The Soulkeepers (23 page)

"You can eat now." He tapped the edge of the
dish and made a kissing sound with his lips. Gideon blinked in his
general direction.

"Okay. Whatever," Jacob said. According to
the stone, Gideon would somehow be the key to finding the notebooks
but he didn't understand how. Maybe it wasn't the cat itself but
rather something about the cat. He decided to search the library
again. Maybe a book on cats or a picture of Gideon would be the
clue he needed.

He walked toward the front of the house.
When he reached the bottom of the grand staircase, Gideon leapt in
front of him, teeth bared. The cat growled a low warning, the hair
on his back standing straight up.

"Gideon, get out of the way," Jacob said and
tried to step around him. The cat struck, shredding his shin with
his claws.

"Owww. Son of a …damn it Gideon! What the
hell?" He reached down and pulled up his pant leg. There were three
rips in his skin that dripped blood onto his sock. He limped back
to the kitchen, not wanting the blood to stain the white marble
floor. With a wet paper towel, he dabbed at the cuts, which stung
fiercely. He had to sit down and put the scratched leg up in a
chair to get a good look at it.

Gideon had followed him into the kitchen,
and was sitting too close for comfort, glaring in his direction.
The stare was knowing, almost...human. The idea clicked into place
as fast as his brain could process it. Dr. Silva was not human, and
her cat was probably not a normal cat. What exactly the cat was, he
didn't know for sure, but what he did know was that if he wanted
Gideon's help he would have to take a more direct approach.

"Gideon, I need to go upstairs." Jacob
looked the cat full on like he was talking to a person.

The cat shook his head from side to side. He
did understand.

"I have to find Dr. Silva's notebooks. The
ones that say how to use Oswald. It's important."

Again, the cat shook its head
vigorously.

"It's the only way. I have to find my mom. I
can't just forget about her. She's the only real family I have
left." He rubbed his eyes. "It's not that I don't like the people
I've met in Paris, my friend Malini, my Uncle John, Dr. Silva,
they've all become important to me. But the thing is, my mom is all
I have left of my history. She's my roots, my only link to who I
really am. If she's alive, the thought that she could be somewhere
and need my help…" He slammed his fist into his palm. "I have to
find her. I have to help."

The cat continued to stare but his eyes
softened. Jacob was getting through.

"Gideon, how do I make you understand?" He
rested his head in his hands. "After my dad died, when I was, I
think eleven, my mom took me to the beach. It was a Sunday
afternoon and our first time back since we lost him. I was boogie
boarding. It was a great day for it, the water was rough and the
waves were big. I'm not sure when exactly I knew I was in trouble.
I felt the water sweep me from the shore but I thought I could swim
through it. I lost my board in the waves but I was a strong
swimmer, always have been. The harder I swam, the harder the water
pushed. It was like being on a water treadmill. I swam until my
muscles ached but went nowhere.

"I think I realized I was caught in a
riptide when I saw my mom wade into the water. She dove straight
into it and let the water carry her out to me. While I struggled
and panicked, she just went with the current. I was so tired by
then that I stopped swimming. I felt the ocean swallow me and saw
the sun grow smaller through the surface as I sank. Frickin'
hilarious now, don't you think, to know I almost drown when my body
was just waiting to give me the ability to control water?

"My mom got there just in time. She put her
arm under my chin and pulled my head to the surface. Once I caught
my breath again I wanted to scream, I struggled against her arm, I
just knew we were going to die. She told me to relax, to let the
riptide take us out to sea. Somehow, I calmed down enough to listen
to her. Sure enough we were carried beyond the surge of water and
once outside of the riptide's grip she floated on her back, my head
in her arm, and kicked us back to shore. It wasn't until we reached
the beach that she started to cry. She said, 'you've got to be more
careful Jacob. We are all we have now. It's just us. We've got to
take care of each other.' Don't you get it Gideon? She's lost,
somewhere, in her own riptide. No one is coming for her. I. Am.
All. She. Has."

Gideon looked down at his paws. Jacob sensed
that if the cat could shed tears he would.

