The Malice Box Read online

Then Robert wheeled as white-hot pain seared his face. In his mind’s eye he saw flames flaring into life, bookcases dry as tinder starting to smoke… Adam’s room… Katherine making love to Adam, Katherine making love to him, oblivious of the flames… unnatural light, yellow, terrifying…

  Head swimming, knees buckling, he lurched to the bed, shouting for Katherine. Then hands were on him, angelic, soothing. He blacked out.

  When he came to, she was gone.

  He struggled to his feet, cataloguing his sensations. Light-headedness. Strange clarity of thought. Fear. The fire. Oh, God, the fire.

  Robert ran. Down the corridor, down the stairs, out into the mist-shrouded court, out on to King’s Parade, past the Senate House. The image was so real he could feel the mounting heat. Flames licking beneath the door. Unnatural light. He had to save them.

  He hammered into Trinity Street, past Caius, as the clocks struck midnight, cape flowing, mask twisted backwards on his back.

  Reaching the Great Gate of Trinity, he beat on the window of the porters’ lodge and shouted until they let him in.

  ‘There’s a fire! In Nevile’s Court!’

  ‘Now just a moment, sir, let’s calm down a moment, shall we?’

  ‘I tell you there’s a fire. Help me!’

  ‘And how would we know this, sir? Are we a member of the college?’

  He pushed past them, sprinting into the Great Court. He heard them in pursuit. ‘Oi! Come ’ere!’

  He cut a straight line across the court, ignoring the footpaths, running on the forbidden grass. Then he was through the passage and into Nevile’s Court. He jumped down a flight of stone stairs and ran along the northern arcade, his footfalls cracking and booming like Newton’s stamping, echoing feet 300 years before. He pounded up the stairs to the first floor, ran left along the dark corridor, saw a fire extinguisher and wrested it free from the wall.

  The flames were shadow-dancing under the door.

  It wasn’t locked. He charged in, saw the fire leap up at him, saw Adam and Katherine motionless on the bed in the next room, still locked in an embrace, saw the face of death in the black clouds of smoke churning in the room. It was a single eye, a bottomless black core staring out of a rippling iris of yellow and blue, long red filaments flaring off it like lightning.

  ‘Begone!’ he yelled, the word welling up from somewhere deep in his panicked soul.

  He dragged Katherine free. She was still breathing.

  Two porters appeared behind him. He handed her off to them. A fire alarm began to sound. One porter began to bang on the other doors in the corridor. Robert went back in. He fired the extinguisher at the base of the flames as he went, clearing a path. In the bedroom he saw fire feeding on loose notes and script pages at the side of the bed. He dragged Adam out through the sitting room and into the corridor. He was semiconscious, babbling.

  ‘Moss?’

  ‘It’s Robert.’

  He heard sirens in the distance. People were emerging from their rooms. One helped him semi-carry Adam down the stairs and out into the cold fresh air. A porter was wrapping Katherine in a blue blanket as she sat on the grass. She saw him. She shouted: ‘Robert. Something happened to you!’

  ‘I started the fire.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I kicked the table over. It started the fire.’

  ‘You kicked the table over. You were shouting about a fire. You frightened me. You went very strange. I thought you were going to hurt yourself.’

  ‘I blacked out.’

  ‘I helped you to the bed. You passed out. Then I came to see Adam.’

  ‘I was Adam.’

  ‘You were saying all kinds of things. Mumbling to yourself.’ Her face screwed up, and she started to cry. ‘You frightened me!’ She began to shake.

  ‘She’s in shock,’ the porter said. ‘Best to leave her alone for a while.’

  Firemen and ambulance men were appearing. Robert knelt down to give Katherine a hug, but she sat like a statue, tears pouring down her cheeks.

  ‘Katherine, did you put something in the tea?’

  She swung her arm and hit him, and hit him again.

  ‘Don’t be silly. It was just a game. It was chamomile.’

  The porter pushed him away.

  ‘You’re upsetting her, sir. Leave her alone now.’

