The Shape Stealer (30 page)

“Of course,” Will replied. “I know I wouldn’t miss it, so why would he?”

We found our seats which were in the twelth row. A Doors song was playing on the sound system—“Twentieth Century Fox.”

“A time reference,” Jules commented, craning his neck to study the audience. “It looks as though many of our fellow concert-goers are paying homage to the later middle years of the previous century.”

I looked around and saw what Jules meant. Men and women wore their hair long, loose or braided; some even, like the song about San Francisco, wore flowers in their hair. I saw tie-dyed shirts, bell-bottom jeans, fringed leather jackets, and loose Indian kurtas. “I guess everyone decided to go retro for the Doors tribute,” I said. “Do you think we’ll recognize the Malefactors if they’ve disguised themselves in these clothes?”

“I will,” Will said, squeezing my hand. “Don’t worry. I won’t let anything happen to you. Now, tell me a little about this concert. Will there be madrigals? Hornpipes? Morris dancing?”

Annick giggled and I proceeded to give Will a history of twentieth-century rock. He seemed to be following, but when the curtain went up and the first band—an all-girl group called Vivian Girls—struck a chord, Will nearly jumped out of his seat. Before long, though, he had adjusted to the music, volume and all, and was tapping his foot to the beat. “I say,” he shouted in my ear. “These girls are spirited. Especially the red-headed lass playing the shiny lute.”

The crowd gave Vivian Girls a standing ovation. The bass player—the red-headed lass—announced London Dispersion Force. Will cheered Jay, Becky, and Fiona’s arrival on stage with gusto. The band opened with one of my favorites of theirs—“Troubadour.”

“The troubadours wrote songs to salve heartbreak,” Fiona sang, “to let beloveds know their endless pain.”

“I might as well attempt to scale a tower,” Jay crooned along, “a thousand miles in height, its walls slick stone,/as try to win your heart which by the hour/grows distant and just leaves me so alone.”

I glanced at Will and saw that he was sobered by the lyrics, which, I painfully recalled, Jay had written last year about
me
.

The next few songs were lighter fare, a pop tune about silent movie idols and a bittersweet take-off on fairy-tale happy endings called “Beauty and the Beat.” Then they launched into a new song called “Out of Time.”

I left my home and family

in the seventeenth century

and now I can’t get back.

The portal’s gone and I’m alone

and all I do is sob and moan

and that’s a sorrowful fact.

Someday I hope time opens wide

and I will be right by their side,

get back the love I lack.

For now the sky’s so dark at dusk,

and there’s no clock that I can trust:

time won’t even open a crack!

I looked at Will and saw that his face was wet with tears. I wiped them away and raised his hand to my lips … and in that instant felt a cool prickle on the back of my neck … as though I were being watched. I turned around, afraid that I’d find a Malefactor lurking behind me, but instead I found myself looking into the silver eyes of Will Hughes—the
other
Will Hughes—eyes that seemed to show the eight hundred years he had lived through. He was a few rows behind me across a crowd of cheering fans, but we might as well have been standing side by side in an empty room.

I started to say his name, but then a look of alarm replaced the look of pain on his face. Something tugged at my laptop case, which I still wore strapped across my chest. I felt ice-cold fingers gripping the strap, and when they couldn’t pull it free I felt the sharp edge of a blade digging through the nylon cloth and into my flesh. I turned and looked into the blank hollow eyes of a Malefactor. It was like staring into a bottomless whirlpool. I felt myself being sucked into the maelstrom of time, into the pit of madness, and knew I’d be falling through those eyes forever.

Then something tugged me back. Young Will had tackled the Malefactor down into the narrow space between the rows of seats. Old Will had clambered over to my side, and then he too had thrown himself into the fray. The Malefactor vanished between them. The two men stood up and stared at each other.

“Hey, sit down!” someone shouted from a few rows back.

Will, the older one, nodded and started to leave our row, but young Will reached and took him by the arm.

“There’s an extra seat here,” he said, pointing to the seat on the other side of me. “Garet will be safer with both of us here.”

