The Shape Stealer (3 page)

“How…?” I began, turning to Monsieur Durant.

“Is it bigger on the inside than the outside?” he finished the question for me. “The institute lies outside the restrictions of time and space,” he intoned rather formally. Then he shrugged, threw up his hands, and lifted his white bushy eyebrows at me. “At least, that’s what it says in our brochure. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a big nuisance. Do you know what it costs to heat this place in the winter? And forget about keeping it clean! The last cleaning crew we hired got lost in the archives and we haven’t seen them since.”

“I was going to ask how you knew I was coming.”

“Ah.” Monsieur Durant tapped the side of his nose. “The pendulum always knows. Look.” He pointed to the lines drawn in the sand, all smooth uninterrupted arcs except for one that had an intricate knot in it. I tried to imagine the motion the pendulum would have had to perform to describe such a design—and failed.

“That knot indicates an anomaly in the time line. It told me that someone had traveled through time today. I assumed it was you, since you used my workshop to fashion your timepiece.” He tapped the watch that was hanging around my neck and then moved closer. “May I?”

I took the timepiece off and handed it to him. He dug a jeweler’s loupe out of the pocket of his baggy trousers and fitted it over his right eye.

“It broke when we came back. Can you fix it?”

He opened the case and studied the gears. His lips moved as though he were counting—or saying a prayer—but he made no sound for several moments. Then he looked up, one eye made giant by the jeweler’s loupe. “Did you adjust the settings at any time while you were in the past?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I’ve adjusted anything on it since it left your workshop.”

“Hmph. I’ll have to see. It’ll take…”—He grinned—“
time
. But we’ve got a bigger problem than your watch. The time line. Ever since we saw the anomaly this morning we’ve been charting the changes in the archives. Come…” He motioned for me to follow him through an arched doorway. As we walked around the pendulum I paused to listen to the soft whooshing of its progress through the sand.

Whooosh, whoosh, Will,
it seemed to whisper.
Whoosh, whoosh, why?

I shook my head. I was just tired, I thought, following Monsieur Durant through the arched doorway and into an even loftier domed space.

“Voilà la Salle du Temps!”
Monsieur Durant announced with obvious pride. The Hall of Time was as vast as the Gare de l’Est, only instead of trains standing in their tracks, stacks of books soared up to the domed ceiling. The stacks were fashioned of curving black cast iron and looked as though they had been made by Hector Guimard, the designer of the Paris Metro entrances. The ceiling, too, was spanned by cast-iron ribs that came together in a giant oculus and supported panes of brightly colored and intricately patterned stained glass. The effect was that of being inside a brilliantly painted hot-air balloon that was soaring through the air. A steady breeze wafting down through the oculus added to that impression and filled the hall with a fluttering that sounded like flocks of pigeons but that came, I saw, from rows of old-fashioned newspaper racks—the kind that libraries or some cafés used to have. I recalled an old Italian café on Bleecker Street in New York City where my father liked to have a morning espresso and pastry and read the selection of European papers that hung from racks like these.

Another source of the fluttering came from long wooden tables that stretched between the racks, where men and women sat gazing into large tomes, whose pages turned by themselves while the readers hurriedly took notes in composition books.

“What are they doing?” I asked Monsieur Durant.

“The
chronologistes
are recording the changes in the archives,” he replied. “When the anomaly appeared this morning, a number of books were disturbed … There goes another one.”

He pointed to a shelf about thirty feet above the floor where a book was protruding over the ledge. As we watched it slid even further out. One of the
chronologistes
—a young woman with crimped tea-colored hair and thick square rimmed glasses—ran toward the shelf, her rather impractical green suede heels clicking on the marble floor. She reached the shelf just in time to catch the book.

A thunderous pounding greeted her successful catch as the
chronologistes
applauded their comrade by stamping their feet.

“Brava, Annick!” Monsieur Durant exclaimed. “What have you got?”

