The Malice Box Read online

  He walked towards the circular fountain in the centre of the park, looking about him and taking in the square. Henry James territory along its northside. New York University east, southand all around. A hulking red-brick NYU building reminded him of a nuclear reactor. Legend said one of the elms in the north-west corner of the park had been used for public hangings. He looked for the tree. The West Village lay ahead of him, where the quest had started at Adam’s secret apartment two days before.

  Turn your helm to another elm…

  He found it. Even bedecked in leaves, it was a sinister, clawing, twisted creature. A tree of death.

  The park had been a military parade ground, a potter’s field, a place of public execution, whether from this elm or others. And before that a marsh, fed by Minetta Brook, the stream that still flowed under Lower Manhattan. In Native American lore, the Minetta, or Manetta, was a serpent.

  He inspected the Hangman’s Elm. Only a tiny green plaque on its trunk identified it. He stepped over the low railings on to the grass to look more closely. Explored around the base. Found a green drawing pin driven into the earth. The cache was deep among the roots near by, below the ground in soft soil.

  The tube contained two items identical to the first, oddly angled geometric forms that seemed to fit together in a form he couldn’t fathom. He stashed them safely in his pocket. He walked over to the park’s chess tables in the south-west corner and declined several offers to play a game.

  ‘Tables for chess and checkers only. No loitering’ a sign said. ‘Two-hour limit per table. Free for public use. No gambling or fees.’ He sat and loitered, waiting for the next call. He knew what he had to do. It was time to take control. He was afraid of the pain it would bring, but he had to do it.

  His mind turned again to the strange faces on St Nicholas Church and at John Street. Flayed faces? Harvest gods? Disguises of some kind?

  After a few minutes, the Quad rang: ‘You have it?’

  ‘I have them, to be exact. Same as the first one. I have three pieces now.’

  ‘One more to go, then, I would guess. What’s the next waypoint?’

  Robert looked at the Quad. It was 036.

  ‘I’ll tell you when I’m there.’

  He walked to the north-west corner of the park again, by the Hangman’s Elm, and circled till he got a new signal. The Quad said just over half a mile, pointing west. He took Waverly Place. Crossing Sixth Avenue, he saw the turret of the strangely beautiful red-brick Jefferson Square Market Building swing into view to the north. A pyramidion atop a square clock face, atop a cylindrical tower, atop an octagonal base. He remembered an Art Deco prison had stood on the site of its garden, demolished now, that had featured a revolving altar for use by prisoners of different beliefs. It was the only prison he’d ever wanted to see the inside of.

  The Watchman gauged Robert’s progress, weighing the risks and the knife-edge balance of the plan. Half-formed images came to the Watchman’s mind. Adam pushing Robert, Robert resisting. Robert wrestling with dilemmas, with fear. Adam fighting the Iwnw, ceding ground, pretending to do the devil’s bidding, concealing, dissembling. Straining towards the light. Deep inside Katherine, as she prepared to go deeper undercover, lay a hidden dark core. No one could see what resided there.

  The Watchman saw the maker of the Ma’rifat’, suspended between lives, latched into Adam’s DNA, unable to forgive, unable to forget. Unable to die. Saw Terri’s cancer, suspended in time. Then he looked again. He saw with impotent horror that it had now become unfrozen.

  Soon, when he came out of his trance, Horace would return to the preparations for burying his brother. Pain awaited him there.

  The Watchman prayed for himself, and for them all.

  New York, August 28, 2004

  As he walked, Robert soon found himself knee-deep in triangular motifs.

  He reached the three-sided nineteenth-century Northern Dispensary, a street-naming anomaly: Waverly Place on two of its sides and both Christopher Street and Grove Street on the third side. Edgar Allan Poe had been a customer in the days when they handed out laudanum.

  He came to Christopher Park, created as a triangular open space at the request of residents after a fire ripped through the area in 1835.

