The Malice Box Read online

  ‘Oh, Robert. Now you sound like an old man. Please.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Computer whiz? I have lots of names, lots of identities. This one is all for you. And yes, I know computers. I put myself through college.’

  ‘Is Terri your real name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have anything as mundane as a job?’

  ‘No. With gifts like mine, money comes to you.’

  ‘Do you really make videos?’

  ‘Maybe. Nothing you’ve ever heard of, if I do.’

  ‘And you seek God.’

  ‘If I had to choose a religion, I’d say I’m a Sufi. But all labels are meaningless: the question is what’s in your heart. I am what I do. If I said I was a Buddhist, would it make a difference? A Wiccan? What’s in my heart?’

  ‘What about the vesica piscis?’

  ‘Get it. Look at it.’

  He took it from the bedside table.

  ‘Second rung of the ladder. It’s the shape you get when two cells divide. It’s creation. A circle with a point in the centre, then another circle, each with its edge going through the centre of the other. It makes a fish shape. It makes a pointed oval shape. Church entrances are shaped like it. And vulvas. Not a coincidence.’

  ‘I want this to last for ever.’

  ‘It will.’

  ‘But in this world, I’ll have to go home at some point.’

  ‘Everything in its time. We’re not done.’

  ‘We’re not?’

  ‘Lie back.’

  She handed him the blindfold.

  ‘What kind of ritual is this?’

  ‘Trust me.’

  She sat up and locked her eyes on his. Mesmerizing emerald depths drew him in, drew him up. She leaned down to kiss him. He closed his eyes and lost himself in the kiss. He felt her slip the blindfold over his eyes.

  She whispered some words, nothing he could understand. Musical, resonant words. Then he felt the nerve wheel moving slowly across his skin, marking where his arms joined his torso, then his legs, then along his sternum to his chin. It was intense, but neither painful nor sexual. She drew it along each side of his neck, then put it to one side.

  The light in the room changed. The quality of the black grew lighter. She pulled off the blindfold and was kissing his still lowered eyelids. One. The other. Then both together. Then his forehead. He cracked his eyelids open and saw golden-yellow light flooding the room.

  Terri was smiling at him. There were two of her. He saw an identical twin of her splitting from her body and moving to the right. A twin of light. They both glowed golden-yellow. Then they both leaned forward and kissed him on each side of his neck. Kissed down along his chest. Two tongues traced interlocking patterns down his breastbone, along his stomach.

  They both looked up at him and spoke in unison. ‘We’re just getting started.’

  ‘How the hell do you do that?’ he hissed. ‘Jesus God.’

  They kissed all the lines Terri had drawn with the wheel, as though symbolically stitching him back together. This time he trembled with pleasure.

  ‘When you build up enough power, enough energy of the right kind,’ they said, still speaking in unison, ‘you can project a body of light outside yourself. Like this.’

  They kissed him everywhere, sharing, alternating. Then one lay down against him and slowly began to fade, seeming to melt into his flesh, while the other solidified slowly back into Terri’s pale skin.

  ‘Rest now,’ she said. ‘I’ve made a gift of my energy to you. May it strengthen you.’

  He slept for a while, a smile deep in his body. The whole world was singing in his skin, and skin was all he and the whole world were made of.

  Several scented candles in small glass pots burned all around the room in the half-light. She got dressed.

  ‘I’m going to leave you to pull yourself together now,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘This was wonderful. You were wonderful. The clock is stopped for tonight. There is no time for us right now. But tomorrow it will run even faster. Be ready.’

  ‘Terri –’

  ‘Be quiet.’

  Robert dozed again, this time for almost two hours, before eventually getting up and running a bath.

  He had been lying in the water for a few minutes, Terri’s necklace wrapped around his fingers as he gazed at the design, one vesica piscis within another, when he heard the door open.

  ‘Terri?’

  No reply.

  He sat up, ready to climb out of the water.

  He shouted: ‘Hello?’

