The Shape Stealer (25 page)

“What an ordeal,” Dee said, coming on without a greeting. “Remind me to use Air Fairy next time. If only such an airline existed. Mere mortals can’t do anything right.”

“Why didn’t you just rent your own plane?” Marduk asked, inspired by the sight of the plane overhead, and feeling it might be useful to feign sympathy.

“I had to purchase a package deal from the official I paid off to avoid the fate of Mr. Renoir,” Dee explained. “Specific tickets were part of it. I guess they wanted to keep an eye on me for as long as they could. All futile for them, of course: yet all due to the unfortunate act of betrayal that has occurred. Something you wouldn’t know anything about, now, would you, my dear Marduk?”

“Of course not!”

Dee’s tone turned impatient, which was fine with Marduk, since his tolerance for talking to this fool was not unlimited (he couldn’t imagine how he was going to get through dinner with him).

“Well, whatever the truth may be, and however unreliable you may have turned out to be, monster,” Dee told him tersely, “I am determined to take one more opportunity to talk sense into you. The greatest opportunity in the history of capitalism remains open. Where and when shall we meet to discuss it?”

“Come here to the Edgemont. Meet me in the lobby, seven p.m.” Marduk hung up without another word, just to irritate Dee. The phone rang again immediately, probably Dee calling him back, thinking they had been accidentally cut off. Marduk grinned at the phone; he was too important to answer it. The caller tried several more times, eventually gave up.

Marduk lingered over his drink, savoring a few bloodred drops nestled at the bottom of the glass as if they were the last juice from a deceased victim. Then he took in the panoramic view from the terrace with a final sweep of his gaze, Dee’s antidote still fortifying him as the sun-lathered breeze with a hint of Pacific salt caressed his features. He inhaled deeply: the sea tang, the sight of glimmering towers, and the red plane disappearing beyond the hills of Berkeley to the east all seemed to stimulate him. Then he stood up, leaving a dollar tip under his glass, and headed back to his room. He’d try calling in the dinner reservation. Then maybe some pay-per-view-porn to while away the time—he wondered if a tonily pretentious hotel like this one would offer it. The bloody, axe-slayer kind?

The moment he got off the elevator on the fifth floor, Marduk knew something was wrong. Traveling in other worlds as he did, it was not so difficult to sense the presence of a new and different one. A recent visitor to 2009, he was no expert in its furnishings, or lighting, or architecture, or music, so he could not put his finger exactly on how he knew he might be in a different year. He was not even sophisticated enough to know that these were gas lanterns lining the hallway, not electric ones. The air was no doubt dimmer, but he did not specifically recall that, where he now walked along a thick rose-patterned carpet, an hour earlier he’d strolled along a thin, pale blue one when he’d left his room to go to the cocktail lounge. He heard music coming from one of the rooms—from a violin, as if someone were practicing—and the bouncy, Irish jig–influenced rhythm of the song bore no resemblance to the music he’d been hearing in the airports in Paris and New York, in the streets of San Francisco.

Marduk had an indefinable sense that the change in time was substantial. Maybe it was that he doubted small shifts in time could be perceived so readily. But he saw no immediate alternative to returning to his room. Perhaps his sense was wrong, and he was just experiencing a hallucination, a delusional intuition. He shrugged and began to stride down the hall toward room 508. Then he stopped himself short, shuddering.

Faintly, like the hint of convoluted twigs in the shadowy air, he thought he caught a view of a Malefactor, a fading one, just outside his door. The creature had one clump of twigs—a forest hand—on the doorknob as he closed it, and now his remnants were drifting toward a nearby exit sign. The twigs drifted as though blown in a breeze, but there was no sign of air movement in the hallway. Was the Malefactor just now exiting Marduk’s room? Could its malign presence in 508, even a brief one, have transported the entire hall, or even the entire hotel, to a different time? Marduk didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. He felt violated, infuriated by the Malefactor’s seeming presence in his room, but not enough to pursue the beast—always a treacherous challenge, given the possibilities for time ambush. No, he needed to act with prudence, to go into 508 himself now and make sure nothing had been stolen or vandalized.

Marduk took long strides along the hallway, beside himself with fury, and flung open the door, which was unlocked. Horror that he was himself, he nonetheless recoiled from what he saw inside the room.