  Next to the park was a bar with a triangular gouge out of its corner at street level, the shape etched into the sidewalk. Two strange carved artisans held up the lintel above the missing shape, seemingly crushed by its weight. In another of the carvings a naked woman rode a sea monster.

  He realized he had come to the irregular star formation of streets where he’d taken the Christopher Street subway two days earlier.

  He crossed the street to the triangular plaque in the street outside Village Cigars, commemorating the refusal of a former owner of the site to sell 5 00 square inches of his property to the city authorities.

  Following the Quad’s arrow, he retraced his steps of Thursday along Christopher, past the tattoo parlours, gay bars, fetish clothing stores. He came again to the stars in the sidewalk where Terri had first reached him on the Quad.

  God, he wanted Terri. His body stirred at the thought of her.

  He realized where he was going to end up, as the GPS unit counted down the feet to the intersection of Charles and Greenwich Street. He arrived outside a white-painted, higgledy-piggledy two-storey wooden house, its lines so out of true it looked like a Stealthplane design. Across the street was the building where Adam had his pied-a-terre. He stood and waited for the Quad to buzz again.

  The third of three, a trinity

  You need to dowse a crooked house

  Our cache’s host, an iron post

  How fire entangles, in love triangles

  Yet to atone, you walk alone

  To survive your desire

  Pass the Trial by Fire

  Robert knelt by the iron railing of the gate that led into the wooden house’s front yard. At its base, clinging magnetically to the railing and painted the same black, was the last part of the puzzle. He quickly pocketed it and stood up.

  Then Adam called. ‘Robert? Where are you?’

  ‘I can’t look at this house without getting dizzy. It distorts the space around it.’

  ‘Dutch farmhouse from the early eighteenth century. Brought here on a truck in 1968 from the Upper East Side to save it from demolition. The lady who wrote Goodnight Moon lived in it before it was moved. Observe the garden.’

  The house sat on a triangular plot of land. He gazed through the railings. Atop a feeding pole, he saw a tiny white bird house with crazy roof angles and canted angles: a perfect miniature and echo of the house itself.

  ‘It’s a bit like the key to the Ma’rifat’ that I sent you,’ Adam said. ‘The small one is a perfect miniature of the big one. Now, there’s something in my old apartment you need to see.’

  ‘What’s going to be up there this time? Is it you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Terri?’

  ‘No. Sorry.’

  ‘Anyone I know?’

  ‘No one’s in this time at the House of Spells. Go up.’

  ‘As it happens, I really need to pee. I thought you’d never ask.’

  Robert took out his keys and let himself in. He started up the stairs.

  ‘Five flights. Thank you.’

  ‘Enjoy.’

  He opened the door. The apartment had been stripped bare. The blinds were lowered, and the only light came from a single electric-blue lava lamp on the floor where Adam’s desk had been.

  ‘You’re going for a certain seventies minimalism, I see. Nice.’

  ‘What music would you recommend to go with it?’

  ‘Kraftwerk, maybe. Was this your love-nest with Terri? Others too?’

  ‘I take the fifth. Do you have the complete key now?’

  Robert held the four pieces of the puzzle in his hand.

  ‘They go together somehow. Can’t see how. What did you want me to see up here?’

  ‘Wait. I’ll b
e back in touch.’ He rang off.

  Robert went into the small kitchen at the rear of the apartment and raised the blind. All four pieces of the key were identically shaped, all magnetically charged. He twisted them against each other. And twisted. And twisted.

  Adam called back a few minutes later. ‘Are you done?’

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘Loser. It’s supposed to be a fricking pyramid.’

  ‘I knew that. I could see that.’

  ‘Robert, give me the keys. You have to.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know, Katherine wasn’t just seeing her friend in the West Village yesterday. She met me too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Listen. Please. I’m going to send you a photograph. We were in Washington Square Park. Look closely at it. We’ve been in touch for a while, but I asked her to keep it secret. She tried to help me last year. And she did. Now she wants to know what’s going on. How much she could tell you. This isn’t a threat. It’s a reminder of what’s at stake.’

