The Shape Stealer (5 page)

took off his smock, breathless, and could not paint:

Picasso froze, had no choice but to faint.

“Hey, that sounds like Cole Porter,” I said.

“It is,” Annick confirmed, “but the jacket notes credit the composition of the song to ‘my dear friend W. H.’ and clearly it’s Will talking about you.” Annick beamed at me.
“C’est très romantique, n’est-ce pas?”
Her bottom lip trembled and she removed a handkerchief from the pocket of her snug peplum jacket.

Monsieur Durant crossed over to the young woman and put his arm around her shoulders. “You’ll have to excuse my granddaughter. Since she has joined us she has seen many painful things. Observing the fluctuations of time is a sobering business. It is not often that we get any good news.”

“I’m afraid it’s not
all
good news.”

The pronouncement came from the serious looking young man with fair hair—Jules, I recalled, was his name. He was flipping through a newspaper.

“Ah, Jules, you are always the pessimist,” Annick scolded, stamping a green suede heel. “You spend too much time reading your crime blotters. I know you do not believe in romantic love.”

“My feelings on romantic love are not at issue here,” Jules said primly, only the rising color in his cheeks betraying that Annick’s comment had stung him. “And I’m not reading the crime blotters. I’m reading today’s
Le Monde
. There’s been another vampire murder.”

“A vampire murder!” I cried. “That can’t be Will. The Will I brought back with me is not a vampire and the other Will—
my
Will—has just spent the last four hundred years reforming himself. Why would he kill now?” And, I thought to myself, if he was in Paris, why wouldn’t he reveal himself to me? Despite my horror at the thought of Will Hughes killing someone, I felt a flicker of hope. Perhaps my Will was here in Paris.

“People never change,” Jules said with a sniff. “Not really.”

Annick clucked her tongue impatiently and pulled the paper away from Jules. She scanned the pages quickly, her amber eyes flicking back and forth. Her face paled as she read, making the freckles on her nose stand out sharply.
Quelle horreur
, she whispered, handing the paper to her grandfather.

I read the story over Monsieur Durant’s shoulder, translating the French. I caught the phrases “drained of blood” and “homeless woman” and “found in the Cemetery of Montparnasse.” The details sounded familiar.

“But these types of murders were occurring
before
I left Paris for Brittany,” I said. “And Will was trapped in the Val sans Retour then. Besides, Will would never kill a poor defenseless homeless woman.”

“Nor would he drain his victims of blood as these have been drained,” Annick added. “It says that the bodies had marks around their ankles as if they had been hung upside down.” Annick shuddered. “Your Will would never do that.”

Annick squeezed my hand and I gave her a grateful smile … that faded as a gruesome image appeared in my head—an image of bodies hanging upside down in a dank cellar, blood dripping into buckets. I had come across just such a scene in 1602 as Madame la Pieuvre and I had made our way through the dungeons of Catherine de Medici’s palace to reach the Astronomer’s Tower. We’d then come across an unconscious Marduk, looking eerily like Will, being intravenously fed the blood, and had deduced that Marduk only assumed the features of those victims he fed on directly. For some reason, Dee and Ruggieri, Catherine de Medici’s astronomer and Dee’s partner in crime, had wanted Marduk to retain Will’s features.

“Someone is collecting blood to feed Marduk,” I said aloud. “Someone who knew that Marduk would be arriving from the past and who wanted him to remain looking like Will.” I explained what I’d seen in the palace dungeons and what part John Dee and Cosimo Ruggieri had played in Marduk’s resurrection.

Monsieur Durant’s brow furrowed. “Did Dee and Ruggieri follow you back to this time too?”

“No … at least, I hope not, but Ruggieri was already here. I recognized him in 1602 because he looked exactly like a man I’d met here—Roger Elden. He said he was an astronomer. He was staying at my hotel, and then I also ran into him outside the observatory—”

I stopped, noticing a look pass between Monsieur Durant and Claudine. At a nod from him she got up and moved to a table that was bare save for one closed book. No one sat at this table. Claudine sat down in front of the book and then Jean-Luc sat down beside her. They each laid a gloved hand on the cover and together opened it slowly as if the cover weighed a hundred pounds or they were afraid that something might fly out of it.

