A Grave Tree (15 page)

The characters weren’t in lines; rather they appeared to be in clusters. Mark made his eyes relax, the way he did when he was looking for faces in the knots on the wall, or shorelines in the squiggles on the linoleum floor. The last few characters in each of the clusters followed one of only two patterns, almost as if one was a certain number of turns to the left, while the other was a certain number of turns to the right. Could the combination really be on the sign? It would be an ingenious way to ensure nobody forgot it, provided they could all read the language on the sign.

Mark stared at the characters. They were almost hypnotizing. He looked away and closed his eyes, and he could still see the outlines of the characters on his eyelids, like a collection of constellations.

A voice came from outside. “Here it is. I found it. I think it’s a door!”

Mark’s tongue had gone dry and sandpapery. He refocused on the sign, then closed his eyes again.

The outlines of the groups of characters on the sign matched the smaller characters on the wheel.

Mark lunged forward and spun the wheel first left and then right, stopping on the appropriate marking each time, then left and right again, and finally one last time to the left.

The door popped open with a creak.

Mark flung the door open the rest of the way, and he and Digby leapt into the new room, slamming the door closed behind them.

He swung the flashlight around wildly, his mind conjuring visions of giant spiders, ghosts, sarcophaguses, and feral dogs, but the much larger room seemed unoccupied. The room was circular, he realized with a small furrow of alarm. Circular rooms, with their implicit link to the sacred or divine, spooked him. Someone always felt that you should speak quietly in circular rooms. The walls were dark unadorned cement, save for what appeared to be light fixtures at regular intervals.

He shone his light on the floor. There, in the center of the room, was a pentagram. Mark tried not to shrink away.

Digby scampered about the room doing his own reconnaissance as Mark skirted the pentagram unsteadily. Pentagrams were not inherently dangerous. But they, like circular rooms, spooked Mark. He approached it cautiously, expecting it might zap him, or crumble away to expose a giant star-shaped hole, or start to glow… or something. But it remained inert. Even the energy he always felt when near the stones or a pair of docks was curiously absent.

The lines of the pentagram were made with pale white wood inlaid into the cement floor. And characters, like the ones on the sign outside, were etched into the floor at the vertices of the pentagram.

Mark turned away from the pattern on the floor and examined the rest of the room. A small pile of something caught his eye. A blanket? A piece of discarded clothing? He moved to approach it, and he stumbled over something on the floor—something long and thin, like a string, or cable. Was it a tripwire?

Mark swung the light around, expecting poison darts to fly out of the walls or a giant boulder to drop from the ceiling and crush him, but nothing happened. After sweeping the entire room, Mark wondered if there were snakes at his feet, and he turned the flashlight in haste to the floor, only to find a long Y-shaped cable lying by his feet. It had metal bits at each end, like a jumper cable, but it was at least fifteen meters long. One of the ends, the base of the Y, had what looked like a plug-in, while the other two, the arms of the Y, ended in round flat disks. Mark puzzled at this for a few seconds before continuing on to the original item that had caught his attention.

It was a woman’s handbag. Or more precisely—because he had an eye and preference for detail, in things if not faces—it was Ms. Beckham’s handbag, which was turquoise and had a cluster of small purple flowers embroidered along the bottom edge. But it was misshapen and covered in mildew as if it had been there for years, rotting in this odd little circular room. He cast his flashlight around again, fearful that he might find a body now (Ms. Beckham’s body, again to be precise) but the room remained empty.

He hovered over the handbag. He supposed he should pick it up and look inside for clues or something. That was what a true adventurer would do. But he didn’t like touching dirty things.

He sat down, careful to stay clear of both the handbag and the pentagram. Right now, more than anything, he just wanted a sandwich. Didn’t all those adventure books involve lots of good meals and cooking fatty meats over a fire? He didn’t recall them containing a lot of scenes in which the hero fainted from hunger or died of starvation in a small circular room.