The older Will looked at his younger self with surprise and then, slowly, a dawning admiration. “Yes, I believe you are right. I should have thought of it myself.” The corner of his mouth twitched, and his younger self laughed. They both sat down on either side of me. Looking from one to the other made me feel a little dizzy, so I looked at the stage. Jay was announcing the next song.

“We’d like to pay a tribute today to some of our friends who have traveled a long way and gone through hell and back to get here. This is London Dispersion Force’s version of ‘Break on Through.’”

The band broke into the old Doors song made new. As Jay sang, something started to happen. At first I thought it was a psychedelic light show …

37

Sheer Charisma

The stage and its backdrop began to waver. The backdrop was a huge curtain of alternating red and blue panels, and at first I thought searchlights were playing off it, but then I saw that the texture of the curtain itself was beginning to fluctuate. It would resemble a tall white movie screen on which hallucinatory multicolored images were dancing, then briefly go back to being a curtain again. The screen, which had a title at its bottom in black curving letters, “Joshua Light Show,” predominated more and more. Additional colors rushed into the whirling kaleidoscope at the screen’s center, while flaming, fire-spitting dragons pranced around its borders. The dragons had the faces of politicians I recalled from my high school history classes: former president Lyndon Johnson, California governor Ronald Reagan, presidential candidate George Wallace. And others I didn’t recognize.

For a few seconds the curtain supplanted the screen, for a final time, and then I felt a broad tremor in the concert hall, as if San Francisco had experienced a mild earthquake. Now the screen came back in vivid detail, and I was startled to see an entirely new band on the stage. The song being played was still “Break on Through,” but London Dispersion Force wasn’t around anymore. Instead, a lithe figure with a mane of long brown hair, clad entirely in black, and the sole subject of a sizzling spotlight, stood to the front of a drummer, a keyboard player, and a guitarist. At the moment he was twining himself around his mike stand as though it were his lover. I’d seen clips of him in concert and I knew this singer was Jim Morrison, risen from the dead, as it were, through the miracle of time travel. The rest of the band played their instruments with great absorption, occasionally looking up and nodding in affirmation of whatever he was doing, while the tremors rocking the building faded away.

I glanced around the audience members, who were staring at the stage with rapt attention, and saw that their general appearance was different from a few moments earlier. Virtually everyone had long hair, so gender could only be determined when there was a beard or moustache, and most had peace symbols dangling around their necks and glitter-bedecked shirts and blouses. Both Wills and the rest of our party were still in our row, but otherwise the crowd was a new one.

It was actually 1967 now, I guessed, with a sense of recognition resembling that of a traveler: as if I had opened my eyes after a nap on a train and found myself in a different landscape. I knew the year only from history books, had read of its legendary “summer of love.” That hadn’t arrived yet, but the Doors were going to be big that summer with their mainstream hit “Light My Fire” and Morrison’s increasingly singular antics on stage. This was the winter before the summer. It was a much shorter chronological trip than the ones I’d made between the present and 1602 and back, but somehow it jarred me more. Yet I still didn’t think we had passed through the portal that could lead directly to the
chronologistes’
Hall of Time. Close, now. But not quite through it. After another minute or two, I thought I detected a thin film, a gauze of some kind, separating our row from the rest of the Fillmore. I reached out to touch it and it would not let my hand pass through it. It was solider than its filmy appearance and exceedingly cold to the touch.

As the Doors went on to “Soul Kitchen” and the haunting song “The Crystal Ship,” I puzzled over what to do next. It was great that we had reached 1967, but we still had to pass fully through this mysterious portal of an unknown nature to reach the
chronologistes
. And I was struck by a fresh, if less immediately crucial concern, while observing Morrison’s charisma on the stage. He writhed and pranced, crouched then threw his arms up, crooned before shouting, then murmured. Every gyration wasn’t necessarily to my taste, but he had a beautiful face, and I was so drawn to him that I understood how late-1940s bobby soxers had thrown themselves at Frank Sinatra, and early-1960s fourteen-year-olds, at the Beatles. When he moved into the rough and jaunty rhythms of “Whiskey Bar,” it suddenly hurt me to think he was going to die in Paris four and a half years from now. At a young age that no one should die at. I needed to warn him. I wouldn’t be able to get near the stage with burly security guards standing between it and the first rows of seats right now, but maybe afterward … Warn him …