Annick, blushing beneath her freckles at Monsieur Durant’s praise, laid the book down on the table and gently opened its cover—I noticed she was wearing white cotton gloves—to the title page. “
A History of the Dutch Stock Market
,” she read aloud in proper, only slightly accented English. “
From 1602 to the Present
.”

“Ah, it looks like your friend Will has been busy.”

“Will? Which Will?”

Annick covered her mouth and giggled.

“The one you left behind in 1602,” Monsieur Durant said, shaking his head. “He’s been changing things—nothing big, nothing that would threaten the world’s existence—but little things. Here, let me show you.”

We left Annick poring over the Dutch stock market and walked to a table where a balding middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit and yellow bow tie was bent so far over an ancient-looking tome that his sharp nose nearly touched the page.

“Anything more in the folio, Jean-Luc?”

Jean-Luc’s head jerked up, his round spectacles fogging as he let out an excited gasp. “
Love’s Labour’s Won
is no longer lost and
Cardenio
is appearing!”

“There are some more sonnets,” a white-haired woman sitting on the other side of the table said. “Granted, some have fifteen lines and/or titles, not characteristic of the famed 154. But there are other signs of the same authorship, and they all laud your friend Will.”

“But Shakespeare hated Will for stealing Marguerite,” I said.

“That was BA—Before the Anomaly. The Will who stayed behind in 1602 made it up with his mentor. Here, listen to this…” She read a sonnet aloud:

“Unmasked”

Come here, dear Will, and let us pluck a rose,

One petal Marguerite and one your Garet James;

We’ll know their scarlet hues without their names,

Rare tints a match for both our bloods. Wind blows,

Rain falls, or sun burns bright—it’s all the same—

When love exceeds both of our growing fames,

And all the theories, facts we’ll ever know.

A bond outlasting eons, drifting snow,

And all the seasons calendars can grow.

Our friendship now restored, we’re London-kin,

As well as colleagues in the sonnet. Let’s

Walk slowly on down Lyme Street, close to dusk,

Envision our beloveds in the mists

The river conjures, cleansing love of sin.

Feel jealousy no more. Our loves unmasked.

Friendship now restored? Could that mean…?

“Wait,” I said. “I don’t understand. Where is all this coming from?” I looked around the great hall. Books were falling, pages were fluttering. “What
is
this place?”

“I told you,” Monsieur Durant replied, smiling impishly. “La Salle du Temps of the Institut Chronologique. The great Hall of Time. We keep track of changes in the time line here. When the oculus is closed, the hall is impervious to changes in the time line. There is at all times…” His lips quirked into another smile and Jean-Luc smirked, leading me to believe that the
chronologistes
were prone to punning on the word
time
. “… a corps of archivists on the premises who are also impervious to the anomaly, as is our library.” He waved to the stacks of books. “We’ve assembled a collection representing the world’s literature, history, science, financial records, and assorted ephemera. As soon as we open the oculus the books in the archives begin to rewrite themselves. The
chronologistes
take notes on the changes they observe and assemble a report. We confer with our brethren institutes—”

“There are more places like this?” I asked, gaping at the enormity of the place.

Monsieur Durant sighed. “Fewer than there used to be. As you can imagine, this is a very expensive enterprise to maintain. And it is always vulnerable to corruption…” A pained look flitted across Monsieur Durant’s face. “And the vagaries of social unrest, or worse. We lost the Warsaw office in the Second World War. But there are still two great monasteries—one in the Pyrenees and one in the Himalayas—as well as institutes in New York City, Edinburgh, and San Francisco. We’ve been getting some very interesting communications from New York this morning. Your friend Will has been a busy fellow.”

“So let me see if I’ve got this straight. Because Will stayed behind in 1602, he has changed time, and you are able to see those changes here?”