"Gideon, have you ever lost something,
something so important to you that you felt like it didn't matter
if you lived or died to find it? What mattered is that you
tried."

The red cat blinked slowly, and nodded. His
green eyes expressed sheer agony. Jacob was surprised at the depth
of it and out of pity reached out to scratch him behind the ear. He
jerked his head away, annoyed.

"What matters to me is that I can look in
the mirror tomorrow and know that I tried everything in my power to
get her back. So what do you say? Will you help me?" he asked.

Gideon's whiskers pulled back from his
teeth. At first Jacob thought he'd offended the cat. Then, he
realized Gideon was smiling. The cat leapt from the table and ran
for the stairs. Jacob stood on his bloody leg and followed at a
limp. The scratches must have been deeper than they looked because
they oozed blood and burned like his leg was on fire. Hobbling up
the stairs proved to be pure agony and took much longer than it
should have. When he finally reached the library, Gideon looked
irritated.

"Don't look ay me like that, Gideon. You did
this to me," Jacob said. "My leg is shredded." He held up his pant
leg to show off the swollen red wound.

Gideon twitched his whiskers. With a
coughing fit that sounded like he had a hairball caught in his
throat, he ejected an enormous wad of spit onto Jacob's hurt
leg.

"Ewww," he said and was about to rip into
the cat for adding insult to injury, when to his amazement the
wound started to feel better. As the saliva dripped down his shin,
the scratches visibly healed.

"I wasn't expecting that," he said.

Gideon made a sound
between a laugh and a growl and walked over to the wall farthest
from the bedrooms. A tapestry of the
Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse
hung from a
dowel, its length stretched floor to ceiling over the silver paint.
Gideon looked back at Jacob and then walked into the tapestry. He
disappeared.

Mouth open, Jacob moved toward the wall that
had just swallowed the cat. The cloth of the tapestry was rough
against his fingers. Once, when he was younger, he'd seen a magic
show where the magician had used layered mirrors to make himself
disappear. He ran his hand behind the tapestry, looking for an
explanation for the illusion.

The cat popped up beside him again, shaking
his head. He looked at Jacob, closed his eyes in a deliberate way,
and leaped through again. What was he trying to say? Jacob closed
his eyes. The first time Gideon had gone through with his eyes
open. Why would he want him to close his eyes? What happened when
he closed his eyes? He couldn't see the wall. Gideon didn't want
Jacob to see the wall. What else had he done differently? He had
jumped. Why would it be important to not see the wall and to jump?
Maybe because seeing was believing. Maybe, Gideon was trying to
tell him to not believe in the wall. Maybe, the wall was an
illusion.

With this in mind, Jacob kept his eyes
closed and leapt forward. His feet left carpet but landed on hard
floor. He opened his eyes and found himself at the base of a
winding iron staircase. Gideon's white teeth stood out from his
silhouette, framed in the light from above and Jacob followed as
the cat led him higher and higher up the spiral. The stairs ended
in a round room with hardwood floors and walls made almost entirely
of windows. He looked through them, out into the yard, and realized
he was in the tower.

The witch's hat tower loomed over the west
side of the house. It was what gave the gothic Victorian its
characteristic dark mood. Jacob hadn't noticed before that there
didn't seem to be any way up to it from the inside of the house.
The view was stunning. Dr. Silva protected this place for good
reason. He could see Oswald from up here, as well as the entire
enchanted garden.

He took a look around the room. A
sophisticated telescope stood near the east window. In the center
of the room, a gigantic mahogany desk with a marble top was covered
in papers. Behind the desk, every square inch of a stand-alone
bookcase was covered with books and papers. There was no lamp or
overhead light. Instead, candelabras circled the room. With enough
natural light still streaming through the windows, he didn't feel
the need to light them.

Jacob walked over to the desk and started
riffling through the mass of papers. These were mostly drawings of
roots and leaves. There were papers on experiments with chemical
formulas that he didn't understand. On the bookshelf, there were no
less than twenty versions of the Bible but also books on Buddhism,
Judaism, and Taoism.