He removed his backpack and then his satchel. He withdrew his maps, which he had placed in a plastic bag in his satchel. His purpose was twofold. First, perhaps he could pick up the handbag using a plastic bag, and second, he wanted to sketch the markings and the pentagram for future reference.

(He knew he should be looking for a way out of the room, or listening at the door for signs of the people following him, but he had to draw the pentagram, and he clung determinedly on to a small hope that whoever they were, they didn’t have the combination to the door.)

He became so engrossed in his sketch that he didn’t notice that the rat had disappeared until he almost had his work complete. Investigation turned up no sign of Digby anywhere in the room. He must have squished through a crack somewhere. Mark hoped he could find his way back. Although he was not fond of rats, having some company in this darkened room was better than no company. And if he got any hungrier, he might have to consider eating the rat just to survive (which seemed like a bad choice, but he was very hungry). He returned to his sketch, and was putting the final touches on it, nearly faint and seeing black spots from lack of calories, when Digby reappeared carrying a foil-wrapped package, which he brought to Mark and dropped on the floor.

Mark picked it up. “One Ration, 4500 calories,” read the label.

How could 4500 calories be in something so small? Mark tore open the wrapper to find a gooey brown bar. He took a tentative bite. It was horrifically sweet and tasted of molasses. He choked down a few bites before shoving the rest in his backpack. Almost immediately he started feeling a bit better.

“Thank you,” he said to the rat, feeling very bad now for having considered eating him. Digby took a run at Mark, and before Mark could leap away, the rat had scampered up his leg and arm and back onto his shoulder. It didn’t seem wrong to be talking to the rat. In fact, it seemed rather that the rat understood more than some of the humans Mark interacted with. But that was probably just his imagination.

Voices outside the room turned Mark’s knees to jelly. Someone had gotten into the antechamber. Loud knocks came on the door and Mark shrank away and started circling the room with his hand pressed against the wall, searching desperately for a place to hide.

A flash of light illuminated the space, and Mark spun (his heart lodged uncomfortably near his larynx) to see two translucent white figures standing in the pentagram, just like the ghosts he had seen the previous day. He screamed, a pathetic and shrill sound that echoed around the round room, but as he filled his lungs to scream anew, he realized that the ghosts looked a lot like Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Beckham.

The two figures seemed excited to see him, because they broke out in broad smiles and their arm movements got very animated. They turned to each other and hugged quickly, then their mouths started moving as if they were speaking, but no sounds emerged. When they stopped talking, they looked at him expectantly, the way adults often did before they truly understood his challenges.

Mark stared at them, frozen. What had they just said? What was going on? What did they want him to do? Tears streamed down Ms. Beckham’s face. They wore strange clothes, and their faces were more lined than he remembered. Mark felt his head start to shake in alarm. It was hard enough for him to interpret what people were asking of him when he could hear their words, but in the absence of words, he was lost.

He saw their smiles vanish, their eyebrows drop, and deep lines of indentation form in the middle of their foreheads. He frantically scrolled through his set of yellow cards of emotions in his mind. Upset faces. They were upset.

After a few seconds, Mr. Sinclair fished around in his pockets for something, and Ms. Beckham tried speaking and waving her hands again. Mark started to panic, flipping his gaze to the door to the room, which remained thankfully closed. He was in danger. He didn’t have time for charades.

He might need to sink into a crouch and block them out. He balled his fists and raised them to the level of his chin, all his instincts pushing him to close his eyes. But they were clearly asking for his help. Weren’t they? He couldn’t just shut them out. He tried to control his breathing and focus. He felt Digby running back and forth along his shoulders. He pressed his ear against the door again. Voices with harsh edges came from the other side. Someone warning someone to get back. Then a loud boom dropped Mark to his knees and the entire dam structure shook.

Mr. Sinclair had found a pen and was writing something on his wrist. The ghosts of Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Beckham had grown fainter, their outlines blurring. The booming and shaking continued. Mark shook his head urgently, his hands pressed against his ears. Was someone trying to blow up the dam?

Just as Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Beckham started to disappear in earnest, Mr. Sinclair held up his arm, and Mark clenched his teeth and crawled close enough to read it.

