The Ninth Turn: The Conductors Loop

The Ninth Turn: The Conductor’s Loop

{Washington, D.C. — April 14, 1865}

The air was thick with lantern haze and cherry blossoms clinging to the last of their bloom. Pierre Lavesque pulled the collar of his wool coat high against the spring chill, the smell of pipe smoke and damp brick pressing close on all sides. The gaslights lining Tenth Street flickered weakly, as if reluctant to cast light on what was coming.

Ford’s Theatre loomed ahead; its red-brick walls bathed in warm glow. Laughter spilled from inside—the play already underway. Pierre’s boots tapped in rhythm on the cobblestones, each step deliberate, rehearsed. Beneath his shirt, warm against his chest, hung the red cedar pendant his mother had carved by candlelight back in Montreal. A circle of wood and dove, the grain twisted like wind-swept branches. She’d said the cedar remembered things. That it would protect him. But tonight, it burned like an ember.

He paused near the edge of the street, where the world grew strangely still. Beneath his feet, he felt it—the pulse. A shimmer he couldn’t see but had learned to sense in his bones. This was the place. One of the old ones. Buried under brick and arrogance. A portal, hidden in plain sight, sealed by earth but not forgotten by the land.

His father’s voice echoed through time: “The red cedar guards the door. But if you cross without truth, it will not guide you home.”

Pierre inhaled sharply, the scent of rain and smoke mingling with the phantom aroma of cedar trees and tobacco from some other place—Sandwich, maybe. Or that grove behind the Grey Nuns’ chapel where he first vanished through bark and shadow and returned days later with no hunger and a new scar on his shoulder. Tonight, would be the last crossing, his ninth turn.

He touched the small pouch tucked inside his coat—powdered resin from Mère Malraux in New Orleans, mixed with ash and bone. A ritual gift. A warning. From across the street, a drunken Union soldier stumbled past, singing fragments of a French hymn.

“Booth’s got the devil’s eyes,” he slurred.

Pierre’s lips curled into something close to a smile. Booth was a decoy. The real shot—his—would be unseen, unrecorded, unwelcome in the pages of history. He stepped forward. Toward the theatre. Toward the edge of time. The shimmer pulsed once more beneath the stone.

{Washington, D.C. — Interior, Ford’s Theatre – Later that night}

The usher barely glanced at him. A tip of the cap, a quiet nod, and Pierre slipped past the velvet curtain and into the back halls of the theatre. He moved like breath through shadow—down narrow corridors lit by candle sconces, past the whirring gears of stage machinery, and into the boiler-scented tunnels beneath the theatre floor. He could feel it now—the hum in the walls, the faint warping of space. The portal’s resonance. In the silence, memories walked with him.

{Montreal – Six months earlier}

The room smelled of pipe smoke and burning resin. Hidden beneath a chapel cloister, men in grey Confederate coats gathered around a table of red cedar planks. A Confederate officer placed a wrapped pistol on the table.

“This is not an act of war,” the officer said. “It’s an offering. There are those older than this Union who demand it.”

Pierre stared at the weapon. It wasn’t ordinary. He saw the runes along the barrel—some he recognized from Wendat dream chants. Others he had only seen carved into the stone groves near Sandwich.

“You’ll enter through D.C.,” the officer said. “Exit where the portal lets you.”

Pierre had nodded, silent. His mission was never just about a shot—it was about completing a circle drawn long before he was born.

{Present – Beneath the Theatre}

He paused at a junction where the earth changed. Brick gave way to stone, then packed soil, as if the city itself had been laid atop something ancient. On the wall, half-buried beneath old plaster, was a sigil. Wendat in form, but twisted—augmented by something else. Creole glyphs. Star signs. It pulsed faintly as he passed. He pulled the pistol from his coat, running a gloved thumb over the markings. The red cedar handle had darkened over the last hour. It would not fire like a normal weapon. It would seal.