The bodies of a man and a woman clad in old-fashioned evening attire—still elegant despite the bloodstains—lay sprawled across the bed at odd angles to each other. The man appeared to have shot himself or been shot in the head, a small crimson hole behind one ear, an antique-looking revolver dropped from one outstretched hand to the carpet. Maybe it was Marduk’s imagination, but the gun still seemed to be smoking, a thin trail of gray wafting up toward the ceiling. The woman was shot too, right in the center of her forehead, and further, savage mayhem had been wreaked upon her. Her throat was slit ear to ear, and there was an impossibly deep X in her chest right over her heart, which could be seen in all its bloody stillness. Her left breast was virtually amputated. The surprisingly modest steak knife that appeared to have done all this lay on the bed next to her torso, a knife broken in half from, apparently, the man’s exertions. Marduk had done worse than this many times, but he nonetheless felt revulsion over what he beheld. Hard to say why.

In any event, he didn’t think the Malefactor had killed these people. No, that creature had dialed the time back in his room many years ago to this event, but for what purpose? To pin it on him? To terrify him, not that such a thing was possible? The Malefactor knew of this probable lovers’ quarrel–murder–suicide and had sprung it on him, Marduk. For what purpose?

As if to answer his question, footsteps and the clamor of voices were suddenly coming down the hallway toward 508. Of course … the gunshots would have been heard, back in time whenever this had happened. Instinct took Marduk swiftly out of the room, his face averted from the newcomers—who appeared not to notice him, as if he were a ghost—into the same stairs the Malefactor had entered. He went down half a flight, then stopped. He listened, more calmly than a moment earlier, to the shrieks, the yells, the horrified exclamations now coming from room 508. There were no indications anyone was pursuing him.

There in the stairs, he suddenly faced perhaps the most humiliating experience of his entire life.
He didn’t know what to do
.

Marduk didn’t know how to get back to 2009. And as tempting as it might have been to stay in this new time period and find a new slew of delicious victims to feast on, it was much more important that he get back to deal with Dee and Hughes. So, from the stairs, Marduk called John Dee on his cell phone. This served to emphasize his humiliation.

He didn’t know what to do.

31

Bird Dust

“You’re trapped where?” Dee asked Marduk.

Marduk didn’t know why the fool hadn’t heard him. There was a crackle of static in the connection, as if it were weakened by the time gulf. But he could still hear.

“I’m trapped a long time ago, like I just said. I don’t know exactly when. Maybe in the early years after the hotel opened. A Malefactor was lurking about my room, and he twisted the time frame somehow.” No need to tell Dee about the scene in his room. It was beside the point.

Dee started to laugh.

“Keep doing that and I’ll kill you the next time I see you,” Marduk told him coldly. Of course, he intended to do that anyway, but no need to be definitive about it at this stage. It would put Dee off.

Indeed, something in Marduk’s tone might have cautioned Dee, for his laughter suddenly stopped. “All right. I have an idea. Go to the restaurant off the lobby, Fiorello’s, which I think has always been a dining room of some sort, and sit in the southeast corner of the room. It won’t be crowded at this hour. I’ll get there as quickly as I can.”

“But—”

Dee hung up. Marduk knew better than to try him again. Seething with anger, he made his way down to the lobby and found the entrance to a restaurant with a painted sign above its doors, “The Gold Mine,” apparently a dimly lit predecessor of Fiorello’s. Marduk noticed a lot of candles and lanterns around, but none of the bright electric illumination present when he’d checked in in 2009.

A waiter standing nearby took him with indifference to a southeast table in the largely deserted dining room, seeming to scarcely notice Marduk’s no doubt eccentric-looking 2009 attire. Marduk ordered a glass of red wine and prepared himself to wait. But almost immediately the air around the table began to waver, then to develop little silvery ridges, and John Dee’s limbs, then torso, then head fleshed out the ridges, a Malefactor-like process except there was no suggestion of a tree. And except that it left the nattily attired Dee with a fine coating of white dust over him, even his eyelashes and lips, one that Dee seemed oblivious to. He put a small silver wand on the table between them, one he’d apparently used to effect his transit, sat down, and gazed at Marduk.

“You look good,” Marduk told him.

“Thanks, my good creature,” Dee replied.

Marduk laughed. “You’re covered in filth, you ignorant dunghill. It looks like you’re shrouded in some sort of bird waste in powder form. You look disgusting.” He turned away in his chair, as if he couldn’t stand the sight of him.