  The file landed. He opened it up on the Quad screen.

  The photo showed Katherine, in the dress she’d been wearing the previous day, sitting on a park bench. Around her head was a cloud of darkness. And in it, Robert saw again the face of death. It was the single, beautiful, seductive eye, flaring with yellow-and-blue light, the dead black core at its centre. Was this the face of Iwnw? Were they going to come after Kat? How much could he believe of what Adam was saying?

  Robert shouted into the phone: ‘Adam…’

  ‘If you won’t give me the keys…’

  The connection went dead.

  Robert stared out of the kitchen window, fighting his fear. Then he noticed a faint hissing sound coming from the oven. A glimmer of flame, like a spark, blinked into existence on one of the top burners. The spark grew and stretched into a tiny string of fire that twisted upwards from the burner, arching slowly into space. It was followed by a second, a snake of flame turning in slow motion in the air before his eyes.

  A web of burning strands of light formed before him as he watched, frozen, spellbound; and slowly it formed into a shimmering human figure, standing before him in a filigree of flame. For a moment the figure held, then melted in upon itself and re-formed as a shifting, rippling face of fire.

  ‘Robert.’

  It was a voice he knew but couldn’t place. ‘Who… who are you?’

  ‘I watchover you.’

  The voice was a sonorous whisper, threaded with the hiss of the gas and a note of deep power, a distant thunder.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘The kitchen is exploding. It’s already begun. This is all happening in a fraction of a second. But don’t worry. I’m warning you in time.’

  ‘How is this possible?’

  ‘You are starting to learn to see.’

  ‘This whole place is going to blow?’

  ‘It already is. You’d never survive, normally.’

  The strands of fire melted again and re-formed in a shifting human figure, as tall as Robert, that rippled like a reflection on water.

  ‘How can this be happening?’

  ‘Time exists differently for all of us. It is part of a cage we build for ourselves. You are opening the door of the cage. You are walking out of yourself. Out of your small, sleeping, ego-bound self.’

  ‘I’m just trying to survive.’

  The tendrils of flame started to fatten, swelling to obliterate the figure’s body and face and coiling into thick ropes of fire.

  Still he heard the voice. ‘I hope there’s more to it than that. You are being attacked by the ones who call themselves Iwnw. They are feeding on the psychic energy of Adam to do this. I am just able to intervene, to insert myself into their attack, long enough to give you a chance to survive. You’ll need to use the window, by the way. You’ll never make it if you take the door.’

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘I am the Watchman. You know me as Horace. Robert, run!’

  Robert reached over the kitchen sink and tried to pull the window up. It wouldn’t budge. The flames thickened. He took a saucepan and smashed the glass, clearing out the frame as much as possible and then levering himself up on to the sink, poking his head through the window, then his shoulders. He twisted sideways, one hand on his eyes, one on his groin to shield himself from broken glass, and kicked with his feet against the wall of the sink.

  He flew horizontally out of the window as the ropes of flame coalesced into a single ball of fire and exploded in a booming, roaring shock-wave.

  He fell on to the roof of the neighbouring apartment one floor below, rolling and tumbling as debris fell all around him. Then he lay on his back, hyperventilating with shock, saying over and over: ‘Dear God. Dear God.’

  Bleeding from a cut on his thigh, his arms and legs shaking, Robert made his way down to the street on the fire escape, hearing sirens approach. He felt a voice in his head, an intuition that seemed like an order: Get away. The authorities can’t help. Get away. He felt defiance in his heart. He was getting stronger. They had failed to kill him again. He was growing on the Path.

  He limped north from the Goodnight Moon house along Greenwich Street, until he found a stoop to sit on for a moment to examine his wound. It was superficial, by the look of it, though a dull throbbing was settling into his leg. He’d been lucky. Or was there any such thing as luck?