{Sandwich, Ontario – A Winter Night}

The trees formed a perfect ring. Red cedar, every one, swaying in still air. Pierre stood at the grove’s edge, Mère Malraux beside him, her bones wrapped in shawls of wolf hide.

“You’re half-tree, half-shadow,” she told him. “You walk lines no white man sees. “

He stepped into the ring. The world blinked. He emerged in a sugar grove near Quebec days later.

{Present Time—The Theatre}

Above him, the crowd laughed at the play’s next line. Just another night. Pierre reached the final ladder and began to climb—toward the presidential box, toward the shimmer of history cracking open.

{Flashback – Outskirts of Montreal, 1847}

He was nine the first time he saw the trees breathe. They stood in a crescent beyond the Grey Nuns’ convent grounds, red cedar and ironwood coiled together like lovers. It was late spring, and the bell tower of the city chimed vespers behind him. His mother knelt in prayer at the altar, her voice soft in French, but Pierre had slipped out the side door, chasing the wind.

His father waited beneath the tallest cedar. Mahingan Lavesque stood with his arms crossed, wrapped in a woven blanket trimmed in beads and bone. Huron blood ran strong in his frame, his eyes deep and still as glacial rivers.

“You disobeyed your mother,” Mahingan said in Wendat. “But the land forgives quicker than people.”

Pierre looked down, ashamed. His father crouched beside him.

“You feel it, don’t you?” Mahingan said. “The pulse in your feet? The pressure behind your ribs?”

Pierre nodded.

“The old ones called it the root track. A path only the blood-marked can follow.”

Mahingan pressed a hand to Pierre’s chest.

“Your mother gave you spirit. I gave you bark. You are both. That is rare.”

He took Pierre’s hand and guided him into the cedar grove. The wind stopped. Sound disappeared. Light twisted. Pierre gasped as the bark on the surrounding trees began to shift—moving not like animals, but like breathing earth. Spirals appeared in the trunks, faint at first, then glowing gold and violet. One tree split at its base like a doorframe, revealing mist beyond. He stepped through.

{Somewhere Else – Moments Later}

He stumbled out of the grove behind a stone chapel he had never seen before. His clothes were dry, though it had been raining when he left. A crow perched on a branch overhead and cocked its head, watching him. Pierre’s mother appeared, panting, from around the corner. Her rosary clutched tightly.

“You went into the trees?” she whispered, eyes wide with fear and awe. “Alone?”

Pierre nodded. His mother dropped to her knees and held him tight. “You’re never alone there, Pierre,” she whispered. “Never. That place… it remembers.”

She smelled of incense and cedar shavings. Her fingers traced a cross over his forehead—and something more. A circle, hidden behind the gesture.

{Return to Present – Interior, Ford’s Theatre}

Pierre paused just outside the presidential box, hand on the cedar pistol, heart rattling in his chest. He remembered his mother’s tears. His father’s silence. The root track led him here. And the trees… were watching.

{Ford’s Theatre – Presidential Box, April 14, 1865}

Pierre stepped into the narrow hallway behind the balcony, boots silent on the creaking floorboards. His breath came slow, steady, but inside, the pulse had grown unbearable—like a second heartbeat, older than his own. From within the box, President Abraham Lincoln laughed gently at a line from Our American Cousin. His tall frame was slouched comfortably, oblivious. Mary Todd sat beside him, whispering something he didn’t seem to hear. To them, Pierre was no one. Just a shadow among shadows.

He reached into his coat and drew the pistol—red cedar grip worn smooth by years of fingers. The Confederate sigils etched into the barrel pulsed with a faint reddish glow, barely visible beneath the lamplight. Mère Malraux’s branded spiral itched beneath his collarbone. Pierre stepped forward. Time thickened.

Lincoln turned. Their eyes met. And then the president spoke—not in English, nor French—but in a low, guttural tone that curled around Pierre’s spine like smoke. A single word, ancient and raw:

“Mawtha.”