  They met several days later, in Katherine’s rooms. She had just been released from hospital. They drank coffee, no one wanting to be the first to speak. Eventually Adam broached the subject. ‘Robert, you saved our lives.’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘Not to us. We bothowe you an eternal debt.’

  Dreadful images leaped into his mind. They wouldn’t stop.

  ‘I can’t talk about it. I’m sorry.’

  Katherine put a hand on his arm. ‘Adam thinks you had an awakening. A spontaneous opening up of psychic powers. He’d seen them in you, seen your potential.’

  ‘Please don’t talk this way. It’s nonsense. If you say you didn’t put anything in my tea, I believe you. I’d had a lot to drink, remember. I think, in the end, I was just jealous. After I freaked out at the Ouija board, I was just jealous of Adam, that you’d gone to sleep with him. So I went to hammer on the door, or throw stones at the window, or fight, or something childish.’

  ‘Robert, I don’t think that’s it,’ said Adam.

  ‘Let him think what he wants,’ Katherine scolded Adam gently. ‘I think, though, that perhaps we all should not see each other for a while.’

  ‘We’re bound up with eachother for ever,’ said Adam. ‘Entangled. But a hiatus seems a sensible idea. Some of us have finals coming up, after all. And I’m afraid we’ll have to put Newton’s Papers on hold. It’s too dangerous a play to write now. Perhaps ever.’

  Robert snorted. ‘What nonsense.’

  He felt raw fear pulsing just below the surface of his rational, daylight-shedding, system-building mind. He willed it away, deep into the darkness. There were dreadful things at the edge of consciousness, chaotic, evil things, and it was wrong to pursue them. Harmful to himself and others. His parents had been right to keep him away from them. Now he did what he had been brought up to do. He set his mind in a cold, clinical cast that denied such things any existence, and he crushed the life out of them.

  ‘Believe what you must,’ Adam said with a kindly smile. ‘You may turn away from it now. But a time may come when your powers will be needed, a time of great danger, and you’ll be called. Just promise me you’ll not turn away when the call does come.’

  Robert met his gaze without speaking, then looked away into Katherine’s eyes. She was so beautiful. ‘I can’t promise anything like that,’ he replied.

  Katherine leaned forward and rested her hand on his knee. ‘You were very brave, Robert,’ she said. ‘You’re my fearless knight.’

  Robert raised her fingers to his mouth and kissed them, then stood up and shook Adam’s hand.

  ‘I should go,’ Robert said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  PART TWO

  The Trials

  1

  Trial by Earth

  New York, August 26, 2004

  Robert left the apartment and walked down the stairs, the Quad in his hand, the earpiece in his ear. The air was thick and humid, and within a minute he was sweating as he paced on Greenwich Street, waiting for the device to pick up the GPS signals from the satellites overhead. It was 3.30 p.m.

  The Quad gave an incoming-call chirp, and he hit answer. There was a crackle of static but no voice. He said, ‘Terri?’

  Nothing.

  He said, ‘I’m leaving the line open. OK?’

  Maybe some breathing? He couldn’t tell.

  He needed to meet her. Understand what was going on.

  The Quad screen showed a small stick man standing on a tiny globe with four blinking satellites overhead. ‘Wait… Tracking…’ it said unhurriedly, and faint dotted lines snaked up from the hand of the homunculus to each of the satellites, growin
g more solid as connection was established with each one.

  ‘How long does this take?’ he said into the open air.

  He heard a crackle of static but no response.

  After four minutes the Quad gave a beep. The screen said: ‘Ready to navigate. Accuracy: 70 feet.’

  He selected Go to Waypoint 025. An arrow came up on the screen, and he started walking. It seemed to get a good reading on him and pointed south-east, flashing up: ‘1.6 miles, speed 2.5 m.p.h.’

  He jogged along in the shade of the trees on the west side of Greenwich Street, crossed the road and made a left on to Christopher Street, heading for the 1 and the 9 subway station downtown.

  Then, without warning, just after he crossed Hudson, a young woman’s voice was in his head, and the street beneathhis feet was full of stars and diamonds.

  ‘Hello, Robert. Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. I’m going to help you. I’ll be watching your back.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘This is where it gets hard to explain. Assume I can see where you are, that I can detect what’s around you.’