“The
Grimoire of Aberatti
—or the
Grim Book
, as some call it. It contains the history of dark magic from the fourteenth century to the present. If Ruggieri has been active since 1602 there’re sure to be signs of it there.”

Claudine and Jean-Luc bent their heads solemnly over the book, carefully turning the pages, their faces grim.

“Why doesn’t it turn by itself like the other books?” I asked.

“Because the
Grimoire
is not like other books,” Monsieur Durant said in a hushed whisper. “Some believe it has a will of its own.” He shuddered. “It is rumored that the pages were made from the skin of murdered witches and the ink from their blood and that the power of those witches resides in its pages. It is very dangerous to look at, so we don’t open it unless we have good reason and never alone. There is always the risk that the spirit of one of the departed witches will enter the body of the reader.”

I looked back at Claudine and Jean-Luc. Claudine was noticeably paler; Jean-Luc’s jaw was clenched so tightly I could hear his teeth grinding.

“What have you found?” Monsieur Durant asked.

“Unspeakable things,” Claudine whispered, her lips white. “It looks as though Cosimo Ruggieri made a bargain with John Dee to gain perpetual life, much as Will Hughes did, but the immortality Ruggieri received was even worse than the kind Will got. He is cursed to grow old and die brutally but then to be reborn.”

“That sounds like what Roger Elden told me,” I said. “He said that when Ruggieri was dying, priests were sent to his rooms to hear his last confession, but he threw them out, screaming that they were mad and that there were no other demons than the enemies who torment us in this world. The priests were so offended at this treatment that they denied Ruggieri a Christian burial. When he died, the people dragged him through the streets of Paris and left his remains in the gutters. Elden said that some believed he had crawled into the catacombs beneath the streets of Paris and there, maimed and dying, found a way to restore his life, but instead of existing in ageless immortality he must grow old repeatedly and experience the same pains of death that he experienced being dragged through the streets of Paris—only
then
can he be reborn each time as a young man.”

“What a brutal sort of immortality,” Monsieur Durant said. “It is no wonder that the man is a monster.”

“Or that he would do anything to escape his curse,” Jean-Luc said, looking up from the book. “From his travels I suspect he has been looking for a cure for centuries. He began researching blood in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century he became interested in time travel. If he knew that Marduk was going to appear in twenty-first-century Paris…”

“He’d want to be ready for him by collecting blood,” Claudine finished the sentence, looking up from the book grimly.

“So you think Roger Elden is responsible for killing these people and draining their blood?” I shuddered, recalling that I’d spent an evening drinking wine with Elden on top of the Astronomer’s Tower, never guessing that he was the man who had built the tower, or that he was a cold-blooded killer.

“I’m afraid so,” Monsieur Durant replied. “It sounds to me as if Cosimo Ruggieri has been waiting for centuries to find Marduk again and use his blood to gain a more palatable immortality for himself. But the question is, where is he keeping Marduk while he supplies him with this blood?”

“I think I know,” Jules said, looking up from the newspapers. “The murders have all taken place in Montparnasse in the vicinity of the catacombs.”

“That’s where Elden said Ruggieri escaped to after his first ‘death,’” I said.

“And,” Monsieur Durant added, “the catacombs are built beneath the former Chateau de Vauvert, the site of unspeakable evils.”

“And they’re near the observatory where I ran into Roger Elden. But how can we be sure—”

We were interrupted by the sound of an old-fashioned typewriter. I might not have remarked on it, but Annick, Jules, Claudine, and Monsieur Durant immediately turned toward the sound. A red manual typewriter, identical to the one from Shakespeare and Company, sat in the middle of one of the library tables, its keys clacking away now by themselves.

“How…?” I began, but the four
chronologistes
were already rushing to the typewriter to read the words appearing on the page inside its roller. When I reached them I saw that there was already a message typed on the top of the sheet.

Garet, go to the Institut Chronologique, 193½
rue Saint-Jacques. All your questions will be answered there.

And below those,
I’m on my way, Garet.

“That’s the message I found in the bookstore!” I said, and then pointing below it, “And that’s my reply. How…?”

