The Soulkeepers (12 page)

Instinctively, Jacob knew which way to go.
It was the pulling feeling again, like he was navigating each bend
on autopilot, trusting his gut with the labyrinth's twists and
turns. He was disappointed not to hear the girl's voice again but
knew she had probably been a hallucination to begin with. It didn't
matter. The important thing was finding Dr. Silva and then getting
out of there before he collapsed.

When he reached the center of the maze, he
was disappointed that Dr. Silva was not there, just the tree he'd
seen from the dune. The gnarly, twisted trunk gave way to corkscrew
branches that reached in all directions. The trunk was as wide as
he was tall with layers that looked like multiple trees had grown
together. The leaves of the tree started near the ends of the
branches, allowing the sun to shine through the small green
clusters. A thick layer of moss grew over the bark.

He'd never seen a tree like this before. But
then, he was sure there'd never been a garden like this before.
Just then, Gideon entered the center of the maze and sat down
between the tree and Jacob.

"Where'd you come from?" he said to the cat
but then returned his attention to the tree. The moss on the bark
looked soft and inviting. He took a step forward. It wasn't a
conscious choice, more like riding on a conveyor belt.

Gideon leapt from his seat and knocked him
to the sand.

"What's wrong with you?" Jacob yelled,
pushing the cat off his stomach and standing back up. Gideon
repositioned himself, growling. The animal looked absolutely
deadly, all teeth and claws. But Jacob only cared about the tree.
The twisting bark was so alluring. He wanted to run his hand along
the moss and climb the twisting branches. He reached out and took
another step toward the trunk.

Gideon leapt again, sinking his teeth into
his wrist.

"Ouch! What the hell?" Jacob yelled,
flinging the cat aside. It took more muscle than he expected, the
cat had to weigh thirty pounds or more. Gideon rolled and moved to
take another swipe, but this time Jacob didn't hesitate. He reached
out.

His fingers connected with the roughness of
the bark and everything slowed down. The bark climbed up his arm,
as if the tree were swallowing him. It was like he was changing
from a liquid into a solid, every cell in his body hardening from
animal to plant. Inside the tree looking out, he became the tree. A
butterfly fluttered by as quickly as a jet plane. The air buzzed
around him in a dance of gravitational pulls.

Looking up through the branches, he saw the
clear blue sky above and slid up those corkscrew arms into the air.
Then, he was the sky. He was an ageless power in connection with
something infinite.

Too soon, he was falling, sliding down
through a new branch, turning inside out like his stomach was
lurching through his belly button. Only, his stomach wasn't a
stomach but layers of wood growing one on top of the other. Until,
the last layer hit the air and his bark became skin. And then he
was only touching the bark.

Jacob was human again but he was not in the
cactus maze.

In front of the tree that was not the tree
in Dr. Silva's garden but a tree on the edge of a wild jungle, he
finally collapsed. His body could take no more and his knees
buckled underneath him until his butt was firmly planted at the
base of the tree. Propped against the trunk, he stared across a
large open plain. A purple, white-capped mountain rose up beyond a
sprawling savannah.

It looked a lot like Africa.

He shook his head in
disbelief but watched the heads of a pod of giraffes bob as they
ran across the plain, a spotted machine. He licked his lips.
Hallucinating. He was hallucinating
.
But the
more he attempted to free himself from the delirium, the more
real it seemed.

The grasses parted unevenly a hundred yards
ahead, no more noticeable than a gentle breeze. A lioness crept
forward from the greenish brown savannah, yellow eyes locked onto
him. She was hunting Jacob and he was easy prey. His legs felt like
rubber bands. Whatever magic had brought him there had drained
every ounce of energy he'd had left. All he could do was watch in
fear as the predator inched closer, and hope that she was a figment
of his dehydrated brain.

The lioness pounced, teeth flashing.