  ‘How? Can you read the location of the Quad? Through GPS?’

  ‘Something like that. It’ll do as a metaphor. I’m… alive to what’s around you.’

  ‘If someone’s going to follow me, are they going to try to stop me solving this riddle or finding this cache? Are they looking for it too?’

  ‘I don’t know. They may end up helping you to understand it. They may try to hurt you. It’s an unusual situation. Now go quickly. I’ll contact you when you get out of the subway.’

  He walked east, sweating hard now, snatches of neon and impressions of building details seeming to fly at him from the walls and sidewalk. Video. Tattoo. Two spirals in the brick to his left, something compelling and hypnotic about them. In the shop windows as he passed there were action dolls of Freud, Christ. Sex clothing for girls and boys, a Cuban restaurant… crossing Bleecker, there were flowers on the corner, a locksmith half hidden underground in a basement store, an old church with a sign exhorting passers-by to love one another, New York Fetish, Boots and Saddles gay bar. Then Village Cigars, with its strange triangular plaque in the sidewalk, the smallest piece of real estate in Manhattan. He walked down the steps into the subway.

  A train arrived almost immediately. As it clattered and rattled along the five stops to Rector Street, they passed through the closed Cortlandt Street Station directly under Ground Zero, built to replace the one destroyed when the 9/11 attacks had sent debris smashing through its ceiling on to the tracks below.

  At Rector he turned right off the train and jogged to the exit, out through the curved iron bar gates and up the stairs. He emerged on Greenwich Street, where the waterfront at the edge of Manhattan used to be, outside a topless bar called the Pussycat Lounge. He crossed the street and walked east up Rector to Trinity Place, where the huge mass of the retaining wall below Trinity Church stood. The wall breathed, expanding and contracting by almost an inch with the heat and cold, like a great chest. He’d met Horace for the first time on a walking tour around this very area. Above, the Trinity spire – once the tallest structure in the city – jostled in the deep blue sky with latter-day rivals along Wall Street, Numbers 1 and 40, a fluted off-white Deco tower and a steepling green pyramid.

  Robert passed under an overhead walkway linking Trinity churchyard to a building next to the American Stock Exchange, the latter a riot of Neo-Egyptian frontage and 1930s-style carved representations of modernity and progress: a ship, a factory, a steam engine, what appeared to be oil wells, giant earth-movers. It reminded him of the declamatory style of Rockefeller Center. Progress! Industry! Wisdom!

  Set into the massive wall of Trinity were several gates. He took the one in the middle called the Cherub Gate.

  He walked up some steps, through arches at the top and into the graveyard. Robert held up the Quad, waiting for it to reacquire the satellite signal in the open space.

  As he headed east towards Broadway along the path through the graveyard, the Quad came to life again. Terri.

  ‘Don’t go on. Branch off to your left. Do you see a big monument? There’s a headstone, a grave. Leeson, James Leeson… Crack the code. Use the website. Show you were here and you cracked it. Hurry. You’re being watched.’

  ‘Code?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Just do it. Please.’

  As he walked, the white-and-gold entrance to the Bank of New York at 1 Wall Street came into view again. The GPS signal returned weakly, pointing him north as it should have, and faded again.

  Robert saw the Gothic brown stone monument, ‘sacred to the memory of those great and good men who died while imprisoned in this city for their devotion to the cause of American independence’, looming over the north-east end of the graveyard.

  He surveyed the stones around it. The gravestone in question was easily found. ‘Here lies deposited the body of James Leeson who departed this life on the 28th day of September 1794 aged 38 years,’ it read. Along its upper rim, above a winged hour-glass and other mysterious symbols, was a series of markings that reminded Robert vaguely of codes he’d seen in Sherlock Holmes stories. In this case they were not little stick men but dots placed within partial or complete squares.

