The Shape Stealer Read Free Page B

pendulum always knows. Look.” He pointed to the lines drawn in the sand, all smooth uninterrupted arcs except for one that had an intricate knot in it. I tried to imagine the motion the pendulum would have had to perform to describe such a design—and failed.
    “That knot indicates an anomaly in the time line. It told me that someone had traveled through time today. I assumed it was you, since you used my workshop to fashion your timepiece.” He tapped the watch that was hanging around my neck and then moved closer. “May I?”
    I took the timepiece off and handed it to him. He dug a jeweler’s loupe out of the pocket of his baggy trousers and fitted it over his right eye.
    “It broke when we came back. Can you fix it?”
    He opened the case and studied the gears. His lips moved as though he were counting—or saying a prayer—but he made no sound for several moments. Then he looked up, one eye made giant by the jeweler’s loupe. “Did you adjust the settings at any time while you were in the past?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t think I’ve adjusted anything on it since it left your workshop.”
    “Hmph. I’ll have to see. It’ll take…”—He grinned—“ time . But we’ve got a bigger problem than your watch. The time line. Ever since we saw the anomaly this morning we’ve been charting the changes in the archives. Come…” He motioned for me to follow him through an arched doorway. As we walked around the pendulum I paused to listen to the soft whooshing of its progress through the sand.
    Whooosh, whoosh, Will, it seemed to whisper. Whoosh, whoosh, why?
    I shook my head. I was just tired, I thought, following Monsieur Durant through the arched doorway and into an even loftier domed space.
    “Voilà la Salle du Temps!” Monsieur Durant announced with obvious pride. The Hall of Time was as vast as the Gare de l’Est, only instead of trains standing in their tracks, stacks of books soared up to the domed ceiling. The stacks were fashioned of curving black cast iron and looked as though they had been made by Hector Guimard, the designer of the Paris Metro entrances. The ceiling, too, was spanned by cast-iron ribs that came together in a giant oculus and supported panes of brightly colored and intricately patterned stained glass. The effect was that of being inside a brilliantly painted hot-air balloon that was soaring through the air. A steady breeze wafting down through the oculus added to that impression and filled the hall with a fluttering that sounded like flocks of pigeons but that came, I saw, from rows of old-fashioned newspaper racks—the kind that libraries or some cafés used to have. I recalled an old Italian café on Bleecker Street in New York City where my father liked to have a morning espresso and pastry and read the selection of European papers that hung from racks like these.
    Another source of the fluttering came from long wooden tables that stretched between the racks, where men and women sat gazing into large tomes, whose pages turned by themselves while the readers hurriedly took notes in composition books.
    “What are they doing?” I asked Monsieur Durant.
    “The chronologistes are recording the changes in the archives,” he replied. “When the anomaly appeared this morning, a number of books were disturbed … There goes another one.”
    He pointed to a shelf about thirty feet above the floor where a book was protruding over the ledge. As we watched it slid even further out. One of the chronologistes —a young woman with crimped tea-colored hair and thick square rimmed glasses—ran toward the shelf, her rather impractical green suede heels clicking on the marble floor. She reached the shelf just in time to catch the book.
    A thunderous pounding greeted her successful catch as the chronologistes applauded their comrade by stamping their feet.
    “Brava, Annick!” Monsieur Durant exclaimed. “What have you got?”
    Annick, blushing beneath her freckles at Monsieur