“Help us. We’re trapped. Bring the statue back to center. Don’t trust S…”

They vanished before Mark could finish reading the message.

*****

Abbey jogged down the sidewalk with a stitch in her side. She’d run all the way from the library. Why had the future changed so dramatically? Had
they
changed it?
Change the future, but don’t change too much
, her future self had said. Had she failed completely at that? Now she had to somehow rescue Caleb. The future Sylvain was too infirm to help her, Simon had been arrested, and the police were after her. She could think of only one more person who might be able to help.

She made her way down the lane and stood outside the shed door for several minutes before working up the courage to knock.

When older Caleb answered the door, his fiery red hair in a wild cloud around his head, she nearly fell into his arms in relief. He reached out silently and yanked her inside what she realized was a small coach house. He pulled her into a tight embrace as he closed the door behind her.

“I need your help rescuing Caleb,” she said without preamble when he released her. When he didn’t respond, she scrutinized him more closely. “Are you okay? Did you destroy Simon’s business?”

Puffy red circles marked the spaces under his eyes, and his body seemed smaller than Abbey remembered, his normally muscular arms thinner and less defined. He raked his hand through his hair, such a quintessential Caleb gesture that Abbey felt her throat tighten. “Does Anna still work for Salvador, do you know?” Caleb said. “In genetics?”

“Yes,” Abbey said. “But…”

Caleb cut her off. “Then I’m probably okay. If I understand how this all works correctly, which I’m not totally sure I do, I think I’m waiting at Abbott’s for you.”

“But how?”

Caleb leaned against the coach house wall as if he needed something to hold himself up. His eyelids fluttered closed and then open. “I can’t guarantee anything. The future rewrites all the time. But go and check. As for Simon, from what he and Sarah have told me, he never had a business. He went to work for Sylvain right out of college.”

He held up his hand in response to her quickly furrowing brow. “I know, I know. He had a business in those futures we went to a long time ago… well, a long time ago for me, but not so long for you, I guess. But the future is the future. It’s not set. So what you see and experience in the futures that the stones take you to may not end up being the future at all. They’re just one possible future, and depending on who moves the threads, they might not end up happening. And unfortunately, when you have time travelers, especially those who don’t have any scruples, the future ends up getting changed a lot. And right now, because a large number of witches were let out of Nowhere at the same time, there are more time travelers than there have been for a long time, so the future seems to change every day.”

“You mean…” Abbey trailed off thinking of the unborn child in her future, of Sam, and of her expectation that they would be married one day.

“I mean don’t trust anything you’ve seen in the future. I don’t really know how it works. There is some robustness to the threads. For example, Simon and Sarah still got married. The futures at this point still got split. I know that at this point, we had a conversation in my future before I moved some of my people to this future. But my recollection and your recollection of that conversation might be different. My recollection is more accurate because it’s in my past and happened in real time. Yours was just a possibility, and the possibilities aren’t collapsed until it actually happens. All I know is that the more you and I and the others travel to the future, the more the future changes.”

“I thought we couldn’t change the future or we’d end up in Nowhere, by creating paradox, that isn’t really paradox,” Abbey said.

“I think Dr. Ford was wrong, as usual. As far as I’ve seen, paradox generally only results from killing someone in the future, because that really can’t be undone, unless someone figures out a way to go to the past. Besides, the other witches aren’t changing the future
while
they are in the future.” Caleb paused and pressed his lips together.

“Having knowledge of the future is often what changes the future,” he continued. “When we come here, we learn things about the future that change the choices we make in our present. Future knowledge can create opportunities for great power and wealth, and some witches have decided to take those opportunities. Some of them have pushed it too far. As a result, everything is in flux. Every time someone pulls a thread, the future rewrites. But even on a smaller scale, every time you or I learn something in our time traveling, the future rewrites a bit because our present selves know more, which not only causes us to behave differently in the present, but also potentially in the future, and when the future rewrites, our future selves don’t remember the previous future unless our present selves experienced it.”