An impulse took hold of me and I senselessly tried to leave my seat anyway, past young Will and on down the aisle. A few others from elsewhere in the auditorium had preceded me down the aisle, dancing wildly in the area between front row and stage under the frowning gazes of the guards, and their numbers were growing. Young Will looked sharply up at me but then drew his knees back to let me through. But right past his seat I came up against the same filmy barrier I had noticed a few moments before, and had no choice but to return to my seat. Glumly, feeling trapped, I watched the continuing performance of “Whiskey Bar,” resigned to waiting for another clue or signal, which might come in the next few minutes or might never come. I considered consulting with the others, but the volume of the performance was so great now that I didn’t think I could be heard even at a shout.

The crowd leapt to its feet at the end of “Whiskey Bar,” beside itself with the energy and drama the Doors, especially Morrison, had generated. There was a tumult of clapping and shouting that rolled through the auditorium like some sort of primeval wave. I stood myself or I wouldn’t have seen a thing. And then the Doors launched into “Light My Fire,” recently released but not to be a hit until the next summer, by which time Ray Manzarek’s extended organ solo and other guitar solos would be deleted.

At first slowly, then with more momentum, the light show on the screen behind them began to change again. It was drifting from an extravaganza of color and shape to a more specific collage of images. I noted something that looked like an irradiated amoeba mutating to a lemon-colored caterpillar, then a sort of blue tangerine. Then there were many tangerines, and they were transforming without warning to the heads of many demonstrators at an antiwar rally in Golden Gate Park, followed by an aerial view of what was captioned as a “love-in” in New York City’s Central Park, followed by scenes from the 1963 March on Washington, DC, for civil rights. There was a sort of charm to it, almost that of antiquated newsreel footage, though of course the causes these people were gathering for were serious, even tragic.

Then, for the briefest of instants, these political and historical images began to be interspersed with seemingly unrelated photographs of some vast desert, a few primitive huts against a great expanse of sand tinted red by the sunset. By staring closely at the screen I could make out, on a rough wooden table in the shade of one of the huts, a glittering, silver, triangular object. A few villagers were staring at it fearfully. I got a creepy feeling from it, as of evil. It began to fade away intermittently into more snippets of newsreel coverage, but it kept coming back.

Then I was so startled I nearly fell off my chair. The same triangular object now occupied a much larger portion of the screen, and it seemed to be in modern times, placed in a box on a table on the stage at an auction house. A little spotlight shone on it and an auctioneer could be seen gesturing toward it. The details of the triangular object were mysteriously blurred, but there was no mistaking the box it was being auctioned off in.

It was the silver box in my computer case, the same one John Dee had asked me to open for him in Greenwich Village and that had started all this trouble in the first place. The auctioneer was pounding his gavel on a podium as if there had been a sale, and he came over to the table and closed the box with the silver object in it. As soon as he did so a date appeared at the bottom of the screen in thin white letters like the time stamp you see on a photograph: January 13, 1967, 2:22 p.m. PST. An insight went through me like a thunderbolt, that if I opened the box in my bag and closed it again, we would pass through the portal we were at the threshold of, the one being suggested on the Fillmore screen. I could not tell if I would find that blurry silver object in the box now. But my certainty regarding this insight was definitive, irrational or even surreal though my confidence may have been. I decided to act on it.

The Doors had started to perform “The End,” going from its simple opening refrain into a cacophonous and chaotic interlude of various instrumental strains. Jim Morrison wandered around the stage very much alone, all black in the white spotlight, the other band members making themselves known with their music from the shadows. He looked almost frighteningly solitary, a tremendous, tumultuous energy pouring out of him in all his movements. Every eye in the auditorium was riveted to him, and there would never be a better time to take a chance on opening the box. And closing it.