He rolled the wooden chair aside and
squatted down to look at the pile of papers on the lowest shelf. A
corner of a picture frame poked out from under a bowl of bark
samples. He moved them aside and picked up the picture. The
portrait was painted, oil on canvas, in the style you see in
museums. He knew immediately that it was Oswald. The man in the
picture had slicked back hair, a three-piece suit, and a perfect
smile. But it was the woman in the photo that gave it away. Dr.
Silva stared back at him from behind the man's shoulder, looking
exactly the same as she did today except for her dress which
reminded him of something out of the Wild West.

So, she didn't age? He wasn't surprised.

Under the frame was a
stack of leather-bound journals. Jackpot! He
thumbed through them and saw hundreds of journal entries,
dates, times, places. And, then he noticed a poster-sized roll of
paper stuck between the corner of the shelf and the books. He
pulled it out, slid the outer band off and unrolled it on the desk.
It was a map of the world, covered in a web of dated lines, all of
them leading back to one place: the tree in the garden.
Oswald.

The Wrong
Direction

The map and Dr. Silva's notebooks looked
complicated but he forced himself to sit down and go through each
page. After an hour or so he checked his watch. He would have to
hurry. If he wasn't back by dinner, John might come looking for
him. Fortunately, he found the concept quite simple, once he saw
the pattern.

The tree accessed power connected to the
longitude and latitude of the earth, like a spider on a web. The
web connected the tree in Paris to the place the spider crawled.
The spider moved around the globe at an angle, reaching every other
tree in the world over the course of a year. Over twenty-four hours
it moved along the longitude of the earth. At the same time, the
months of the year caused it to climb the lines of latitude. The
power reached the equator half way through the year, which was why,
he realized, they had visited Peru in June.

The calculation of longitude was fairly
straightforward, mapping exactly against the time zones and
International Date Line. Latitude was much trickier. The rise from
South to North happened more quickly at the poles and slowed as the
force reached the equator. He thought of it like this: the spider's
web was stretched more tightly across the middle of the earth and
the spider had longer to crawl to complete the circle to reach its
next thread.

He smoothed the map out on the desk and
searched for the North Pacific just beneath the Tropic of Cancer.
When he'd found Oahu, he traced it with his finger. The island was
small in the vast blue ink that represented the Pacific Ocean. If
he didn't know exactly what he was doing, he could easily drown in
its depths, emerging in a mass of seaweed, miles from dry land. Of
course, he could control water now. If he missed, he could ride a
wave to shore—he hoped. A date near the island read August 15th,
1992. It was logical that August 15th would be the date he tried to
get home to find his mother.

He thought he understood the basics, but
there were things he couldn't explain, anomalies that didn't follow
the rules, like a rogue date in Munich, Germany in January 1945 and
in Hong Kong in December of 2000. Dr. Silva said it had taken her
decades to learn to use the tree. Jacob only had a few minutes
more. As luck would have it, he found the answer in her
journal.

Dr. Silva could use sorcery to build a
string between Oswald and any other tree, regardless of the date.
Her power acted as the tree's power; she stood in for the spider.
But following the string backwards from a normal tree was only
possible while the string was still open, twenty-four to
forty-eight hours. According to Dr. Silva's earliest entries,
climbing back up the spider's web always took magic. She could
follow someone or something else, if their string was still open.
But once the string was gone, a normal tree wasn't enough to
amplify her magic.

No wonder she had been so adamant about
Jacob not using the tree alone. Without her, there was no way he
could get back. It also explained why their trip to Peru had to be
short. She needed to help him return before the string
dissolved.

Jacob slapped his hand on
the desk when he realized Dr. Silva could've used her magic to take
him to visit the Medicine woman much earlier. What she'd told him
had been a half-truth. Yes, if he were traveling alone, June
10
^th
was the day of connection. Dr. Silva could've built a string
from Oswald. He suspected she hadn't offered because she knew the
trip wouldn't help. She wanted to dangle the carrot long enough to
fill his head with her story about being a Soulkeeper. He'd been
such a fool.