“See and record. Once any one of us leaves the institute our own memories will assimilate to the new time line. Jean-Luc here will not remember that
Love’s Labour’s Won
was ever lost. Claudine…”—he gestured to the white-haired woman who had read the sonnet—“will think she has known those poems all her life. Because she
will have
. Only here in the institute are we granted a brief window of … er …
time
 … to record that the world was ever different and to evaluate the nature of the changes made.”

“Why?” I asked.

Monsieur Durant looked perplexed.

“I mean, sure, I can imagine you do this for knowledge’s sake—”

He shook his head so vigorously that his fluff of white hair moved like a storm cloud. “
Non, non, non!
Not merely for the sake of knowledge, but to guard against those who would change the time line for their own nefarious purposes. If we find such a change, we send our operatives back in time to prevent the change.”

“Oh,” I said, abashed at my assumption and looking with new eyes at the bookish crew assembled in the hall. “Will you be sending anyone back this time?”

Although they didn’t raise their eyes from their books I knew by the cessation of pen scratchings that the
chronologistes
were listening.

“That assessment is made by the head office when all the data is in, but I would gather from what we’ve seen so far that the answer will be no. Mr. Hughes has, on the whole, been making harmless and even beneficial changes. I can see no pattern of attempting to gain unfair advantage over the world. Even his dealings in the world’s financial markets have been to shield and protect the victims of precipitous crashes, and defenseless animals from cruelty, instead of profiting from any foreknowledge he had. The changes we have seen in the police blotters … well, Jules can tell you about them.”

A thin young man with fair hair parted in the middle lifted his head from a ledger and pushed his eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose.
“Mais oui,”
he began in French, then cleared his throat and reverted to English. “So far I have recorded twenty-eight fewer suspicious deaths from the years 1602 to 1689.”

“What kinds of deaths?” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry.

“Murders of prostitutes and street beggars, some bearing the earmarks of a vampire attack such as wounds about the neck, and great loss of blood. A few murders of this sort each year have been
rewritten
.”

“You see,” Monsieur Durant looked at me with eyes that were no stranger to pain. “A new vampire would have preyed on such victims. It is not surprising that he would have inadvertently killed many in his blood lust. But when Will went back he chose
not
to kill these people. Of course, there is always the possibility that one of the people he has chosen to spare will change the time line adversely, but so far…” Monsieur Durant shrugged. “When you walked through the streets of Paris this morning, you did not observe any cataclysmic changes, did you? The sky was still blue, the sun was still in the sky,
n’est-ce pas
? It seems to me that Mr. Hughes is on a mission of repentance. And, I think, my dear, it’s clear what his inspiration is. All of this…” He waved his hand at the tables of fluttering pages that sounded in the vast hall like flocks of pigeons wheeling through the sky. “… is Will Hughes’s four-hundred-year-long love letter to you.”

4

Impressing the Lady

“Johannes Kepler! How is that possible? You were alive … well, when
I
was alive!”

The man beamed, as if pleased that Will had heard of him. “Let’s be blunt here, man,” he said. “If you’re looking for Kepler and Dee’s, likely that’s because of its time travel reputation. It doesn’t attract much retail traffic. So surely you have sufficient intellect to conjure up reasons as to how I could be here, in 2009!”

“You’ve traveled in time as well?”

The gentleman tapped his forehead to indicate that Will had guessed correctly. “The problem is, I don’t want to be exactly here. I was looking for a different year and must have made some small error in calculation regarding the portal. And now I find that my own store is missing to boot, making it extraordinarily difficult to reenter the portal. Pardon the blasphemy, but this has been a hell of a day for me so far!”

Will saw the man grimace, but Will was feeling a small bit of relief. Maybe this possible Kepler was a colleague in Will’s predicament, lost in the wrong year as he was. Kepler was known as one of the scientific geniuses of history. He could figure out a solution to their joint quandary if anyone could—and Garet would certainly have to be impressed when he delivered Kepler to her.

“I believe you!” Will said. “What’s more, I think we can help each other.”

The man began to eye him with curiosity. “And who would you be, lad, now that you’ve learned who I am?”