  A figure appeared in the bathroom doorway, holding up a bedsheet between them. He vaguely saw what he thought was a woman’s silhouette behind the sheet before it flew at him, covering his face and chest. A hand came behind it, forcing his head under the water, forcing the wet sheet over his nose and mouth.

  Robert fought to remain calm, jamming his hands up where it seemed his attacker’s head would be, trying to hold his breath. He missed, flailing against wet cloth. A gloved fist punched him in the solar plexus, and he shouted involuntarily, inhaling water. The linen tightened around his face. Now panic kicked in. He thought he heard a woman’s voice as the blood roared in his ears, and he lashed and kicked upwards. He felt a hand grabbing for the necklace in his closed fist. Glass shattered as he kicked candles over.

  Darkness started to rim his vision. He was at the bottom of a deep, dark well, the stones wet and slippery to the touch, clawing with his fingers to pull himself up… He felt the water heating up as he struggled. It began to scald him. Through the sheet over his face, he suddenly saw his own arms and hands, flailing upwards, outlined in a grey-blue viscous light. The light was hot, fluid but dense, dripping from his fingers. Burning hot. With his eyes closed he could see it even more clearly. He reached upwards and grabbed the arms of his attacker. She screamed. He felt the crackle of shrivelling flesh as his hands burned into her skin.

  Then the figure was gone, the bedsheet suddenly limp and knotted around him. The heat had gone out of his body as suddenly as it had come. He heaved his torso over the edge of the bath, coughing up water, gasping for breath. Steam rose from the bathtub. The necklace was still wrapped around his fingers. The door slammed.

  Robert pulled himself out of the bath and rolled on to the bathroom floor. It’s real, he said to himself, over and over. It’s real. Dear God, it’s all real. Part of him had still not quite believed that the spiritual threats Horace and Adam and Terri had spoken of were about real physical violence in the real world. He’d told himself the fight on the subway could have been a mugger, the whole thing could somehow still have been a macabre game that was spinning out of control.

  Now he knew for certain: there were people who were trying to kill him, and he had the power and strength to fight back.

  Little Falls, August 27, 2004

  When Robert got home, no one was there. A note in the kitchen said Katherine had gone to visit her friend Claire in the West Village. She’d be back late again.

  He felt relief. He couldn’t lie to Katherine. It wasn’t in his nature. Yet he dreaded confessing to her what he had done. It seemed to him he still smelled of Terri, smelled of sex.

  It was after ten at night. He had the necklace safely in his grasp. But he didn’t have his wedding ring. When he’d gone to pick it up from the bedside table, it hadn’t been there. He’d uprooted everything. Nowhere to be found. He’d tried to reach Terri on the Quad. Number blocked.

  He changed clothes, put his things in the washing machine, ran it. Showered. Called Katherine to say he was going to bed soon. Left her a message again. Called Claire’s landline and learned Katherine was fine and had just left.

  He sat alone and stared into his returning fear.

  When attacked, he’d had no qualms about fighting back. He’d protected the keys. He felt good about that. And he was becoming more powerful. He felt more alive. But at what cost? He’d done a thing he’d sworn never to do, broken a vow he’d
sworn never to break. There would be consequences, and he wouldn’t avoid them. Yet it had felt so necessary, so right, to make love to Terri. He might not even have survived without the power she had given him. But it was going to happen again. Would he be as strong next time? He felt his stomach knot. It was real. He had no choice but to go on.

  He looked for a message from Terri. She had sent him another audio file. Nothing else. It was called ‘Two Knights’. It was password-protected. He tried various variations of vesica piscis. Then he remembered the black iron flowers. Two was part of the sequence, she’d said. Part of the password.

  It opened to Vesica2. It was a haunting piece of operatic music for two male voices. He listened again and again. They were singing in German. Eventually he identified it through internet searches. It was from The Magic Flute. He found several translations, some freer than others. The part she had sent him was incomplete. It said, more or less:

  Whoever walks this path of pain will become purified

  Through fire, water, air and earth.