Jacob felt claws sink into his back but they
were not the claws of the lioness. A hand grabbed him by the shirt,
pulling him backwards, plunging him into the tree's slowing
sensation. As he was absorbed into the bark, he saw the lioness
fall to the earth in fast-forward before experiencing the funny
inside out feeling again, but backwards. Then he was sliding down a
branch and folding into a tree trunk. Until, finally, he was Jacob
again, lying on a patch of sand looking up into the sky.

No…he was looking up into two sky blue
eyes.

Dr. Silva's face hovered above him, her
frown stern and resolute. She glanced at the tree, which now
appeared normal in its cactus habitat and then back at him on the
sandy mound.

"Well," she said with a sigh, "I see that
you've found Oswald. Jacob, it is time we had a serious talk."

The Root Of The
Problem

"There's no sense hiding it from you now.
I'm going to need your help keeping this a secret. Let's go back to
the house and get you cleaned up. I'll explain everything over
lunch." Dr. Silva reached for his elbow and helped him to
stand.

Jacob's knees wobbled. As hard as he tried,
he couldn't get his mind to form coherent words, his thoughts a
jumble of images lost in translation. Without asking permission,
she grabbed his arm and rolled him onto her back, piggyback
style.

"Don't worry, the feeling should clear up in
a half hour or so," she said. Dr. Silva navigated the cactus maze
with astounding speed considering his added weight. He could
already see the sand dune.

"Its amazing that you made it through the
cacti unharmed. Some of them are quite poisonous—even deadly. Of
course, I planted them myself to keep people out. You can see why,
I'm sure. There could be …complications, if Oswald was accessible
to the wrong people." She stepped down the stone pathway, between
the snapdragons and past the blue cucumber.

"That bloody knee has
my
Dracaena Daemonorops
in a state." The plants were swaying violently
and he could feel Dr. Silva accelerate across the stones, dodging
the yellow heads. When the teeth of one succeeded in latching onto
the bloody sock again, she casually reached into her pocket and
pulled out garden shears. Without missing a step she clipped the
flower at its neck and the head fell onto the stone
walkway.

Moments later, he was overcome with the
stench of rotting flesh. He buried his face in his arm to escape
it.

"Yeah, that will bring you
around." Dr. Silva laughed. "They are
Amorphophallus titanium—
very rare.
The smell is to attract flies and beetles, which pollinate the
flowers. Totally harmless but, again, meant to deter. Apparently,
you were not to be discouraged."

She bounded through the gate, carefully
unlocking and locking it behind her. Before he knew what was
happening, he landed on his backside beneath the shady maples, a
mass of achy joints and throbbing temples. She handed him a bottle
of water from a pocket in her cargo pants. He drank greedily, his
blood bounding in his veins. A moan escaped his lips as he broke
contact with the bottle to catch his breath.

"Right. Keep drinking. I've heard it feels
like altitude sickness…to your kind." In her hand was his
sweatshirt. She wrapped it around him, pursing her lips against the
puff of compost that escaped the fabric and helped him get his
flaccid arms into the sleeves. He noticed she was wearing a
sleeveless black T-shirt but didn't seem the least bit cold. She
tucked the empty bottle back into her pocket and hoisted him onto
her back as gracefully as if he were her cape.

When they reached the sunroom off the
kitchen, she dumped his body into a rattan chair.

"What the hell?" he stammered

"Now Jacob, relax and listen to what I have
to say. There's a logical explanation for all of this. Wait here,
I'll be right back." She left the room and returned several minutes
later with a tray of pita bread, hummus, cheese and assorted fruits
and vegetables. "I hope this is alright. I'm a vegetarian." She
poured them both a tall glass of water and settled into the chair
across from him.

Hunger is a powerful motivator. Jacob
started in on the tray with no regard for manners. "I'm listening,"
he said between bites.

"It was a mutual love of plants that brought
Oswald and I together," she began and as she did she turned her
head slightly and stared at a spot on the wall. "I was a graduate
student studying the plants of India when I made the most
remarkable find while visiting the Bengali marketplace. It was an
amazing specimen that any horticulturalist would be proud to
display. The seed of the Coco de mer can be found naturally only in
the Seychelles, a group of islands off the coast of Madagascar. It
was a truly incredible find, easily forty pounds or more, and I was
haggling with the shopkeeper for it. I can be very persuasive. The
seed was as good as mine.