  He looked back at the apartment building. There was no fire now, and it looked like the explosion had, somehow, directed all its force outwards from the top floor, causing no damage below. Neighbours were pointing up at the blown-out windows of Adam’s place, and a police car was arriving on the scene.

  His hands were still shaking.

  The slow-motion explosion was already like a dream in his mind. Had he seen Horace speaking to him in the midst of the flames? Had he been hallucinating? What was real and what were tricks of his imagination?

  He couldn’t go on much longer. Yet he had to.

  He thought of Adam’s threat of blackmail. Robert made up his mind. He would call Adam’s bluff, take back the initiative. Tell Kat about Terri before Adam could. However muchit hurt.

  He turned his mind to practicalities. How to get home. How to warn Katherine.

  Years ago she’d insisted they establish emergency codes in case either of them was ever in danger. With her past, prudence and habit died hard. He made the call.

  ‘Katherine?’

  ‘Robert? What’s up? Are you OK?’

  ‘Hi, my darling. I’m fine. Just to let you know I never got that migraine I thought was coming on this morning. I may have to work late with Derek, but I’ll leave as soon as I can. And, hey, I got tickets for the Lion King at last. Very happy about that. Guess which night?’

  ‘Which? Tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d better get ready, then.’

  She hung up. His hands left damp imprints on the phone casing. The humidity had risen as the day wore on. He was drenched in sweat now. His eyes stung with salt and the throb in his leg was deepening.

  He flagged down a cab and offered a generous fare to New Jersey. Just as they were nearing the Lincoln Tunnel, Katherine called back. ‘You’re going to have to take back those tickets, sorry. I just remembered we have Orlando coming to dinner.’

  ‘Oh, shit. You’re right. I’ll do that. See you soon.’ Migraine and Lion King meant that she should go to a safe place outside the house that only he and she knew about. The fact that she’d called meant she was there.

  Knowing she was safe, he went to their house first and cleaned up, changing his clothes and disinfecting his cuts. Their current safe location was their friend Kerry’s house, a few miles from their own, and it was almost three thirty when he got there, after following a circuitous route. They both had keys. Katherine would look in on her cats whenever Kerry travelled for work, which was frequently. This week she was in Chicago. As he slid the key into the lock, he remembered the s
ound of his father coming home to the cottage in the evenings after working late on the grounds, the sense of security that it gave as he heard the door latch being lifted, the hope that he would come to Robert’s room and talk about his day for a while. Yet, as he entered Kerry’s house, he felt as though he were bringing something alien with him, something dangerous and unwelcome. Katherine was sitting in the front room in loose-fitting trousers and a light jacket. Her boots were on, and he knew she’d have a pistol concealed close by. She gave a barely audible ‘Hi’ to his whispered greeting. He walked over and kissed her head.

  ‘It’s all going to be fine,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you.’

  ‘Crazy day. You showered?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She looked straight into him. He felt a flutter on his flesh and behind his eyes. Was she trying to read him? He’d never had such a sensation before.

  ‘Did you hear about the bomb-plot arrests?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘NYPD arrested two guys, an American and a Pakistani, for planning to blow up Herald Square subway station. Said they had all the intent but no actual explosives.’

  ‘Did they really know what they were doing?’

  ‘Sounds like it. No suggestion of links to organized groups, though. Is this anything to do with that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s the threat?’

  Katherine’s training could make her very no-nonsense. They were well matched, that way.

  ‘We have been deceiving each other, somewhat.’

  ‘What’s the threat?’

  ‘What did Adam tell you yesterday?’

  ‘Let’s be clear about something. He came to me last year –’

  ‘Asked you to keep it secret. I know. What did he want help with?’

  ‘He wouldn’t say. Back then all he’d say was that he was going to be going up against someone very powerful, and he wanted to know if any of my gifts had returned. I told him no, but he asked me to try anyway.’