  If he can overcome the fear of death

  Then he takes flight for heaven…

  He fired up the Quad and posted a short note.

  What the second cache said to me

  Today was the Trial by Water. Find God in the sea of sex. I have never felt so fully known, so fully electrified, so fully comfortable with another human being. Having her utterly in my power. Being utterly in her power.

  But my sexual desire cannot be for Terri. It has to be for Katherine. I have to fold it back towards her.

  A response came within a few minutes, but not from TerriC1111.

  You have done well, Robert. You have passed the second trial.

  The Watchman

  A Martyr’s Love Song: The Making of

  the Ma’rifat’

  I do not address you with the splendour and flourishes of my native tongue, for I am well versed in American ways and know that you will find too much ‘God is greatest’ and ‘praise be to Allah’ discomfiting.

  I was killed by my own creation on August 14, 2003.

  Can you believe a man can be killed by his sins? For this is how I died, sparking the great discharge of energy that plunged the north-eastern United States into darkness on that day.

  I failed in my mission, for the detonation was unintended. I came under attack at the key moment of arming the Device, and I was not sufficiently pure in my heart, mind and soul to respond safely. Although the effect was great, the power released was only a fraction of its potential.

  Know simply this: there is another Ma’rifat’. There were two Devices. When the second is detonated, it will slice away that which is impurest in the impurest of cities in the impurest of nations: it will destroy Manhattan, the clitoris of the great whore, because in Manhattan it will find the richest fuel for its detonation, because Manhattan is so riddled with greed, and lust, and envy, and pride that the chain reaction, once begun, will erupt like 10,000 suns. An apocalypse of souls.

  You may think what I have to say is gibberish. Let us explore that term. For what is ‘gibberish’ to you, what sounds like the jabbering of a madman, may simply show your prejudice and ignorance. Do you know where this word comes from? And ‘alchemy’, ‘algebra’, ‘algorithm’. ‘Alcohol’?

  Let us look at some of these words.

  For, while some will say ‘gibberish’ merely imitates the sound of nonsensical talk, others will tell you of Jabir ibn Hayyan, known to you in the West as Geber, the greatest Muslim alchemist of all, also a geometer, a mathematician, all knowledge being one to the wise; for his language and concepts were so subtle, and his encoding of the great secrets so effective, that none but the finest minds could pierce the ‘gibberish’ of his writings to discover the gold beneath.

  Or perhaps we should take ‘algebra’ – once also used in English to mean bone-setting, did you know that? – which derives from al-jabr, Arabic for bringing broken parts back together, used by the ninth-century mathematician Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi of Baghdad as the title of his Kitab Al-Jabr w’al-Muqabala, or Rules of Reintegration and Reduction, his great treatise on equations.

  Or ‘algorithm’, which simply mangles the name of the same man, Al-Khwarizmi, who also gave you our Arabic numerals.

  Or ‘alchemy’ itself, from Al-Kimiya, from Khem, an ancient name for Egypt, the black land, land of the black earth. There is more. Let us not speak of ‘alcohol’, for example! But I do not wish to tire you.

  Looking backwards in time, the Muslim stands between the modern world and the ancient wisdoms of Egypt and Greece; we are the door through which your world passed; we are the filter of that knowledge, and the saviours of it. Without us, there would have been no you.

  3

  Trial by Fire

  Little Falls, August 28, 2004

  Robert awoke early, feeling like a stranger in his own house. His body was singing. His whole being was singing. But he could not imagine being anywhere else. Katherine. The memory of Moss. Their life together.

  Surely he smelled still of Terri. He could taste her, smell her, feel her on his body. He felt complete. Fully alive. He had never felt so physically jubilant, never felt his body resonate so fully with joy. In his skull. In his mind. In the tips of his fingers. In his heart, for God’s sake. From the sex. From fighting and surviving the second attack.

  He looked in on the room that would have been Moss’s. Suddenly tears burst from his eyes, and he stood crying silently for the loss of his baby boy, shoulders shaking.