"Oswald swept into the shop and recognized
my prize immediately. I would be lying if I told you I wasn't
immediately taken with him. He was quite an attractive man, my
husband. But I was more concerned at the moment with acquiring the
find of my career. In perfect Bengali, he told the shop keeper he
would pay whatever he asked and proceeded to buy the seed right
from under my nose for the equivalent of fifty U.S. dollars. I
followed him out of the shop, of course, demanding that he return
the seed to me at once.

"'Lady,' he said, 'I know that you probably
want this as a decorative mantelpiece but I will have you know this
is a—'

" '—A priceless seed! It is the largest in
the world. A truly remarkable botanical find,' I said.

"We agreed at that moment to join each other
for dinner, to discuss who was the rightful owner of the seed. I
learned he was a young professor and also from the United States,
California specifically. After spending two weeks together in
India, Oswald gave me that seed as an engagement present. We
returned to the United States and I convinced him to move here, to
my house.

"Our marriage was one adventure after
another. We traveled all over the world you see, studying plants of
all sorts and discovering new species. At one point we had the
largest natural seed collection of anyone in the United States. But
he died, as all men do."

Jacob stopped eating at "died". Her face was
different as she talked about Oswald and he could tell this was a
difficult memory for her. "I'm so sorry. That must have been
horrible. What did you do?" he asked, softly.

"Once I confirmed he was dead, I buried him
in the garden."

"Wha--excuse me?" Jacob spit out a bite of
pita and looked Dr. Silva in the eye.

"I buried him in the garden," she said,
again. "It was what he always wanted. It was in his will. He loved
plants. He wanted to be part of nature, eternally."

"But didn't you have to go to the emergency
room or call the police or something?"

"Jacob, this isn't TV, it's Paris. I called
the coroner, he was pronounced dead, and I buried him. That's all.
No fanfare, no funeral, no autopsy. It wasn't required back
then."

Jacob sat back in the cream futon and raised
his eyebrows. The only thing he could think to say was "okay,"
which must have been enough because she continued.

"I did the best I could to bury him. It was
probably not deep enough. Not as deep anyway as they bury you in a
cemetery but he was my first grave. I buried him in the fall. The
ground froze over that winter and I trudged through the snow to
visit his grave. In the spring, I was ecstatic to find a sapling
growing there. I knew then that his blood had unlocked deep
magic."

"Magic? Are you a witch?" he blurted.

"No. I. Am. Not." She held up a finger in
front of his face. No further explanation was offered. She
continued with her story.

"As the year progressed and the tree grew
faster than any, I realized that the air around the tree was always
warm and humid, no matter what the temperature. I began planting
some of our collection of rare seeds around Oswald. Everything
grew, faster and larger than possible. It is always around
eighty-five degrees there, three hundred sixty-five days per year.
I took precautions: the hedge, the corpse plants, the cacti maze,
to make sure that I was the only one who knew the secret of the
garden.

"Even I did not learn of Oswald's greatest
secret until later. I was transported the first time in the summer,
when Oswald had reached his full height. I was lucky to be found by
a medicine woman. She was a Healer and an elder of the Achuar tribe
of the South American rainforest. See, they have none of the
preconceptions about time and space that we do. She just assumed my
presence was a sign from the spirit world and took me in. She
showed me what I needed to know. That's when Gideon came to me."
She looked across the room at the cat. "I've been traveling with
Oswald ever since."

Jacob blinked. Was she serious? "So, you can
travel anywhere in the world through the tree."

"Well, to anywhere there are trees. They are
connected…spiritually."

He didn't really understand but nodded his
head anyway.

"But Jacob, that's not the most important
thing I have to tell you."

At that moment, Gideon rushed across the
room and jumped into the chair next to him. A growl escaped his
throat. Jacob rubbed the bite mark on his wrist. He was beginning
to think the cat was downright moody.