by G. P. Ching
Chapter 31
Gideon’s Passage
As soon as his obligatory Sunday brunch was eaten, Jacob crossed the street to Dr. Silva’s. He didn’t need an excuse, it was his job to feed the cat and weed the garden. In fact, he would do those things, but he would do something else as well. He would find Dr. Silva’s notebooks and learn how to navigate Oswald.
The mosquitoes were becoming a nuisance after dark, so he decided to work in the garden first. He finished up by late afternoon, and then let himself in through the sunroom to feed Gideon. The big red cat was waiting, pacing the tabletop. Jacob pulled the next plate from the refrigerator and placed it on the floor.
“You must be hungry, huh, boy,” Jacob said.
Gideon didn’t move. The tip of his tail twitched.
“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 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. Three rips in his skin 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. They stung fiercely. He had to sit down and put the scratched leg up in a chair to get a good look at it.
Gideon followed him into the kitchen and sat too close for comfort, glaring in his direction. The stare was knowing, almost … human. An 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 his 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 shook his head. “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 because the water was rough and the waves were big. I’m not sure when exactly I knew I was in trouble. The water swept me from 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. But the harder I swam, the harder the water pushed. 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. The ocean swallowed me and I saw the sun grow smaller through the surface as I sank. Frickin’ hilarious now, don’t you think, to know I almost drowned 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. I caught my breath again and struggled against her grip. I thought 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 the surge of water eventually spat us out. Once outside of the riptide’s hold, 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. Gideon 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 at 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 pain started to ebb. 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. Jacob followed him to the wall farthest from the bedrooms. A tapestry of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse hung from a dowel, its length spanning floor to ceiling over the silver paint. Gideon looked back at Jacob and then walked into the tapestry. He disappeared.
Mouth open, Jacob approached 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 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 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 at the base of a wind
ing iron staircase on the other side of the wall. Gideon’s white teeth stood out from his silhouette, framed in light from above. 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 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. Without Gideon, he might never have found it at all. 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 standalone 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, mostly drawings of roots and leaves. Several experiments used chemical formulas that he didn’t understand. On the bookshelf, no less than twenty versions of the Bible took up an entire shelf along with 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 the bowl aside and picked up the picture. The portrait was painted, oil on canvas, in the style you see in museums. 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 away his identity. Dr. Silva stared back at him from behind Oswald’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 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.