  He left without waking Katherine, leaving her a note. He couldn’t face her. Told her he’d been summoned urgently by Horace. Another lie, though he felt oddly, coldly detached from it.

  New York, August 28, 2004

  In Manhattan, Robert left the Port Authority bus station and fired up the Quad on 8th Avenue. A text message was waiting for him from Terri giving the new waypoint: X62. It was a couple of miles south-east, at a corner of what looked like Tompkins Square Park. The message had said eleven o’clock, and it was barely ten. He decided to walk east along 42nd Street to the F train at Bryant Park and take the subway to Delancey.

  It was a humid, brilliantly sunny day. A fever was building in the city. The Republicans were coming. There had been armed National Guards in camouflage uniform around the Lincoln Tunnel. The Fujifilm blimp was overhead but now painted with NYPD markings. Whenever he looked up, it was there, an unblinking eye in the sky. Groups of police cars sped by, making sudden rushes from one part of Manhattan to another. A motorcade of five black vehicles, windows tinted, forced its way through an intersection in the oncoming traffic lane, lights flashing. Already there were police everywhere. Even the skyline was weaponized. He talked to a couple of cops at Times Square.

  ‘Ready for the Republicans?’

  ‘Ready for anything.’

  ‘Protesters?’

  ‘Anything. You’re in the safest place in the world right now. See all those rooftops? There’re sharpshooters on most all of them.’

  Many New Yorkers were away on vacation. Few Republicans and protesters had arrived yet. But something momentous was coming, for good or evil. Regular rules were eroding; space was opening up for extraordinary things to happen.

  He was burning to see Terri. He jogged up the subway stairs at Delancey and pulled out the Quad. As soon as he had a fix on the waypoint – just over half a mile north – he ran along Essex Street.

  There was a giant clock face on the side of an apartment building’s water tower as he approached Houston. All the numbers were screwed up: 12, 4, 9, 6… He shook his head and looked again. They were still screwed up.

  As he came to the south-west corner of Tompkins Square Park, ‘Arriving Destination’ flashed up on the Quad screen. He looked about. No sign of her. Five minutes to eleven. He examined the immediate area, looking for anything meaningful.

  Where was she? What was she doing to him?

  He walked into the park. Five or six g
uys, down at heel, were congregated around the stone chess tables. One was speaking Spanish. No one was playing. He sat in one of the green slatted chairs at a chessboard and waited.

  Every inch of his body was smiling at him. Every second of pleasure was recorded in the memory of his skin. The slightest friction of his shirt against his chest conjured her hair and fingertips brushing over him, her breath on him, her eyes on him, her heat, her sugar-wet, her salt-wet, her honey-wet.

  He checked the Quad: ‘Ready to navigate, accuracy 7 5 feet.’

  Someone settled into the seat behind him, their back to him.

  ‘Don’t turn round, Robert,’ a man’s voice said. ‘It’s time for us to talk.’

  ‘Adam?’

  ‘Just don’t turn round.’

  ‘What the hell?’

  ‘This is a place of great holiness and great loss, you know? Terrible sadness. Lots of homeless people, lots of desperation, lots of lost faith, lost hope. Then there’s some joy too. Dancing and singing. If you know where to look.’

  ‘Where’s Terri?’

  ‘We’ll get to her in a few minutes, don’t fret.’

  ‘Are you safe?’

  ‘No, old friend, I’m not. Not at all safe.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You’re saving me, I think. I hope you are. Are you?’

  No words came. Robert made to twist round in his seat. Adam’s voice was sharp: ‘Don’t. For Christ’s sake, don’t.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on, Adam.’

  ‘Just make like you’re enjoying the sun, or something. Talk softly. In a moment you’ll go for a walk. For now, relax a little and listen.’

  Robert clenched his jaw.

  ‘You asked if I’m in danger. Yes, I am. So are you, so are we all. You need to come further into the game if you are to come out on the other side. There is no way out but in.’