Pierre froze. He had heard it once before—whispered by his father at a Wendat solstice rite. A word not meant for mortal ears. A name. A gatekeeper. The pistol vibrated in his hand. Lincoln looked not afraid, but aware. Pierre blinked. For a heartbeat, Lincoln’s face was not Lincoln’s—it shimmered into another, older face. Deep lines, obsidian eyes, a crown of ash. Then it was gone. Pierre’s finger pulled the trigger. The flash lit the box. Lincoln’s head snapped back.

A scream. The theatre erupted. Seconds later, a second shot rang out—Booth’s cue. The decoy. The story history would remember. Pierre was already gone, vanishing into the passage behind the curtain. Blood still sizzled on the cedar pistol. The shimmer below the floor had turned bright gold, visible now even to the uninitiated. The air cracked open as he descended through the sublevels.

{Beneath the Theatre – Portal Site}

The floor was soft earth again. Stone outlines of a buried grove etched into the foundation. The roots of red cedars long cut still lingered in the space between. Pierre stood at the center, the pistol smoking, heart hammering. The portal opened. Mist, violet and pulsing, rippled like silk.

He stepped forward. One life for many, he thought. One crossing for all the rest. He passed through. The portal sealed behind him with a sound like trees snapping in the wind.

{Somewhere Else – The Grove That Was}

Pierre stumbled into silence. The mist curled like incense, glowing faintly purple and gold. The air was wrong—too still, too hollow. The cedar pendant at his chest throbbed with warmth, but the sigil beneath his skin began to burn cold. He stood at the center of what should have been a grove. Red cedars rose around him, twisted and skeletal, their bark scorched and split. They did not move like before. These trees leaned inward, their trunks gnarled, groaning as if whispering in judgment.

Time was fractured here. In the distance, muffled laughter echoed—the same line from the play.

“Don’t know the manners of good society, eh?” Again. And again. On a loop.

Pierre turned. He saw himself. Another Pierre—whole, steady, alive—walking down Tenth Street. The same wool coat. The same calm rhythm. The pendant swinging like a pendulum. Pierre tried to cry out, to warn him. No sound escaped. He ran—branches snagged at his arms, shadows clinging to his coat. The trees blurred around him. He arrived at the edge of the theatre. There was the crowd. The lanterns. Booth creeping down the corridor.

There he was again—himself—raising the pistol. Pierre reached out to stop it. His hand passed through like smoke. The shot fired again. Lincoln died again. The shimmer glowed again. And Pierre was pulled back—back into the mist, into the grove, into the place where time turned in on itself like a snake devouring its tail.

{Washington, D.C. – April 14, 1865 – Again}

The air smelled of pipe smoke and cherry blossoms. Pierre Lavesque walked down Tenth Street, his boots tapping softly against the cobblestones. His coat was heavy on his shoulders. The crowd ahead was already gathering outside Ford’s Theatre. Lanterns flickered in the lamplight. He felt it again—just as he had the first time. The pull beneath his feet. The shimmer beneath the stone. He reached up and touched the pendant at his chest—red cedar and dove, still warm from a mother’s hand carved long ago. He didn’t remember putting it on. But it was there.

A soldier stumbled past, singing a half-drunk hymn in French.

“Booth’s got the devil’s eyes,” he muttered, same as before.

Pierre’s eyes flickered toward the balcony window. His body moved without question, guided by a rhythm older than memory. The lines had blurred—between duty and curse, between choice and design.

He heard the voice of his father—distant and ancient: “The land remembers.”

And the voice of Mère Malraux: “Some tracks, once walked, are never escaped. Only repeated.”

He didn’t fight it. He stepped forward. The shimmer pulsed beneath the street.

{Final Line:}

Pierre Lavesque walks toward the theatre once more, the air thick with cedar and fate, his footsteps bound to a path that loops, where time forgets to end.