Shift: A Novel

The light was completely gone now. Or, rather, the shadows had thickened until the quivering forest was midnight dark. The only light came from—

Came from—

BC rubbed his eyes, or thought he did. He wasn’t sure if his arms had moved. At any rate, the building that had materialized in front of him was still there.

Bulky chimneys bookmarked the tiny structure; jagged fretwork gleamed like broken teeth against the shingles. Railings and balusters appeared to have been constructed from sinuous lengths of grapevine, and they slithered and danced around the porch like bark-covered lightning. In the bright light of day, the little building would have been nothing more than an overgrown dollhouse or gingerbread cottage. But lit only by daggers of moonlight—where had the sun gone?—it was a nightmare vision, full of dark omen.

A light flickered behind the curtained windows, a match-strike that quickly flared into lantern brightness. It bounced from one end of the house to the other like a goldfish leaping between fishbowls or a burning tennis ball hurtling from racket to racket or barrels of flaming oil launched by a pair of trebuchets from either side of an ancient city wall. The metaphors seemed to bloom in BC’s mind of their own accord (along with words like “trebuchet,” which he was sure he’d never heard before). With each volley the glow gained intensity—insanity—until it was nothing less than the superpowers hurling nuclear annihilation across the vastness of oceans. BC almost expected to hear screams coming from the cottage. He almost wanted to scream himself.

Suddenly a pillar of light filled the doorway and exploded over the porch. At first it was just fire. Then, impossibly, features came into focus. Arms, legs, a head. Slitted eyes and open mouth, hair flaming like a Klansman’s torch. A witch? No. A boy. A burning boy.

No: a boy made of fire.

Like all seraphim, it was terrifying in its beauty and power. Something that didn’t belong in the material world and shouldn’t be seen with mortal eyes. Something that would kill you the way you might kill an ant—thoughtlessly, because it attached no importance to your existence, or heedlessly, because it didn’t even see you.

BC’s muscles tensed and twitched. He had seconds to decide: should he run, or welcome whatever message the boy brought? But was it attacking him, or merely fleeing the house? Carrying the truth, or carrying his death? A demon, or—please, God let it be or—an angel? He wanted to run, but terror held him rooted to his spot.

Somewhere far away from him, Timothy Leary was speaking to someone who wasn’t quite there.

“You see why we thought this one was special.”

Millbrook, NY

November 4, 1963

Amid the rippling forest, the rusticated cottage was completely still. Yet somehow it was all the more frightening for that—a clear indication that the building wasn’t part of the phenomenon but the source of it. It took all of BC’s self-possession to mount the two steps and walk across the narrow porch. The floorboards thumped solidly beneath his feet, the wrought-iron door handle was firm in his fingers, neither hotter nor colder than the surrounding air; it didn’t vibrate in warning over what lay on the other side of its portal. Even so, BC couldn’t bring himself to open it, and he turned to wait for Leary. The doctor’s eyes were on him, squinting, scrutinizing. The pantsless professor is observing me, BC thought, as though I’m the anomalous one. But any anger he felt was tempered by the trees dancing behind Leary’s back like a Greek chorus emerging from the wings to prophesy the hero’s fall. It was the sight of the trees that caused him to turn back to the house more than Leary’s prying eyes, and, squaring his shoulders, he rapped decisively on the curtained glass.

The only answer was a chuckle behind him.

“Agent Querrey? This isn’t Thanksgiving dinner.” And, sliding past BC, Leary pushed the door open. The doctor started to walk into the house, then stopped so suddenly that BC crashed into him.

“What the hell?”

For the first time, an element of fear entered the doctor’s voice.

BC peered over Leary’s shoulder. The first thing he saw was a red handprint on the opposite wall. The print centered BC the way a track on the forest floor centers a hunter. The rippling forest disappeared from his mind as his eyes zeroed in on the bloodstain. The color was dry but still bright, probably only an hour or two old, and thick, suggesting it was the hand itself that was bleeding—possibly from hitting the wall—as opposed to the print of someone who’d touched a mortal wound, then flailed around.

Leary was still frozen in the doorway and BC had to push past him to see the rest of the room. It had been torn to pieces. Tables, lamps, picture frames, all smashed to bits. Upholstery had been shredded, holes kicked in the walls, shelves broken in two, pages ripped from books. Almost all of the debris was stained with blood.

A strange whining noise came out of the doctor’s throat.

“Wh-what happened here?”

BC ignored him. This kind of carnage was the work of a single disturbed mind, not a fight: not the haphazard destruction of bodies crashing into things, but the willful annihilation of a tormenting environment. The thousands of fragments of pottery were so pulverized they seemed to have been ground into the carpet by someone jumping up and down on them. BC was so sure of this last assessment that when he saw the ceramic shards embedded in the soles of a pair of shoes sticking out from behind the overturned sofa, his first thought was, I was right! Then he noticed the ankles sticking out of the other side of the shoes and, blushing slightly, rushed across the room. He didn’t bother to draw his gun. There was something about the stillness of the shoes that told BC their wearer wasn’t a threat to anyone.

He drew up short when he saw the blood on the man’s chest. It wasn’t the wound that surprised him—it was hard to see this kind of violence heading anywhere other than suicide—but, rather, the fact that the inch-wide slit was empty. A knife wound, not a gunshot. But if the man had killed himself, where was the knife?

“Is it—” Leary’s voice caught in his throat. “Morganthau?”

BC wondered that himself, but he couldn’t ask Leary. Still, the reversal in the two men’s roles was complete. The blond doctor was quivering in fear, whereas BC felt focused and purposeful.

“I need you to call the local police. Ask them to send a car and an ambulance.”