poetry, he could appreciate the quality of this particular poem, but in general he didn’t care for it. He knew the Hughes creep wrote poetry, and that was enough reason to condemn it. Once, centuries ago, another creepy poet was publishing such a book—sonnets, if he recollected—and a short man in a black cloak had hired him, Marduk, to destroy copies being sold in a shop near the tower. Said they were filled with paganism and too-manly love. Marduk had gotten fifty pounds for under an hour’s work, and the copies, which he’d seized at swordpoint, had wound up in the Thames. That had been his most memorable moment with poetry.

He went out the door, down the stairs, and out onto Lombard Street. The air was damper and mistier than at the window, rippled by a sea breeze, but Marduk found it more refreshing to breathe than he had upstairs. Maybe he was just exhilarated to be outside, energized after the artificial stillness of the room. He could enjoy the outdoor air while he killed. At this solitary hour, assuming he could find a meal, he probably wasn’t going to need an enclosure, a boarded-up shack or dilapidated storeroom, to drag his victim into. He could enjoy her (or him, if necessary) under the rolling black sky and whatever moonlight and starlight twinkled through fast-moving clouds.

He began with a slow, meandering route back to the black pools building, first going west on Lombard to Pierce, then back east on Alhambra down to Cervantes Boulevard, then onto Beach. He hoped to catch some late-night reveler returning drunk from a party, on foot or in the few paces between departing cab and front door, or maybe a sleepless dog walker. The pastel town houses and their spotless pavements were beautiful, but they failed to yield up a pedestrian. The black pools building had gone silent and dark, apparently deserted, the taped front-door sign removed. Marduk moved relentlessly on, along Casa Way to Marina Green. Somewhere in the city of San Francisco, he told himself, a lone pedestrian walked. He went in a new direction now, east toward the low silhouette of Fort Mason that jutted out into the Bay.

The vista was striking, with the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz both shrouded in fog, and the breeze rippled black water that glowed silver where and when moonlight broke through the clouds, but Marduk was not there for the sights, and the bay walk looked as deserted as the streets of the Marina had been. He reluctantly pondered the possibility that he, lord of the Babylonian underworld, might actually have to go hungry. All night. He considered returning to a city neighborhood, breaking down a door, and feasting on whoever he found inside, but that level of aggressiveness had considerable risks and drawbacks. Then, in the distance, just past where the path swung south around a rectangular inlet near Fort Mason, he spied a figure sitting on a bench, too far off for Marduk to discern the gender. His pulse quickened with excitement.

There was a problem, however. He could not stealthily approach in such open terrain. He should have thought of this problem before leaving the city streets, he reprimanded himself, but he’d hoped he might encounter someone so drunk as to not require any stealth. Which could still be the case. So he strolled tenaciously along, grassy field on his right, lapping waves on his left, breeze everywhere. The person could have glanced his way at any time but did not.

Marduk didn’t walk with the enormous speed he was capable of: a few cars still rolled up and down Marina Boulevard, and he didn’t need to attract the attention of the police or anyone else. He might have been erring on the side of paranoia, and he wouldn’t normally have been this cautious, but with Hughes in his sights soon, and this fresh target almost within reach …

The person on the bench got up suddenly, stretched arms as if with relief toward the sky, and began to stroll slowly away from him, still without glancing back. The first street lamp revealed the person to be a young woman with red hair halfway down her back. Agitated with desire, Marduk couldn’t help himself; he heightened his pace so that each of his strides gained more ground than three of hers. If a witness wondered what manner of being could cover five yards in a single stride, so be it. It was going to be much easier to surprise her this way, both of them in motion. The only thing missing from this perfect scenario was a cautionary glimpse of her face—no accounting for ugly—but young flesh was the spice of passion, and he’d take his chances.

Closer and closer. She never looked back. As Marduk got within a couple of strides, he could perceive the fullness of her figure and the lithe athleticism in her motion. Luscious. She was reaching the southern bar of the rectangle, and there was a dense grove of trees just off the path, which he could carry her into. To be fastidious about privacy. He—

With no warning, his prey stopped and turned to face him.

Though Marduk had no feelings in the human sense, he felt something now. Shock, and dread. A creepy coldness that made his bones shudder. He paused in his tracks as completely as she had. His world splintered.

The body may have been youthful, but the face wasn’t. It looked thousands of years old. Though a monster himself, he found it monstrous. The one eye in the center of the forehead was the color of dung, the mouth was an open sore with a leech crawling on it, the skin was grayish yellow under the lamplight and oozing a foul odor. Worst of all, her hair was a menagerie of snakes, red-eyed and hissing.