“It’s a little message system we have rigged up,” Monsieur Durant explained. “Anything typed at the typewriter in Shakespeare and Company appears here, and vice versa. Look, Will found your message.”

I read the lines that had just typed themselves on the page:
Garet
,
I have gone to find Marduk in the catacombs. If I survive the encounter I will meet you on the Pont Saint Michel at dawn. Yours (I hope), Will Hughes.

“Crap, that’s young Will,” I said, “But how did
he
figure out that Marduk is in the catacombs?”

Monsieur Durant shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s likely that he’s walking into a trap.”

6

A Day’s Work for Death

During the fifteen-minute cab ride to the entrance to the catacombs, Will Hughes began to get a little nervous. He’d been impressed with the way Johannes Kepler, refugee in time like himself, had hailed a cab in this era alien to him, stepping aggressively up to an empty one stopped at a red light. Kepler had pleaded with the driver that they were desperate for a ride, and it had worked, even though Garet (while introducing Will to the invention of the car that afternoon) had explained that a person had to wait on line at a taxi stand. Kepler, if he knew of this rule, paid it no heed. And after pleading desperation, he had swashbuckled them both into the rear seat, as if Will were a dignitary and he was escorting him. Will was impressed.

But on the drive Kepler lapsed into a discomforting silence. He had initially been the garrulous sort, though of course Will didn’t know him well. But now he turned gloomy. Maybe, for all his bold talk, he found Marduk fearsome and was trying to think of a way to extricate himself from their mission. Even more disturbingly, Will thought he detected a faint odor coming from Kepler now, one that had perhaps gone unnoticed in the sweep of the street and the bustle of café and bookstore. The odor was mildly rank, suggesting mold or decay. Perhaps it was some lingering effect from time travel, common to all travelers. But when Will furtively sniffed his own sleeve, pretending to wipe a speck of lint off it with his chin, he smelled nothing.

He asked himself how well he knew this man. What—for all of a half hour? The smell, dank and now vaguely sulfurous, grew stronger. Did Kepler, a genius revered for centuries, previously work as a laborer in a sulfur mine? Not to condescend to manual labor, but … Will scrutinized Kepler’s attire, but the man’s clothes were spotless. Fighting a hint of nausea, he rolled his window down as far as it would go, and then at last the cab pulled up in front of the entrance to the catacombs. Kepler seemed jarred out of his gloom by the cessation of motion. He paid the driver—with a generous tip, judging by the latter’s reaction—and then bounded enthusiastically out of the car, Will following.

Without as much as a glance at the apparently locked entrance to the catacombs, Kepler turned to the south and gazed up at the night sky. He made a grand sweep with one arm that seemed to include all of the universe, and then pointed in particular at a bright red star, which Will suspected was Mars. Lord, is this fellow volatile in mood, Will reflected. It doesn’t take much to excite him! He could have moved his neck a little and seen the night sky all throughout the car ride, if his bleak-eyed gaze hadn’t been sunk in his lap.

“Look!” Kepler exclaimed.

“I know, Mars,” Will replied impatiently. He was anxious to bring home—if home were Garet—the trophy of Marduk.

“My dear lad,” Kepler said, clapping Will on his shoulder, “that’s not the point. It’s Mars at the twenty-second celestial latitude at exactly eleven p.m. on this date, just as my theory predicted in 1602. Not bad, huh?”

“You are able to gauge celestial positions with your eyes like this?” Will asked wonderingly. “Without maps or charts? Or a telescope?”

“I have lived with celestial positions like the most romantic of lovers lives with the face of his beloved, moment after moment, for so many years. In my thoughts always. So yes, I can gauge them.” His face was flushed with excitement. But then he suddenly grew subdued again, as if turning his thoughts toward the matter at hand.

The entrance to the catacombs was a small stone building with an iron door that was shut. No doubt there was some stairway or (another invention he had just learned of) elevator within, Will thought. A sign above the door, one with much larger lettering in French than in English, advertised daytime hours as posted and “tours by appointment,” but there was no sign of activity of any sort. A mild breeze blew a few scattered papers across the concrete path leading up to the door, as if to emphasize the desolation of the place.