  He squatted in front of the headstone and gazed at the code. Shut out the world. He’d seen something like this before when he was a kid, in a spy story or a puzzle book, or one of those boy-soldier manuals that sometimes came with toys, or Action Man, or Clarks Commandos’ shoes. He remembered those shoes had had animal tracks imprinted on the bottom, so wherever he went playing around the grounds of the estate he was himself and also a bear, a deer, a badger. He cast his mind back to that time, to a special copse he had known, where he used to go to puzzle through things that confused him as a child. There was a smooth stone in the middle of the copse that he would sit on, and lose himself in the birdsong that echoed there, sometimes for what seemed like hours at a time. He remembered now the language of the birds, the endless sea of voices and harmonies, twittering and whistling and singing in a torrent of sound that had seemed to him to be the very voice of the world. He’d never left the copse without an answer to what troubled him. He let his mind roam free in the same way now, lost in the memory of the harmonies he no longer heard.

  He was hungry, he noticed. He thought of a diner on Route 3 that he sometimes would go to on the way home, the Tick Tock Diner – neon and gleaming metal cladding. There was another diner called the Tick Tock on 8th Avenue, neon and chrome, at the street level of the hotel New Yorker. Tick Tock. He’d sometimes imagined walking into the Tick Tock in New Jersey and emerging from the Tick Tock on 8th Avenue. Maybe all Deco diners were connected. Maybe they were all just one diner. Tick Tock. Tic-tac. Tic-tac-toe. Noughts and crosses, as the Brits called it back home.

  Then he had it. Tic-tac-toe.

  He wrote down the letters of the alphabet in a noughts and crosses grid with A in the top left, B in the top middle, C in the top right, and so on. He saw three grids side by side, the first containing the letters A to I, the second J to R, the third S to Z… so on the first grid, E was represented by a closed box, B by a box open at the top, H by a box open at the bottom. How were the grids distinguished from one another? Some boxes on the gravestone bore one dot, some two, some none.

  He stared at the grids. If a single dot signified the first grid, and two the second, none the third, then he got: Q… E… L… E… L… B… E… Q… D… E… A… S… H.

  It made no sense. Something was off. Wait. Wait. What happened if he treated I and J as the same letter, and U and V, as gravestone lettering often did?

  R… E… M… E… M… B… E… R.

  The lower word was: D… E… A… T… H.

  A chill ran down his spine, mingling with the thrill of cracking the code. ‘Fuck,’ he said out loud, partly to banish the fear.

 
Robert used the Quad to post it to the website with the pictures.

  ‘Well done, Robert. Remember that, you’ll need to. Now go north, till you get the GPS signal again. Follow it. Here’s a rhyme. A clue. I just got it by text message. Remember it.’

  ‘Who is sending you this stuff, Terri? How do they know when to send it?’

  ‘I told you, it comes from someone called the Watchman. Adam told me to trust him. You’ll need it to find the first cache. I received it as soon as you posted the decoded gravestone message, so it was a response. A reward, perhaps.’

  ‘This wasn’t the first cache?’

  ‘No. It’s near by, I think. Take it down, quickly.’

  He got his pencil and notebook out.

  ‘Our zero’s a place for heroes

  Ground of being, way of seeing

  Don’t have a conniption, seek something Egyptian

  Kind of a digit, to find the widget

  Our secret cache is where the ashes

  And bones of Eire

  Aren’t laid to rest. By the star, you’ll go far

  To prove your worth, pass the Trial by Earth’

  He heard heavy breathing. Then she spoke again: ‘Got it? Go.’

  He walked northalong Broadway, stepping on five-pointed stars in the sidewalk honouring an eclectic mix of sports stars, war heroes and foreign dignitaries who had received ticker-tape parades on Broadway in the 1950s.

  Hopping and scooting between pedestrians, he passed on his right a large red cube sculpture poised implausibly on a point; and to the west the buildings fell away to reveal the vast absence of Ground Zero. Behind the site loomed the twin solid masses of the World Financial Center, their glass panels ablaze with orange light.

  He jogged across Cortlandt Street, looking down to the giant Century 21 Department Store, past the New York Stocking Exchange lingerie shop, crossing Dey and then Fulton. There, right in front of St Paul’s Chapel, the signal came back on the Quad, with an accuracy reading of 43 feet. It pointed west. He headed down the hill towards Ground Zero.