Dee put a finger to his forehead, removed it, and gazed at his fingertip. He frowned, then wiped the tip clean on the tablecloth, repeated the process with his chin, his cheek, his lips. Marduk turned back to him.

“The dust of the centuries,” Dee said grandiosely, as if acquiring it had been an achievement. “Time travel is so unpredictable. You must excuse me. I will find a washroom.”

“The dung of the centuries, you mean,” Marduk told him, laughing again. With his finger, he helped himself to a daub of dust from Dee’s forehead, placed it under his nose and made a revolted expression, though he smelled nothing. “You must have encountered a flock of time-traveling birds in your journey,” he taunted. “What an unfortunate accident.”

Dee got up, patting Marduk on the head as though he were a pitiable simpleton, and left. When he returned, much cleaner now in his gold suit, yellow shirt, and black tie, he had dropped the pretense of gentility. His eyes held only the cold glare of an inquisitor. “Yes, I did acquire some dust effect from the travel,” Dee said. “Odd. These things never go perfectly. If Kepler had worked harder on the technology as promised, instead of wasting centuries pursuing me for nonexistent moneys owed, perhaps perfection would have been attained. Ah, well. Someday he’ll see reason, and I can release his bookstore back to him instead of having to conceal it as collateral against his wild financial fantasies. Anyway, speaking of imperfect beings … if you didn’t tip off the police, any ideas as to who?”

“I know nothing about it. Nothing at all. But since you’re starting to ask questions, I’ve got one for you.”

“Yes?”

“Can a corpse be transported through time? Or does the passenger have to be alive for your tricks to work?”

Dee looked at Marduk suspiciously. “And your reason for wanting to know is?”

“Your deathly pale appearance in all that dung dust brought it to mind.”

Dee frowned, but then appeared to ponder Marduk’s question. “I’ve never tried it, but I’d have to guess the answer is no,” he eventually said. “Living cells, and the living molecules that make them up, have a sort of elasticity to them, a vibrancy, a bounciness, that dead cells lack, and that’s probably necessary to cling to the irregular passages, the freakish angles, that are necessary for a passage through time. Elasticity, flexibility: no, my good ghoul. I don’t think the dead can be transported through time.”

Marduk slapped his knee with enthusiasm, leaving Dee with a baffled expression. “Oh, thanks, Sir Dee. You’re a well-informed fellow.”

Dee, clearly puzzled by the compliment, went on. “Ah, then. Let’s not dwell on the past. I’ll assume you had your reasons for the double cross, whatever they were. You have your moods, and Renoir can be a pompous, irritating sort. And after all, he’s merely been incarcerated. It’s not like he’s been hung—”

“Is there a point to this, Dee? I’ll repeat, I admit to nothing!”

“Yes. The point is, we can still go on together, you and I. Plotting.”

Marduk looked at Dee with an expression of amazement. Dee wanted another conspiracy, even after Marduk’s treachery? Unbelievable, even for an idiot like Dee. There had to be some sort of trickery here. Treachery. But he stayed silent. Let the fool be a fool.

“In retrospect, perhaps it was an error to mimic Hughes in our machinations. Not that I think he was the source of the betrayal: he couldn’t have known about the plot yet—I suspect you, denials or no—”

Marduk nodded, as if he had been complimented.

“—but once the plot got its inevitable public exposure, that could have led to complications with Hughes, given the hellhound’s tendency to be disruptive, even vengeful. No, I’ve devised a more efficient strategy now, with an intermediary we can dispose of.” Dee reached in his pocket and handed Marduk a newspaper photo of a man in his late twenties, long blond hair, handsome features, powerful build, making a gesture as to wave a photographer away. Marduk glanced at it.

“Mack Ames,” Dee explained, “the so called ‘meat billionaire,’ savant of speculation in meat stocks and grain commodities. He’s a Wharton whiz kid whose Page 6 reputation for late-night drinking and upscale fisticuffs is exceeded only by his wealth. You’ll find him a juicy, sloshed target in New York City neighborhoods like SoHo and Chelsea one night very soon. Dee glanced at his watch. “Probably too late now for tonight, though. After your meal of him he’ll be gone for good, no time-trapped doubles to worry about, and he makes a nice counterpoint to Hughes on the pathetic vegetarian thing. No phony sensitivities for ‘Meat Muscle Mack.’”